Simple Pin Podcast: Simple ways to boost your business using Pinterest

If you’ve ever thought about what it’s like to be a Pinterest account specialist, you’re going to want to listen in today as I share some tips and takeaways. I’m also sharing an opportunity for growing your own Pinterest account management business.  How I Built My Pinterest Marketing Agency – Simple Pin Media In this episode, I’m not going to go through the history of how I built my company, Simple Pin Media, since I have gone deep into the story in two previous episodes. If you missed those and you want to hear the whole story, from food stamps to hiring my first team members to where we are today (serving almost 500 total clients with over 120 current Pinterest clients and a team of almost 40), you can go back to episode 27, which tells my story from the very beginning. Next, head over to episode 62, where I go into detail about how I built my team here at Simple Pin.  What Is a Pinterest Account Specialist? Let’s begin today by defining terms. When I use the term Pinterest account specialist, I am talking about someone who immersed in organic pin management, promoted pins management, and/or consulting.  This can also include: * creating Pinterest images * data tracking for Pinterest * account clean-up or initial account builds.  A Pinterest account specialist is a person who does some or all of the Pinterest marketing and/or creation for an individual or a business.  Why do I use the term specialist? It’s simple really. I use that term because it perfectly describes what you do for clients.  I know that some of you refer to yourselves as a Pinterest VA, which is fine if you also provide other types of services.  But if you specialize in Pinterest marketing or management, I strongly encourage you to use the term, “Pinterest account specialist,” because you are specifically knowledgeable in this area and it’s what you have chosen to focus on for your specialization.  5 Facts You Should Know About Owning a Pinterest Management Business I have five specific things I want to share with you when it comes to owning a business that is centered on Pinterest management: #1- Know who you are in your business. I know that a lot of women get into this business the way I did – someone asks you to help with their Pinterest marketing. Maybe you’re a virtual assistant and a client asks you to work on their Pinterest account. After a while, you realize that now you have a business with a specialization in Pinterest marketing.  If you are going to continue in this business and be successful, it is critical that you understand how you work. My preferred method of figuring this out is to take one or more personality tests. Whether it’s the MBTI, Enneagram, DISC, Kolbe, and others, you can choose one or more assessments to learn more about yourself and what kind of business owner you will be.  #2- Systems are everything. If you don’t have good systems set up, or if you don’t adhere to the systems you have, you can count on things to break.  In years two through four of growing Simple Pin Media, the team often found ourselves describing our circumstances with this quote: We’re building this plane as we fly it. And while it might sound funny now,

How’s that for a dry podcast title — How to Make Your Website ADA Compliant? OK, hear me out friends — if you have a website, you really do need to listen to this episode.  Rather than share a laundry list of boring facts, my guest is going to walk you through exactly what steps you need to take to make sure that your website is 100% compliant with current accessibility laws.  What I want you to promise is that you will listen without allowing yourself to get overwhelmed and then take action on the three steps we give you at the end of the podcast. We’ll break it down very simply, with the exact steps you need to take in order to achieve ADA compliance, depending on where you are in your business.  Andrew Wilder is my guest today. He’s the founder of Nerdpress, a digital agency that provides WordPress maintenance and services for small businesses. While Nerdpress services all types of blogs, they specialize in food blogs. Before we jump into the episode though, I want to remind you of all the free resources we offer here at Simple Pin.  For starters, we have a free, comprehensive marketing planner that grows and gets better every single year! We also offer a free 8-page Pinterest image guide. In addition, we offer a variety of email training series, based on where you are in your business.  Ready to get started with Pinterest marketing, or are you a beginner? Sign up for our Start newsletter series. If you’ve been in the game for a while and you’re ready to grow, sign up for our Grow newsletter series.  From Food Blogger to Blogging Tech Business Andrew got started in the online space with a food blog (Eating Rules) back in 2010. As he grew it, he also began to get involved in the food blogger community, attending conferences and helping other food bloggers with their blogs.  What struck me about Andrew is that his process was similar to what we see so often here at Simple Pin. A person starts out pursuing a hobby, they start a blog about their hobby, and before they realize it, they have created an actual business.  Websites and blogs require certain things in order to remain legal. In recent years, the GDPR regulations has thrown many a blogger for a loop, just trying to figure out what it all meant and how to do the right thing in light of it. In addition to making sure your website complies with GDPR and CCPA regulations, there are even more legal aspects to think about, one of those being accessibility.  Ensuring that your website is in full compliance with current laws can be a full-time job. Do you have to say goodbye to your hobby and hello to a new job? Not necessarily. You can outsource some of these tasks so that you can still focus on the part of website ownership that lights you up — creating the content. What Is ADA Compliance? Because of the number of horror stories that center around bloggers trying to figure out GDPR/CCPA, I wanted to interview Andrew on the podcast so that he can explain to us exactly what we need to know about ADA compliance and accessibility for our sites.  Accessibility simply means making sure your website is usable for everyone, including anyone with any disability. There are varying levels of accessibility. The basic ideas is that anyone who wants to consume the content on your website is able to so. For example: * If the user is visually impaired, they should be able to use a screen reader to navigate the site. * If they are unable to use a mouse, a reader should be able to navigate the site with their keyboard.

