A style and travel influencer who's on track to make more than $100,000 on Pinterest this year shares how she does it — and her advice for other creators

style and travel influencer Oyin Edogi stands in front of mountain and water — Style and travel influencer Oyin Edogi.
Pinterest

Like Instagram and TikTok, Pinterest is creating ways for its users to monetize their content.
The platform's Creator Fund offers a $25,000 grant to help underrepresented creators grow their reach.
Style and travel influencer Oyin Edogi says joining the fund helped her land multiple paid partnerships.

While many content creators focus on platforms like Instagram or TikTok, Pinterest is emerging as another place where they can make money. Once simply a place to go for fashion ideas or DIY arts and crafts, the site now includes more travel hacks, entrepreneurship tips, daily motivation, parenting inspiration, and even live shows. At the same time, Pinterest's new Creator Inclusion Lead, Zeny Shifferaw, has joined others in the company setting goals to "uplift and empower historically marginalized creators."

One influencer who's found their piece of the Pinterest pie is Oyin Edogi. She's a beauty, style, and travel influencer who began monetizing her Pinterest account in December 2020, when she only had several thousand followers.

"I had about 5,000 followers before I received my first paid campaign on Pinterest. I honestly was pinning for fun and didn't know the power of the platform," Edogi told Insider.

Over time, Edogi says she was able to position herself as a 'top pinner '— someone who pinned other creators' work as well as creating her own pins — which caught the eye of Pinterest's partnerships team. Edogi says they reached out to her directly to offer her that first paid campaign.

Pinterest's Creator Fund

In May 2021 — after Pinterest had made an open commitment to amplifying creators and businesses from underrepresented communities — the platform rolled out the Creator Fund, which offered selected creators from underrepresented communities a $25,000 grant, a four-week training program, and creative strategy consulting. Edogi and other creators were hand-selected by Pinterest to join the fund.

Since joining, Edogi says she went from having 100,000 monthly views to over 600,000 in less than a few months. Besides the fund, she says she's also begun creating pins with brands like Ulta. She's made $77,000 so far in 2021 and is on track to bring in $106,000 by the year's end from both a partnership with Pinterest TV and her sponsored brand posts.

Edogi told Insider that the Creator Fund experience helped her network with other creatives, learn new tools of how to build and scale her personal brand, and understand in more detail how Pinterest's analytics work.

Her secrets to success

She also said there's a winning recipe as a Pinterest creator to attract followers, pinners, and paid partnerships.

To begin with, pinning is a must. Each Pinterest creator has their own boards on their pages that represent the things they love to talk about and share the most. With these boards, you can create your own pins. Pins grant you opportunities to be more visible, Edogi said, because you can include a series of photos, videos, or a combination of both. The more people pin your ideas, the more visibility you create, so it's ideal to have colorful, inviting content that others want to share, she said.

On average, creators should pin their own and others pins at least three to five times per day to gain traction. "Consistency on Pinterest is key," Edogi said.

In addition, creators should use the "@mention" function in their idea pins to tag brands and products, which helps spread brand awareness but also attract brands to see creators that are organically engaging in content creation.

Read the original article on Business Insider