15. How to Outsmart the Pinterest Algorithm With These 5 Simple Steps With Sahar Twesigye

Why should boss babe learn to master Pinterest? The amazing thing about Pinterest that I will say is that it is a search engine. It’s not a social media platform. The way you want to look at Pinterest is more like Google rather than social media.  Here’s the thing that people don’t realize is that social media is designed for you to remain within that space.

Sahar is a life coach, an online business strategist, a wellness blogger at Earth and Spoon and the founder of the Pin to Profit Blueprint Pinterest course. She became a multi-passionate entrepreneur in the thick of having her 4 kids and is now on a mission to empower ambitious mamas to start, sell and scale their businesses without sacrificing family.

When she started as a food blogger, she was trying to compete for space on the internet with the big guys, who can relate?

She then discovered that Pinterest is a great tool to drive traffic to your website. At first, like so many of us, she started a Pinterest account but didn’t have the time to actually implement all the knowledge she had about the platform. When she finally decided to take the time and try out all her theories, her traffic to her site increased by 300% in 3 MONTHS!

Here’s a quick overview of the interview, but for more detail, listen to the episode here!

Why should boss babe learn to master Pinterest?

The amazing thing about Pinterest that I will say is that it is a search engine. It’s not a social media platform. The way you want to look at Pinterest is more like Google rather than social media. 

Here’s the thing that people don’t realize is that social media is designed for you to remain within that space. So Instagram does not like you leaving the platform so they will do everything that they can to keep you within the platform. The same goes with other social media platforms. Pinterest, on the other hand, is great because the whole reason if you think about it, every time you see a pin that you like, and you click on it, you’re actually leaving the platform. It’s driving traffic to the website that you’re visiting. So you want to leverage Pinterest in that sense, and you want to use it to drive traffic to your website. 

And that’s, that’s the other thing I want to say about Pinterest as well is that when you use Instagram, like, as a business owner, whenever you create content on all these platforms, your content doesn’t even last more than what 24 hours. I mean, that’s even me being generous, like typically, it’s just a few hours and then you can see that the engagement on your posts starts to die down and that’s it. Once it’s gone. It’s not showing up on people’s feeds anymore. It’s just kind of disappears. Pinterest, on the other hand, rewards content creators. Like right now I have blog posts that I’ve written over two years ago, and they’re still generating traffic for my website.

Honestly, all you have to do is show up on the platform and you can create fresh content in a way without creating more content. I know that sounds like it’s a little confusing, but the way you do that is through creating several pins for one blog post. And you can continue doing that as long as you’re using like new images with your pins, and then that’s considered new content. 

So these are the reasons why I love it because it drives massive traffic to your website and gets people off these platforms, but you also can do it in a way that’s, you know, that’s automated and releases all your time.

How do Keywords work on Pinterest and where should be be putting them? 

Going back to the point about Pinterest being a search engine, search engines like to crawl through text and words. With Pinterest, you want to include keywords because the algorithm will search for words. The way the platform works is that when people go on to Pinterest, and they type in something that they’re looking for within the toolbar at the top, it’s very similar to Google in the sense that whenever you start to type something, it has suggestions for you. 

So what you want to do is you want to make sure that you’re including keywords in your profile in your boards and in your pins, because as people search, that’s when your content, your profile, or your boards are going to appear within people’s searches.

What type of content should someone be creating for Pinterest? What gets the most views? What seems to be the best for that platform?

You have to go back to the type of audience that Pinterest has, and also remembering that it’s completely different to social media. So for example, if you’re using Instagram, the type of content that does really well are really sort of, posts that are very social, you know, sharing pictures of your family and your dogs and your cats, and, you know, every now and again, you can share some content that teaches and shows yourself as an expert in your field or maybe your products. But really, people are Instagram because they want to connect with people and they want to see that kind of content. 

Pinterest, on the other hand is completely different. So when people are going on Pinterest, they’re actually people who are planners, and people who are researching to buy. They’re looking for a solution to a problem. So people use Pinterest more like they use Google than they use Instagram.

People on Pinterest don’t care about the social aspects. They don’t really care about, you know, seeing personal pictures of you and your family and your cats and your pets and all that kind of stuff. They want a solution to their problem. They are looking for inspiration. So the best type of content that works on Pinterest are actually blog posts, because blog posts are our long form content that teaches people how to go from A to B, so anything that teaches people how to do something in five simple steps, or those kind of lists or breakdowns. 

