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Using Pinterest as A Business

Lesson 12 from: Unlock the Power of Pinterest

Melanie Duncan

Using Pinterest as A Business

Lesson 12 from: Unlock the Power of Pinterest

Melanie Duncan

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Lesson Info

12. Using Pinterest as A Business

Get tips on using Pinterest to grow your business.

Lessons

Class Trailer

Day 1

1

Bonus Video with Purchase: Create/Convert to a Business Account

07:39
2

Bonus Video wtih Purchase: Business Resource Center

04:25
3

Bonus Video With Purchase: Your Profile

06:27
4

Bonus Video With Purchase: How to Create Boards

10:16
5

Bonus Video With Purchase: How to Edit Your Pins

03:17
6

Bonus Video With Purchase: How to Follow

02:01
7

Bonus Video With Purchase: How to Pin

07:46

Lesson Info

Using Pinterest as A Business

So let's get down to the dirty good stuff. How to use it as a business. Probably everyone, or almost everyone that's here today that's watching from a worldwide audience is using it for personal. So you're pinning stuff you like with no idea how you should be using it strategically for business. Like I said, I've actually use it for business for over a year now. It is one of the top traffic sources for my websites for products and services, and it refers over thousands of dollars in sales every month. So I don't want to say I've cracked the code, but I definitely figured out what are the main strategies that work the best in a general practice type of way. And the first thing I want to talk about before we talk about setting up your business account before we talk about all this content you need to create is if you haven't done this yet and you have a website, and if you don't have a website yet, this is something good to file in the back of your mind as a must do once you have that we...

