How we made $1000 using Dropshipping and Pinterest?

At 925 Millionaires we talk a lot about passive income, the only way to stretch your income and become a millionaire quickly is by earning more.

There are tons of opportunity to earn passive income and eCommerce is one of the best one to start as a passive income and grow into full time. Especially dropshipping, where you don’t have to manage the inventory and fulfillment process.

In this post, I am going to show how to use Dropshipping to increase Pinterest sales and make some passive income using your e-commerce store.

We have an eCommerce store using Shopify. Shopify is an amazing platform that has integration with almost all social media and marketplaces.

Basically whenever you list a product in Shopify the product automatically appears on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and many more marketplaces including Amazon.

In my opinion, Pinterest is an untapped social media to sell products. We never expected Pinterest to be effective but our data showed otherwise.

This is the screenshot from our analytics.

Powerful Organic Sales channel

About 15% of our revenue came from Pinterest, with little effort. 

When it comes to promoting physical products, often people focus on paid ads using facebook or google and miss out on the great opportunity of using Pinterest to drive sales to their store.

Currently, Pinterest is a less crowded space with a lot of room for growth. We jumped in and it proved to help us so far.

Pinterest is a buying community

Pinterest is not a typical social media platform, it is a pinboard to collect ideas and pin them for future reference. That makes it ideal for offering products to get into the users’ pinboard. Since the pins stay in the pinboard for a long time, the sales can happen anytime.

People spend time on Pinterest to find ideas to solve a problem. They look for inspirations and often they don’t know what they need, makes it ideal for us to present our products for them to pin and buy later.

Pinterest published a report saying their demographics consists mainly of women who are inclined to buy and the average order value is $58.95 compared to facebook $55 (according to Shopify research).

An average pin is repined at least 11 times and 80% pins are repinned. They also referred that popular pins can be active for months compared to 7 mins on twitter. This means a popular pin can bring you traffic and sales consistently for many months without any additional effort.

And we saw exact same thing when we ran our Pinterest promotions.

Based on our experience, here are the steps we follow to drive sales to our dropshipping site.

Steps to increase sales using Pinterest

Step 1: Setup right tools

First, we made sure we have the right tools to get started. After many trial and testing, we found this combination of tools works best for us.

• Pinterest Business account – You need to convert your personal Pinterest account into a business account so that you can leverage many tools like analytics and promoted pins.
• Shopify Pinterest Channel – Shopify provides an inbuilt integration with Pinterest. Every product you publish becomes a buyable pin and Shopify also applies the product schema that is required to show price and product details in the pin automatically. This also helps Google to understand your product details and helps in SEO.
• Tailwind account for Pinterest with the chrome extension – Tailwind is one of the best tools for scheduling and promoting pins. They are the official Pinterest Marketing Developer Partner for Content Marketing. It looks like they mastered Pinterest and know exactly what works.
• Stencil – We use the stencil app to create pins for our store. It has a chrome plugin and makes it super easy to create pins quickly, they have readymade template and ton of stock photos.
  
  You can also share the pin directly to the board and have Tailwind do the rest.

These are the tools that would be critical for success with your Pinterest promotions.

Step 2: Pick the right pins

We noticed that pinning right images works best compared to just pinning the product images as it is. Pinterest is filled with pins and many pins look identical, so it is important to make your pin standout to see better results.

Here are some tips for that.

Organize your Pinterest account for best conversion.

When you structure your account for easy navigation it makes so much impact on your Pinterest growth. Here are some things we tried and worked for us.

• Niche boards – Our store was a general store, so we separated the niches as collections. Similarly, we created boards for each collection in the store which represents the niche.
• Categories Boards – Then we also created some collections that are based on categories like best selling, featured and subcategories based on product types. We also created Pinterest boards for these categories.
• Group Boards – The next board we created is group board for other pinners to add their pins as well. It is a powerful strategy for growing your followers fast. Instead of we adding all the content we are letting others add pins to our boards to help our visibility go viral.
• Supplement product boards – This is something like cross-posting or upselling a product. It is something like when you buy a toy they offer you batteries. We create such supplement products that are essential and attract more customers to your store.
• Information Boards – We also created boards with pins that has how to do articles. Content marketing works best to sell any kind of products or services. Teaching people how to do something is an excellent way to get engagement and followers. It also helps in SEO to grow the Pinterest account faster and make more sales organically.

Create a theme for your pins

Something we thought about branding within the Pinterest account, all the pins looks uniform and stands out with brand colors.
We also organized our Pinterest account similar to our store.

 

• Standout theme – Pick a theme that is close to your brand theme. Fonts, designs, and style should match your brand. When navigating from Pinterest to the store, customers should feel seamless and not alienated. This helps build trust and reduce the friction to buy for you.
• Consistent design – 80% of Pinterest traffic comes from mobile, and mobile displays are vertically long. We have seen that lengthy pictures get more engagement than horizontal pictures. In our theme, we only use long-form images that can scroll for more time on mobile devices. We keep this format consistently throughout the profile.
• Brand colors – Consistent colors is also important to build brands, people will get used to your colors and that builds trust.