Are you confused by Pinterest ads (aka promoted pins)? How do you know when it’s time to hire out? What do all the recent changes mean for promoted pins? Is there an easy way to understand what’s going on? Those are some of the questions we are answering in this episode of the podcast. We’ll break down the new elements, things to watch out for before you dive into promoted pins, and what to know before you decide to hire someone to manage them. Meet the SPM Promoted Pins Director Erin is our Promoted Pins Director here at Simple Pin. She will be sharing a TON of information in this longer-than-usual episode, so please, look at this as an investment in your online business education. Grab a cup of whatever you like, and get comfy as we dive into everything you need to know about Pinterest ads  Erin came to work for Simple Pin in 2016 as an account specialist. She spent the next two years doing that job incredibly well. When we launched a promoted pins department in 2018, Erin was the natural choice to lead it. She spent a solid year beta testing Pinterest ads, learning everything she could about promoted pins, and best practices for using them. She now heads up an awesome team that manages Pinterest ad campaigns for our clients.  Let this be a lesson to those of you who are CEOs of your own company. I wanted to do all the promoted pin stuff myself. But there came a point where I had to get out of my own way. If I wanted the business to continue to grow and to meet the needs of my clients, I had to turn this part of the business over to someone else, and that someone was Erin.    Why You Need to Educate Yourself about Pinterest Ads There was a time when I would have said you had to have an understanding of how organic pins work before trying to dive into promoted pins. I don’t necessarily believe that any longer. I think that you could dive right into promoted pins right now, even if you don’t have a great organic pin strategy (in fact, some would argue that Pinterest ads can actually boost your organic strategy). Choosing to invest in ads is a huge decision, and we understand that completely at Simple Pin. It’s always scary to take that next big step and invest even further in your business. Our goal is to continue to help you understand the different levels of investment you can make and to explain them in such a way that it takes away some of that fear you may feel.  Promoted pins WILL be a vital part of any sound Pinterest marketing strategy over the next year so it’s important that you begin to educate yourself about them now.  Pinterest Ads: Our Best Tips for the DIY Pinterest Marketer   Don’t Put Money into Broken Funnels Here at Simple Pin, we have been experimenting with using promoted pins to: * grow our email list * increase email sales * drive small product sales (with the hope of funneling people into our membership).  But here’s something we’ve had to learn one lesson the hard way: Putting money into ads, whether they’re on Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest, will not fix a broken funnel.  Here’s what I mean by that. If you aren’t making it easy for people to buy your product, or if people simply aren’t buying it, ads aren’t going to fix that. You’ll become more frustrated because ads will highlight the fact that people aren’t buying. 

We all know that keywords are important but how do you find the right Pinterest keywords to use when you’re on the platform? This is the question we’re answering today. Pinterest users experiment with different keywords to find what they are looking for. We want to make sure that when they search for a specific topic or product, they find YOU.  Steph is the Project and Content Manager here at SPM, and today she’s here to talk about searching for the right keywords to target on Pinterest in order to be found in search. In today’s podcast episode, we also talk about the shifts and changes in keywords that is happening in 2020 (the craziest year ever).  It just so happens that this is the topic we are discussing this month in The Simple Pin Collective. We’ve compiled 18 pages of keywords that cover almost every single niche. We’re taking a deep dive into how exactly to execute your keyword research. Don’t miss your opportunity to tap into the knowledge and expertise that’s available in the Collective.    Keywords Power the Pinterest Platform  A lot of things have changed recently on Pinterest. We’ve already talked about the algorithm update and how you need to view your Pinterest stats with a new lens in 2020. What hasn’t changed is that Pinterest is still a search and discovery network. This means that organic keywords really power the platform.  There are many new businesses beginning to use Pinterest right now. If you have never used Pinterest for your business, the best place to begin looking for the right Pinterest keywords is on your own website. Review your site categories or a word cloud generated from your site. Use those words within Pinterest’s search feature to see what comes up.  If you have super general categories (think “DIY”), you will see a ton of results pop up. You’ll need to get more specific and drill down a bit in order to zero in on what you post about.  Keep in mind that what you type into the search box might not actually generate the type of content you’re expecting. You’ll need to check to see what type of content pops up when you search on those keywords in Pinterest.  It’s vital to keep the searchers’ intent in mind as you nail down your Pinterest keywords. In October of last year, if someone searched “DIY face mask” on Pinterest, it probably resulted in a ton of beauty-related posts, like how to make a mud mask. But if you search for “DIY face mask” in 2020, you’re bound to find a lot of content on how to sew your own face mask. You have to be conscious of context when it comes to using keywords.  How to Choose the Right Pinterest Keywords   Create A Master List of Keywords Steph starts by creating a master list of keywords she can work with. She uses more general terms for her board titles and more specific keywords for board descriptions.  Your pin description is where you want to really hone in on your keywords.  To test out this master list of keywords, Steph starts by using the Pinterest search bar. Once she’s settled on the words she thinks she wants to use, she checks them out using the Pinterest Trends tool. She completes this step in order to help her determine the exact word order of her long-tail keywords.  Related:

