Episode 210: How To Generate Leads With Pinterest Stories, Videos and Hashtags – with Laura Rike

You’re listening to the Sweetlife entrepreneur podcast, simplified strategies to grow your service business and launch a life you love faster with business mental and entrepreneur activator, a probate. Hey everybody. Welcome back to episode number 210 on the Sweetlife entrepreneur podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in today. Happy January, 2021. We obviously just finished commitment week 2021 for entrepreneurs and small business owners.

And we had our fourth podcast anniversary birthday last week. So first of all, great way to kick off 2021. Thank you so much for being a listener of this show for the last four years and keeping us a top of the charts for business development online for entrepreneurs. We love you guys. If you haven’t had a chance to yet, please cruise over and leave us a review on Apple podcasts,

or just simply share this podcast from your Spotify up to your Instagram stories, or share this on LinkedIn. We appreciate you spreading the word about this show and just honestly how awesome you guys are as listeners. I get direct messages from many of you on Instagram and on LinkedIn, and just appreciate them so much. So we’re kicking off our fourth year with more proven business trainings that you can take to the bank.

We are known for giving you business steps and strategies that coaches charge thousands of dollars for. And it’s all totally proven. I’ve been coaching entrepreneurs for 24 years and the guests that also come on the show are proven experts in their space. So I’m so glad to turn you over to another guest expert on today’s show. We’re talking about how to generate leads with Pinterest stories,

videos, and hashtags. And let me give you a quick little backstory. I don’t do Pinterest. I’m not the Pinterest kind of girl whatsoever from a business strategy standpoint though. I definitely want to be where our clients are in where it’s a great place for our company to be, which is called the sweet life company for people to access our resources in the content that we distribute here on the podcast.

And so last year we got on Pinterest. We recorded a show about Pinterest with a guest expert, and my team quickly got to work implementing all those steps in our Pinterest engagement grew by something crazy. It was like 813%, which could be two things. Number one, it could show you how terrible we were at Pinterest before. So, you know,

there’s only way only one way to go is up or the strategies once are implemented with Pinterest. You can see almost instant results when you’re using Pinterest correctly. But with that being said full transparency, I still am not great at Pinterest. I’m grateful to have a team that does Pinterest. I’m not really on Pinterest. And so as an entrepreneur, I had a lot of questions for our expert today on,

you know, really who should be on Pinterest? What can you do on there? And especially all the new Pinterest stories feature. So on today’s show, we are talking to you guys about the fact that Pinterest could be that sleeper tool that you’ve been looking for to generate leads and grow your business. It’s not a social media platform. We’ll talk about that in today’s show,

but it’s really a great way to get eyes on your business and have people land on your website and increase your website, traffic and therefore generating leads. But honestly not a lot of companies are still leveraging Pinterest really well. So inter today’s expert, Laura rag is in the house today and she’s at Pinterest powerhouse who helps high performing business owners, content, creators,

and influencers grow profitability the right way with sustainable systems using Pinterest. She’s helped clients and students bring in over $50,000 in monthly revenue with her strategies. I mean, she’s really rad. You guys are gonna love her. And she’s been featured as a guest on podcasts like tailwind, ultimate marketer, twin cities, collective, and small business revival. And Laura lives in Minnesota with her family.

And she can be found@laurareich.com and we’ll of course, make sure all the links and everything we’re talking about in today’s show are going to be available for you guys in the show notes. If you’re new here then just so you know, you can find all the show notes and all the bonuses that we deliver with this podcast, by going to Sweetlife co.com, simply click on podcast,

and then you can click on the podcast number, or you can just type in the number of the podcast in our search bar. This is episode number 210. So welcome here to the sweet life entrepreneur podcast. And just a little bit of housekeeping before we dive into today’s show, if you haven’t yet held your seat or joined the early registration waitlist for my,

your signature offer masterclass, that is coming in February. So now is the time to get on that wait list. It’s a two half day intensive, so not two and a half days, but it’s two half day intensive that I’m going to be teaching in the middle of February. And this is going to teach you how to extract your own intellectual property.

Take a look at all the assets and all the great things you’ve created, and we are going to together build your signature program. Course mastermind, membership, whatever the business model of that is, we’re going to help you extract it all and create it into a signature offer. That’s perfect. Should give you the results that you want. Make sure that you’re joining that early registration list by cruising over to signature offer.com.

