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Pinterest Marketing for Makers & Designers

Lesson 5 of 15

Create a Power Pinning Strategy


Pinterest Marketing for Makers & Designers

Lesson 5 of 15

Create a Power Pinning Strategy


Lesson Info

Create a Power Pinning Strategy

What we're going to do now is create that power pinning strategy and so you're going to do a couple things and I'm gonna walk you through actually finding some pins so what I say is aimed for fifteen to twenty minutes of focused pinning a day that's it fifteen to twenty minutes but it needs to be focused so here's what I think about when I do that so I like to use stolen time to pin on my smartphone so I might not do those fifteen or twenty minutes all at once in fact it's better if you can break him up two or three times a day we're talking about five, ten minutes of pending at a time I'm a lion waiting for my coffee pin pin pin pin pin right? Or at least I'm going on and liking content to pin later from talk about that a minute but I'm on their little stolen amounts of time you're waiting for your kids get off the bus pin pin pin pin pin this is where the smartphone makes it essential, right? Because it's also then divided like when I'm on my computer I'm working and now I'm going to...

pull it my smartphone and just real quick pin we're going to use related pins and boards to find content quickly I'ma show you how that works in a minute most important important rule of your focused pinning strategy don't click through do not click through because then what happens is suddenly you're on buzzfeed taking a quiz about which finding nemo character most matches your personality right? Don't click throw so we're finding images we like we're pinning them we might click on the image to see other related pins, but we're not clicking through a website if you come across an article or something you want to read during your focus spinning, create a secret board for that to read later or to check out later pennant to that secret board then you know saturday morning you get up, you've got some spare time and you want to go back and find out which finding the male character you are then you can take that quiz on buzzfeed and then we're gonna actually used likes to save content that needs new descriptions or to spread out related content. So what might happen is you find a great pin let's say I'm looking for modern holiday ideas, right? So I found a pin that kind of match is that board and I go to related pins on something I see fifty pins that are like yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, I don't want to do even though smart feed kind of plays that at a limit for my audience I don't wanna pay fifty of those at once, so I'm gonna like them instead so when you're looking at any pin, you can see what I have her over this, I have some options I can pin it, I can send it on son means that you can send it to a friend. This is something that I don't think I've not seen. It really uses a business strategy, it's more just the way that my sister and I communicate with each other here look at this on and then we have a little heart and that little heart means I like it, I want to look at it later so then what happens is I could actually go into my feed and you can see I've got a pretty solid amount of pins here also, I have a giant chunk of likes, so now what I can do is if I'm trying to pin really efficiently, I can come in here and I can pin from my likes and that's really useful because part of being a power pinar is that we want to write great descriptions, right? So if I'm using that stolen minute on my phone and I come across this pin, which is exactly what happened, I think I was getting ready this morning and I spent, like two minutes on pinterest and I found this pin and there's no description, so I just liked it. Now what I'm going to dio is I'm gonna actually pin it. Now I'm going to go in here and I can put it on the right board, and this is another reason right here is you actually scrolling slowly that doing this on your phone near mobile devices actually more efficient when you use it in the app, it shows you the last three boards you pin teo at the top, so if you're focusing on a couple keyboards look like you can see here, if we looked at my likes, I had probably like four pins that would all go on my street style board this way, I don't have to keep scrolling around the ones that I've been painting, too are there. So now I want to make sure I'm getting like, a decent description who I like this not a useful description. If I don't know anything about the image, I'm going to be really descriptive, I'm going to say high waisted gray pants and navy jacket it's not that exciting, but those air good, solid keywords if I really want teo make pinterest happy, I could also say street style because it likes that were done in c, but you're not going to do that with every pin in your board, so I actually say that we're done it see for my own pins so I'm not gonna put it here but if this was a piece of content that I was pinning for my own site I would probably say something like street style inspired high waisted gray pants and a navy jacket I want to save those really really optimized super optimized descriptions for my own content but when I'm pinning I want to put this in here now the idea of the power pitting strategy is that it shouldn't take what I just did like five minutes to get us that one pin right we want to be a little bit more efficient so you can see when I added this it actually gave me another board that it was on now one away because I talk too long but you can use the pins that you know you like tohave recommendations so if I click on the pen again I'm not clicking through not going to the website I'm just clicking on it it's going to show me and this is going to get be different on a mobile device but you'll still see some version of related it's going to show me other pans on that board