Many people are wondering how to properly promote their portfolios with Pinterest. Basically, it is possible to stop at the point where you can just upload your work for all to see and that will be enough. However, this is too easy and very inefficient. Our task will be to figure out how we can make the best use of Pinterest to achieve desired goals, which is how to promote your design portfolio.

Pinterest is not just a source of inspiration and a social network. It is also a search engine in its own way. For all designers, illustrators, and artists it is a very important and sometimes paramount task to attract visitors to a portfolio, traffic to a blog, or buyers to an online shop.

In this article, we will take a look at how to promote a blog, a stock portfolio, all of your online stores and social networks through Pinterest.

However, let’s take a small digression from the main topic and take one amazing trick for ourselves. If you suddenly have doubts about your abilities, or if you have no way to promote your portfolio, there is a small solution to check your level. Try working with marketplaces such as MasterBundles, Art Web, or Artnet. If they are interested in your work, you certainly have a chance.

Pinterest Basics

It would seem that what is incomprehensible: well Pinterest is just Pinterest. However, as practice shows, quite a large number of users do not fully understand all the features of this service. So, let’s take some time with you to understand the basic concepts that will help us a lot in the future.

Can you imagine a huge board like the one we use in universities and offices to pin a note, a photo, or a shopping list? Pinning is about keeping all the important, useful, or just beautiful things and organizing them in one place. Remember notebooks and diaries in primary school? Surely everyone has kept their notes, drawings, and reminders pinned to a whiteboard at some point? The same philosophy is professed by Pinterest.

In a few words, this is what Pinterest has to offer us:

  • Compile collections of images from all over the internet;
  • Show your original pictures and shots to the world;
  • Keep your content organized;
  • Promote your brand;
  • Increase traffic to your website or portfolio.

The pinning process itself is very simple, and its simplicity is another reason why Pinterest is so popular. The network also has wide applicability and practicality, as you can use it for the following:

  • Companies looking to connect with users (even if the business is not focused on visual content);
  • Handmakers, needleworkers;
  • Bloggers, artists, photographers;
  • Anyone who wants to save images or content on any topic.

Besides, Pinterest is also quite a profitable service when you look at the storage side of your post. One of the main factors in social media marketing is the average lifespan of your post on social media or in your newsfeed. The average retention time of posts on some social networks is ridiculously low, less than 40 minutes.

The main advantage of Pinterest is the longer retention time of posts compared to most social networks. The longer your pins are available to people, the greater the chance of a conversion.

Plus, Pinterest is also a huge source of inspiration. Here you may find ideas for home renovations, painting, weddings, holidays, as well as motivating screensavers for your gadgets.

What to Look Out For?

Before you promote anything with Pinterest, you need to pay attention to the mistakes that exist for beginners.

The most common mistake is missing links and links that lead to non-existent pages. If you forget to add a link to a photo that was published directly from your computer, nothing is lost. Just link to the appropriate sub-page. However, things will go much worse if we have inserted a photo and not checked if the link is valid. 

This often happens if the structure of the online store changes, and along with it the links to individual products also change. That is why every time you change the structure of your page or the way your menus are presented, it is worth checking that the links to the products you are promoting look identical. If you find discrepancies, simply replace the original link with the correct one.

Promote Your Pinterest Profile

Obviously, in order to get noticed and more attention, we need to design our account nicely and properly. Yes, it all starts with your account. It is unlikely that anyone will pay attention to your work if you have an empty profile and it is not clear who you are at all.

Account Set-Up

Actually, we are interested in a good profile description using keywords and a clear name. Using an interesting photo in your avatar (the same as on other social networks), a link to your website, if you have one, is the best way to set up the account. In general, it is all trivial, but many people do not do it.

Switch Your Account to a Business Format

Connecting a business account is free, but you will get access to statistics, the ability to optimize pins from the website and advertise them, and a newsletter with promotional tips.

Decorate Your Boards

It is worth looking at your account as if it is a glossy magazine of your blog or your business and the boards in the account are rubrics. Name the boards in such a way that key search terms are used in the title. If you suddenly decide to clean up and delete boards, this is not highly recommended because you may have subscribers who only follow a particular board and if you delete one, you will also delete the subscribers. An expert recommendation is to rename the board and change the content there.