bsite is, you want to encourage people to pin from your website, and the reason you want to do this is just like I said before. And people pin content from your site and then appears to all of their followers. So they're people who have three followers. You know, their mom, their cat on Pinterest. That's great. There's also people who have huge audiences and both personally and with a lot of my clients I've worked for. There are major media brands, say, like women's fitness or Vogue Or, you know, bloggers that have hundreds of thousands of followers that somehow pick up on your content and 80% of the pins on Pinterest or actually re pins 80% of them. And the reason this is cool is because it's a very viral platform, and Denise and I were talking earlier about, like having some your content go viral. It's much more common for my experience to have that happen on Pinterest than anywhere else, because it's so shit is heavily shared. You know you might post something on Facebook and you get three shares, but on Pinterest, 80% of those pins air repent, So if you get your stuff on the platform, there's a virtual army of people that are just spreading that content and sharing it for you. So I encourage you to have the pin it button on your site whenever possible and wherever possible. So actually, there's tons you can actually google Pinterest pin it buttons. You can get some better blow every image, you know, like just the standard stock social media plug ins. There's also lots of coolant that you hover over an image of little Pinterest Button pops up. I do them. I will actually say it's of my blawg posts like, Hey, and don't forget to pin this image like it's a really great resource for your followers or something like that. So all do kind of double whammy to get to remind people as much as possible because a lot of people probably would be open, depending things, but they're just not really gonna remember unless you give them some sort of visual cue. So this is something I really, really, really recommend is to do this because it's also a one time action. You know, when we talk about your Pinterest account, we're going to teach you how to do it less than an hour a week to maintain it. Yeah, but this is something that you do once, and you get to reap the benefits for forever. You don't to go in every week and updated. This is something that is kind of on autopilot once you get it installed. Something else really cool. If you go to Pinterest dot com. Ford slash source Forward slash whatever your domain name is. So whenever your website name is so for me, this is my business luxury monograms. That might be luxury monograms dot com so Pinterest dot com forward slash source forward slash your website. You can actually see everything that's ever been pinned off of your website, and this is very cool because I was surprised the first time I went and there was stuff being pinned for my sight even before I had a pin it button. And that's because some of you may know you can actually get the little pin it button in your browser so you can pin images from any Web sites online. Now you can block with you want to, but most websites you can pin from, So this is really cool, because I'm all about marketing research, right? What are people doing on my site? What are they engaging with? And this will show you what people are already responding Teoh and are already using on the Pinterest platforms. They're already pinning it. They're already sharing it and it will give you a really great targeted information to understand what to do more off. It also is interesting to see You probably know what you're most popular products or services. I hope you dio, but you might see that that is can grew int And that's what people pin the most might be different. Maybe you have a product that a lot of people are penny but not that many full, but are buying you find out why that is the price too high. Are you not properly explained on the page if there's interest there? But you're not seeing that correlate with the amount of sales you're getting your the amount of clients you're getting for that service. That's something you want to start reaching out to people and asking why? Because there's interest there and you're not really getting the profits from it. But this is really cool. Hopefully every can write this down And if you get an error message, some people tell me Oh, my gosh! And error messages popping up, That simply means that maybe nothing has been pinned yet. That might be the reason you're seeing an error message, but I love that resource. It's so cool to see that you can check it all the time. All right, So creating an official business page her Mabry, explain something to you. E. I love you guys are awesome. I'm getting point proving to you that most people don't understand, but I'm gonna walk you through it. And I'm also gonna talk about a lot of a lot throughout the next three days, so we'll go over it as many times as you need. There are official business pages on Pinterest. It's true. Nobody told you, right? There are official business pages. The only thing you need to know about this they don't look different. They don't really do anything differently. The main thing that is different, as if you have an official business page on Pinterest, you have access to analytics and what this means is you might be using Google analytics, which I hope you are. Teoh. Track them out of traffic or getting to your side or track your sales. But you can't track how many times your board is appearing on Pinterest. You can't track how many times your pins appearing in search results. That's all specific to the platform. And if you have a business page on Pinterest, you can actually see that data, which is really cool. They'll actually show you. We can walk through the whole business resource center later if you want, but you can actually see which types of content get the most engagement. Which one of your pins is getting re penned? The most just really good information to understand, as you're creating more content where you should be focusing on. But you're making that point and the distinction because I think a lot of people are confused about what I have a personal page I don't even get and why should have a business page. I'm really excited to dive into that, but I think it's also it's also great that you're talking about the statistics and the the looking at what's working or not working because a lot of times like starting from that big level picture of why am I doing this? Yeah, that that's so important as to getting that strategy together? Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, it's really important to understand to you can have more than one account. So as you heard me talk about earlier, if three I one that I use personally and then I have to that I used really, really strategically where the content that is on there is on there for a purpose. Pretty much 99% of is my own personal content, and we'll be talking about the pros and cons of that because there's still a lot of people that are very shy about self promoting on Pinterest, they say, You know what percentage should be my own content versus other people's content, and we'll talk about all of that and how you can determine for your business. But for mine, and if you're creating great visual content or interesting information in a way that is valuable to people, I personally don't see any reason why you can't have the majority to be your own content to serve your audience. So business dot Pinterest dot com. Do you go to that? It's awesome. Not enough people know about this. It's actually a resource site for using Pinterest for business. So business dot business on Pinterest dot com. And this is where you can set up an official business account if you want to have to accounts like I do have one personal one for business. But you can also, if you think I just want to keep this simple, I just want to use, you know, I just want a business account so I can see those metrics you can actually convert so you can set up. You have your cow ready. You just go to business dot Pinterest dot com, and you can actually convert that account and just switch it over and they'll show you. This is what you'll see when you convert to a business account. Again. It's very, very similar to a personal account, so you'll be able Teoh type in contact name, email address. What I want to talk about is the about section Now. The about section is what you actually see on your Pinterest page at the very top. So you've got your picture and you got your about section, and I think most people really struggle with this and they say, Well, what should be putting this about? Section what should be there. This is where you want to get really savvy with keywords. Andi again, I told you wouldn't get to and s e o. But search engines are very powerful. Like I said, that's what put my first business on the map was being able to be found by people searching for Greek sweatshirt or sorority sweatshirts or photography. And, you know, Vancouver, something you wanna be able to appear when people are looking for you specifically, that's gonna be your more missed audience and the easiest to actually converting to clients or customers. So what's cool is, if you've ever, if anyone's ever tried Teoh have their sights search engine optimized. It's a bit of a process. Giving expensive takes a long time, and it's really hard. A lot of key words are very, very competitive. So say, if I wanted to rank my business luxury monograms to appear for monogrammed pillows, I'm gonna be fighting Jonathan Adler and Macy's and Bloomingdale's and, you know, pottery. Borrow these really big sites, which is really challenging, because the way that Google or Yahoo determines whether it's a good result to show is how much traffic you get, how many back links to how many other sites are linking to you. Basically, it's just really challenging. But what's cool about Pinterest is it's called a root domain, So Pinterest dot com for a slash luxury monograms that goes to my Pinterest page. But it has all of the importance and the meat and the juice in the end via the FTO keyword backing of Pinterest. So now I'm not just relying on my website, but I'm getting to kind of piggyback on the Pinterest but get my website found for things. So if I put words in here like monogram or pillows or bridal shower gifts, I am going to have a higher chance of Google searching through and going Oh, okay, well, yeah, we got Pottery Barn got Williams Sonoma, but there's also a Pinterest page luxury monograms that has a lot of words like pillows and monograms and bridal. So it's working keywords into the about section is huge. Also your board titles and I'll be walking you through. All of this is we set up a Pinterest account, but I also want you to think about using keywords in your board titles. So if you know your audience, bias your stuff for bridal shower gifts. If you know that a large part of your audience is looking for fitness or nutrition or dieting information using words like diet, fitness, nutrition actually in your about section and in your board titles will make it easier to be found on Pinterest. And people are searching but also easier to actually get your sites or your page ranked on Google or on being her yahoo any of those search engines. So this is really cool and not burning. People are talking about it, but it's really powerful because also, you gotta put a bagel link to your website on the top of your Pinterest page. So people click from Google, they go to your Pinterest page. There's a link to your website, and that can be a great traffic strategy. So how's everyone feeling how the online audience feeling about official business pages? Are we getting a lot of questions already? Melanie, do you do you want to take a few right now? Just in terms of what? We've just been talking? Absolutely OK, that would be awesome. So, first of all, do we have any get go in the studio? Okay, let's take a few from the outside world. Okay, So a question from gel Colin Bach, Can you see if other pages are business pages or personal pages? For example, can you see if a business has signed up for a personal page or business pain? Nope. And the only way actually can show you this. This is it's really confusing, cause they looked the exact same. It's not like Facebook where you actually can tell the difference. But the only way to see is on your own account, so you can't tell on other people's accounts. But if you have a business account which is not logged in, you will actually see a tab for analytics. So let me just log in here for a second. And while you're doing that, can you have multiple business pages? Yes, yes, because you do. Yep. You just have to have different email addresses. Okay, see if that works. But it is really interesting