Want more visitors to your website?
Wondering how Pinterest can help?
To explore how to drive more traffic to your website with Pinterest, I interview Jennifer Priest.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.
In this episode, I interview Jennifer Priest, a Pinterest expert and social media strategist. Her courses are Smart Pin Pro and Hashtag Pro. She also blogs at SmartFunDIY.com.
Jennifer explains how to improve the visibility of your pins with hashtags.
You'll also discover how fresh images and multiple boards help you boost website traffic.
Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Pinterest Strategy
Jennifer's Story
Jennifer started using Pinterest in its early days when you needed an invitation from a current user to join. For several years, she was a Pinterest user for personal, not professional, reasons. In 2014, she started monetizing her blog, which she used to promote her crafting classes and supplies. However, her sponsored content, ads, and affiliate links didn't bring in much money.
Her blog wasn't getting enough traffic. Although she was pinning her content and thought she was doing all of the right things, she wasn't seeing the amazing results from Pinterest that she heard people raving about.
In 2015, to improve her Pinterest strategy and increase traffic to her blog, she began researching and testing Pinterest strategies on her blog and with her clients' Pinterest accounts. Seeing how the math worked helped her zero in on a strategy that increased traffic.
Today, Jennifer still has her blog and runs an agency, Smart Creative Social, where she manages Pinterest accounts for clients whose products are sold in big stores like Walmart and Target. Since she started researching Pinterest marketing strategy, the tactics she uses have evolved as the platform has announced many changes and new features.
Because Jennifer and many of her clients are solopreneurs or very small businesses, she continues to emphasize automating Pinterest marketing as much as possible. The strategies have to be something they can actually do in the course of their day. They can't use strategies that require hours of their time.
Listen to the show to hear about the time-consuming tactics Jennifer avoids.
Why Use Pinterest?
Pinterest is growing quickly. It has about 250 million monthly users, and the male demographic is growing. From a traffic perspective, Pinterest has become a resource similar to Google in that Pinterest helps people find content and new ideas. For instance, people use Pinterest to find recipes or ideas for planning their lives.
Pinterest is also about sharing. Even if you don't pin your content on Pinterest, other people can. However, you have more control over how your content appears there if you understand how the platform works and actively pin your content yourself.
I add that for Social Media Examiner, Pinterest drives organic traffic in a way that Twitter and Facebook don't anymore.
Listen to the show for more of my thoughts on organic traffic from different social media platforms.
How Pinterest Hashtags Drive Search Traffic
Jennifer has a sophisticated strategy for increasing traffic with Pinterest that includes adding hashtags, refreshing pins, and maintaining multiple boards. With this strategy, she blogs less frequently than she used to and focuses on driving traffic to her content.
Pinterest added hashtag functionality in September 2017, and Jennifer is excited about how hashtags index content and help users find it. On Pinterest, hashtags have a lot of power if you think of them as keywords.
To illustrate, if you use the hashtag #ThanksgivingDinner,