What you will learn
- How to identify which niches work well with Pinterest marketing
- What to do AFTER you’ve gone through the basic of setting up your account
- How to accelerate growth once you’ve got some traction on Pinterest
- How to consistently turn cold, hard Pinterest traffic into $$$
- How to build a hands-off Pinterest marketing system using automation
We have a very special guest on the podcast today: Kate Ahl of Simple Pin Media.
I found Kate after asking the Authority Hacker community to help me find a Pinterest expert. There were lots of people mentioned, and after following my nose, all roads seem to lead back to Kate.
Meet Kate, our Pinterest expert…
If you don’t know much about Kate and her business, let me give you a quick rundown (it’s pretty impressive).
Aside from running a very good blog and producing a couple of great courses, Kate runs perhaps the biggest interest consultancy I’ve come across. Cumulatively, Kate and her team have managed literally hundreds of Pinterest accounts, and as of today, they have 70 clients.
In other words, Kate is in the trenches. And it’s obvious in her content. One of the pieces I loved most, for example, was Kate’s piece on the correlation between traffic and followers, which analyzed all of her client accounts at the time to see if the number of Pinterest followers affected the number of pageviews. I loved it because it was an extremely data-driven approach that yielded counterintuitive results (kind of a mainstay here at Authority Hacker).
I also suck at Pinterest. So I was super excited to have Kate on the podcast.
Of course, as with all the experts we have on, we like to stay out of theory and instead keep the discussion as hyper-actionable as possible.
So, to really dig into the tactics of Pinterest, Kate and I imagine how we might go about establishing a Pinterest action plan for a hypothetical site in the outdoors niche.
We are imagining that our outdoor site is in a position similar to many of the sites owned by Authority Hacker members: medium-sized sites that are primarily driven by SEO and organic traffic but want to diversify using social media.
We use that as a starting point and structured the discussion around five pillar questions:
1. Will this niche even work on Pinterest?
What I’ve considered diving into Pinterest for pretty much any site I’ve ever owned, this is been the first question it’s popped into my mind, and if I’m being honest, this single question has (at least once) stopped me from even trying Pinterest at all.
Kate helps us understand, first, that almost all niches can leverage interest– even the ones you think might not do well (and why), and then we discuss how to look at Pinterest to evaluate what kinds of content in your niche are already performing well and how to recreate those on your own site.
We cover topics like:
- How can you tell if a niche will do well in Pinterest?
- What are the requirements for a site before marketing on Pinterest (design, niche, images etc.)?
- What might we need to do to our little outdoors sites before launching a Pinterest marketing campaign?
2. Assuming we have the basics covered, what do we do now?
This is always been the biggest stumbling block with Pinterest for me.
The basics–creating an account, setting up boards, using Tailwind–are all fairly easy to figure out. But the actual execution still feel like a mystery.
Do you just start pinning? Do you focus on growing your followers? Do you try to get on good group boards?
Kate walks us through exactly how you should prioritize your time and why Pinterest’s move to their new smart feed has changed the way Pinterest marketers operate (and why it’s actually easier for little guys with great content to compete with bigger players now).
3. After our outdoors site gets some traction, how we accelerate that growth?
So now, with our hypothetical site, we are getting a little bit of traffic and maybe even making a little bit of money. If we want to grow, how we do it?
- Is it just a matter of 2x’ing your pins?
- Should you focus on producing more Pinterest-friendly content on your blog?
- Should you use other marketing channels to promote your pensions account?
We explore how to take Pinterest accounts that are already working and grow them even more.
4. How should our outdoor site monetize the income Pinterest traffic?
This is one of the things I really want to talk about with Kate, since she has such a great bird’s eye view of so many different Pinterest accounts and Pinterest-driven businesses.
At Authority Hacker, we can, at times, lean pretty heavily on affiliate marketing revenue and advertising revenue, and that’s because both of those revenue streams jive really well with organic search traffic.
But what about traffic from Pinterest? In this section Kate helps us understand:
- Which monetization methods her clients typically use (including a percentage breakdown)
- The benefits of sponsored content (a revenue stream we don’t talk about often enough here)
- How she uses Pinterest to get people into her sales funnel
- Why it’s okay to send Pinterest traffic directly to sales pages (even if you have an email funnel in place)
5. Finally, how do we automate the Pinterest marketing for our outdoor sites we can focus on growing other parts of the business?
There are a couple of different options for automating the Pinterest marketing for any site, and Kate uses pretty much all of them in some way.
Specifically, we examine these four options:
- Hiring and training a virtual assistant
- Hiring someone who was already a Pinterest expert
- Hiring a Pinterest management service
Automating with Tailwind
Overall, I personally learned a lot on this podcast,, and it was a pleasure to talk with one of the foremost Pinterest experts on the Internet.
If you’d like to follow Kate, check out her blog at SimplePinMedia.com. And you can also find her courses and Pinterest management services here.
