Pinterest Verification Question

[soupking]

Hi Everybody,

I'm trying to set things up on Pinterest. The first thing is that I guess I'm suppose to verify my website for traffic. I can't on Zazzle (as I understand it), so I'm posting a link on my site, but...I'm not using my site as a merchant site. I'm using Zazzle, so this seems rather semantic for the purpose. 

Is what I'm doing make any sense? All of the guidelines for this on Pinterest don't matter if I'm not using Zazzle. Is this just some pedantic step or do I need to take this more seriously because it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to verify a website I'm not using for e-commerce. I just don't want to get in trouble for something down the road. Like, we can use Pinterest with Zazzle, right?

Thanks for reading. 

[Anne]

I don't know the answer to your question as I only link through to Zazzle via my own website. And haven't been on Pinterest for quite a while. So now coming back there I got another verification question: they want my birth date! (not going to happen!)

[karab]

That's part of them verifying that you're not underage! They have different rules about permissions and privacy for teenagers vs. adults.

[karab]

What are you using your website for? If you have a blog in it that links to your Zazzle shop you should definitely claim it on Pinterest because then all the pins that send traffic there will be reported in your Pinterest analytics even if someone else pinned them from your site.

If you're not trying to get traffic from Pinterest to your site, or if you're not sending traffic to Zazzle from your site, you probably don't need to know about traffic from Pinterest to your site, so you don't need to claim it. But it's good to do it anyway, it can't hurt.

I have two sites and four different Pinterest accounts, and I've claimed the sites on two of them but the other two are just personal accounts so I don't have them claimed to any sites. I still pin from Zazzle to them, I just don't see any stats about traffic or other engagement on Pinterest. It's not great because I'm not getting any feedback about how the things I'm pinning are doing, though. For the accounts that have claimed sites I have more information about what's working.

[soupking]

I just want to drive traffic from Pinterest to my Zazzle site. I'm only bringing up some other site because Pinterest needs it to approve me. I have all these notes from Pinterest YouTube channels and all this stuff to just connect the dots. Now I need to link a website Pinterest to be "Approved" that I'm not even using. 

Claim your website

Required

By claiming your website, you'll receive attribution and get analytics for the content you created.

??? - Um...that's why I got a Zazzle site, so I don't have to use Printify etc. 

The Internet should make things easy, I just keep running into one roadblock after another to connect two sites. 

I don't want to go through all this work, and then get some message in 2 months saying I'm suspended/banned because I didn't check a checkbox. 

[Sara_H]

@soupking 

Just get a free blogger blog and connect that. You can still share your products from zazzle to pinterest then you've ticked the box.

There is a connection from Instagram where it will auto post to pinterest (used to - not sure if it still does) You could set that up and killing two birds with one stone so to speak.

But ideally Pinterest likes unique pins uploaded in their preferred dimensions (1000 x 1500) - which you could post on your blog too.

Pinterest youtubers rarely tell you the whole story  - pinterest changes so often and none really are zazzle specific.

There's a lot of work to be done promoting on pinterest (and don't pin too much all at once)

[soupking]

Hi Sara, thanks so much for the feedback. Yeah, I have a gallery site, but it's not a merchant site by any means. Maybe a blog could be a good parallel site. I'll have to think about it though. I have so many irons in the fire these days. Escalating Print-to-web + Social Media is almost like it's own degree or crash course. I've taken on a bit more than I can swallow, work daily, and still try to stay creative. And yeah, trying to figure out how much NOT to post. Even though SM is highly competitive, I don't want to be redundant or annoying. Thanks again. 🙂

[karab]

I have a youtube channel and I talk about Pinterest occasionally, but I know what you mean...

A lot of the Pinterest advice on Youtube is for people who are trying to get traffic to their websites, where they earn ad money. It's not so much for just sending traffic to a site where you would buy things, which sounds like what you want to do.

If you don't have a website that you want to send traffic to, you don't need to claim a website or verify anything no Pinterest. You can have a business or personal account, put your Zazzle store link in the bio part of your profile, and then just pin your listings to Pinterest. If you want to get deeper into Pinterest at any point you can definitely do that, but there's no reason to make yourself crazy if all you want to do is send traffic to Zazzle.

[soupking]

Hi Karab, cool thank you for the insight/perspective. Half the time I'm just playing operator. I don't really know why I'm doing what sites ask. I'm just plugging holes to get this implementation over with. If verifying a site (that's not my Zazzle merchant site) is not 100% necessary then I'll hopefully just leave it off/alone. I don't see the need in connecting a catalog at this point either. I'm just not that product heavy. thanks again 🙂

[Malissa]

I do recommend you have a business account for pinning stuff from Zazzle (for various reasons you can find out more about by a forum search), but, like Karab said, you don't have to worry about verification of a website.  

When you verify your website you get rich pins and the attributions to your site- that is the biggest benefit.  However, Zazzle is a verified site in its own right and you get rich pins from pinning directly from Zazzle as well.  

(Rich pins give info underneath them and are dynamic with changing information, but it's not something you need to know about or mess with in order to promote your Z products on Pinterest.)

Bottom line, switch to a business account if you don't already have one, add your Zazzle store url- I think you can add your referral number at the end as well, and start pinning.

[our-porch]

Thank You, I was just on Pinterest, and clicked on my Zazzle url they have as my website. So I came over here knowing that it's better to claim it, yet you can not claim it. Just very interesting, they should do that differently. Thanks for letting me know it is still ok not to claim it. 

[soupking]

Hi Malissa, thank you so much for chiming in to back up what Karab was pointing out. It helps to know what's what and have a frame of reference for what's necessary and what's auxiliary.