Another piece of content or type of content, rather that I’ve realized is does really well on Pinterest, are the before and afters. For example, they have a picture of maybe their bedroom before they renovated it and then after the renovation, basically that’s how it works. So people love that kind of content, because they’re looking for inspiration for a project that they’re planning or they’re working on.

So I’m taking that concept the before and after, and I want to copy and paste it across every niche. So if you’re, say, a business owner, and you have clients who are maybe entrepreneurs or business owners, again, what you can do is maybe create content that shows your transformation. How can you show that is it through maybe your analytics and how, for example, in my case, maybe how much Traffic I had before I started Pinterest and how much I had after. I can show that in a visual way through the graphs that I have from my Pinterest analytics. Or maybe you can talk about the sales that you’ve made, or the results that you’ve gotten your clients, or your students. 

So you can use the before and after transformation story. These are really, really powerful because it allows people to see themselves where they are now and it also paints a beautiful sort of future for them where they can see the possibility of the results that they want to have.

Can we repurpose content from other platform for Pinterest and have it be successful?

You absolutely can. And the what I will recommend though is that you don’t want to just blanket post everything that you’re posting on Facebook or Instagram to Pinterest because like I said the audience on Pinterest is very different to the audience on social media. So certain posts might not work. 

You want to position yourself as an expert and show people and teach people and add value to them before you can have them on as clients. So all those kind of posts where you’re teaching, where you’re explaining, where you’re positioning yourself as an expert, you can definitely put those out on Pinterest as well. 

You can also like create blog posts where you position your product or your service as the solution to the problem that they’re trying to solve. So if you have a product that you sell, you can create a blog post that teaches how people can use your product, for example, in five different ways or five simple steps and then you can include a link for them to purchase it from there. So rather than you just selling off the bat, you can add value first and then kind of make that pitch and sell

What Three Take aways can my listeners do TODAY to help move the needle forward in their business?:  

1. The first thing you want to do is you want to make sure that You have a blog. A lot of people panic when they hear that because sometimes the platform, their platform of choice is not a blog yet. Sometimes people have a YouTube channel or they have a podcast like you, for example, Molly. So what I always say is that there’s a very simple way to get around this. And it’s simply through just transcribing all your audio and video content. And that’s another way of stretching your content and repurposing it. Every video you create every podcast episode, if you can just send it to a transcribing service or an app or something like that. have it done for you. Do a quick proofread, and just put it up as a blog post and then pin it to Pinterest. That is one way you can do that. So the first thing I’d say is you definitely want to have a blog post or a website with a blog post. And if you’re a product based business and you don’t have that many You know, you you haven’t considered maybe content creation, what I will say is you don’t have to get on to the content creation wheel, you simply just want to create a few simple pieces of high quality content that showcases your product as the best and as a solution to this to the problems that people are trying to solve. And then that way, you can then start pinning them and just create different pins for the same blog post. So it really doesn’t have to take that much time. So you can work with how much how much or how little time you have. 

2. The second thing I’ll say is make sure that you switch over to a business account and on Pinterest and that is beneficial for you because one, it just allows you to be seen as a legitimate sort of account on the profile. But also when you register as a business account. You also want to sign up and claim your website because that will enable you to have something called rich pins. Now that process has some, you know, you have to sort of copy the some coding that they provide you with. But don’t panic because all you have to do is copy and paste it to your website. But you definitely can do that. And then what that allows you to do is that whenever you’re pinning, or people pin from your viewer blog, the rich pin format then extracts all the information of your blog post. And it includes the pin description, the pin title, and all of that within the pin itself. So it creates less work for you. And also, it looks like a more legit sort of format on the Pinterest platform. So it makes you more desirable. So that’s the second thing I’d say. Make sure that you register as a business account and claim your website so you can have rich pins because it makes all the difference.

3. And then thirdly, I’d say keywords keywords, keywords like we mentioned like you will not have success with Pinterest. If you do not use keywords. It is a search engine. And the most important thing is to use keywords. If out of this podcast episode, you don’t get anything but you get the fact that you have to use keywords you would have done great. Like that’s the main thing you want to focus on.

Grab her FREEBIE HERE! | WEBSITE | SOCIAL MEDIA HANDLE: @sahartwesigye

XOXO,

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