BUILD YOUR TEACHER BUSINESS WITH PINTEREST
There are many wonderful ways to start a business as a teacher to make extra money and more importantly, to share and collaborate with other teachers. Our go to resource for finding everything from teaching strategies to videos of instruction and examples of standards based activities is social media and other internet destinations. Pinterest in one of the most popular websites for collecting many ideas and resources in one place to refer back to later. Although it isn’t really social media–Pinterest allows you to follow others and them to follow you in a way that emphasizes common interests and streamlines your searches for teaching ideas and information.
What is really great about having a Pinterest account is that the pins for specific things are searchable via hashtags and keywords. When your desire is to promote your Teachers Pay Teachers store or your professional blog, one of the most powerful things to consider is the words you use most often and the jargon most likely to be used by others in your field, which is your target audience. For example, an elementary teacher often uses the terms “grade”,
“activity”,“project”, “writing”, “reading”, “math”, and “centers”. So, when creating a link or pin to your blog or Teachers Pay Teachers Store, Using phrases such as “3rd grade math center activities” as captions are an efficient way to insure your pins will be discovered and fall into the right hands. You may also add hashtags to emphasize exactly what a post contains. The more specific a caption or hashtag is, the more likely it is to end up the top result in a search for your target audience.
A couple of things you need to know about using Pinterest for your business may not be things you thought of right away. For example, there are free business accounts for promoting your pins on Pinterest. There are ways within that business account to check statistics of a pin, and see how many audience members you are reaching and when they are located. This allows you to get specific with your strategy to continue to have repeat customers and reach out to new ones. Likewise, another lesser known idea is to cross post your links on Facebook and Twitter. Instead of leading the customer directly to your site or store, have the link take them to the pin board instead. That way they can get a glance at all the other items you have to offer. And finally, consider joining and contributing to collaborative Pinterest boards. These are boards featuring similar ideas from a wide variety of contributors and is a way to crowd source some of the top quality resources out there. Business to business re-pins will help to grow your followers even more.
Pinterest has a wonderful “All About Pinterest” page to help with the basics of account creation and management.