it's going to show me other boards that it's on and it's going to show me related pens this related pins piece comes up on your mobile aps too and it's really really key for your power pitting strategy now I found something I like I'm gonna come into related pins and I'm actually doing a fair amount of scrolling because I can tell you that I know I've pinned a couple of these already, and if you're not sure pictures helps you out, I could pin it, and it said, you already pinned this to street style don't do it again, so if you're not sure, because once you start to get to a critical mass of pins, it's really easy to get confused, it'll tell you, sometimes I just decide I'm gonna pin it anyway, if I don't remember having pinned it means I probably pin in a really long time ago, and I might just go ahead and pin it again. A lot of people actually are asking this, not just in the past, but also in the chat rooms. Are there any copyright issues you need to be careful of when you're using other people's images? So and I imagine, yeah, fashion magazines, et cetera, like you to reap in there? Yes, oh, actually, there is a bit of code you can put on any website to keep images from being pinned to pinterest. And so if people are really don't want their images, shared their, they've probably done that now that said it's, not perfect, but if you're using, if you're using half your, you're probably you're going to be ok it's not the end the world what I tried to do is if you really want to be great, you try to make sure that things link back to the original content and not like tumbler, which is the black hole of copyright s o if you want to be a good kind of mindful user trying to make sure that things are linking back to good content now that doesn't mean you have to click through it just means that you want to see where it's found and if it looks like it's found somewhere sketchy if you don't repent it that's a good rule of thumb that's a great question chimed in she got a perfect answer, she says check out the terms of use of interest and they are very they're pretty complicated, but yeah, so so then you can use this kind of power pitting strategy to find related content and pin a lot, so when I'm pinning, what I do is I start with my feet right? Because I followed some great people, so I'm going to go into my feed and I'm gonna maybe scroll down and find some images, but if I see something I like and it falls into a board that I might be trying to focus on, then I might pull that up scroll through look for related pins now my rule of thumb is I only try to pin, you know, more than like three to five pins to a board in a row before I make myself switch to another board, and I tried to pin no more than like ten to twenty pins in a category before I jump around another category, so fun feeling, and for me categories, they're pretty much only home deck and fashion, right? Those are my two categories, but if I've just pinned like twenty home deck things, I'm going to mix it up and jump to fashion for a little bit. I just paint a bunch of fashion things, I mean it, mix it up and jump to home deck, but then within those things, you know, I might pin three or four to street style, but then I'm gonna make sure that I may be pinning three or four in my professional style board and in looking for those three, two, four, two streets in street style, I find a lot of pins, I'm just gonna go ahead and like them, right? So I've paid a couple of street style and I see a bunch more. I'm just going to go ahead and hit that little heart button like like like, and I'll come back so it another time. When I don't have quite as much time maybe to browse or there are some days where I know I should pin a little bit, but I just don't feel like looking at my feed, right? I just have one like, get in there and get out then I come back to the likes I'll just go through my likes I'll paint a couple and move on, right? So what you really want to do is aim for at least I was twenty pins a day is a good rule of thumb fifty is better, I would say a hundred should probably be about your backs that's an awful lot. Ah, no, I haven't found much of a correlation between when I'm like I don't count, just so we're clear I don't actually count these air all ballparks I think I tried to count one day and what I found was there really wasn't much of a difference between if I was pinning like fifty and a hundred what's really even more important is that you're focusing on getting a critical mass of pins to your specific boards, so seasonal boards aside because they're kind of a special case. If you look at my top two rows of boards, I've got fourteen hundred pens on my black and white board, I've got fifteen hundred on fashion and style, I've got two thousand on street style those are some of my most followed boards, in fact, I think there are, like three of my top five most followed boards, you know, down here, I've got a few that are a little bit lower again, we're gonna throw out seasonal boards, those those tend to be lower a thousand pins here, even in the, you know, making sure I'm in the hundreds that's really, what? We're actually aiming for our critical amounts of pins on aboard any board in your top two rows that has, like, less than two hundred pins, that should really be a focus for you as you're moving forward. Cabbie yeah, people following certain boards, as opposed to following you to the only see updates from that particular board. Yeah, that's a great question, yes, so if people on ly follow a particular board right there on lee, going to see the pins on that particular board, if they're not following your entire profile, this is actually what makes it really important to develop lots of different boards that you can pin your products too, right? So this is why, if you're looking at my top row, I've got a lot of different boards where I could pin my products because someone might only be interested in professional style, they