that you can't tell if you're on a business page or they look the exact same. So to tell if you have a business account. Maybe you're wondering. I don't know. Do I have a business or personal? If you go to the top right and you click on that since the only way to tell you will see analytics in your drop down. And if you don't see analytics, that means that you don't have a business account. And the other thing when you set up a business account and this is kind of uncharted territory here, you will be asked to verify your website. And this is something that can be a little bit tricky because you actually have to upload a file to your server. Don't ask me how to do that. I have no idea, but you can contact your hosting. If you have a graphic artist or program or someone who helps you with your site, they can do this for you. I reach out to my a graphic designer who didn't like 15 minutes. So it's not difficult. And also, if you go to Pinterest business dot Pinterest dot com. Ford slash verify They have tons of tutorials and step by step instructions for how to verify your site. But what Pinterest needs to do is to plug into your website to be able to just link and do all of that. So verifying is how you get those analytics because they're also going to show you traffic to your site and commerce and things like that. So it's pretty straightforward again. You don't have to a business account. This is more of a advanced strategy. You could absolutely start with the personal. You just get your feet wet. You can convert to a business at any time, but I just want to show you to be aware of what's possible. It's available to you and I highly highly recommend that resource center on Pinterest for being able Teoh go through tutorial. They have case studies, all sorts of stuff like that. So Brenda J. Is asking about driving local traffic. She says, I need to drive mobile traffic. How can I target locals? I get lots of likes from the Midwest. Is a photographer? Yes, great question. So the best way to do this to get the local traffic? I've been asked this before, and I think about this is with keywords. So I work with a lot of realtors and they say, you know, I want to sell real estate in Orange County. How can I make sure that people who are following me are going to be relevant there in Orange County? Want to buy or sell home in Orange County? And so I thought about it. First of first of all, it's keywords. So you wanna have a few If your local businesses in Nebraska, you want to make sure that you have the city and the state in your about section. Additionally, you can actually put a location when you're setting up your account. That's another good thing to Dio. But what I've actually seen that is the most effective is when people create content around that area. So I worked with this one realtor and very successful page, and what he did is he created kind of in Orange County account. So he pinned all the best restaurants in Orange County. He pinned great kids activities in Orange County. He penned great Aveeno places to shop for cool people that lived in the area, things that people who were interested in Orange County would want to gravitate towards. And now he also had some boards with his listings, and he also had some boards about his brand in the people who work on his team, but he drew people in with the content that would be relevant to his market. So that's why I recommend a lot of times if there is a local business and they want to draw in local traffic, use your keywords and your about section. So when people are searching for that area, you will be found. But also put content on your board that they are going to respond to that they are interested in Okay, so many great questions. Just do some like rapid fire. Carolyn Reap. If you are not yet launched as a business, then you still get a business account. So, do you need Teoh be an official business with the government or something in order to utilize that? I think right, we talked about some of our audience is part time madness or what have you. I think if it's if my memory starts the right to do the official business account, you will need to go through that verification step, which means you need to have a website up and running. So and what I would recommend is start the personal account. And then once you've got that site, just switch over to business account because also a lot of those metrics, while it's cool to see what stuff is being repent, where that information is really gonna serve you is once you have a site to be tracking and driving traffic to, so start personal, then switch over to business. Once you have that a site that site to plug in. On a related note, Christina wants to know if you convert to a business account and you switch back if you want, or you kind of stuck right. Great question. Somebody asked me this the other day, and I've actually never tried to convert back, So I don't know someone's welcome to try and figure it out for me. Um, I know you can convert to a business account any point, but I don't know if you can switch back. Pinterest is pretty flexible, so it wouldn't surprise me if you could, but also, I don't really know why you would need to switch back to personal because you could essentially still use it in every way that you would want personally without having to switch back and just you've got that extra additional analytics tool. So I don't really know why you would need a switchback. You could. Still, if you want to switch back and use it for your own personal enjoyment, you can still do that under an official business account. But I I don't I don't know. Officially, on the record, if you can switch back afterwards, you can change your user name in any time when you're going through and actually setting up your account. At any point, you can go into the studies area from Caroline Read. Does it cost to get a business account? Or the Google analytics included? Right now everything is free. We all know and you know Silicon Valley. Everything can change in a minute, but right now it is totally free. There is no charge for any of it, so it's a free resource. But you're studying is what I want to talk about is your user name. Also, I was showing you your user name is what it's gonna be, you know, Pinterest dot com. Ford's last. You want that to be not your cat's name or, like, you know, some weird pin code you want that to be a link that you can put out