 You don’t need me to tell you that 2020 is a little bit of a crazy year. But you may not have thought about how this craziness affects your Pinterest marketing. Right now, data and usage are very different, as are the ways people are searching on the platform.  In today’s episode of the podcast, Jennifer Priest of Smart Creative Social joins me to talk about understanding Pinterest stats in 2020.  It takes some effort on our part to change the way we have been doing things. But we should be amenable to changing our Pinterest strategies in order to meet the Pinterest user where they are. In this episode, we cover some goals you can set and how you can reorient to the new Pinterest landscape.  These are not quick fixes. It will take hard work and time to implement changes. It can be tough to have to do the same things on repeat. Hopefully, we can encourage you to see the changes on Pinterest and come up with goals to match up with where Pinterest is.  Just a reminder that we offer several free resources to help you grow your Pinterest marketing. One of our favorites is our Pinterest Image Guide. Your pin images are your billboard advertising on Pinterest. It’s the first thing a pinner sees and it tells them whether or not they want to click through. Check out the 8-page image guide to learn all about how to create the most engaging and click-worthy pins.  Understanding Pinterest Stats in 2020   Tailoring Your Pinterest Marketing Jennifer Priest has been on the podcast before to talk about Pinterest Visual Search and using hashtags on Pinterest. I appreciate her posts in the SPM Facebook group because they always encourage people to use their Pinterest stats and analytics to inform where they are going.  Jennifer recently commented in the group about the changes in the platform, and how users and searches are at an all-time high on Pinterest. But there is a trend of Pinterest marketers trying to apply old methods to new situations.  Another common issue we come across in the group is marketers who complete trainings or gather information from other business owners and apply it to their own business without making any tweaks to the strategy or system to fit their individual biz. Jennifer uses this fabulous analogy to explain why this doesn’t work: You don’t try to put on jeans that you know aren’t your size just because your best friend is wearing them. You buy what works for your body size and type.  Likewise, you have to tailor your Pinterest marketing to fit your particular business needs.  Refining and Adjusting Your Pinterest Marketing If you watch a video training that Jennifer offered two years ago, those tactics might still work even though everything on Pinterest looks different now. The tactics will just provide you with a different result. The best practices from 2018 might give you a 10% improvement now whereas, in 2018, they delivered a 100% improvement.  This is why paying attention to your Pinterest analytics is so important. Analytics show you what happened and what you can learn from it. The next steps are to take the information and refine what you’re doing.  You don’t want to just throw everything out if you find that a strategy is not working. Refining and adjusting are the most important steps.

This post contains affiliate links, which means if you make a purchase through these links, I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. Click here to read my full disclosure policy. Since Pinterest has introduced the new versions of story pins and video pins, and with the recent algorithm updates, you might be left wondering whether there still value in growing a Pinterest following. In this episode with Jillian Tohber Leslie of MiloTree and Catch My Party. we’re getting the lowdown on why you still focus on growing your followers. MiloTree is a plugin that I started using back in 2016 to help me grow my followers. This plugin is so easy to use that I managed to add it to my website while being sick in bed with the flu. In the last four years, I have grown from 4,000 to 41,000 followers on Pinterest by using MiloTree. In this conversation with Jillian, we discuss how things are changing on Pinterest and how you can strategically weave these changes into your business.  If you’re interested in learning more about growing your business, we’re spending this entire month talking all about strategy in The Simple Pin Collective. You can join the Collective today to take part in Pinterest marketing coaching, in real-time.  Pinterest Followers DO Matter – Use MiloTree to Grow Yours Building MiloTree  Jillian has been on the podcast three times before, chatting with me about * seasonality on Pinterest * how to create the best Pinterest boards * ways to get more followers on Pinterest.  Jillian and her husband Dave depend on large volumes of site traffic to monetize their main website. Like so many bloggers, they had been using Facebook to send traffic to their site until Facebook changed its algorithm a few years back. They realized that Pinterest was driving traffic to their site without them even knowing it.  Related: The Transition from Facebook Marketing to Pinterest Marketing According to Jillian, follower number does matter on Pinterest because it’s a signal to the Pinterest algorithm that your page is high quality. When they realized this, Jillian’s tech-savvy husband built a simple plugin for Catch My Party the creates a pop up with a call to action for readers to follow them on Pinterest. After installing the plugin (MiloTree), they watched their follower number grow on Pinterest. This follower growth was accompanied by an increase in traffic from Pinterest. They soon rolled out additional functionality in the MiloTree plugin to grow followings on Facebook, Youtube, email lists, etc. Jillian and Dave have continued to improve the plugin based on the feedback they receive from their customers. For example, you can now turn off the plugin on a sales page so that nothing distracts from the call to action on the page.  A Major Shift in Focus for the Pinterest Platform Our creative director, Tina, attended the creators’ seminar that Pinterest recently hosted.