might not care about street style, right? So I want to make sure that if they only followed one or two boards that's still going to be a place where they can see my product or see my content that's, why that's so important you're great question if they were so if I say, if I followed your megan almond style board, is there a way that I can go back in and see the boards that I decided to follow? Or is it because I don't see? I mean, I don't know if I've really searched that wall to see, but, you know, you could you could search the people who you follow, but what about the board you follow? Can you follow? So yeah, so if you go into who you're following, you can look, you would look at the pinard penner's, and then you can look at specific boards, so if I just followed one board, you can see in there, okay, but what? You can also see when you look under your penner's, if I find someone whom you see that one comes up, so see this person here where it actually says follow instead of unfollowed, that means that I'm actually on ly following some of her boards, like I'm I'm assuming you haven't been following less than fifty percent, so then if I click on her it's going to tell me follower on follow so it's going to tell you which board so I'm clearly following this only that born claude it okay and then if I wanted to I could go in and see the rest yeah but will that board that you're following show up under the paige back that just says yes it will okay, perfect oh good no thanks so even in other questions coming in from online there was one I should I thought was interesting you clash I didn't get her name but there's three people voted on this same so when you're re pinning is it better to change the description that people already wrote so it is small, consistent with your messaging that's a great question if it's a solid description, don't worry about changing it because if you have to change every single description in your power pinning strategy it's going to take forever the only ones that I change are ones where either there's no description at all or it's just like a period or a flash or something or if they're if they're using language that feels wildly off from your brand. So I tend to change descriptions of someone used the word cute it's just not doesn't feel on brand to me right? So I change that um you know kathy is all that kind of happiness, so for some reason that the description fella little email or something you might you might really I'm not sure what the pin would be that fit your brand where the description wouldn't be very happy but you might change that, but I wouldn't try to change every single one to be on brand because that's going to take way too on the great question when you pin your own product should you keep it in separate categories that only contar neuro products or could you put them in broader categories that contain all your pins? No, they should always be in broader categories for sure they shouldn't you really at the most you'll only have kind of one board that would be specific to your products but really you want broad ones that you can mix in? Thank you. All right, so when you're thinking about those search terms are those descriptions I'm got glad people are asking this is where again you can go back into guided search to help you write better descriptions. This is not something that again you're going to do every time you're pinning a pin, but every so often go into guided search and just see what's working so you know, I pinned those like, you know, actually it's about example cause I spelled I like to smell great the british way uh so I might go in and you also I pins that pin I rewrote the description to say like navy blazer and gray pants so if I search grey pants like what other things or people using their using the word outfit they're using the word work so I might know that actually work work or work style those might be good keywords for me so you start to pay attention to what's related to what's out there and that just gives you some ideas the other thing that you could dio if you think you want to use promoted pens is that you could actually start to keep a list of important keywords somewhere on your computer so I keep a list of key words that I think my customers were searching for in a full like in a folder on evernote right? So if I can't remember and I need some help on a description like I might just pulled that list and be like oh right I thought that my customers might be searching for like style over forty so I should use that so spending a little bit of time here I can help you as you're writing those descriptions so we have other questions about that kind of pin strategy we talked about you know, kind of number of pins per day the other question I think comes up a lot is what times of day should be pinning so if you listen teo, that kind of rule of thumb that that somehow that florida on the internet it's like two to four p m and eight to eleven p m on thursdays and saturdays I don't know it's very specific and that might sort of be true but it's also very much depends on where you are in the world where you think your followers are and and kind of all those other elements so one of the things that you should be doing with your power pinning strategy is playing around with the times of day and seeing what get mohr or less kind of pins so if you pin a lot early in the morning does that content get pinned a lot if you pin a lot more at night does that contact get pinned more doesn't get pinned more overnight uh one of the ways that you can kind of keep tabs on this as you can see as we've been kind of hanging out here I've been getting these notifications popping up right this number keeps changing e haven't I can you can turn that off either so just has to show up it's showing you is probably all of you guys watching this class pinning things off of me right now I think you can see it's going to give you those notifications so that's