Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey guys, I'm Peggy Dean an artist born into massive success due to using social media. In this class, we will be diving in depth into the ins and outs of using Pinterest to gain exposure, to target your ideal audience and most importantly, to prompt actual action. I will introduce my exact formula and recipes so that you can see instant results. As long as you do exactly what I provide in this class's instruction, you will be well on your way to driving traffic directly to you and not staying lost in a sea of noise. This class is for you if you have a service or a product that you offer online and you want to drive people to your website. It's for you if you want to convert viewers into actual buying customers. It doesn't matter how far along you are in your journey of business or social media. I didn't start looking at Pinterest seriously until about a year ago. Let me tell you once I did, my income skyrocketed. I can't wait to dive into the nitty-gritty with you in this class. Let's get in there.
2. Let's Begin: "Need to Know" Stuff: When I first started my business, I wasn't too into Pinterest. In fact, I poured so many of my networking and exposure eggs into one platform, which was Instagram. But I was consumed by it and so, at the time it worked. I could determine exactly what was shown when because its algorithm, hadn't interfered with chronological order yet. But what I wasn't thinking about, however, was once something was posted, unless somebody who's going to spend time scrolling down my feed, they were never actually going to see those posts. That was the case then and it's the case now. Basically, if I was trying to reach a target audience, hopefully my timing was just right. Moving into Pinterest, if you're not familiar with Pinterest, it's a social media platform that allows users to save and share images that feature products, services, projects and ideas like DIY Craft ideas, recipe, art, interior decorating, home tricks, photography and so much more. When viewing an image that someone has shared, just below, you will see a large collection of similar shares. Pinterest algorithm will identify what's in a photo by image and pair it with like images. It's a wonderful tool when searching for that thing that you want to be just right. The first and most important benefit about Pinterest is that its content is evergreen, so think of it like a blog post. Let's say you want to find out how to do something, so you plug in your questions into Google's search engine and you find a tutorial on somebody's blog. Let's say you click the article, find the thing and you're all set. But did you also happen to notice, the date from that blog post, chances are it's like two plus years old Evergreen content. Pinterest is the same way, but with way less work than a blog post and with a built in audience. What you pin will get repinned and repinned it will come up with different searches. 80 percent of activity on Pinterest are re-pins, while only 20 percent are original pins. Basically, somebody sees a pin that they like and they add the pin to one of their boards and the more pin gets re-pinned, the higher it will rank in search results. Clicking directly onto a pin will open up either the original web page that it was pinned from because it auto links or it will open the link that was assigned to it when it was created on Pinterest. I'll get more into this in a bit. But I do have a bonus challenge. After filming this class, I realized how many times I said the word Pinterest. Starting with the first lesson, which is next, if you can count how many times I say Pinterest, email me with the right answer and I will send you all of my pre-designed fully customizable templates for you to use to promote yourself and your brand. Let's get on into it.
3. The Perfect Pin: Let's discuss pins. Think of pins as you would a post on Facebook or on Instagram. They serve a purpose as static content that can be reshared. You have the ability to link websites to pins, add descriptions and even post videos. Pins can be posted directly within Pinterest, where you upload an image or a video on the platform. Then you can assign a destination link, or you can pin from an external source by just sharing. You'll notice that your smartphone has the ability to share to Pinterest, as do images found on the web. Pinterest actually even has a browser add-on button that you can install to make pinning what you find a breeze. You can pin images of any size ratio, but the recommended pin size is always vertical format, meaning it's taller than wide. Pinterest recommends a 2-3 aspect ratio. If your image is 1000 pixels wide, then it would be 1500 pixels tall. If your pin's in landscape form, it will still show up but it will get lost in Pinterest's feed on both desktop and mobile views because of the way that Pinterest is laid out in columns. It'll be larger if it's vertical. Your pin should always be eye-catching. Not all images will get someone's attention, so you need to put thought into what you're pinning and how that will best reach somebody. Take a moment to research the following topics on Pinterest and take note of what stands out most and why. Try craft ideas, nursery, and then let's try colors. For crafts, you probably notice that vibrant, clean images with a small amount of accompanying text best describes what a pin is all about. You may have also noticed some split images hinting at what the project is so you can upload multiples in there. Searching nursery pulls up a lot of decor, arts, organization ideas. Look at that and figure out what were you drawn to the most? Then searching for colors is always a real treat, but you might have found isolated colors of what drew you in. I like this exercise because it will help guide you in how you format your own pins. Searching for what you're posting and taking notes on what stands out the most will help you know how to deliver. Think about, "What would I be drawn to if I was looking for this?" Of what you're posting. Creating the perfect pin will grab attention, like you would not believe. You want to create pins with specific goals in mind, so the first is exposure, the second is brand awareness, and the third is conversions. The perfect layout should include eye-catching imagery. It should make somebody want to repost what you posted, to re-pin it. It should have good color themes, pleasing font pairings, and it should be easy to digest clearly and quickly. Also try showing how what you're pinning could fit into the viewers' life. The pin should basically speak on its own about what it is that your brand or services offering. It should be visually stimulating and stand out in a feat of other very similar items. Because remember you only have a split second to grab someone's attention so you want to make it count.