Okay, let’s go ahead and dive into today’s podcast training.<inaudible> I’m super excited to be here with Laura Reich. And I will say that we did reschedule this episode because we’re both moms and that is what happens in our life. And Laura, you guys have to see this behind the scenes, this video, make sure you go to our YouTube channel and to our Pinterest,

there’ll be videos on there because she is glowing because she is beautifully eight months pregnant. And we had to make sure we recorded this show before baby, right. Number three, arrived. So we’re, we’re getting this out of here for you, Laura, welcome to the show. Thanks so much to everybody. A little bit about yourself. Yeah, for sure.

I thank you so much for having me. I am a mom of two boys with a girl on the way. So we are so super excited over here in this neck of the woods. And I am a VA gone rogue is what I call myself. So I used to try to do all the things and with a family that doesn’t work. So I picked one thing I love,

which happens to be Pinterest and design. And I have been going hard at that ever since and just love it. That’s awesome. Okay. And what is your URL? So people can find you, even though we’ll put all this in the show notes for you. Yeah, of course. It’s just Laura wrike.com. So it’s L a U R a R I K e.com.

Awesome. Okay. So today on the show I have a million Pinterest questions. So we had Melanie fountain on the show a while ago, almost a year ago, really diving into Pinterest Pinterest marketing. It was a great episode. I will say, as a case study, we took those like Pinterest one Oh one steps, and we tried them. And as a company,

we had crazy results. It was like we went from being nowhere on Pinterest, having random pins to, you know, having thousands and thousands of impressions. And it was like an 813% increase with applying some basic steps. And so I am a believer in Pinterest now, but I will also say I am completely still Pinterest illiterate because my, my team does it.

And I get questions all the time from business owners about, you know, still, should I be using this? What is this look like? What can Pinterest really do? And so today’s show is all about kind of dissecting some of those high-level business questions. So our listeners can, first of all, determine whether or not they should be in Pinterest.

So number one is this worth your time, number two, how to get started and you have a toolkit for people to get started, which I wish that we had had in the beginning, I will say for sure, you know, really what is this toolkit? How do we get started with this? But there’s so many things kind of spinning around with Pinterest.

So let’s kind of start, I would say, spinning around in my head with Pinterest. So let’s go ahead and just start with question number one. How does Pinterest rack up and compare to other social media outlets such as Instagram or LinkedIn? Yeah, for sure. Really the biggest difference is it’s not a social media platform like Instagram or LinkedIn. LinkedIn is been known for the more professional type connections and Instagram.

You have conversations and the comments and things like that. Pinterest really does not focus there. They really focus on you putting in the conversation into the copy and making sure that you have the keywords there so that people can find you when they find you. Then they read that conversation and they click through to the destination, which is where you can take it from there.

So it’s more search based and it’s more top of funnel based because you can utilize Pinterest to send it where those conversations are happening right now and bring in a wider audience over there. Okay, fascinating. So it’s SEO, it’s search engine. It’s a way to take a conversation and become the top of that question for you. Is Pinterest owned by Google or is it a Google product or something of that sort?

It is not, no, it’s separate. It actually plays off of Google’s domain authority and their own domain authority. So when you have your website and then you have a Pinterest profile or business account, right, you’re going to get more domain authority with your profile on Pinterest than you are your own website. Unless, I mean, you’re some super big wig,

but it has been around forever. Right? But like my website is not going to have as much domain authority as Pinterest. And so I really use that and play off of their authority to be able to bring people to my website. Very cool. Okay. So what businesses should be there. And so let me rephrase that question. You know, obviously who should be on Pinterest,

but as a business strategist, my brain works the other way, what buyers are on Pinterest, like who is actually looking for content to increase maybe their performance, their profit, their business ability or whatever it is. You know, we have a lot of marketing coaches, brand new coaches, video coaches, health coaches, a lot of physicians, a lot of attorneys and even a lot of CPAs that listened to our podcast are their buyers.

