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In today’s Q&A, we are helping you using Pinterest to maximize exposure to all your content.
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Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
- Check out this post on Pinterest
- Verify your Pinterest account
- Elementary Librarian
- Canva tutorial – 5 simple steps for all your image creation needs
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to Q&A with S&J.
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome back to another Q&A with S&J.
Today’s question is from Teddi Lyn Plumley.
I’m sorry, Teddi Lyn, I know that we always mispronounce y’alls names and I know what that’s like because when I was growing up, my name was Jocelyn Hyravy so I feel your pain.
SHANE: H-Y-R-A-V-Y, the happiest part of our wedding was Jocelyn only having to write Sams for the rest of her life.
JOCELYN: Yeah but now people write like S-A-M-M-S, so.
SHANE: Right, so they still spell it wrong.
JOCELYN: It’s a little easier though. All right, Teddi Lyn says:
“Is there an actual strategy to using Pinterest or do you just pin your own post or content and hope they spread like wild fire?
SHANE: I hope they all spread like wildfire because that would be good.
JOCELYN: Yeah that would be pretty nice but it doesn’t exactly work that way. This is a question that we actually get a lot and the reason why is because I do mention Pinterest a lot in some of the content that we put out. The reason why is because Pinterest has been really big for me and my business especially in the Elementary Librarian business. The reason for that is because my audience is mostly women. Now Pinterest is not just for women. There are a lot of men on it and all the Pinterest folks out there will very quickly correct you when you say that it’s for women, but the fact of the matter is that mostly women do use Pinterest.
SHANE: What’s funny is though, I actually pinned a lot of things about my football stuff when I first started out. I didn’t really think about it. I just was kind of trying to be everywhere kind of deal. I was making sure it was on the list of things to do whenever I posted something – tweet it, Facebook it, pin it, whatever.
I actually have made sales because women have seen my stuff and have told their husbands about it. I know that for sure because I have received emails from those people that were like, “My wife saw your playbook on Pinterest and she told me about it.” Even if you don’t think you have a huge audience that’s out there using Pinterest or maybe you have a male-dominated audience, don’t negate the fact that putting stuff on Pinterest can get your message right in front of the people that need to see it.
JOCELYN: All right, when we were talking about this topic, we actually came up with a lot of different ideas that we could talk about so I think we’re actually going to make this into a longer podcast. Be on the lookout for that but really quick, we are going to give you a couple of actionable tips that you can start using right now for Pinterest.
SHANE: The first one is to verify your website. When you go to Pinterest, you can actually go in and say, “Hello. This is a legit website. This is my account but this website goes with me and I am the owner of this website.”
Pinterest only allows you to verify the website on one profile so it makes it kind of legit. That way when search engines see your stuff on Pinterest, they are going to trust it more because you have this verified account. So make sure that you go to Pinterest, look it up. You can just type in “verify my Pinterest account.”
JOCELYN: We’ll put it on the show note.
SHANE: Right, we’ll put a link there for you over at, what is this QA24? Yeah.
JOCELYN: I think so.
SHANE: Yeah, so it’s FlippedLifestyle.com/QA24. Make sure you’re verifying account so that the search engines can trust your results because the goal of Pinterest is to get all your stuff on there and get it to show up in front of people. People don’t just find pins on Pinterest. Sometimes, they show up in Google search results. Make sure that you verify your account to make sure that you’re taking advantage of that fact.
JOCELYN: The next tip that we have for using Pinterest is to create a beautiful image. In my opinion, that image really needs to have words on it.
SHANE: Yup definitely.
JOCELYN: There are differing opinions about this but the things that really stand out to me the most on Pinterest are images that are very beautiful, not too busy, you don’t want a lot of things going on in your picture just like a singular statement on your picture.
SHANE: Like if you’re going to have a birthday cake, take a picture of the birthday cake, not 10 feet back of the entire table spread decorations with the birthday cake a little bit in the middle, basically.
JOCELYN: I like to have some words on there, not too many, but things like 5 tips for a great birthday party. That would be a great pinnable image when we’re talking about birthday cake. I’m not sure why we’re talking birthday cake.
SHANE: Because, you may never know, somebody might be into birthday cake niche. You never know that.
JOCELYN: Exactly. If you can create that beautiful image with words, that makes it even that much more pinnable. Now people are going to say, “Well, there’s a description right underneath the picture.” Yes, there is a description underneath the picture but people can change that description. If you have words on your image, that’s going to keep conveying your message even when people change the description down below.