Have you had your blog or business for a long time? Are you interested in learning how to rebrand your website, business, and Pinterest account?  There are so many questions that come when you decide to switch up your niche:  • Do I start a brand new Pinterest account? 
 • How do I rebrand? 
 • How do I change up my website and redirects etc? 
 MaAnna from BlogAid and I recently collaborated on a Facebook live centered around this topic. She is incredibly knowledgeable when it comes to the best ways to redirect and rebrand your website. We talk about that, as well as how rebranding needs to be handled on Pinterest (redirecting pins, changing URLs’, rich pins, etc.). MaAnna has helped us shape content for The Simple Pin Collective. If you are interested in learning how to speed up your website,  join the Collective. This month we are diving deep into all things strategy. We would love to have you!  The Rebranding Revolution  Rebranding is a hot topic these days. People are realizing that the websites they started a few years ago can be actually serve as the foundation for business. Rebranding is a very personal and specific process. You can’t just follow the exact process of what someone else did. Why People Rebrand Their Website A lot of people start their websites by choosing a fun or cute name. But as their business evolves, site owners want their website to evolve in order to accurately reflect their current business. Many other business owners choose to change their website name to their actual name.  In other cases, people started their site as a hobby but found that readers have a real interest in one particular topic that they talk about on their site. It then makes sense to “niche down” and focus exclusively on that one topic (instead of talking about a broad range of topics). You might also decide to rebrand because you start to create products that you see a need for in your audience. No matter what your reason for rebranding, there is a right way to rebrand your website. How to Rebrand Your Website Changing Your Domain  Q: Can I just change my domain and redirect everything?  Yes, you can. But you don’t want to!  It’s the cheap and easy way to do it, but it will cause a lot of headaches down the line. You already have a redirect chain happening, (www to non, and HTTP to https) and this chain has to be in a very specific order for things to end up in the right spot.  Adding another redirect slows things down and can cause problems with Google.  The best way to approach it is this — You have a primary domain in a directory. Create another little box with the new domain name and migrate everything to the new domain. Then move all your content into this new domain.  Then you’ll take your site out of the old box and put the redirect in that spot to send it over to the new domain.  Q: Do I need to hire someone to do this migration and conversion for me?  Not necessarily. Your host might do it for free. There’s a wide variety of quality across hosting sites, but the high-end hosting sites will do a great job. MaAnna wouldn’t trust just any hosting provider to make this switch-over as it can cause problems with site load time.  One option is to create a new theme for your website. If you decide to create a new theme, your designer will migrate everything to the new theme. MaAnna teaches designers how to do just that. 

Have you heard about the newest Pinterest algorithm update? There is always a lot of buzz around these changes and what they will mean for our business.  Today we’re going to explore exactly what Pinterest is changing and what YOU can change to keep serving your audience well.  Blame It On The Pinterest Algorithm  If you have been a long-time listener of my podcast, you know that whenever someone says the words “algorithm change,” I tend to get a little prickly. It’s not because I think they don’t exist. I know they are happening all the time. The platforms are always trying to find ways to serve their audience more efficiently.  One thing I’ve realized is that sometimes people use this term when their traffic is going down without taking much time to look into what is going on in their analytics. I want people to dig a little deeper and find out what might be going on instead of automatically using “the algorithm” as their explanation.  Related: What to Do When You Experience a Pinterest Traffic Drop   Pinterest Algorithm Update: What’s Changed?   The Old Model  With that said, we actually did experience a Pinterest algorithm change in mid-July and Pinterest let us know about it. They are introducing a new ranking model to their home feed. They want to show different types of content (regular pins, video pins, idea pins (formerly story pins), etc.) Traditionally, Pinterest monitors the content on the home feed and looks at the habits of the pinner. They call this a “click-through prediction model.” They then show the pinner more of the content that they typically click on.  This model ensures that the pinner sees what they want and will engage with the pins in their home feed.  Controlled Distribution The problem with this is that if a pinner never clicks on idea pins or video pins, they won’t ever see any of those types of pins in their feed. Pinterest has a ton of great content that they want to get in front of their users.  To solve that problem, Pinterest introduced a new real-time ranking system called “controlled distribution.”  First, the user tells Pinterest what content they love. Next, Pinterest decides how much of the “extra stuff” (like idea pins, videos, and GIFs) to sprinkle into that user’s home feed. If the pinner engages with these pins, Pinterest will sprinkle in a little more.  This allows Pinterest to show a wide range of content without relying solely on the pinner’s engagement as the determining factor of what to include in their feed. With the goal of dispersing different types of content within a user’s feed, controlled distribution is the main feature of the latest algorithm change.  Good Content Keeps Giving Our former creative director (Tina) recently attended a creative seminar hosted by Pinterest. During the seminar, Pinterest communicated loud and clear that its platform is changing. Although their initial goal was to drive content, they are now focusing more on content creation.  We see this when it comes to idea pins. In most countries, you can’t add a link to an idea pin. Hearing that Pinterest is focusing more on content creation tends to freak out Pinterest marketers. But Pinterest is always focused on keeping the user around and showing them what they want. Even though you can’t link them to your site,

