You clicked on this article because you want more traffic to your website and I am here to tell you there is no better way to do that then Pinterest. Besides TikTok I think Pinterest Has to be the most undervalued and misunderstood platform in 2020. Pinterest is one of those apps that we all use for inspiration but forget we can also use the platform to leverage our own business. Whether you’re an artist, photographer, hairstylist, MUA, designer, or brand you can without a doubt triple the traffic to your website using Pinterest for free. Think about that, how much do you think you would have to pay in ads on google, Facebook, or Instagram to triple the traffic to your website? As you can see from the screenshot below Last month alone I had 1.1 million impressions on my Pinterest account with over 25,000 engagements and over the last three months I’ve had an average of 656,000 monthly viewers. Although these numbers are far greater than anything you will get organically with Instagram or Facebook they are not hard to achieve. According to my Google analytics 65% of my organic website traffic comes from Pinterest. That’s huge. It’s very simple, If you are an artist, designer, brand, or business your end goal is sales and in order to make more sales you need more traffic to your website and to get more traffic to your website people need to find you and right now there is no better way to find you then on Pinterest. You need to understand, Pinterest is a search engine NOT a social media platform. No one uses Pinterest to catch up or follow their friends, they use it for inspiration. Maybe it’s inspiration for a photo shoot, a recipe, a wedding, make up, hairstyle, or outfit. Whatever it is use your product, service, or skill to be that inspiration. Inspiration leads to curiosity and curiosity leads to sales. Just ask Sharee Davenport a wedding photographer who booked over $200,000 worth of weddings using Pinterest. So now that I’ve shown you the value of using Pinterest for your business here are some tips on how to actually use Pinterest correctly. Tip 1. Every pin on your page should link to your website. Tip number one and probably the most important tip I will give you is this: If and only if you are using Pinterest for your business “in other words to drive traffic to your website”, delete every board and pin that is not linked to your website. This one change made the biggest impact on my account almost immediately. I repeat, delete every pin or board that is not linked to your website. No one visiting your Pinterest page gives a shit about what vegan recipes you’ve saved or at home workout plans you’ve pinned. Those things have nothing to do with your business. When using Pinterest for business every board and pin should be specifically related to what you have to offer. If it’s easier to start a separate account I would suggest doing that. This way you wont lose all the pins you've saved. Tip 2. Use Board Titles and DescriptionsBoard Titles and descriptions are important. Use them wisely. Whatever it is that you have to offer do some research and find out the most popular keywords people are using to search for your product or service. Take some time and think about what your perfect client would be searching for to find you. If you’re a wedding photographer in Portland Oregon you might want to title your board “Oregon wedding photographer” or “Portland wedding photographer.” or get more specific and have a different board for each Wedding Venue you've shot at like “Portland hotel wedding” or “The Nines hotel wedding” or “Gray Gables Estate Wedding” Remember newly engaged couples are looking for wedding venues, wedding destinations, wedding photographers, or floral inspiration. No one gives a shit about Jack and Jill‘s wedding so lose the titles like “Jacob & Sarah’s Beach front wedding” and go with something like “Pacific City Beach front wedding” It’s okay to use names on your blog but no one’s searching Pinterest for Tom and Karen’s lake view wedding I promise you. Use keywords in your description like Oregon wedding photographer, Oregon wedding venue, dream wedding, Oregon wedding ideas, Oregon wedding photography etc. If you’re a wedding photographer for example using keywords like the venue you shot a beautiful wedding at is crucial because the first thing soon to be brides look for when planning a wedding even before photographers are venues. So when a bride to be is searching Pinterest for local wedding venues you want your work to show up. Tip 3. Use Pin Titles and Descriptions Just like board titles and descriptions each pin will have a title and description as well. For example if I am adding a pin to my cosplay photography board I will keep the title and a lot of the keywords in the description the same as what are used for the board itself because they are related, the only difference I will make are some of the keywords in the description of that pin more specific to the photo itself. As you can see in the photo below I used keywords related to the photo like marvel cosplay and marvel universe and avengers endgame and female cosplay and female superhero. The keywords in your board description won’t be so specific they should be more broad. Remember Pinterests algorithm crawls the app for keywords not photos. Pinterest can’t tell a photo is of a bride and groom reading vows, you have to tell Pinterest what the photo is via keywords and that’s how Pinterest matches your photo with someone’s search. This is where so many people go wrong. Tip 4. Use Key Words on your Profile Page Not only is your profile the first thing people see when they come to your page but the web crawls Pinterest for keywords you want to use not only in your board titles and descriptions and pin titles and descriptions but also your profile page. For example If you’re an Atlanta hairstylist or make up artist you should use the phrase Atlanta hairstylist on your profile page in your pins and on your boards. That makes it very clear to Pinterest that you are a hairstylist in Atlanta. Tip 5. Keep it simple Keep it simple, this isn’t as hard or as time consuming as it sounds. If you’re a photographer you have an extreme advantage because you already have a ton of content you can post. Try to stick with as few boards as you can so you don’t overwhelm anyone coming to your page. 20, 40, 80 boards is too much. Remember Pinterest is a search engine not social media so unlike Instagram you don’t need to come up with a witty description for every photo, I literally copy and paste most of my descriptions from previous posts. If you are a fashion designer and you make a board for a new fall line, most if not all of the keywords you use in each photo from that line will be the same. Tip 6. Use Pinterest search to find popular Keywords For instance the photo below is a photo I took for a local athletic apparel brand. So to find corresponding popular keywords I use Pinterest search for suggestions by typing in a word related to the photo like "athletic" and as you can see a list will pop down of other popular search terms related to athletic. Such as athletic women, athletic outfits, athletic wear, athletic