 

Pinning frequency & Schedule

Keeping a consistent frequency is critical for success in Pinterest. Initially, you will need to test various timeslots, once you figure out the right schedule then it is much easier to scale. This is where Tailwind is super helpful, the scheduling and analytics feature will give you the exact insight you need to know from the pin promotion standpoint.

Here are some of the scheduling tips.

• Figure the pinning frequency on each board – As mentioned above, you need to figure this one out by testing. Test as many time slots as possible to find the ones that bring maximum results. If you don’t get the timing right you pinning efforts might be worthless.
• Scheduling your pins in advance – You need a ton of pins to be on top of the feed for each user. It is recommended to pin at least 10 times a day.  That is for one pin in one board, which is one variation of your product. Now imagine how many pins you need to pin each day for all your products on multiple boards.
  This is not humanly possible, that is another reason you need a tool to automate this process. Once again Tailwind takes care of that effectively.
  
• Group boards – We talked about setting up our own group boards. However, we also need to participate in others group board as well and pin in their boards as much as we could.

Step 3: Traffic

Next step is to drive traffic to your store using Pinterest.

• • Pins to appear more frequently – You probably know that a pin is one variation of your product. That means you can have many pins for a single product. Every product picture, colors variations, style variations and anything you can think of can be a pin. All these pins should be pinned as frequently as possible on all related boards. I know it feels like spamming but that is how Pinterest works. More the pins out there the probability of success is more.
  • Join Group boards – Join more group boards which are already popular. There is a site called Pin Groupie which shows all the popular Pinterest group boards. You can filter based on your niche and look for the one that has fewer contributors and have high engagement. Usually, the description on that particular board will have details about joining the group, if not contact the collaborators and request to join. Adding your pins on a popular board could make your pins go viral.
  • Tailwind tribes – This is just like the group boards but within Tailwind app. Tailwind has a large user community and they started creating groups within the app. They are powerful because the users’ communities are highly engaged. Join these tribes or start your own tribe and promote your pins in these tribes as well.
  • SEO – Pinterest also gets a large amount of traffic from search engines. Adding your pins with right keywords gives you a great advantage from SEO perspective. If your keywords match the search query the possibility of your pin showing up in the search result is high. Since Pinterest has high authority the probability of the person clicking on your pin and buying your product is high.
    Follow the keyword research method that you would do for your store and use the same keywords for your pin as well. You can also optimize your boards for SEO.

• Pinterest Pin button – Use pin it button on your product listing to encourage users to pin the product images on their board. It generates a lot of organic growth.
• Promoted pins – This is another popular way to drive traffic to your store. It is the ad network for Pinterest and it is not as popular as Facebook or Google. The reason is it is not as effective as other platforms. For us, organic traffic methods were more effective than running ads on Pinterest.

Step 4: Analytics

By now you would have realized Pinterest is a very chatty application. Too many pins and activities happen on Pinterest. In order to manage all these activities and understand the effectiveness of your promotion, it is critical to capture and study the analytics.

Based on this you can alter your strategy and scale the ones that are working well.

Here are some of the data to look for.

• Look for pins that performed well – You need to know the top performing pin and learn why that pin works better. Look for the category, pin images, times shared and the groups you shared and so on. All this will give you information to create and promote your next pin.
• Look for trends in topics – Some neat tools in Tailwind like board insights and pin inspector give you information about the boards that are trending and pins that work. Leverage them for a better understanding of the products that you can list in your dropshipping store and make sales immediately.
  
• Organic trends – Some pins that you thought might not work and end up working is the gold nugget to look for. This kind of data gives you the ideas on something that we overlooked. Dig deeper into the insights in tailwind to collect this information.
• Website traffic – There are more tools that give you more information on how your Pinterest efforts are paying off. Google Analytics and  Shopify analytics are 2 other tools that give you a ton of information about traffic, conversion rates and the keywords that work best. Leverage as much of these tools to understand what works and more importantly why it works to do more of it.
  

Step 5: Rinse and repeat

Once you understand this process, all you have to do is repeat the process. Split each effort into a campaign and measure how your campaign did.

When you get the insights each time, the quality of your campaign will get better results. You will learn more about your niche, your customer’s behavior and the products that work best on Pinterest.

This data is critical to run any business and we are getting all that for free and on autopilot. Use them effectively and grow your eCommerce dropshipping store using Pinterest.

Conclusion

Pinterest is a great opportunity to promote physical or digital products and make passive income. With the right tools, you will be able to be successful with Pinterest.

Once you understand the power of this strategy, you will probably scale it to a larger income stream on autopilot. (Which are working on currently).

At 925M we are all about passive income to become Millionaires fast.