I have long been both in love and in a bitter battle with the Pinterest platform.  The thing is that when I create a pin and post it on the platform, it feels right to me and I'm supposed to be able to back that up with data, but I feel like I have no idea if it really IS right.
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I love making pins. It gives me a creative outlet that I can complete while sitting on the couch next to my husband as he watches whatever sporting event in on tv that night. I tr.y to create images that I think would catch my eye, but here's the problem - I have no idea what that is either.  I am a fan of many different types of images on Pinterest. Bright, clean and cheery? I like it.  A little more moody can work for me too. Lots of text, no text, one word on the pin - they all work depending on the pin.  I still haven't been able to analyze the pins that I like well enough to determine WHAT it is that makes me like them. So, I just keep making more pins that all look completely different from one another hoping that one of them will catch the attention of pinners scrolling through their feed waiting to be educated, entertained and amused.

My newest pin is below but I'm also very excited because I just learned how to embed it in my blog post right from Pinterest. I took a picture and circled where I clicked on my pin.
​It gave me some code which I put into the embed code thing and wha-la! I am a fancy pants coder!

Until I took the time and really started reading posts about Pinterest, I didn't understand (or believe) that it had so much power.  Well, I've been working on this during the summer and I'm here to tell you - it does, it REALLY, REALLY does.  Prior to the summer, I used Pinterest occasionally to pin items that I found to be interesting to me personally, not really caring if anyone else liked what I was pinning or not.  That was fine for that purpose.  However, I wanted to see if I could really increase traffic to my Teachers Pay Teachers store and therefore, increase sales.  The answer is, without a doubt, YES.  Now, in all honesty I had paid Pinterest to promote a few of my pins before sales and things but after that - well, see for yourself.  The number of monthly viewers has (at least for me) turned into increased sales that I could not have believed if I hadn't experienced it myself.  

Now, I'm not turning into Deanna Jump (but who is?), but I can tell you this increase will help me pay extra toward my student loans that I'm incurring while pursuing my doctorate and I am very grateful.  I'm also slightly proud of the positive reception my products have had from teachers.  I made them for myself in my own classroom and I'm so glad to see that other teachers find them as useful as I do.

I'm sure I've committed some sort of Pinterest Faux Pas because I uploaded EVERY SINGLE PRODUCT (okay, not really - but many) to my board today. I still don't understand the etiquette and I've committed to study it more, but I was so excited that my products were DONE, I just had to get them out there.

Additionally, I watched some videos on making Pinterest Pins. Apparently, I haven't been doing that right either! Good grief.  I'll get there I guess. Here are a few attempts. I learned on TpT that you can assign them specific links and then you can see which one brings you the most traffic. SO MUCH INFO! 

Which one will people respond to best? I'm not sure. What do you think? Asked the hubby and he said he loved them all - isn't he the best?!

Okay, I'm off to make more covers - this is too fun!

​Rebecca