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What's Working Now Pt. 2 & Q&A

Lesson 15 from: Unlock the Power of Pinterest

Melanie Duncan

What's Working Now Pt. 2 & Q&A

Lesson 15 from: Unlock the Power of Pinterest

Melanie Duncan

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Lesson Info

15. What's Working Now Pt. 2 & Q&A

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

What's Working Now Pt. 2 & Q&A

Does anyone have any idea what trending topics are like? Topical things that are happening right now that you have maybe pull up in the news? Exactly. Exactly. Current events, um, holidays, things people are talking about, things that are popular right now are all trending events. So, for example, in the month of November, what do you think? A trending topic on Pinterest iss. Probably Thanksgiving recipe Thanksgiving. What to cook. What? To make your table look like crafts for the kids table. What to wear if you're hosting Thanksgiving, You know, I mean, you can really think about any sort of broad, you know, recipes, uh, different games to play at Thanksgiving. Obviously, this is speaking to a very particular type of business or if it's a particular type of craft, but trending topics are actually very, very effective. And something that I use within my business Luxury monograms. So, like I said, we sell monogrammed pillows. We also do monogrammed stockings. A very seasonal specific. S...

omething we found very effective is to frame. Our products or frame are content around a trending topic, something people are talking about. So around Christmas, we created a Christmas and holiday to core and recipes and so mixed in. You know, some boards could be just all your content, but some could be mixed with other forms of content. So we would go ahead and pin our own products our own, you know, ideas for decorating that source of thing, but also share other content that other people had created that related to that. So people want to follow this board because they want more holiday ideas, more holiday inspiration. And we're also showing them that they can use some of our products or use some of our services around that concept as well. So that's what I mean by trending topics. Chelsea Thanksgiving. So, in addition to a bunch of great recipes and ideas for menu cards, we also are showing, you know, some of our place mats that we offer. So focusing on framing your product or your service is in a context that is really relevant right now. And this is important because trending topics, of course, get more repent and more shares because it's relevant us right now in the moment. But it's also really good for search. So when people are going on to search their searching for Thanksgiving recipes, which, you know millions of people are gonna be doing and think in November or searching for holiday stuff for Fourth of July or holidays remain thing. But you can also frame it around. You know, elections or things were happening in the media. Right now. You know, there was some some something something around the Grammys and you sell clothing and you wanted Teoh do Grammy inspired looks. And you showed what Beyonce was wearing and you showed address that was kind of similar in your boutique. You're then putting it into context. It is relevant to what's happening right now. So, you know, I could go in a lot of ideas, but at this point, making sense. Everyone is Internet audience kind of understanding this underneath. You have 30 to 40 boards get, so each year you delete these boards or you delete these trending things once it is no longer a trend. So here's something we're gonna talk about later. There's actually something called secret boards on Pinterest. I know them well. Yes. So the one making the thing is you only have three. You can have up to three at one time But sometimes what I will do is I will either take this board and push it to the very bottom my page, which a lot of people aren't going through all 40 boards and checking out the bottom. So a lot of times in November, it's going to be in that top row of my boards. After that, it's going to the bottom of my boards. I may even choose, depending on how I'm utilizing secret boards for other things will be talking about. I may just choose to make it, you know, secret. So it's not shown. But most of the time what I do is I will actually just push it to the bottom. Great question, though, and your products products are good to pin on Pinterest. I don't know if you've heard, but it actually is very good to pin your own products. People are shopping on Pinterest. People are in that mindset of discovery, so don't be afraid to pin your products and actually want to. As an example, a friend of mine has a company called Society Social, and she sells all sorts of furniture kind of around the the idea of entertaining. So she started out with bar carts, really fun bar carts, moved into chairs and sofas and pillows and kind of expanded from there. But she was one of the first people I saw on Pinterest that would create boards just around one of her products. So aboard just of her chairs or aboard just of her bar carts, I think I have, Yeah, Another example. So I can actually pull it. Maybe this is working. I can pull up her page because some people, if you have a large variety of products that you sell, your Pinterest page can essentially be one big online catalogue. And this goes to you know what your brain is like some people that just sounds like the worst idea in the world. To them, they're like, No, I want it to be authentic content, which is great, but you seriously can't have a Pinterest account that is all of your products. All of your different frame them by categories like you would navigation on a site. I'm gonna pull up her Pinterest account because people will browse and shop through your boards just like they would on your website. And this is a way to get them in front of a much larger audience than you might have from organic traffic on your site anyways. So she is amazing also because she has created a ton of visual content around her brand. What she has done, and we're gonna talk about this more when we talk about using images in your business and your brands. But one of