Absolutely. So there’s kind of two different ways that I tackle that for people. One, I am a Pinterest junkie, right. It’s my jam. So I’m always going to tell you, yes, there are buyers there to give you kind of an unbiased opinion. I tell everybody to go to the platform type in something that your buyers would be searching for,

right? Like what is the problem or the pain point that they are having and how would they find you? Other places on Google, on Facebook? Like what are they looking for? And if what pulls up underneath that search is offering or information or education that you can provide to them because you know how to do that as well. Then 1000000%, that’s where you should be listed because you’re missing that opportunity.

The other thing that I like to talk to people about is really when you’re thinking about buyers, like where are they? Right. Cause everybody has a different stage. And so we talked about this for a second too. Like, it might not be that they’re a startup or they’re established or whatever, but where do they aspire to be? So if they are someone who is earning three figures right now,

they’re not going to be looking for how to earn three figures on Pinterest. They’re going to be looking at things like how to grow your email list to earn five figure months. And that’s because they aspire to be in that position. So that’s also something that you need to kind of reverse engineer and think, okay, is my buyer talking to where they’re at right now?

Are they aspiring to be a five figure person? Are they aspiring to maybe lead a life where it’s freedom, right? And so they have more time in their day or their moms or whatever. And that’s really how you want to address it too, when you’re going about it that way too. So smart. Yes. And you know, there are always,

people want to hang out just you and I do too. We want to hang out with people that are just slightly ahead of where we are. Right? Those are, those are the best people that are going to hold our hand and grab us to the next level. And that totally makes sense that that’s the same thing people will be looking for on Pinterest as well.

How often should people post let’s actually talk about the content that should be posted on Pinterest? What is like the baseline, if you’re going to get started, this is how often you post. This is what it really looks like. Yeah. So it used to be an everything that I’m going to tell you guys here is how I handle it, right?

So I am not saying this is the end all be all. I’m not saying this is a hard and fast rule. You have to do it this way. This is what I’ve implemented for myself and my clients and my course members and things like that, where they see the results. So one of the things that I really tell people is it used to be pin 20 to 30 to 40 different times a day,

and you would pin your stuff and other people’s stuff. And really that’s not necessarily required anymore. What I teach is that you need to be consistent on the platform. So if you’re someone that’s just starting out and maybe you don’t have a ton of content out there, which I can try to prove you wrong, because there are multiple places that I can find content you have already posted online that can work for this.

But if you’re thinking content in terms of like landing page or sales page or blog posts, and you’re feeling like you don’t have a ton, then start at one or two pins a day, right? Even if it’s a time constraint, like how do I create all these pin designs? Start at one to two pins a day, then start to work your way up.

If you’re someone that’s been blogging or you have tons of an audience, and you’re looking to really expand on that and you know that you have tons of content, then start hire. We did a case study actually on my website. It showed, even though they had a smaller audience and the other account had a larger audience, one pinned, I think it was like seven times a day.

And the other one pin 21 times a day, they still saw the same incremental increases on their own accounts because they were being consistent. And it was the quality over how often they were posting that gave them that feedback to know that that was beneficial. Wow. That’s so awesome. That’s super encouraging. I know because our listeners are like thinking like, Oh shit,

20 times a day. Like, how am I going to ever do that? Like that is not ever going to happen. And so that that’s super cool to look at the case study and the stats and, and really just the incremental growth that’s happening with. What’s being posted now, little tangent, what software do you recommend that people use to manage their Pinterest?

So I go back and forth on this. I personally use tailwind. I love them dearly because they have tailwind tribes. And that’s really like a community-based where you’re sharing ideas together. And then, I mean, sharing other people’s ideas and really having that community type feel like you would on social media. The problem with me only telling you to pick one platform that I see though,

is it’s not a good fit for everybody all the time. So if you’re out there and you’re like, I’ve tried tailwind, it doesn’t work for me. I apologize that it didn’t work for you. I love them. They are amazing. But what I urge you to do is go to Pinterest and make sure that the scheduler you’re using, whether it’s ladder,

whether it’s meet Edgar or whatever is a Pinterest approved platform. Because if it’s not, you set yourself up for possibly getting marked as spam or even shut down because they might not be following Pinterest best practices. Wow. Okay. I know that is such a fear. I’m so glad you said that because people would never know, know to even look, they’ll just think,

Oh, well, because this platform offers it does works. Great. I’ll just take this one, but it is so important with not just Pinterest, all the different social media platforms that whatever schedule are you using does it does abide by their regulations. So thank you for that. And we’ll go ahead and make sure we leave some resources so that you guys can find Laura.