Whether you’re dying to know the best Pinterest image size, or how to get more clicks, we answer all your burning questions about Pinterest images. Creating incredible images is one of the most important tasks when it comes to your Pinterest marketing. Those images will capture the pinner’s attention and lead to clicks to your site. And those clicks are what lead to conversions.  For some of you, creating images is an escape. You love the design aspect. For others, creating images makes you want to throw your computer across the room. I definitely fall into the latter category.  Regardless of which category you fall into, Pinterest images are different than the images you find on any other social media platform. You should always have the pinner in mind when creating your images.  In today’s episode, my former creative director, Tina, and I are answering the five most commonly asked Pinterest image creation questions. These are the questions we field ALL THE TIME. This episode comes at a perfect time since it’s Image Month in our Pinterest marketing community. We’re diving deep into coaching you on how to create the best images for your brand. This includes Pinterest video pin creation, story pin creation, and every other pin you need to create. Join The Simple Pin Collective today to join us Image Month!   How Much Time Should You Devote to Image Creation? There was a big push to jump on the Pinterest image creation bandwagon recently with Pinterest saying that fresh pins are what will get you the best distribution. This caused many creators to shift their focus from content creation to image creation. But exactly how much time should you carve out for this Pinterest marketing task? It’s a hard question to answer because there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer.  If you are using image templates, Tina believes that finding the branded image you want and tweaking the images shouldn’t take you more than 20-30 minutes per image. If you are building a brand new image with multiple layers, then expect the image creation process to take up to an hour per image.   Top 5 Pinterest Image Creation Questions   Q: What types of Pinterest image designs are currently trending? Right now, in 2020, we are seeing a trend toward light and airy images. Less is more. Uncluttered, simplistic, minimalistic designs that make use of white space are definitely performing well.  If you look at what big brands are doing, and if you use Pinterest as a normal user would, you will see that promoted pins are simplistic in nature.  If your brand is not light and airy, you don’t have to worry. Regardless of your brand colors, you can choose photos that are more simple. Look at images that are trending and see if you can work those types of examples into your image creation.  The image below on the left is a great example of the light and airy trend:   Q: What design techniques can get me more clicks? This is the magic question. More clicks are what we all want.  The answer for Tina always comes down to one thing: you have to be creating images specifically for mobile. Over 85% of Pinterest users are using their mobile devices to look at Pi...

If you’ve ever had a dream of growing a business but you’re scared to start, this episode is for you. I know that feeling all too well, and today I am sharing how I moved past it and the incredible growth that I’ve experienced in doing so. 200 Simple Pin Podcast Episodes! I can hardly believe we have hit the 200th episode of the Simple Pin podcast! I am so blessed by you and by all the amazing guests I’ve had on this show since it started, way back in May of 2016.  I am also really about the guest I have on today’s episode. Leslie Samuel was my very first business coach and the one who convinced me to start this podcast. I was so scared! But it has turned out to be one of my favorite things I do.  Overcoming Fear in Business: Learn How to Do It Scared Leslie and I chat about a lot in this episode, including what business coaching looks like, how to grow a business, what it means to push through when you’re scared, and how we wrestle through the challenges of being an entrepreneur.  I just have to share a direct quote from Leslie here because it perfectly sums up who he is and what he does: I love to take people from, ‘Do you really think I can do that?’, to ‘Oh my word! 200 episodes!!   You Can Do It! Leslie loves working with people because he sees the potential in each person.  We are all full of potential. Unfortunately, we tend to get in our own heads and we convince ourselves that we can’t really do the things we want to do.  We tell ourselves that we actually don’t have what it takes to accomplish our goals and reach our dreams.  In his previous life, Leslie spent time as a biology professor. As he studied the human brain, he was amazed to observe what we are able to accomplish if we simply allow ourselves to move forward.  You truly can do whatever you set your mind to do.  Can You Make Money Online? I started coaching with Leslie at the end of 2014. As I look back on that time, I remember feeling a ton of fear. I was even afraid to hire a business coach. But a friend of mine had been coached by Leslie and she told me I simply had to do it.  I asked Leslie to think back to that time and he remembers seeing the potential in me.  I already had a small business. I had clients who were paying me every month. It wasn’t huge and I wasn’t making much money, planted the seed to grow something that was viable.  Leslie firmly believes that: if you’re already making money online, you’re miles ahead of people who are trying to make money online. So, I had demonstrated that I had the ability to make money online, even though my business was still relatively small.  If you have people who are willing to pay you for something you provide online — whether it’s a service like I was selling or a product — then other people will also be willing to pay you for it.  Reaching Beyond My Comfort Zone When I first began working with Leslie, I had around seven clients. And I was confused.  I had this group of clients who were paying me but, I had zero idea how to move forward or what to do next. And I had no systems in my business. I was basically flying by the seat of my pants every single day.  And so, the first six months were spent laying some necessary foundations in my business. We worked on systems. And then we worked on growth.  I remember reaching 20 clients, and I decided that was good enough for me and we could st...