one way that you can tell you is there a lot of activity happening? I pinned a bunch this morning did I see that number jump a lot or did it kind of stay static or stay fairly low on the other thing that I like to dio, you know, is if I pin at night, when I wake up in the morning, I'm going to come in and look at my pins, I'm just going to see what's getting more pins, right? I want to see, you know, okay, that that got three that got ate and you and I getting more on things in the morning or the evening, so you want to actually just start to pay attention what's happening in your pinterest boards because that's going to help you know what, times of day or better for your audience, but at the end of the day, pinning at any time is better than not pinning because you feel you have to pin at the optimal time, if that makes sense. So for me, I really like to pam, like first thing when I get up like I'm in bed, I haven't gotten out of bed yet, I think of my phone actually to pin for a little bit it's a good way to, like ease into my day. I wake up early, unlike a six thirty on the east coast, awake kind of girl, not my fault my husband goes to work at that time, uh so that's not really a very active time on pinterest, it's three thirty in the morning on the west coast. There they finally gone to bed. Not quite. Everyone on the east coast is up yet it's not the most optimal time, but it works for me, so I'm gonna go ahead and paint a little bit there. But if I'm writing good descriptions, even if they don't get seen in in the smart feed there's still going to come up on search and they're still going to help build related content because that's, the other really key thing about the way pinterest is shifting the way that they bring content to people is it's all related. That related pins thing is so important, so you really want to make sure that your content is coming up in a related pin. Yeah, good for you were mentioning earlier about like the great gatsby and then people overloading their feed a few months ago. I don't know if it's changed like a few months ago. I was pinning a bunch for my art studio. And then people were emailing me thing like my friends were like oh are you building an art studio are what are you gonna post picture that like it was weird like they had totally known that but I was doing it for my own personal but now is it different in that mean with the algorithm so if you if you pinned a lot of those in a row, huh your followers probably won't see that meant they might see one or two okay, perfect right? But if they have also been looking for that kind of content they'll see more so the thing is everybody smart feed looks different there's no way to predict what your customer smart feet is gonna look like, but what you khun dio is put your products into the context put your pins into the context of other pins because and that increases the odds that they're going to show up in related pins this's step further and if you're really making pinterest sort of your marketing strategy and you're a maker developing your names for your products or how you're listing them on your website could you then utilize pinterest to sort of pledge out what the most popular pens are like you would do on that say you know what the most popular pens are put that in your girl for the product item then when you pin it with that then rank you hire in search result it's, because you're a girl for the product is then again repeated in this and then again repeated in the egyptian, so I'm gonna go to clarify that everyone but I'm going to clarify that everyone knows exactly what you're talking about, so pinterest uses descriptions teo teo, find pins that are related and to find in search, but they also index keywords from the earl and images pin from which is what tiffany's talking about their so if you're using a great keyword in the earl of your product like minimal classic gold thin hoops, that's actually better than if the earl is just hoops, right? So they like that there they also like, if you do that in your all text, which is the alternative text description for your images, and they like it, if you do that in the file name of the image itself, and actually just be like the trifecta really, really has on actually and because I knew he wouldn't have time to really die very deep into it live on air there's actually a bonus video that's just free with enroll, which is optimizing your website for pinterest and I talk about the importance of doing that so you're good pinning strategy actually starts with naming your files very descriptive file names. So if you were to go into my file names now, you can see I believe this if you looked at a file for something like this necklace, it would probably say, like, the file would be bronze elizabeth bib statement necklace and then dash like white background one or something, depending on what it wass behind the scenes is behind mean ceo stuff. So right, right, so what's funny is that this things that work on ceo so work to actually help you on pinterest, but what I found and I don't know other people have this, but what I found is that I have a really hard time wrapping my brain around ceo, right? But on pinterest, it all makes sense to me and here's why I'm not convinced that someone anymore is going to google and looking for a statement necklace, right? They're probably just going to pinterest, and the good news is that if they're going to pinterest to search for that there, there might be something that's super optimized, but they're also going to see this related content, right? So again, pinterest is all about that kind of browse, so you might sort of have an idea of what you're looking for, but then pinterest says, let me show you things that other people sort of like termites sort of be related, right so happens in the store you want to store might sort of be looking for something and then the sale staff says, hey, let me show you these other things