And then also to some of the software tools in the show notes of this show. So we’re not going to totally leave you all hanging out there with that. So this week I was on Pinterest and I have a confession to make. I am never on Pinterest. I’m not a Pinterest girl. I’m just not okay. And so this week I thought,

okay, I’m going to go ahead and post a video. I think I had posted something to a LinkedIn story downloaded, like the little five second video. And then I, you know, distributed it or long all of our, you know, Instagram and LinkedIn story channels. And then I’m like, well just sitting there on this little five second video,

why don’t I just try to put it on Pinterest? And so I went on there, not knowing even that Pinterest had stories, I was just going to post it like as a little video on there and, you know, boom, I’m sure everybody who’s listening to. This is like, yeah, duh, April Pinterest is had stories for a while.

You know, but to me that was, I was like, what, it’s another thing with this story. So what are Pinterest stories? What should be posted there? What is the purpose of a Pinterest story and how can they be leveraged in the business? Yeah, for sure. So it’s actually not something that’s entirely like completely past you, right?

So it is new. So don’t worry about that. Some people have had it around for a little while, but it has now opened up to more people. And so a lot of people are seeing the get early access symbol when they’re locking in, there are two sides of it, which is awesome. One side is the, I really feel like Pinterest is stepping up their game in terms of providing an opportunity for content creators,

to be able to tell a story better, to be able to educate more. Because when you think about it, you only have one graphic and you can only have so much on that one image to try to tell that story and capture their attention. So the purpose of stories right now is to be able to have multiple images so that they can kind of tap through.

And it’s kind of like a slideshow. I teach people to do more of like step-by-step, or this is what I’m working through or behind the scenes, or like more of that conversation visually in those stories. The only downfall to stories that I see currently, which I’m hoping they open up in the future is it’s not clickable to an actual landing page. So you wouldn’t use it like you do a static image because you can’t get them to use that referral traffic in our research that we’ve done in the past few months,

though, it really does help increase the brand awareness and authority on your account. So you will see that if you are using it, to teach people things and to educate them and to provide more information for them at the end, Pinterest puts on a follow button so they can start following you on Pinterest. And it’s really bringing in that authority from that platform.

And then we’ve also seen the link clicks and the traffic and the leads increase on the other things that we’ve been consistently putting out there because of the help with the stories. Okay. Totally makes sense. And leads me to, first of all, say, that means I really failed on my first story. Cause I just uploaded that one video and I was like,

wow, they want me to share more. I don’t have any more right now. All right. What the hell? I’m just going to upload this one video. So first of all, how people find your stories if they’re not already following you, does Pinterest use hashtags? Yeah. So Pinterest uses hashtags. This is one of those controversial type things though.

Pinterest, a while ago said no hashtags. Then they said, yes, hashtags. Now they’re saying don’t use them a ton. So my philosophy has always been when they’re, when they opened up hashtags, don’t use them to keyword stuff. Use them within a sentence that you have put into the description, like use up your entire 500 character limit. And then if you have room and you can’t put on a whole,

a full another sentence in there, but there’s a hashtag or a phrase that still is relevant to what you’re sharing, then use it as a hashtag. Right. And just kind of take it that way. I’ve never done more than like three on a pin at most. So I don’t really see it being a problem. As long as you use it,

that way, those that have gone gung ho or followed the ups and downs of the hashtag or no hashtag I think are starting to not see the best results. The hashtags are still searchable, so you can still find them in search. So it really just depends on, on what placement you have for them in the description. So if your pin is about how to create a content marketing strategy,

and it’s like a download of a calendar or graphic, you’re not going to use a hashtag girl boss. I hate that hashtag by the way, every girl listening to the show is going to hate me for saying that I can’t stand that term. Yeah, no, it’s too general. Yeah. Right, right. You know what I mean? You’re going to put like content marketing or content calendar or a social media calendar or something.

Yeah. So two that don’t do the girl boss. I’m not a huge fan of that either. I like the terms that actually are like leading me somewhere. Right. Like that seems anyway. So I would say if you’re talking about content marketing though, in the description, don’t waste your hashtag on hashtag content marketing, maybe do calendar download or calendar template or something like that.