Are you struggling to convert your Pinterest traffic to sales? The whole point of Pinterest marketing is to find your person, lead them to your website, where you offer products that directly address their pain point. In today’s episode, we’re talking all about your Pinterest conversion rate — that’s basically how effective you are at finding and converting your person on Pinterest. This will help you drill down to also find your Pinterest conversion rate. I’m going to be helping my friend, Natalie Gingrich, take her Pinterest traffic and convert them into people who want to sign up for her certification program. Natalie is a longtime friend and I wanted to take this opportunity to help her figure out how to convert her Pinterest users. Why? Because 30% of her traffic is coming from Pinterest and she’s struggling with how to convert that to sales. This post contains affiliate links, which means if you make a purchase through these links, I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. Click here to read my full disclosure policy. Your Pinterest Conversion Rate Natalie is an operations leader and mentor for helping people that have a skillset in project management. She takes effective project managers and helps them to build a business in remote and online spaces by utilizing their skills in project management. Natalie’s ideal person has the ability to be an effective project manager. They might have those skills from education or from experience. They don’t have to have a background in the corporate world to come into her certification program. Having experience in operations can look like HR, project management, finances, engineers, medical professionals, etc. Any person who has worked in a profession where processes and systems are incredibly important. Natalie is looking for leaders and strategic partners. Leadership means being willing to say “yes, maybe” instead of “yes, ma’am” to everything. It’s important for Natalie that her applicants get exactly what she has promised, especially since they are spending money on the program. The Content Investment Natalie has been consistently blogging for three years and has been releasing podcast episodes for one year. She started using Pinterest about 2.5 years ago. Every one of her blog posts has 1-5 pins created for it. Natalie’s top ten performing pins are team-related. Her most popular pin is about “Onboarding New Team Members,” but these posts are older and her branding has changed since then. Her “Director of Operations” board is what she wants people to be clicking on but that term might not be as easily found as “Online Business Manager” or “Service Provider.” The first thing Natalie can test out is pairing down the text on her pins. You need to create an interest in the user in order to create a desire in them to click. The person on Pinterest doesn’t want to read a ton of text on an image. You need to capture them as quickly as possible. One thing you can do is take the questions you are being asked and put that text directly on your pin images. Learn how to a/b test images. Two Different Types of Pinterest Users There are two different types of users on Pinterest: * One is looking through their feed and mindlessly scrolling. * The other is actively searching for something specific. By creating two different types of images for the two different types of users, you can capture both of them. You don’t have to have your podcast episode numbers on your Pinterest images, but it is crucial that you just have your branding on every image. Make sure it is visible and tasteful.