Teoh email out your list to put on your Facebook page that it's gonna be professional. And that's not too long like, honestly, I probably went a little bit too long with, um, entrepreneurs here, but that's why I switched to Online Edge Academy. But you can change any of us at any time when you set up your account will ask you what business type you are. So you know, whether your professional or media or brand, it's really not that important. A lot of people get really hung up on this that you know me belly. Oh my God, am I a local business in my an online marketplace? This really it's just not super important. So whatever seems to make the most sense for you if your professional or brand online, that's just, you know, choose what you think is good, but your user name is important. That about section is really important. You can, you know, select here whether you want to get email what you want A link to Facebook. This is something really good to talk about, so when you are setting up your account, you can choose whether you want to link it to Facebook. Here is the caveat. You can Onley link to a Facebook personal account. Why? I don't know. I wish you could link it to a page. I'm sure it's something that they're working on, but right now you can Onley link it to a personal account. So if you want and you use your business page or use your your Facebook page somewhat for business, you can link it up to your Pinterest. And what's cool is you could get a lot of exposure so people can see what you're pinning. It doesn't post everything every single thing, but will do kind of summaries of what you're posting or what you're pinning and post that on your Facebook on your news feed. But if you have a business page like Ideo, I really don't use my personal account on Facebook for a lot of business. But I have business pages that I would love to be able to promote my content on, so what you have to do is definitely it manually. So I choose. I do have this link up to publish a little bit on my personal account. But what I tend to do well, talk about social media integration and how to use all these components working together later on in the day. But what I do is I a couple times will go over to my Facebook page and post a link to on my boards, or I'll post a link to something I pin specifically and talk about why people should check it out. But this is good to know when you're setting up that you are choosing whether or not to link actually to your personal account on Facebook. Well, food for thought there. Okay, So how are we doing? Is everyone kind of following a long do you think? Is it valuable to set up an account to it? Let's do it. Okay. Do you think it is step by step for those people who are So what I'm going to need since I told you guys that I have already have three accounts. Is there anyone in the studio audience that would like to set up a new Pinterest account to be used as a guinea here? Okay, so I'm gonna actually log out, and I'll probably have you come sit up here? Yeah, and go through it all. Kind of explain the explain the steps as you're going through it and honestly might look different for you than like when I set mine up a few months ago because they're always adding some new feature. But go ahead and come up here, okay? And we're gonna have you. You can choose whether you want to sign up with an email, and we're going to just set up a regular person held personnel account. Since we talked about how you can just switch that over, really within a click of the button on the business stop interest. It's one click to switch over to a business account. So go ahead and just fill out. Sign up with email any of your basic stuff. And what kind of go through Hopefully doesn't show your password. I don't think it should, but anyways, we'll go geo different prompts and things you'll be asked because one of the things last time I created account that I saw is Pinterest actually helps you with people who follow. Originally, a lot of people go who would just be following how to even find people on Pinterest. I actually, uh, more people are using it now. But originally, people would go. I just don't get Pinterest. I don't get it. What am I supposed to do on it? How does it all work? So what kind of talk about that as you're setting it up. So I want pictures to personalize my experience. Melanie, I would uncheck it because I don't know what that means. I don't know what it means. I don't choose it with you on that. Yeah, but you can see if are you a business click here. So if we want to set up a business account, you could click right there walking through the similar promise. So this is your blank account. And actually, they didn't follow. So sometimes I've noticed again. This stuff changes all the time. For a while, they were having you automatically follow people. Some people love that. Some people hated that. So you'll, depending on when you'd create your account, you might see either option. But right now you're not actually following anyone and you have nothing on your account and you have no image. You have no about section. It's a totally blank canvas. Completely blank. Yeah, So if you were to click on this, we won't have you actually fill everything out. But if you're to click on this, that's where you can actually upload a picture. Now could question about this. If you're doing this for business, should you have your face? Should you have a logo? Should you show a picture of one of your products totally up to you? Research showed us with social media. People buy from people, even if you're a business. So a lot of times having a picture of you. If your personal brand. If you are a service provider and people are working with you, it's best to use your face. That being said, you can kind of do whatever is the most representative of your overall branding. Some people have a very professional little bit detached fiddle, their branding where they want it to be more commercial. They wanna have a logo you can absolutely upto use a logo there. If you have, you know one main product you're known force. Maybe like for luxury monograms. I have this one best selling pillow that people really love. I could actually put my product as this photo. Get that exposure there. But you wanna have an image just like on anything you want to make sure that you go ahead. That's one of the first things you dio is at an image to this area. And if you click on