Episode 165: How To Grow Your Business With Pinterest – With April Beach and Melanie Fountain

you’re listening to the sweet life entrepreneur podcast Simplified strategies to grow your service business and launch a life you love faster with business, mental and entrepreneur activator a probe Age Hi, everyone, Thanks so much for tuning in with me again for another week. Here on the suite Life podcast It’s good to talk to you and connect again, and today we’re diving Maur into online marketing strategies. Last week on the show, I talked to those of you guys who have been doing a lot of work. Maybe you’re spending a lot of time on instagram or on Facebook or even on LinkedIn,

and your numbers just aren’t growing. And we dove into some really authentic marketing strategies that have worked for years and are important to keep integrating into your business to grow your following. Today we’re diving back into some of the online marketing strategies because, as a business owner in today’s day and age were all online marketers. And so it is important that we’re always continuing too deep in our online marketing skills, and so I am thrilled to be joined by a Pinterest business building expert on today’s show. Now I’ll be honest with you.

I’m not a Pinterest person. I don’t cook, so I usually tell Go after recipes. I do love looking at Pinterest for design and in home needs, but it’s not something I do on a regular basis, maybe like five times a year, So I don’t even think that actually counts at all. But we do is a business, have a Pinterest account and it always shocks me. When I go over to our Pinterest account and I see how many followers we have or how many people are noticing the content,

I often think to myself, Wow, this is a really engaged platform. I should be here more, but the truth is, we haven’t as a company. It wasn’t something that we had had on our marketing strategy and plan. And so I have the privilege of interviewing today’s guest. After this interview, I asked our guest who was amazing to sit down with myself and Kelly, who is my content quarterback for the content for the show, and we started diving into our pincher strategy, and I will tell you,

with only one week of doing the strategy that you’re gonna learn here on this show, are Pinterest percentage has risen by something crazy like 1900% engagement. It was insane. The numbers from one week of doing What Today’s guest taught us how to d’oh from today’s show. So I’m so excited to introduce you and share of these strategies with you. So today’s podcast is for those of you guys who are in any phase of my lifestyle entrepreneur business building system. But if you have not used Pinterest before and you want to try that strategy so it doesn’t matter where you are in your business building if you haven’t built your business yet or if you’re an established scaled multi six figure company and you want to use Pinterest,

this show is for you as well. This show also is going to help you understand the basics of what you should be doing every single day, every single week on Pinterest. How Pinterest works, why Pinterest is powerful, especially when you compare it to other social media handles in the S e o aspects of Pinterest and how you can get started on your very own Pinterest marketing plan today. You’re gonna leave with all of those answers after this show If you’re busy and you can’t take notes of what we’re talking about,

you can find all the show notes over its sweet life. Podcast dot com forward slash 1 65 All right. You guys were here with Melanie Fountain, and she is a Pinterest guru. We’ve been wanting to bring interest experts on the show because you guys are asking for it. We as a company, we want to know more about growing and connection with our listener to followers rip interest. So I’m super stoked about this show. We’re talking about everything interests who should be on Pinterest, how to activate your business and Pinterest.

You know how to grow your list through Pinterest how to get started software scheduling all of the I would save basics. But I’ve been through, you know, we’ve been through this outline of what we’re gonna talk about before, and it is foundational information, but really, really powerful. So I’m very excited to have Melanie on the show. Please introduce yourself and let everybody know who you are. Hi, everybody. I’m so excited to be on here today. Thank you, April for having me. My name is Melanie Fountain.

I am a blogger and Pinterest strategist. So I work with bloggers, content creators and business owners that want to get their contents scene without paying ah ton of money on ads or having to worry so much about website S E 02 ranking Google and that heavy competition. And we strategize based on their content. And really, it’s kind of let the little guy be seen. And it’s possible to market yourself without paying a lot of money and add. I love it. Okay. And how long have you been doing this?

And what’s your history? How did you get end to doing this? I love hearing everybody’s stories, and I know a lot of our listeners resonate with our guest stories. So tell us just really quickly some background of how you started doing this. Sure. Well, you know what? This month is my year anniversary of really calling myself an entrepreneur. And I started as a virtual assistant, so as a general virtual assistant, just wanting to get out of the regular 9 to 5. I’m a single mom and I live in California,

and I really wanted to, you know, you feel like you’re missing out on life when you’re working your life away for a company. But you know, you’re really not going to grow in. So I decided to sign up for a virtual assistant course, and then it kind of went like wildfire from there, and I fell in love with Pin Trust and the visual side event. But then the you know, the strategy behind it, the marketing and I started working with business owners and found that I actually had a talent in it.