Every so often, we change up the format around here and I offer you a sneak peek behind the scenes of Simple Pin Media and how I run the business.  If you want to know more about how I built Simple Pin Media from the ground up, our fostering story, and how I built my team, you can click through to listen to those episodes.  In today’s episode, I am going to talk about my philosophy of rest…taking the time to pause and refresh.  To be honest, when I added this topic to the podcast schedule, I had no idea that we would literally still be in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. I figured that it would be long over.  The interesting thing is that Covid-19 has not killed my business or caused any forced downtime. In fact, the opposite has happened. Here’s a snapshot of what has transpired at Simple Pin over the past few months: * Pinterest usage has exploded during the pandemic and has been at an all-time high. This means our clients’ accounts are growing at a faster rate, so they demand more attention from us.
 * We’ve experienced the necessity of creating and releasing products that we didn’t plan to release until the fall of 2020 or sometime in 2021. 
 * We’ve upped our teaching game by beefing up our offerings inside the Simple Pin Collective, which is our membership community for Pinterest marketers. 
 * Our website has experienced several hiccups through this crazy growth (and you know how frustrating and time-consuming tech challenges can be!) * I created and launched Simple Pin Pro. This new offering is my way of giving back by teaching others how to grow their own Pinterest management agency.  With all of this unexpected activity and growth, I needed to take a forced pause so that I could reflect on the business. It was during this pause that I was reminded of how important those natural breaks are when you are a business owner.  What I want to do in this episode is to share with you five strategies that I’ve adopted during my seven years in business to help me prevent burnout and fuel my creative spark.  This post contains affiliate links, which means if you make a purchase through these links, I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. Click here to read my full disclosure policy. My Philosophy of Rest   1. Take a Weekly Sabbath Day The most important thing I have done when it comes to developing regular rhythms of rest is to take one day completely off every week — no looking at my computer, no checking email, nothing work-related. I have designated Saturday as my weekly day off. The one caveat to this is if I have planned to have a working weekend. Most weekends, I leave the internet behind from Friday evening at 6 p.m. until Sunday morning at 11:00 a.m.. This break includes walking away from Instagram. I love Instagram, but it can be mentally draining in its own way and I need the break.  During this time, I may work on house projects or spend time on my hobbies and doing things that give me joy. Let me be honest about my “sabbath”. I don’t spend it binging Netflix series or reading hefty novels. I am mostly active and working on some type of project. But that is what I love to do.  My business coach calls it “active meditation.”  For me, when I’m creating something, it centers my brain and actually helps to organize my thoughts. It’s a weird form of rest,

  (Update: Story Pins are now called Idea Pins.) Have you seen the new feature that Pinterest has rolled out? In this episode, we’re going to introduce you to Pinterest story pins. More specifically, you’ll learn how to integrate them into your Pinterest marketing without it feeling overwhelming.  New features on any platform can tend to make us feel overwhelmed. But if we take the time to learn about them, master them, and then use them regularly, we can get beyond that feeling of not knowing what the heck we’re doing.  My promoted pins specialist, Erin, was in the original beta group for story pins a couple of years ago and she also participated in a more recent beta group for the release of story pins. As a result, she has a lot of experience using them and learning how they work.  Erin has been testing Pinterest story pins for her website content — Clever Bloom.  In this episode, she shares how she uses story pins, why she thinks they’re a useful feature, and how to use them so that they aren’t overwhelming.  Are you new to Pinterest and not sure where to start? Do you already feel overwhelmed? Don’t worry, because we’ve got your back! We have a special newsletter just for you, where we teach you how to get started on your Pinterest marketing. Sign up and we’ll help you get off to a great start. We’ll be there if you get stuck at any point along the way.  Pinterest Story Pins: The Ultimate Guide   What Are Pinterest Story Pins? If you want to see some story pins in action, Erin recommends you go into the Today tab and click on one of the pins. On the day we recorded this episode, every single pin inside the “Recipes” tab was a story pin, which seems to indicate that Pinterest is favoring story pins at some level.  You can also see more story pins at the top of the main feed, so the prioritization of them is pretty obvious.  But how do you know if you’re looking at a story pin?  If you’re on mobile, you’ll see a bubble in the top left corner with a number in it from 3-20. That number lets you know how many slides are in that story pin. On desktop, the bubble will say “story.”  Please note that story pins are not in any way comparable to Instagram stories. Like I say all the time, Pinterest is not a social media platform, so don’t expect it to behave like one.  I say that to let you know that story pins won’t be “real-time” like Instagram stories. You can’t pop in and talk to your audience that way.  You can choose to include sound in your video story pins. Erin hasn’t included her voice in any of the story pins she’s created, simply because she knows that most people don’t have sound turned on while they are scrolling through the Pinterest feed. She did add some music to a couple of her story pins, just in case anyone has their sound on.  Should YOU Be Using Story Pins on Pinterest? I will fully admit that I have been more than hesitant to jump on the story pins bandwagon. But Erin has been wearing me down and I am ready to learn more about why they are beneficial and the best way to use them.  So, if you are just getting started with Pinterest marketing, please don’t try to add this to your current strategy. This feature is for advanced users. Feel free to read on or listen in but keep doing what you’re doing for right now. One caveat to what I just said- if you don’t have a blog yet but you do want to begin sharing ideas and solutions with an audience, story pins might be a great option for you.  Because story pins aren’t linked anywhere,