SHANE: And also all that text blends in. Every image has its own little description or text so it’s all just kind of noise. People are looking at the picture. That’s why people go to Pinterest and by putting those words actually on the image, you’re going to make sure they see what you want them to see. Another thing on images, another tip is to make sure you’re ‘naming your image file something. When we take a picture with our phones or something like that or even when we make an image and maybe download it, it might say something like “screenshot 12.24.2014 taken at 3:58 PM.” You don’t want that to be your filename.
You don’t want to just upload that straight to Pinterest. You want to make sure that you’re naming it something with your message because if you just upload a file, it’s going to have that name in the pin. It’s going to say “screenshot xxx.” You want to make sure that you go in and you name it. Give it a title. Give that thing something that’s keyword rich so that when you upload it to Pinterest, it’s already in there. You can change that when you get into Pinterest but it’s a lot easier if you just change the filename and you upload that.
Another thing with the files, all images, Google is out there indexing everything. I always go in and name every picture I have something very specific and keyword rich because it’s a lot easier to show up in Google image results than it is to show up in the actual text search results. When you’re using pictures on your blog and you want these things to be pinnable, it’s just very good SEO to go in and name the image something very specific, like, if I’ve got a picture of a play for football, it might be, “running the football to the right” and maybe someone searches for that.
I’m not going to just put a picture up that says, “JPEG 12345,” I’m going to put “running the football to the right.”
That way when someone pins it, I know that the pin is going to be named “running the football to the right.” Maybe they don’t change the description, they are just going to put the image up. I know that it’s also showing up in the search results that way. Make sure that you name all of your images exactly what you want the title to be. That way if someone does pin it, you don’t have to rely on them to change the description. You’ve made it easy for your audience to share your stuff.
JOCELYN: One final tip for today’s podcast is to make your image easy to pin. It’s great to have a beautiful image on your site or on your post but if people can’t easily pin it, then it’s not really doing you much good. One thing that I love to use is called “pin button attraction.” It is a plugin for WordPress to use on your pictures and it just automatically puts a little pin it button on every single picture on your website. Now you can take the pin it button off if you would prefer that people not be able to easily pin certain pictures.
SHANE: For example in our course, we have things on our website that are protected behind like email collection boxes. A pop up will say, “Hey, I need your email before you can go on to this page” and we don’t really co-encode those but they are kind of domain names that we don’t share. We don’t want people to pin things when we’re trying to get emails to access those. We will turn the pin buttons off on those images so people can’t pin them but when we’re giving away free stuff, it’s just out there and it’s just a picture on one of our blog posts, we’ve got a little pin it button in the upper left-hand corner of our images.
JOCELYN: You can find the link to the pin button attraction plugin on the show notes for QA 24.
SHANE: It’s FlippedLifestyle.com/QA24 and we will have an icon, image, or something that says, “Click here to check out pin button attraction. That is a very good plugin and it always gets a lot of clicks. That’s’ how our stuff gets pinned. We don’t have to rely on people having the little Chrome extension or whatever to pin things. It’s just every picture we have. It says “pin it” right there. How big do the pictures need to be, Jocelyn? Jocelyn always yells at me because I like rectangles. I always make my pictures rectangles but that’s not the right image for Pinterest.
JOCELYN: The Pinterest pictures can be longer but they don’t need to be very wide. I don’t know the exact dimensions but if you use Canva which I really recommend. I have a tutorial on Canva which I’ll link to in today’s show notes. If you use Canva, there’s actually a Pinterest…
SHANE: Size or template, I guess.
JOCELYN: Yes, there’s a Pinterest template on there that you can choose and it will make it the correct dimensions that you need to use.
SHANE: Because if you make it too wide, what happens is Pinterest is going to zero in or focus in on a certain part of that image and it might look a little messed up. Remember, it’s not just you sharing it. If someone else pins your image, you want the image to appear the way you want it to show and you want it to be titled what you want to say. That way, the user doesn’t have to change the description and zoom in around and all that because that’s going to slow people down from sharing your stuff.
JOCELYN: All right, Teddi Lyn, I hope that that helps you to use Pinterest. As I said before, we are planning to have a long-form podcast about using Pinterest because there are many other strategies that I actually use. I’m working on a blog post right now about using Pinterest so if you head over to FlippedLifestyle.com/Pinterest, I will have that done for you by the time this podcast airs. Thanks so much for your question.
SHANE: Thanks again and until next time. We will catch you all on the flipside.
JOCELYN: See you later, bye.
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Teddi says
Thanks Sams’!!! I’m so excited you chose my question and this was super helpful. I am looking very forward to the other blog/podcast about Pinterest and I can’t wait to start using these tips on my website
P.S. – Yes, it’s Plumley…like “plum” the fruit… 🙂
Luke Durbin says
Hey guys, looks like your “Post on Pinterest” link might be a bit broken…