And so I actually started as a Pinterest strategist about nine months ago now. But since then I’ve been able to work with over a dozen business owners, helping them grow Pinterest and strategize. And in May of 2019 I was able to quit my job. And so I’ve been working for myself for the last nine months. Net war Basically, since I transitioned over to nation down into Pinterest marketing and here we are that’s such on the awesome story.

Oh, my gosh, that’s a chance. My story and that story alone like, forget we’re gonna talk about pictures today.

That story alone, a lot of our listeners are like I can’t wait to be there and that’s what I’m working towards.

And so it’s really cool, especially in such a short period of time hearing those awesome results, and I will just kind of add in there.

The reason why Melanie probably had such amazing results is because she needs down like she is that pinchers expert.

If she was like I’m the V eight, all people in all things, I can guarantee you her business wouldn’t be where it is today.

So we talk about Nietzschean a lot on this podcast. She is a perfect example. That’s so I’m super excited that you’re on the show today,

So we’re gonna talk about Pinterest everything. First of all, give us some background about Pinterest. What,

actually is it cause it’s not a social media platform? Right, Right? Exactly. So Pinterest is commonly known as a social media platform,

but what it actually is is a search engine. It’s a visual Google, and more than that, it’s a discovery engine.

When people go on Pinterest, they want to be inspired. They want to discover they want to learn,

but they don’t always know what it is exactly. They’re searching for soap. Interest is there for people to discover what it is they’re searching for.

And a lot of the time from a business perspective. They’re there to discover you were there to discover your business and the value that you have to provide.

And Pinterest has over 300 million active people monthly on Pinterest, searching for businesses like the businesses that listen to this podcast.

That’s crazy. That’s somebody over multi 1,000,000,000 searches every month. And and that’s why I’m a little bit we’re gonna talk about s CEO and how to be found on pin trust,

of course, but it’s such a powerful platform. And on Lee now, are people really starting to discover the power of interest?

That’s so cool. Okay, so one of our listeners, you know, she’ll be out there saying,

Okay, that’s cool. But I’m on all these other social media platforms and you know, I’m strapped for time,

So just reiterating what you just said. It is a surgeon, Jen. It is searchable by Google,

and it’s actually on Lee search engine that we know of today that actually is searchable by Google. Is that correct?

YouTube is as well, but that’s right. Yeah, So there’s YouTube Interesting Google and those are the big guys when they have to search engine.

And that’s the funny thing. And I’m glad that you mentioned that April because when you’re searching something in Google,

a lot of the articles and images that come up are also on Pinterest. So when you’re on Pinterest,

you’re kind of killing two birds with one stone, right? Yeah, you’re definitely increasing CEO getting to page one and all that stuff.

You were gonna talk about that? Okay, so who should be on Pinterest? If you are creating consistent content,

you should be on Pinterest and it’s really a simple is that you don’t have to have a blawg. You know it’s helpful.

Absolutely. But if you’re a podcaster, if you create videos if you write article, you know, if you’re creating content,

Pinterest is where you should be. Okay, awesome and some things like Okay, cool. How do I get started?

I talked to people about the different stream like a business account and a regular account is Pinterest have both different types of accounts.

So when you when you sign on to Pinterest is a user, when you create an account most of the time you’re creating a personal account.

The difference between creating a personal account in the business account. When you have a business account, you will lock features like analytics.

You can track the performance of pans you contract clicks to your website. You can leak Pinterest to your website to enable rich pins,

which basically pulls the metadata and on the S E o from your website, making your pants more likely to be seen super cool.

Okay, so is it still one account? So you sign up. Is that personal? And then you upgrade to business or they to separate accounts to usually recommend people have.

It depends, so you could do both. As a personal account. You could convert and make some of your more personal boards secret or if you’re a blogger,

and if your lifestyle blogger and a lot of your boards are already relevant to your ideal audience, then you can keep those boards.

But sometimes I could recommend if you have ah, 100 boards random, completely unrelated to your business, it might be better to create a whole new account altogether.

Okay, Super interesting. All right. And then how does somebody get started setting up their account. It’s freeze.

So if you want to get started on Pinterest, you sign up for your business account. Oh, you know,

if you have a website you put in your domain, you make sure that you clean your social media accounts and then when you’re really got me started on,

Pinterest is all about content and, you know, scheduling to different board. So I have a 10 10 rules.