petrus is like the sales staff that's working for you right? We show you these other things so yes it is it is good strategy but pinterest also uses similar things to make that work so that's all behind the scenes but it can also help your content get found but it's important that obviously we have no control in the content that were pinning we have no control over you know what that file was named or what the earl of it is, but we want to make sure that we're putting good descriptions and when we were doing our power pinning strategy so that those pieces are easier find too because what happens is if you have a pen that's getting repent a lot even if it's not your content that still helps you on pinterest it tells pinterest here's a person that pins content that other people are interested in that when you pin your content the next time pinter says all right people like things from her bring that higher into the smart feet is that why there's this one necklace of mine that just gets pinned mohr and more and more and more yes so it's up there yes, pinterest like that and it rewards it yeah, absolutely we're getting other questions coming in from online yes, one of you is asking a few people have voted on this is it beneficial to pin the exact same product in multiple boards in order to reach more followers? Great question so yes and we're going to talk so much more in the next segment about actually pinning your own product but absolutely over time you're going to pin your product to multiple boards so I mentioned at the beginning that the life span of a pin is longer right? That it's might be two months or three months or six months and it still might get seen but that doesn't mean that we can pin it once and forget about it we can also give it a boost, right? So just like with anything else we might pin and then a few months months later when pennant again and a few months later we might put it again and we're going to vary the boards that we put it on. So yeah that's a great question were always pitting the same things to multiple boards I think we are going to get to this later as well, but I'll throw this out there because lisa's asked this and she's six people voted on it how do you balance using pinterest for research and inspiration and sharing that with your customers to use private boards for that? Yes, so I'm mostly for research and inspiration use secret boards right? If I'm developing a collection, I'm going to put it there now that said, we're gonna actually talk about this in the next segment if it makes sense to pull that inspiration into a board kind of once the product is out, then you can actually do that so we're gonna actually use tiffany as an example because I know I mean they even got a little sneak of what's coming up you have a collection that was inspired by the pacific northwest right o ee o I should develop better write you could build an entire board around this idea of inspired by the pacific northwest and pin your content on that so what I would say is if you're in the development stages, I would keep that information on secret boards but then once the collection is out then you could develop a board of inspirational content around it. I just want to kind of remind you guys clean we covered a lot of ground here what that power appendage pinning strategy looks like right? And actually if you're on page eight of the workbook you can see I've got a couple of key questions for you, so figuring out what the best times of day for you to pinar right? And this is, you know, partly thinking about your audience but also just partly thinking about you right I know that my audience is pretty active late at night and they might be pretty active on the west coast late at night I'm asleep I like to be asleep it's fine, we'll catch him catch him later, right? So figure out what those best times of dave are you for you are to pin that didn't make any sense at all but you know what I'm saying then figure out when you think you can sneak in small moments of pinning right? So when I'm in line for coffee or when I'm waiting for the you know to pick up the kids from school, figure out what those little moments are for you and you might even decide if you're the kind of person that fairly forgetful or gets really absorbed in your studio work you know I'm just gonna set a little reminder on my phone so like tomorrow at two o'clock I want to take a really quick break and pin for ten minutes right? My phone's gonna go off I'm gonna stop from my shoulders back, relax for a minute and then pin pin pin pin pin and go back to work right then you should also figure out what the keyboards are that you're focusing on like today or this week so for me, I know that right now I want to focus on, you know, my modern holiday bored by modern style board and maybe my professional style board, those air really key, so if I add a loss for content, I'm going to go in to pinterest looking for that kind of content first, so maybe I'm going to go into sir, and I'm going to say in a search holiday style, and I'm the see what comes up, but I'm going to follow those related suggestions searches and I'm gonna look it related pins, and I'm going to try to find some content that way, so you know, every week or every couple of days you should think about what boards you're focusing on and remember you came up with those kind of top ten or fifteen boards that are the best places to both put your product and that your customers are interested that's where you should be focusing your energy at the beginning and then figuring out just what categories can you mind for relevant content? So if you're stuck no, okay? If I'm really stuck, I'm just going to go into home to core, I'm just going to go into women's fashion and you're probably not going to just browsing browse, browse, browse because what you'll find when you go into those category pages is that a lot of it doesn't match your aesthetic, so you're going to browse