hairstyles. And because all of those are related to the image I’m posting I use those keywords in my description as well as the more specific keywords for local search like Oregon portrait photographer or Portland fashion photographer. Tip 7. Hire a Photographer to make you content Now you may be sitting there thinking to yourself OK Lance this is all great but I am not a photographer, I’m not an artist, I’m not a designer, I’m not a model, how am I supposed to create all this content to post on Pinterest? That’s where hiring a professional photographer comes in. As professional photographers we are content creators, our job is to create engaging and interesting content based around your product or service that you can use to promote yourself via Pinterest and other social media platforms. Let’s say you’re a business owner and your business is dental work. First thing you want to do is create a website/blog, and then write interesting and engaging articles like how marijuana affects oral health or how the keto diet affects oral health or how often you should replace your toothbrush or what’s the connection between stroke and oral health. Once you’ve done that take some photos yourself or hire a professional or hell you can even use free stock photography and use those photos to promote your articles on Pinterest. But the better those photos are the better your post will perform on the App. Tip 8. Switch to a Business Account Now that I’ve given you the knowledge how to utilize Pinterest for your advantage the only thing you can do now is take what you’ve learned and practice but the only way to practice and get better results is to track what’s working and what’s not so you can make the necessary changes moving forward and to do that you will need to track your analytics. In order to track your analytics you will need to go to your account settings and scroll down to account changes and switch to a business account instead of personal. Don’t worry this doesn’t cost anything. Tip 9. Track your Analytics Let’s take audience insights for example. Here you can see in the last 30 days how many people have engaged with your pins and what they are interested in as well as their age, gender, and location. You can choose between looking at your total audience or engaged audience but we want to specifically look at our engaged audience because these are the people who are actually clicking our pins and sharing our pins and viewing our website. We want to learn everything we can about the people who are the most interested in our pins because these are the type of people we want to target because they are more likely to click or share our image and view our website. As you can see which is as no surprise to me my engaged audience is most interested in art, women’s fashion, education, entertainment, and beauty. Tip 10. Get Specific Now that we have that information we can dig even deeper and get more specific. For example as shown in the image above 69% of my engaged audience is interested in women’s fashion and when I click that it then tells me of those interested in women’s fashion 61% is specifically interested in women’s fashion dress. So that tells me I should see higher engagement and thus better results when I share photos of a model in a dress and use the corresponding keywords like women’s fashion dress. I hope that makes sense. Now I can go even further by clicking dress and it will bring up a page of the most popular pins for women’s fashion dress and this tells me what kind of photos are doing well in that category. Great for inspiration :) Furthermore you can view your impressions and engagements per pin through analytics. This will tell you what photos are doing well and what photos aren’t. As you can see in the photo below my most popular pins are all Cosplay. This tells me I should post more photos in that category. When I compare my pins in that category the analytics will tell me the difference between what performed well and what didn’t so I can improve moving forward. Might be the keywords used might be the photos itself. I have tried the route of pinning straight from my Instagram to send people there hoping to gain more followers that way but I have found that the algorithm doesn’t like that very much so you’re going to get far better results linking to your website and not another social media. In conclusion, to make this as simple and straightforward as possible this is my method: I’ll create a board such as Portland portrait photographer because I’m a photographer in Portland and I shoot a lot of portraits. Because of this I obviously already have a ton of content I can use on my phone. Once my board is created and I’ve chosen the right keywords for my title and description I will then add one or two sets per day. A set being all the photos I shared previously on social media from a shoot which usually ends up being around 10 photos. Obviously if this board is for portraits all the photos from the set I’m sharing are going to be portraits. Each photo you add back to back will need a title and description and I literally just copy and paste because all the same keywords will be relevant for the most part. The only time this wouldn’t be the case is if let’s say you were adding a set of photos to a Lakeview wedding board and one photo was of a couple and another photo was of just the cake. Obviously you wouldn’t use the same keywords for the couple as you would the cake however you would still use some of the same keywords but some would need to change. This is why when I’m adding sets of photos back to back I’ll choose one board so I can easily copy and paste and that saves me time. So how do you copy and paste? I always have my Pinterest app open as well as a web browser open with my Pinterest account that way I can copy the title and description from the web browser and paste into the Pinterest app. Bonus Tip. Use Regrammer Pro tip for photographers, for a fast and easy way to find sets you’ve done, on your phone go to your Instagram profile and scroll until you find a set you’ve shared that you would like to share on Pinterest. Click the three dots on the upper right corner and then click copy link. Then with the Regrammer app “if you don’t have it get it, it’s free” paste the link in the app and you can quickly save the photos from that post, and there you have it you can immediately share those photos to Pinterest one by one via the Pinterest app. If you have any questions please ask them in the comments below and I will try my best to answer them. Also make sure to connect with me on Instagram HERE. Just remember, it’s very unlikely that someone sends you a message on Pinterest wanting to hire you or buy your product. Most likely they will click through to your website, check you out and probably follow you on social media. There they will see your work and personality. If they like what they see they might reach out to you and that is when your job begins, your job is to build a relationship with that person so they ultimately end up hire you.
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Author Lance Reis
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