4. SEO & Discoverability: Use images and texts that focus on desired outcomes. You want to keep it simple, less is more. It is just always the way that it works. When you are skimming quickly. It is just a few words or a short phrase as the text overlay that will help showcase what your pin is. We will catch the eyes of people looking at your content because they are going quickly. Only add texts that serves a purpose as we start talking about your image, I am going to cover a very important element to your pins discovery on Pinterest. If nothing else that you take in from this class, this is what you want to pay attention to. Your file name matters. I am not talking about the title of your pin. I am talking about the back end where it is sitting in one of those folders on your computer file name. I know that we all have our own organization methods, so you can keep that as is. But my suggestion would be to make a temporary copy of that file image just right-click, duplicate, copy, whatever your computer wants to do, and rename that file according to what somebody would search for, if they wanted to find it. If I am painting a watercolor tutorials, I could save that image as how to paint a gallery dot JPEG and or galaxy watercolor painting tutorial dot JPEG. It is simple, it is effective and it tells Pinterest that it is a result to that search. As the same note, it goes for every single image that you post anywhere on the web, Google doesn't know how to interpret IMG 1859385 dot JPEG like a watercolor tutorial. You know what I mean? You will notice that pins pop up also on Google images as search results quite often. Make sure that you save that file name correctly. You also want to make sure that your image will stand out among the others in the search results or within somebody's feed. While it is good to research what is most eye-catching, It's also good to use that research to create something a little different so that your content speaks a bit louder. You could try using unexpected angles. Statistics show that lifestyle images performed better than product shots. Try mixing it up and doing several; you could try adding a couple or several images to a pin. But whenever possible, which is always try to include your brand name or your website or your logo within your pins. Make it small but still legible. But you want discoverability on your pins because you don't know where that image is going to end up. Then as far as using video on Pinterest, it is a great way to capture somebody's interests because Pinterest is so image heavy, so video is easier to stand apart. Let me give you some best practices. If you do use video, you want to keep them under 15 seconds. This is an attention span things so if you can get your message clear in that time, Good to go. Be sure to also select a strong cover image, because that 's what shows up in someone's feed first before they start watching it. Then videos will auto play without sound. Don't rely on sound whatsoever when posting videos. It is fine if you add it, but just do not use it as a key component for when it gets discovered.
5. Focus Messaging: When adding text to your pens, you want to be sure that you use focus messaging. This means adjectives and details of a product or service, texts to convey an attitude or a vibe to compliment the visual and text that prompts action. When you using text overlay, try making it actionable, adding a call to action can increase your sales. Like most comfortable bras versus take this quiz to find your perfect bra size or something along those lines, so see how it changes from descriptive to actionable, both are great but actionable is better. Using seasonal and special occasion references will significantly boost relevance, the more niche you get, it's that whole theory. Be sure to utilize the brand description, so you can use up to 500 characters, so don't be afraid to get into it, and most importantly, include relevant keywords to weave into your description so it shows up more. Include your brand and your pen description, so once the image takes off, you don't know where that image is going to end up, so basically you want people to be able to find you. Adding a call to action and the description as well is good, most people in browse mode, they're not always thinking about acting until being prompted, and then this one should be a no-brainer but you'd be surprised, avoid fonts that are difficult to read. Don't put more than three fonts in a pen because it's going to be cluttery and those get overlooked. In the description, did you also know that you can add up to 20 hashtags within [inaudible]? It didn't use to be used much on Pinterest, but it's a thing now and will help with discoverability. Especially when someone clicks the hashtag to find similar posts, that's another way to get discovered. I actually go over hashtags like in detail in my class, social media for the creative entrepreneur and that class also includes a 40 page e-book on creating hashtags for your brand, so I highly recommend grabbing it.
6. Specs to Note: I want to quickly mention pin specs so you know what to plan for. Typically you would save your uploads as these file types anyway, but it's worth mentioning. The first one, image file types should be JPEG or PNG. Ideally the 2-3 ratio, so 2 times wide 3 times high, and then video has to be mp4, MOV or M4V files. Titles on Pinterest can have up to a hundred characters. Your description can have up to 500 characters. But keep note that only the first 50 characters will show up in someone's feed, and then I also have included Pinterest's their creative best practices. That's available in the downloads for you to print out as a reminder to help you with exposure in sales. It comes straight from their mouth, so it's really helpful. So grab up that. I think that's all.