this little pencil right there, that is where you can fill out your about section. So everything we talked about earlier, where you can actually put in your keywords, you can put in your location and you can put any link to your website. Now, you don't have to verify it to get this toe link, so that's really cool. If you don't want to go to that extra step, you know, not a text happy person. Just not something you're concerned about. You don't have to verify. You can still have a link to your website. But I do recommend if you're going to be using this, you know, for a big brands, you do you wanna have access to all information? You will want to go through the verification steps. So that's all good stuff. If you up here in search, let's type in. Well, actually, that's not search because it'll pull up images But what you would normally do is put any search term. So we're going to talk about the right people to follow in all of that later on. This is where you can actually search for different brands you want to follow. Exactly. If you put all image academy, you'll see these air pins that people have the keywords in. But also, if you go back, right, Yes. So that is, if you click on Pinter's. Do you see that right there, Right here? Yep, yep. This will show you actual accounts. Got. So when you search, you'll have, you know, results that are actually from the actual pins. You'll have results that are from boards that say, all manage academy, or you can actually, pitchers will show you the accounts with that. Okay, this actually be. So that's that account. So I will walk you through how to follow. People who are the right people to follow will go through all of that later. And I'm also going to show everyone how to create boards, how to pinned to boards and all of that in later session as well. So you accomplish everything we're looking to accomplish. What sign it with your email, you have a chance to go through a little tour. You have a chance to tell offenders a little bit about you. What you're interested in is they can suggest things. Or you can just start from scratch of the blank board and populated on your own. Wonderful. Yeah, but that's great. Amazing. Did Alexa then create a business account from her personal account? Can we show that? Yes. So what you would do is actually go to busy, I think I don't think it's understanding. I think you go to business dot Pinterest dot com which Okay, Right. You see the tab on the far left? Yes. Go up. He'll have on the browser, actually. Where? My head? Yeah. So you could click, join or actually could click Convert here. Okay. And this is where she could, though, and convert that over to a business account. So it's one click. Easy. All right. Wonderful. So it's very simple to get started again if you want to even shortcut entering your email that you can use your facebook account to log in. But, um, so you have now, perhaps successfully of interest account. Thank you. So we'll go ahead and switch back over to the presentation. But like I said, I have a lot of time at the end of every one of these for us to go ahead and take questions. If you want me to do something again, toe walk through something more than happy to do that and available will have time at every session to do that type of stuff. Cleaning. Let something you You mean you want to see it again or you try to do and there's some sort of an issue we can walk through that so people like brands better and are more likely to buy after viewing their Pinterest page. Research shows us this, so it's pretty cool because people getting experience when they're on your page, they feel like they know you more, particularly if you set up your account win going to show you people are going to trust you more. They're going to be more interested and more connected with your message and why they should want to work with you. So our main things we talked about is to recap is to make sure that you're using keywords in your about section. Both for your search engine optimization and also for search ability on the platform. Uploading a high quality image. Probably know shocked anyone. Pinterest is visual. And so the visuals you have on your page really count. You want to choose a short and sweet user name? That use dream is what's going to be your direct link to your Pinterest account. So you want to be something that you're comfortable sharing and people can remember and when possible, and when you're ready, go ahead and verify your website. And like I said, there is a whole resource guide on the Pinterest business site that will walk you through how to do this. It's also something that you can reach out to a program or a graphic designer, even a tech savvy girlfriend husband boyfriend that might be able to help you out with that if you're like me and not super tech savvy. So I walked you through the Online Edge academy a little bit. We're gonna be talking about this actually an upcoming session about why these boards are here. What thestreet egy is behind every one of them. But this is a business account, and these are actually just a snapshot of the analytics. So we talked about when you do have a business account, when you have verified your website, you're going to be able to see site metrics. You're gonna be able to see what's been pin the most. Recently, you're gonna be able to see what's been repent most collect all sorts of good information there.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Post Design Elements.zip

bonus material with enrollment

MDBusinessPinterestH264.mov
How To Get Lots of Pinterest Followers Fast.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

What an incredible amount of GREAT information that Melanie gives in this course! I couldn't watch it all live, but I saw enough in about 30 minutes to know I had to have it and so I bought it and it is worth EVERY PENNY! I can't wait to start utilizing all the great info to make my Pinterest boards work for me and have more fun pinning! Thank you CreativeLive and Melanie!

Stamperdog
 

So glad I saw this and got it to keep. With just a few tweaks, I turned my non-active boards into active boards and quadrupled my followers in just a few days. This spilled over into site traffic AND major lead generation for my mailing list. Thanks for the inspiration, Melanie.

Michelle Smith
 

Awesome learnt so much thank u

Student Work

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