So it’s still relevant, but it’s playing off of a different type of search that someone would do. Maybe they don’t know about the content marketing calendar, but they’re looking for calendar templates or some sort of business template or something like that. That way. Then you have the conversation, it still flows. You’ve got the keywords in the description. And then you just add in a couple of those hashtags that are still keywords,

people would search for, but you couldn’t put it into the sentence flow that you were creating. All right. I got you girl. That totally makes sense. So with our stories, can you add hashtags? I kind of went back to that question. How did, how do people find my stories if they aren’t following me? Stories are still there like a collaboration of pins.

So you get to put three or five or however many you want in there and you still get a description on each one. So it’s still going to be searchable. You still can put a couple of hashtags in there if they’re not already following you and they search for something, it’s going to show up in the feed, just like any of the other static pins or video pins.

So in terms of your video, you could have uploaded it just as a pin instead of a story. And it works the same way as a static pin. You do get a little bit more tagging capability in terms of topic, tagging for videos. Then you do a static pen. So you can also use the tags for keywords that you want to be found for.

And that increases the searchability as well. Okay. So let me make sure I understood this correctly. The stories are basically a collection of pins related to the same things, is that right? Yep. So if I have a static pain, can I like Instagram? When you have something in your feed, that’s a post, can I push that to story?

Like, can I push a static pin to story or is it a separate, complete way to post that It’s a separate, complete way to post that you can repost it? The only problem that I see by doing that though is Pinterest is very heavily encouraging people to do fresh content. So they will see that same static pin posted. And then again on your stories and they’ll consider that as like a spam duper kit.

Got it. Okay. I lied that. Wasn’t the last question before. Thank you listeners for bearing with me. I hope I’m not asking like questions that you all know the answers to. I really include this in this area. And so it was, I’m so glad to have you here, Laura. And so how long the stories stay in a story?

How long are they shown for So completely different than social media? They stay on there just like a Pinterest pin, unless you go and delete them, they will be on your profile. Awesome. Okay. That makes me really happy. Nothing bothers me more than posting a really great Instagram story that people only get to see for 24 hours. So that’s super awesome.

Thank you. I’m super excited about stories. Like I said, Kelly and JC on my team really create our Pinterest content and post that. So thank you. By the way, to those of you guys who have been following us on Pinterest it’s, it’s cool to see that and those interactions and things, but I’m totally personally Pinterest illiterate. So I’ve just have so many questions that I am not able to answer for our clients.

So I’m very excited about all this. Okay. So let’s chat a little bit about video pins. Now, what is the parameter around video pins? Are they all vertical? How long can they be? And are they clickable? Yeah, so they Do not all have to be vertical. I still suggest it because then you’re taking up more real estate on the feed.

I personally don’t want to go more than a minute to a minute and a half. I believe you can go longer. I think it’s like two or three minutes that you can go up to. I’m not a hundred percent positive because I stick on the lower end. And then what was your other question? That was my other question. Oh, it’s are they clickable?

Oh yeah. So they are not clickable unless they’re used for ads. They have been clickable in the past. Again, I’m not sure if that’s something that’s changing or updating because there have been a lot of changes in the past, like four to six months on the platform, but they really do help with that growth of the account as well. When we’ve seen a lot of people come to us and say,

you know, I had a huge spike in October and now it’s December and everything’s dropping and I don’t know what to do. They post a couple video pins, they do a story pin and they’re back up again. Right. And they’re doing that consistently. I’m not going out there and telling everybody to post one and you’re going to be like woo through the roof and like,

awesome. But like, if you keep doing that, you’re going to keep seeing the results go up and back in the direction that you want them to go. Love that. Love that. Thank you so much. I have my million of Pinterest notes here and, and Laura, the couple of things. So for our listeners who want to get started with Pinterest,

I will say in full transparency, even though I’m not the one that does it, I’m really grateful for an amazing team that manages our Pinterest there. We really have seen amazing results and growth from using Pinterest as a platform with our audience. So I will say that from what I I’ll just say, if you guys are considering using Pinterest, definitely have a strategy behind it.