So you want to start with 10 templates, I recommend Camba. It’s free to start, and they have a really good monthly program with all these stock photos,

and they have a lot of Pinterest template to. So if you’re not a graphic designer and that’s not your,

that’s not your thing. Campbell has a lot of free templates. Create 10 of them and then you can just kind of plug and play.

I recommend about Reed of four pins for a piece of content, and if you have a lot of content,

but you’re just getting started on Pinterest, just pick may be the last five pieces of content blowing post podcast and then create four or five pens for each of those,

and then you could eventually work backwards if you want to do that and then use those 10 templates and then schedule them to 10 relevant board.

So when you’re creating boards, I recommend having, like, a best of board of your business. So on Lee,

your content goes in that board. And then if you’re a blogger having your content with all of your blonde post and one or a podcaster,

whatever your content, maybe and then beyond that have really generally named boards. So that way, when you’re scheduling content,

we’ll get to schedule that you just a little bit. But when you’re scheduling to those boards, you can pretty much set your Pinterest on autopilot.

So you know, if you can’t afford to have somebody managing. But you kind of, you know,

with Pinterest, I’ll get more into this, but you want to schedule at least 8 to 10 times per day.

Oh, my gosh. Okay, let me ask you some questions. One of the things that you said Waas and I want to make sure our listeners you’re hearing this.

So for every piece of content, you want to create three separate kin’s three separate posts from that content.

This is great content repurpose ing strategy, a love that you said that. So for every piece of content you guys create,

whether it is an article that you’ve written on your website or if it doesn’t matter where you want to send them,

you could somebody actually an article he wrote on somebody else’s website to establish you as an expert or if you’re a guest on somebody’s podcasts and them two that podcast,

whatever it is. But for every piece of content you recommend three different posts, and then you recommend 10 different templates to choose those three different posts from so 10 templates that you creating Can va there,

there and all you have to do is plug and play a different title plug and play different image in there.

We heard that. Christ, Lee. Yes. Okay, all right. And then Pinterest for those of our listeners that haven’t been on there yet,

has boards. And you can place your own content, your boards, you can pin somebody else’s content to your board.

And so what you’re saying is, and I love this this is really great. So a lot of our listeners are in the phase of actually scaling their business where they’ve been in business for a long time.

And they do have a lot of content, whether they’re podcasters or bloggers or just straight content creators and other capacities.

So in love, the best of board, so the best of board totally cool. And you’re also recommending those people that are bloggers have a board to put their block post to have or their articles?

Would you recommend any other kind of creative boards like we? D’oh! We like to do a lot of promotion of our clients and of our podcast listeners.

So would you recommend, For example, we had a sweet life entrepreneur, a podcast like featured listener board where we could send linked to our favorite and greatest listeners.

You know, would that be something that you’d recommend as well, even though it doesn’t actually promote our company?

But it would make other people realize what we’re about? Are those type of things beneficial as well on Pinterest?

Absolutely. You could do, you know, and I love my client’s board and share your client’s content.

You can you know your podcast episodes. If you’re somebody that creates AA lot of freebies and you have a resource library.

You can have a board just on sweet life. Entrepreneur freebies. Wait. Have 100 and 57 of them.

Okay, well, you know what? There’s 400 pins, you know? Go. Yeah, and I love how you said repurposing content because that’s exactly what it is.

It doesn’t have to be hard. It’s a long I’m talking and all of you are probably thinking, Oh,

my gosh, this is overwhelming. But it’s really just taking the content you already have and putting it out there for the world to see.

I love it. Okay, so now let’s go back to my short little heart attack when you said eight times today posting.

So let’s talk about posting frequency. What is that like, How often are people on Pinterest? So,

for example, when we look at it another social platform, even though we’re trying to say that Pinterest isn’t one of them,

but another platform where you can put content like Lincoln, for example, the average person only goes toe linked in twice a month.

Okay, so every single different outlet has a different frequency. Talk to me about Penn dresses, Pinterest frequency.

Why? Eight times a day. It’s all about S E O. It’s about also staying relevant because you have,

ah 100 million you active users every month. Ah, good portion of that. Our business owners putting up their content constantly,

and it’s also about staying on top of the feeds you want to be. You know, it is search engine optimization,

so the more frequently you post they could be anywhere from eight times a day to 50 times a day.

And that’s why it’s really important to have a good scheduling tool. The reason why you do that also is to continue to be able to share your content.