7. Boards: You can organize your pens into what Pinterest calls boards. It's like putting files into folders, but you pin things to boards, pretty darling. You can categorize your boards to their applicable topics, and you can even create boards within boards. For example, you might create a board called illustration and then create boards within that that categorize what's being illustrated. So you have illustrations and then you have people, flowers, animals, etc. Keep in mind that you want your board names to be easily found in searches, so keeping the names of your boards really simple, and to the point, and relevant will help. One of the neat things about Pinterest is that people can follow boards instead of following everything that you pin. They'll still be considered your followers, but you might have a recipe board that someone just isn't interested in, in which case they don't have to follow it, but they can still follow your other boards. It's actually one of the things that I like almost most about Pinterest versus other social media sites, because you can literally filter topics from a single person. Like there's artists that I follow on Instagram and suddenly they have a baby, and I don't have kids, I don't really care to see all the baby stuff. So your boards focused is a good practice and I recommend having a minimum of 10-15 Pinterest boards and a profile with a minimum of 30 pins on each board. It's just going to help again with searchability and discovery, and then get people more interested in following it. Think about your target audience. If you are pinning DIY crafts, you could create generic boards like DIY crafts, or home ideas, or you could get more specific with your boards and name them things like wedding stationery ideas and DIY Halloween costumes. Then in the description of the board, add additional short keyword phrases that also apply. For the best practice of board descriptions, try creating what's called a long-tail keyword phrase. This is when you have a sentence or two describing what your board is about, while including the relevant keywords, and short tail keyword phrases within it. An example for DIY Halloween costumes could be, here are a ton of cheap DIY costume ideas for family craft time to enjoy and get you dressed up on Halloween. I had a few keywords in there that would land well, such as cheap DIY costume ideas, or shortened to just DIY costume, or costume ideas so that all fits together as short tail key phrases, and then craft time is in there, dress up is in there, Halloween. So see how that makes it more optimized for search results. The goal here is to get people actually interested in your boards, so keep them more niche, and that will do the trick. I have a couple of tips for using boards, so you can create secret boards on Pinterest that only you can see. To do this, you just toggle secret on. But here is my tip to you, if you are one that really, really likes to plan your social content, you can create a secret board to post your own pins to so that you can see and test how they'll show up on Pinterest before actually posting publicly. Another tip is think about inviting other people to collaborate on boards with you. You can also join group boards that already exist, and this will allow for even more pins that come from other people to increase the content within the board, and make the board itself really discoverable. It'll be more of a community of Pinterest around a specific topic, but that doubles, and even triples, quadruples, you name it, eyes that are seeing that board.
8. Consistency Time Savers: You want to make sure that you are posting consistently. It's going to increase your monthly views and increase your followers. Followers don't matter as much on Pinterest as much as your views do, but it's great to have somebody that's constantly seeing your stuff. It's better to pin over a certain amount of time rather than all at once, since that provides a steady stream of content and reach a wider audience. Luckily, though for Pinterest, like I mentioned, 80 percent of its pins are re-pins. It's not as crucial, but it's always good to be consistent. Nice thing about the consistency is that Pinterest actually lets you schedule your posts. All you need to do to schedule is create a new pin, select publish at a later date, and then choose when you'd like your pin to go live. The downside is that you can only schedule one pin at a time, so it can be time consuming but you can schedule up to 30 pins in your queue and then note that you can only schedule two weeks in advance. Here comes Tailwind. If you want to take it a step further, I highly recommend Tailwind. I'm not going to lie. My main tip for consistency is to get Tailwind like yesterday. It's incredible and works for you and you have to devote such a small amount of time to pinning. There isn't a timeline max, you can schedule months and months in advance. There isn't a cap on how many pins that you can queue. What I love the most about Tailwind is that you can be on a general blog page, let's say and simply just press the build in browser button that they provide and it automatically grabs the images on that page and lets you select as many as you want, and then assign them to boards that you want them to show up on and create a title and description and all that on the same page. From there, you can auto stagger their scheduled posts time and then also Tailwind helps generate the best times for you to post for optimal reach. It just makes everything super easy and you don't have to think so hard about scheduling and getting single posts up all the time.