And really what I would like is to direct people towards some steps to get started. Nobody wants to recreate the wheel and you have a Pinterest like toolbox a toolkit it’s really cheap. It’s like 37 bucks or something that people can get started with what is inside that toolkit and what can people expect with that? Yeah, for sure. So the toolkit is really put together for anybody that needs that simple strategy,

right? That’s actually gonna help them convert on the platform. And so it’s easy. We provide different templates for them, whether they’re static, pen templates, video template, story templates. I have an awesome keyword swipe file in there too. So I’ve gone through over 700 different type of niche, specific keywords and hashtags in this swipe file. And the cool thing is,

is we constantly update that. So the swipe file for fun stats has actually brought in over $33,000 for clients and toolkit. So That’s been super fun. Yeah, That’d be good work. That’s so good. Talk about an ROI. Yeah. Tons of other stuff too. Like we have a call to action, swipe file a branding blueprint to help them really understand how to brand their pin images.

And then there’s some bonuses of course, like a custom dashboard for Google analytics and how to track and make sure you’re getting the ROI and stuff like that too. So Yeah, I mean, when we, when we got started and we started implementing what I was saying is so true, like if we had had a toolkit like this, we would have grabbed it in the second.

And so based on our listeners in our show, if you guys are thinking you want to get started with Pinterest, we’ll go ahead and make sure we leave a link to grab this toolkit in the show notes for this episode. So make sure you guys go over and grab this. I would recommend those of you guys that are listening to get started here.

It’s a low investment and it saves probably months and months of time and years of learning because you’re getting Laura’s wisdom for only $37. That’s crazy for those of you guys that are scaling your business. So for those of our listeners, you’re scaling your business. You have a team like me that you really just, you want to delegate this, you know,

you, you probably want to be on the platform. Maybe your team doesn’t know Pinterest. They aren’t experts. Then I am going to point them towards you, Laura, we’ll go ahead and make sure that we put these show notes and I would really consider like hiring Laura’s team out to manage your Pinterest for you or something like that. At least chatting with Laura on the phone.

I know she has a bunch of other stuff for you guys. So based on our listeners, I always try to give recommendations. So if you guys have ever gone through and taken our quiz to figure out what phase of business you’re in, I’m going to tell you exactly who needs to buy kind of what here, if you want to do this, if you’re in phase one or two,

then I would go with the toolkit. If you’re in phase three, four or five, then I would go with one of Laura’s other done for you services. If you don’t know what phase of business you’re in, go to sweet life code.com forward slash quiz. And you’re going to get a whole rundown based on where you are of your phase of business development,

and then we’ll direct you there. But for those of our listeners, most of our faithful listeners already know what phase of, of our start to scale up system they’re in. And so they know, so phase one or two, you guys are the toolkit people three, four or five, then really done for you services near you’re ready to scale. Thank you so much.

Yay. Love everything that you shared. My, my Pinterest entrepreneur IQ, just like totally leveled up three levels. I feel like awesome. And I can’t wait to, you know, for our team to like start implementing some of the stuff that we talked about on the show as well. So super appreciate your time. Congratulations on your new baby. When this airs he’ll be here and I’m so excited for you and we’ll make sure we leave all the show notes for everybody to get their hands on these things.

I will say you guys, honestly, Pinterest has been a real nice pleasant surprise. We’re not on Tech-Talk or anything. We’re not on Twitter. And Pinterest has been really awesome and powerful for us to grow our audience. So thanks for being on this show. Yeah. I love hearing that. And I mean, honestly, it is such a great platform.

I’m so glad that your team can help you with that. That’s absolutely amazing. And thank you so much for having me. Of course. Yes, of course. Thanks for being here. I’ll talk to you soon. Thanks. Awesome. Some show. Thank you so much for tuning in and sticking with me here with Laura at the time that we recorded this,

Laura was expecting, and now she is probably listening to this episode, holding her beautiful baby girl in her arms. And so we just really appreciate Laura’s time and making sure we were able to record this episode for you guys before she gave birth and went on her maternity leave in such great information, follow us. If you aren’t yet on Pinterest, you can find us at Sweetlife podcast and you can see some of the things that our team has been doing over the last year.

You can even see how our, even our branding and our usage of Pinterest tablets has evolved how we’re using Pinterest stories and how we’re using video. We’d love to connect with you there and follow you back. All right, you guys have an awesome day. Again, all the show notes can be found by visiting Sweetlife co.com. This is episode number two.