until you find something that does match your aesthetic. You're going to click on that pin, not click through, click on, and then use the related pins to start filling content, but you should have an idea of which categories you're gonna go to first, and the same thing with search terms. What search terms am I going to use? You guys start with the same things you think your customer is searching for, and then making sure that if you don't have a lot of times, rewrite descriptions, or you're finding extra content that you don't want to pin in the moment, making sure that you're putting it into your likes, so that if that phone rings at two o'clock to tell you, hey, pyne for ten minutes, and you want to be super efficient, you pop into your likes, you pin ten things, twenty things from there, and then you're on your own with your day. And so this is the strategy that you're going to use to start to grow your followers, and you start to build those critical mass of boards, and you really want to do this before you start putting it ton of effort to pin your own content. We want to do that for two reasons, one is that if we have more followers, are content, has a better reach to begin with, right? But the other thing is that we really want to again curate this whole world so people are going to follow you if they think all they're going to see all day every day is your painting your own products right? But if you're curating this great vision and they recognise that and then you start to feed in your own products or images that represent your own services that's what's going to draw people to your brand and that's actually what we're going to talk about in the next segment because eventually after you started to build this kind of presence and build this following then you can kind of use a ten to one strategy ten pins from pinterest ish to everyone pin of your own either product or content again dish these air not hard and fast rules but that's kind of the where we're going to go with that but for now I just want you to get in there and we can actually if we want to go back to the sides we can so I can show you your very specific homework which is that we're going to start pinning so you're going to get in there you can while we're on break you can actually get in there and start using your power pinning strategy and filling out those boards and putting great content so that you could bring in more of your ideal customer sarah is there a um um for instagram there's a there's a thing called I think it's a con a gram or something you can go in and it gives you words that you can use it gives you all this sort of analytics that will can help you, um, you know, get more in terms of you like on prince around gives you keywords is that what you're doing will give service? Yeah, so I'm injuries that's less necessary because you have that suggested search feature, right? So you can use that guided search of that zit suggestion search to start with a broad category like a fashion and it gives you like that list I showed you scrolls on and on and on, but it will tell you the most popular one so here's the thing I don't care about the most popular ones I care about what's interesting to my audience, and so that idea of like most popular is very misleading. Now there is a service called tailwind its tail when ap dot com it's actually in that resource guide and I talk and I show it in the bonus video because it's even use just schedule pins that's an analytic service also and that will show you things like what you're most popular boards are see you can see kind of what the most popular content is on those so that can help you in terms of looking at your own content but we always want to keep it focused on us because what's most popular might not be what's most relevant to our audience anything else from our online ideas there's one thing that way touch but at the very top of the first segment but maybe you could just talk about this briefly a psalm owner is asking a lot of people asking us well, we've talked a lot about how you pee in products, but can we also are we going to talk about strategies about how to pin service when your service company rather than product? Yeah, so so again this kind of strategy that we just talked about in this segment you should be doing the same thing even if you're a service provider. So you should be thinking about what is the lifestyle of your customer? What are they coming on and looking at because your customer isn't thinking about your services twenty four seven in fact, they might not actually be thinking about them at all. They're thinking about other things, so you want to put your services in a broader context. So you know if you're a wedding photographer, you should have all kinds of different wedding boards if you maybe you're like a baby and child photographer, you should have lots of things to that if your yoga teacher or wellness coach you're going toe, you know baby built all kinds of boards around that theme. So this first part is still the same. What's going to change a little bit for service providers. And we're definitely can talk about that in the next segment, because our guest, bridget lions, is a service provider. So she brings that angle and force for sure, is that us have to be more a little more intentional about your own content because you don't have product. Image is ready to go right? You will have to create a few more visuals. So we can absolutely talk about that in the next segment. But all of this stuff that we've been talking about curating that very specific world for your customers. That applies regardless of the business you're in.

Class Description




You’ll learn how to:

  • Grab the attention of the right kind of followers
  • Create Pinterest® content which guarantees re-pins and clicks
  • Convert Pinterest® followers into fans, customers, and buyers







Mirka Laine-Pietila


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