Promote Your Account

There is really nothing complicated about it. You need to ping several times a day. In general, it is enough to ping 2-3 times a day to promote your account fairly evenly. If you do this, the number of subscribers grows quite quickly.

There are also programs that automate the process, so if you are too lazy to do it yourself, you can resort to their help.

And do not forget all the standard promotional methods: put a Pinterest icon on your sidebar, tell the blog visitors that you have a Pinterest account, include it in your posts also using a widget.

With these simple tricks, you will get ahead very well. You should always remember that on Pinterest it all starts with your account and if you set a good standard, be sure it will get a little easier from there.

What About a Content Plan?

First of all, we must understand one important thing — nothing happens all at once. In order to promote a portfolio properly, we will need time, which means we need to get it right, and a content plan will help us do this. Basically, in this case, a content plan is a list of pins you publish on the board. It will also help us not to spend hours every day thinking up publications, but to do everything in advance and then just post the pins. For example:

  • To promote an online shop, post eye-catching pictures of products.
  • When you need the traffic to your blog, draw illustrations or infographics for each piece.
  • When you need to interest buyers for design — make your Pinterest a showcase portfolio of the best material.

Think about how your pins will attract users to the website or simply grab attention. Preferably, you should be able to add an attractive description and link to the website, or a call to action to each one.

It is advisable to consider daily publications in the content plan. The more pins you post, the more people will see them, and the faster the statistics will be gathered. Make a separate document and schedule it for the next 3-5 weeks. For example, arrange for three pins to be published every day:

  • the first is an item from your online shop;
  • the second is a useful article from your blog;
  • the third is an idea of how your product can be used.

Promoting with Pinterest: Optimization and Design

  1. It is worth noting that a Pinterest image should ideally be at least 700px wide x 1000px high — or higher. The large image above is 700×1500. Such vertically aligned images attract more attention and get more repins on Pinterest. Repins are exactly what we are aiming for and really need. You may have to make portfolio images from close-ups of unique features of your web designs. Or you may use the graphics software to merge screenshots together for a vertical image. This can be done online in PhotoJoiner or in the Photo Stitching tools. You can also use this tool to join screenshots of your website to make the platform look like one long vertical image.
  2. It is always important to remember that if you choose to create pages on your site or on client sites, you need to have an image to share on each page. As we know, a reputable image will be vertically aligned — the height is greater than the width. It makes it more visible and attractive on Pinterest — and our main goal is to get other people to repost your images. The art of creating good pinnable images is sometimes underestimated, and for good reason. A lot of traffic to websites these days comes from Pinterest because search engine positioning is often difficult to achieve — especially in the design field.
  3. If you have different specializations (you just need them), make sure you create a Pinterest board for each of your specializations. For example, if you are a web designer, it would be a great idea to create a separate “Web Design Business” board, just with a more innovative name. If you make websites for furniture traders, create a board called “Furniture Trade Web Design Ideas”. This will really help people who are planning to create similar sites find you as they search for ideas. Put a link to your web design site in the description of every pin that comes from one of the websites you have created.
  4. It is also essential to make sure that when a picture is pinned, it is reflected in its description. Do you remember that Pinterest has taken more from search engines than social media? The description should look nice, concise, and reflect the essence of the post, not look like a “qwerty.JPEG”. It is not only unattractive, but it will not help users in any way in Pinterest searches. Many people used to name the images like that, and it is still the case because the descriptions are now on other people’s boards, and there is no way to remove them.
  5. Finally, it would not hurt to make a Pinterest board just for yourself. One board should contain links to all the pages of your website and portfolio. Help people find the content you offer. To do this, look at all the pages you have already published and create images for them. Perfectly every page should contain an image that is open to view (vertical) and an alternate image (horizontal) that will look good on Twitter and Facebook. Images are what people are looking for these days — and developing graphics has become an integral part of the design that we should never feel shy about adopting.

Conclusion

So, we have reviewed some great ways to help you promote the portfolio. However, it is worth remembering that they won’t work for everyone, and they may not succeed right away, so do not get upset if it doesn’t get done on the first day. Your task is to gradually improve your work, and this is long and hard work.