Work frequently because you can share one pin once a day. But if you’re on Lee sharing that pin,

then you can only really share that every selected because your feet is just going to be like, Hey,

look at me, look at me. So that’s why you want so many different pens. And once you get in a rhythm of scheduling them out,

it’s not so overwhelming. So you know, at first, you know, getting everything set up is time consuming.

But once you get everything set up and automated in a loop in in a schedule that eight times a day will quickly increase to kind of get your get your content more likely to be seen.

Okay, a ball questions number one. Can you on Pinterest re share the same pin over and over again?

Or would that just be repenting the same pin to a board? Or is it actually fresh brand new pieces of content that should be released eight times a day?

You can repent the same pin every day, but two different boards. That’s why you want to start with 10 boards and continue to grow off of that.

So at it, it’s more important tohave more boards than it is to have a lot of pins and a few boards.

So that’s why I think it’s very important to have general board. So when you have one pin, let’s say you’re a travel blogger or something,

and you have aboard all about trouble and then international travel and traveling abroad and their own really general terms.

But then, if you have something about traveling to bully, you can schedule that panto all of those boards once a day,

and then it can Luke back. But then you throw in some war of your content and then that schedules to different boards.

And it’s a snowball effect because, like Google, Pinterest does take some time to recognize who you are for your account to catch up to the algorithm.

So it could take 3 to 6 months to really start saying traffic, go to your website. But by that time you will have all of the content you need to be seen on Pinterest and start getting that traffic it builds on.

It felt awesome. Okay, so let me ask you one more question about that, just to make sure I’m fully understanding.

And so when you say posting eight times a day, it still could be individual pieces of content, your meaning,

like eight times a day. You should have something landing on a different board, absolutely. And if it’s your content,

as long as it’s a different pain than it could be to the same board, you just don’t want the same pin landing in the same board eight times a day.

And if I say you’re scheduling eight times a day, it could be what, especially when you’re first starting out.

It could be six of your pans and two of somebody else’s, too, because Pinterest favors people that share other people’s content at the It’s a shared platform,

and they want to make sure to that you’re not just hearing your content and that’s how you get re pins and you’re content shared as well.

Okay, cool. Thank you for clarifying that. Love that. So you can actually grab somebody else’s pin and put it in your scheduler.

Talk a little bit about you mentioned at a scheduling tool software tool while we’re on scheduling, you know,

before we started recording that you really like to use. So my favorite and they’re partnered with Pinterest is Tailwind.

You could integrate till one with penne trust, and there’s also different analytical tools that sync up with that.

You can sink it with Google Analytics, and you could basically see all of your pants and a big schedule.

So for those of you that use Instagram scheduler like plan early or something, you could see you’re a good kind of planned out and grades aren’t so important and Pinterest,

but you can school through and see. OK, how far my planned out do I have any duplicate pans like right back to back to back and then also with until when there’s something called tribes and they’re basically like Facebook groups four Tailwind or perp in trust,

and you shared your content there. And when you drawing to TRIBE, if you share something, you also have to repent something else.

So when you share to those tribes, people are almost required to share your content as well. So there’s different sharing analytical features,

and there’s something entailing called Smart Loop. So but Tillman has a free plan for up to 30 pay,

or up to 100 pens a month. But if you’re going to invest in something with Pinterest, I would recommend upgrading that because then you pretty much get unlimited pins per month,

and then they also have Smart loop feature, so you can basically set your your pants and a smart loop,

and it will schedule to your boards for you. And that’s why I recommend having general boards so that you can set up.

You’re scheduling on automation and have your pins circulate to those general boards without having pains go to Pier 11 boards.

That that makes sense. Yeah, it does make sense. Okay, I have questions about the type of content.

Question number one is how much content shows below the pin before it’s like a remora or linked to this site button about how much text copy is usually seen.

And how important is that content and copy in addition to the graphic pen. So the pen description is really important when it comes to the S e O.

Now you really only get about. I think it’s 250 characters that you get and in that and you kind of want you want to give a description with enough C words in there with maybe 2 to 3 hashtags,

you know, up branded one and some general ones know usually with instagram those hash times a really neat show with Pinterest.

You want them to be very general, and then you kind of want to call the action. You know,

you don’t have to have the link, but you want something like, you know, for more tips and tricks.

Visit my website, read my blog’s, but you don’t want anything like Click cheered. You know, by this,

because then you might get registered as Clickbait or spam. So you want to be very careful and Pinterest uses its own S C O.

So when you’re looking for key words for your pin descriptions, you want to use the search bar and Pinterest to find the key words you’re going to use to describe your content.