This post contains affiliate links, which means if you make a purchase through these links, I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. Click here to read my full disclosure policy. If you’ve been around SPM for any amount of time, you know how much we love the Tailwind App.  It is an amazing scheduling tool, not just for Pinterest but also for Instagram. The Tailwind App is also a great analytics tool to use as you work on growing your business.  Right now, The Simple Pin Collective is about to jump into what we are calling Tailwind month.  We’re going through all the features of the Tailwind App, diving into our How to Master Tailwind course, and giving you a look into how this tool can really help you grow your business. If you’d like to join in on this training, you can join The Simple Pin Collective at any time.  To kick off Tailwind month, I’m interviewing Danny Maloney, the CEO and co-founder of Tailwind, to talk about the origins of the Tailwind App, and his business success story.  Origins of the Tailwind App   His First Business: Collectible Re-Selling Danny’s educational background is a mix of engineering and business.  He’s always been entrepreneurial in nature and started his first company while he was in college. He saw an opportunity in the e-commerce space, (re-selling collectibles) that turned into a nice business that helped him pay his way through college.  As he was approaching graduation, he decided to work for larger companies who were run by really smart business people so that he could learn from them and fill in knowledge gaps.  According to Danny, he learned more from this work experience than he did in the classroom. He worked for companies like Google, Youtube, and AOL before he circled back to running his own business.  His Second Business: Bridal Industry Niche  It ended up being over 10 years before Danny felt like he had learned enough to take a shot at creating his own company. The very first idea that Danny and his Tailwind co-founder Alex started working on was during a start-up weekend in New York. Danny and Alex had been friends for a few months before this start-up weekend.  They zeroed in on an idea to start a business in the bridal industry. They kept hearing, “I’ve never planned a wedding before, I don’t really know what I like, but I’ll know it when I see it.” This market research identified an opportunity within the niche. Related: Pinterest Marketing for Wedding Professionals They wanted to provide a way to show brides real pictures from real weddings and provide a way to save and identify what they liked. This would allow them to match the brides to vendors and pull off their perfect wedding.  They tried 12 different ways to generate revenue and were never able to figure it out. Ultimately, they reached a point where they had both left their full-time corporate jobs and they knew they had to figure something out to pay the bills.  Pivoting in the Business – Selling Analytics Technology Danny and Alex started brainstorming a way they could pivot their business in order to make money.  They had built some initial analytics technology to analyze what trends were in the bridal space on Pinterest. This allowed them to go back to photographers and let them know exactly what they needed, content-wise. Then they could fill their content pipeline with what people...

Today we are going to be talking about a Pinterest feature that isn’t regularly used – Pinterest carousel pins.  Pinterest carousel is a feature that seasoned marketers can test out after they’ve set up a great Pinterest marketing foundation. It’s something optional that you can explore once you’ve mastered the basics.  If you’re still working on setting up that strong foundation, or are working on growing your Pinterest marketing, make sure you’ve downloaded the Simple Pin Pinterest Planner. It’s over 20 pages of monthly trends, stat tracking, checklists, and more. And it’s free!  What Is A Pinterest Carousel Pin?  According to Pinterest: A carousel is a pin with multiple images. Carousels are a great way to showcase different features of a product, advertise multiple products at once, or tell your brand story in chapters. People see the carousels in their home feed just like they would any other pin.  They can swipe through the different carousel images (called “cards”) directly from their feed. They can also tap on the carousel and swipe through each card to its corresponding URL, essentially swiping through the different landing pages.  When someone saves a carousel, they save the entire pin, including all the cards within it.  Keep in mind that the pinner might not know to swipe when they encounter a carousel pin. You need to communicate to the pinner that they need to swipe.  Why You Should Test Pinterest Carousels?  This is not a major feature of Pinterest. In fact, it was a feature that, until recently, was only available to promoted pin advertisers. I also don’t believe that this feature will drive a lot of traffic. I do think it’s good to test it out these types of Pinterest features every once in a while, for those of you who are seasoned marketers. It’s a great way to diversify your strategy.  Here at Simple Pin, we’ve added a UTM tracking code to our carousels so that we can report back about whether or not they are working for us. We’ll be able to see if anyone is clicking on the carousel or onto our site by viewing the results in our Google Analytics.  Carousel pins are also a great way to display groups of products.  If you’re a product seller and want to show multiple views or colors, this is a great way to showcase your products. You can also test this out if you have a blog post with multiple options for a recipe, or a variety of steps in a DIY project that you’d like to break down.  We will have a podcast in the next few weeks about Pinterest Story Pins. One key distinguishing feature between story pins and carousels is that you cannot link a story pin, but you can link a carousel pin. How to Create a Pinterest Carousel Pin The instructions to Pinterest carousels state that you can only use them for ads (i.e., promoted pins), but that’s not true. You can use them organically.  To get started, have all of your images downloaded to your computer so that you can upload them all at once. When you upload, you will be prompted to create a carousel or a collage. Choose “create a carousel”: Once you choose the carousel option, you’ll be able to reorder your images and choose the links you want to attach to the images: If you are a product seller who has a category page, you can link to that main category page instead of choosing multiple links.  You can have the same description and URL for the entir...