Pinterest Marketing in One Hour per Week

With good time management and the right tools, it’s possible to squeeze Pinterest marketing in one hour per week. There is some work that you’ll need to do upfront, but the effort you put in now will save hours each week in the future. This post will help you focus your business goals so you have a clear idea of how to grow your business, and then provide you with the tools that will help you make the most of your time.

Note: Pin scheduler Traffic Wonker has sadly gone out of business, but owner and CEO Andy Fling has given me permission to share his useful Pinterest research and other information on my site. I jumped at the chance as Andy is the smartest guy I know when it comes to Pinterest!

Establishing Clear Small Business Goals

If you’re going to be successful with your small business, you need a marketing strategy.

Your marketing strategy should:

1. Map out how you will grow your small business.
2. Outline what products you will develop.
3. Identify who your customers are.
4. Identify why your products are better than the competition.
5. List how you will best use your time to market your business.

Without a marketing strategy that looks something like this, you’ll wind up feeling overwhelmed and disappointed by the results.

As an example, here’s my idea of the Starbucks® Coffee Company marketing plan.

1. Grow business with free and paid advertising and many store locations.
2. Offer coffee and bakery items.
3. Market to middle and upper-income adults.
4. Offer a unique innovative atmosphere that establishes the business as a status symbol.
5. Offer products and atmosphere that is so good, that word-of-mouth saves time and advertising dollars in promoting products.

Here’s a list of tools that may soon be saving you tons of time. It will take some time to set everything up, but the time spent will be worth it when everything is up and running.

Organization

Quick Note is a Chrome browser extension that allows you to make notes. Just open the browser and click on the icon to open the app. I added Quick Notes about a year ago, and it’s been one of my favorite tools.

1. Because it’s a browser extension it’s not cluttering my desktop, and it’s always in the same place.
2. It’s great for saving ideas and links for upcoming newsletters.
3. Common email responses are quickly accessible.
4. Post ideas are easily saved for a later date.

For Pinterest marketing, you can use it to save blog post title variations for fresh pins that you will create. (If you haven’t tried varying your post titles before, it’s a great way to attract visitors who aren’t responding to your current headline.)

Pin Design

There are many tools that make Pinterest pin design incredibly simple. If you don’t consider yourself a designer, check out Canva. If you’ve got a little experience and would love more freedom, try Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop.

Canva has quickly become a favorite for Pinterest marketers, providing an easy-to-use tool to design pinnable images. Canva provides intuitive controls, so creating and editing your image is almost a no-brainer. Just choose a template, or start with a blank canvas. Then select the “Layouts and Background” feature to figure out how you want to format your image. Finish with images and text.

Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop are the tools for design professionals. Adobe Illustrator is my tool of choice for website design, flyers, business cards, Pinterest pins, and more. Both tools offer amazing freedom and design possibilities, but also come with a giant learning curve. You don’t need to be intimidated though. Just start with boxes and text, and learn a little more every day.

If you’d like to know more about the tools available for Pinterest pin design, check out our post, 10 Ridiculously Simple Pinterest Pin Design Tools.

Marketing on Auto-Pilot

MiloTree is a pop-up that helps you grow your email, Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook following. Putting this tool to work on your site can help you build followers, without having to manually following them yourself.  Here is a post if you’d like to learn more about MiloTree and how it works.

Checklist to Do Your Pinterest Marketing in One Hour per Week