Oh, fascinating, Yes, totally a different strategy than we see on Instagram and those other places. Okay,

so this is where the search ability comes in is actually the copy underneath the pen because you can’t read copy from a graphic.

Super curious about that in Pedro’s does use Hashtags, so that’s just fascinating. This well, in the different hashtag strategies they aren’t is nish.

I think that’s fascinating. Okay, uh, let’s talk about video a little bit. Okay? Interest actually allows video.

What kind of video does Pinterest like in a wow? So unlike most of the platforms, Pinterest is vertical with video pens.

You see vertical pens or square almost like Instagram because there’s a really great instagram sharing capability to Pinterest now,

and that’s just developing just like the video pins. So it’s a relatively new feature. It’s in beta testing for scheduling per tail.

It and it’s really new. And it’s really exciting because with how visual Pinterest is, introducing video into that is going to be really,

really great for businesses to give a snapshot into their business without having to just create a graphic. And the videos and Pinterest are generally 20 seconds or less because you have a feed of all of these pans and because not many people are making video right now,

when you’re on your phone, when you’re scrolling through Pinterest, the videos are automatically playing, so they’ll catch your attention quicker.

So that’s why it’s so powerful to do it. And you could do something like a goby spark people.

You can use a snippet from your YouTube videos. You can get really, really creative when it comes to your video pins,

and it’s so new that people are just still developing the strategies for it. People use them a lot for Pinterest ads,

so Pinterest does have add capabilities. You know, a lot of people don’t ever use ads, but primarily they were used for ad,

and now you can use them just for organic reach. Supercool. Okay, what else should I be asking you that I didn’t ask you for those of our listeners that are interested in getting started to create more visibility with interest.

So when it comes to pen Trust s CEO is key because it is a search and we’ve kind of touched on it during this.

But I just want to make sure that if you’re going to go on Pinterest and you’re going to start implementing this as a strategy for marketing,

which I highly recommend for any content creators in any regard. But optimize your Pinterest description with keywords and give called actions your board’s make sure that you have each of your boards categorize and described with S E O using the S E o from Pinterest giving called actions to your websites because a lot of the time people get the board recommendations more than profile recommendations,

so they may land on your board before they ever land in your profile. So you want to make sure that you have a called action so they know you’re a business that you mean business and that you have awesome content to provide so and then the pen description.

Something s e o is key. If you’re gonna learn anything about Pinterest. Make sure that you know how to use keywords.

Awesome! Oh, my gosh. I have so much I want to talk to my team about right now that I just can’t wait to get off this interview and turn all this over to them.

Thank you so much for your time. Melanie, This was exciting. I love this. I love this show.

Led this interview. How can people find you so I actually have a free pace. But group where I go with a live weekly and interested Tuesday is that I just had one this morning and I share with the groom have use Pinterest Ansel content ideas.

I also offer free strategy calls for business owners that want some one on one. Just kind of wanna get pointed in the right direction.

And April I will give you my social media links so people can stay connected and I give a lot of probably way more pitch free paint.

Could trust advice that I said I love it. I love it. I love Yeah. We’ll make sure all the links to find you are in the show notes for this episode.

Thank you so much for your time. Melanie. I learned a lot today. I appreciate it. Thank you so much,

April. All right, you guys, that’s a wrap. Thank you so much for tuning into the show today for all the show notes.

And the resource is how to connect with Melanie Moore and how to get literally tons of free resource is to grow your business.

If you haven’t been to our podcast website lately, it’s pretty incredible. You can actually sort all of our shows by what you’re looking for,

whether it’s marketing. Brandon copyrighting online courses Landing your first client Every single thing you need. There are years and years of free resource is there,

so please use that website over at sweet life podcast dot com. And before we go, I want to make sure I’m giving a shout out to this week’s sweet life podcast Superfan.

This is 311 solution. You confined them by visiting 311 solution. C b d dot com there. Empowering healthier lifestyles.

Effective C B D supplements from lab tested hemp life in balance. And Shelly is one of our biggest fans of my Facebook page,

and she is always working hard to build her business, working hard to bring a quality product to market.

I know that based on the the D EMS that she sends me and she tunes in here to the sweet life podcast.

And so we wanted to give her a shout out. Shelly, thank you so much for listening to the show.

Thank you for being a super fan of this show and really creating an awesome, brisk business bringing amazing products to the people that need them.

So go over and give Shelly a shout out at 311 solution CBD. She also could be found on Instagram at 311 solution CBD and on Facebook at 311 solution.

All right, you guys have an awesome day. I’ll talk to you soon.