9. SEO for Business: The big question that I have been asked over and over that's actually brought me to create this class is how to use Pinterest for business. All the previous tips are crucial to your success on Pinterest but now I'm just going to walk you through setting up the business account. It's actually really easy, this is going to be short. If you already have a Pinterest account, you can change it to a business account or you can add a business profile to your existing personal account or you can just create a whole separate business account but to set up a business account to your personal account, just click the three dots in the top right corner and select, add a free business profile and then follow the prompts, it makes it super easy. If you want to convert your personal account to a business account, just go to this link is just makes it easy pinterest.com/business/converts, and then just follow those prompts. You can also create a business account from scratch and then the link to that is just pinterest.com/business/create. You want to set up your account for the best SEO. SEO is search engine optimization we've been talking about that this whole class, but ideally, your business account, your profile photo will either be your brand logo or your face. Be sure that the image is clear and bright, your name should be your brand name, but also include what you're offering using keywords. It will give a much better opportunity to show up in search results. So for example, I've included the pigeon letters and then art tutorials, so it's got my brand, it's got art tutorials. It's pretty basic, but it tells you what I'm doing I show up easier. Your profile description should include as many keywords as you can add that are relevant to what you do. Once your account is set up, makes sure to go and claim your website and your social media accounts. Each option will explain how to go about doing this, but you want to claim it and that's going to help as well, and I'm going to briefly be covering pinterest ads next but I want make sure that you know that ads are not necessary to succeed on Pinterest at all. They're good to have, they will boost exposure, but they're not necessary.
10. Ads: As I previously mentioned, ads aren't necessary to make your pins show up. They'll just show up more, which is not a bad thing. I personally never used ads for Pinterest but I'll show you where you can do it if you choose to do that. To create an ad, just select the "Ad Tab" from the top left from your Pinterest business account and click "Create Ad", choose your campaign objectives. Do you want like brand awareness or do you want traffic? Then name your ad under the campaign details and then add your daily or total lifetime spend limit if you want to control the amount that you spent on your ad. I recommend this otherwise it's just going to squeeze your wallet, then press "Continue." Pinterest gives you the ability to target your ideal audience, allowing you to maximize your pins impressions by reaching people with actual genuine interest in what you're providing, or you can target your audience by interesting keywords. Interest targeting makes your pins show up to people based on their interactions with Pinterest content rather than specific keyword searches. This method shows up organically for them and then keyword targeting is what it sounds like. Someone types in their search and your pin will pop up. For example, using the keyword flower, that could pop up in searches for any keywords with flowers. The benefit here is that a lot of pinners do spend more time searching than they do browsing their feed, I don't know how true it is, that's how I do it though, so I could see how that makes sense. Then 40 percent of clicks from Pinterest come from the search results, so that's a high clickable rates and you also have the ability to target by demographics like age, location, device usage, and more. The "Analytics" tab will show you all of your audience insights, and then the "Ad" tab is where you'll create and manage your ads and campaigns. There's a lot to go over there and I encourage you to browse and peruse and see how that works for you. But the target marketing is the really nice part about these ads. Again, make sure that you follow the very best practices so that if you're ad is promoted, it's promoted for a reason and it's got striking imagery and task is easy and call the action so that people actually want to interact with your pins so that it will give you optimal results because you don't want to pay for something if it's a dud.
11. Pro Tips: I've got some extra tips and resources that will be handy as you go on your Pinterest journey. If you have the ability to add the Pinterest saved widget to your websites so that people can easily save your content directly to Pinterest. You may have noticed like a little red button pop up while browsing somebody else's website when you hover over an image. You can make that happen on your website. You just go to the Pinterest widget builder and follow the instructions on that page, depending on what type of website you have or who it's hosted through. Another cool tip, or piece of knowledge is, Pinterest has something called a Visual lens, which is like a hidden gem that helps you search without any words. You've probably heard of like Google's reverse image search where you upload a photo and then it traces back to its source by finding like anywhere that that particular image has shown up online. Well, that's super helpful you know, you can actually dive deeper. Let's say you have an image that you just love and wish you could find related images or even better related pins. That's exactly what the visual lens does. This is more just a fun little thing I wanted to share with you just for your own use. But, you can upload an image from your camera or like literally point your lens at something while you're out and about, and Pinterest will automatically use it's visual technologies to source like related images based on the object, pattern, color, etc. Like if someone is wearing a shirt that you totally love, but it's like they got it three years ago, take a picture of it and then it'll show you like related stuff, and there's a lot of shopable pins, so it's pretty cool. Then another tip is, if you're wondering what kind of content is trending on Pinterest, if you go to Pinterest100.com. So Pinterest100.com is updated every year to show you what's trending all over the world. You can use this resource when you are searching for ideas to plan your content around. Wrapping up you guys, I want you to really make sure that you pay a lot of attention to the optimal SEO image set up. All of this stuff because it's so important to have that visual stimulation and then have it actually show up for you in results. Because I know that you can be successful on Pinterest with your business and it's just going to take off. Do these best practices. I hope that you took notes. Feel free to go through this again. Remember my secret challenge. I will see you next time.
Peggy Dean, Top Teacher | The Pigeon Letters