the most effective things you can do if you sell products, is to show your products in the context of how they're used. It's one of the best ways to sell visually, and she's done that very successfully by creating just in a lot of photo shoots. But she's actually created, um, boards around the different ways. So this is her official photography, and you'll see this tons of great shoots who actually collaborated. That's a luxury monograms pillow right there. But she's created beautiful images that kind of show the way, what you how you would use her bar carts, what you would put on them, what it would look like in your home. You know, we all have the standard product photos where it's a picture of our product on a white background. But what people love to see is you know, where these chairs gonna look like in my living room. What? And this is where aspirational branding comes from too, You know, What are you buying into? How are you experiencing this brand? The way we buy things, we buy things that we want to project a certain impression. You know, we want to buy from brands that we feel are in alignment with the way we live our lives, the way we want our homes toe. Look, we want our homes to feel. And so creating visual content around a product like this is great. Not only because this is amazing for Pinterest I mean, I think it will show me on the page how many repent. But her pins get a ton of traction and engagement because they're really beautiful. But these link to her blawg. So if I go back, Teoh this other photography board and this is also a great way. I mean, shot up to the photographers out there If you are a product selling business, having high quality photography with your products is probably one of the best investments you can make. And I'm gonna talk after this about my business luxury monograms. But one of the tipping points, one of the key turning points in getting us really legitimate exposure and a lot of legitimate press was because we had product shots that showed how to use our products in context, and also that looked really high quality. So you can see here. Here's a picture of one of her bar carts, and when you click on this, hopefully let's see. It takes you to one of her products that's featured in that image, and so some of them will actually go and link to the bar car. This is a lie in that, I guess, is actually on her site. But see how you could actually shop from a look. And this could be somewhere to, you know, Like I said, if you're selling fashion are selling jewelry You could have a picture of how toe were that great necklace, A great outfit put together and assuming it's your original content, you can then linked to a product page where that necklaces and people are going to be much more likely to buy a necklace or by a chair when they have some sort of idea of how it would be experienced and used in their lives, not making sense. Everyone. So I love that she's done this with her boards again. We'll go back to this. But further down she has. This is all the rugs she sells. She has a bunch of bar carts all on this page. If you click on this, this is going to be all of her different bar carts. But for me, personally, this is not offensive like this is browsing an online catalogue, and this is a great way if you are selling a variety of products. Like I said, if you're n e commerce, site your jewelry and you have necklaces and earrings and bracelets. You can have a board for each category of those products and essentially create this interactive online catalog of your products on Pinterest. Now we'll be talking more about how to do this as a service provider as well. But I think that last flight I just wanted to hop over and show you on my business as well. How we're doing this so luxury monograms. We're gonna be talking about contests coming up, and I showed you some of our trending boards and ideas. But it's really not a bad idea to actually just pin your products so you can see one of our most popular types of products are website our pillows. And so this is probably going to make the graphic designers cringe because I am not a graphic designer. But I actually have created little like sets on Polyvore or created this little images of ways to stage or show my products. We've got some photography that we did officially that show the different types of ways to use the pillows and pair them together. Different table scapes we've set, but you can have a board around just a particular type of product you're selling. So a questions about that is that making sense, everyone you audience, whose heads are nodding any, any ideas, any questions. It's, uh I think I think maybe my first question would be how and maybe this is almost a really complicated thing that might take all of tomorrow to ask about how How would you dio aspirational marketing like that with like a service industry, like with photography or with fitness and nutrition or something like that, and not just products I love it. It's a great question. I can answer it very easily because I believe it's today after lunch, the entire segment is going to be how to create visual content as a service provider, how to use it to get more clients. So I will be walking you through the aspirational the experience of creating images as a service provider. Just not right now. Okay, But after I think that was one of the day, I have a whole segment just on that, I actually had an idea. Last segment. I had an idea for pinning your products. So obviously, as a service provider in it depends. Some photographers list their pricing on the websites of the camp. First out, I happen to be one who does. Yeah, so why not have beautiful images for each collection in the product elections? So in the inner product board, with pricing and information on each of the collections in there, So that's one of the ways I think that you could possibly do it. But that's dependent that I mean every photographer's different things that would like to publish their prices. Some people don't right and something kind of cool to talk about prices so a few months ago, if you type the price in a caption. So if you type the dollar sign in the actual numeric value, pitchers would add this big price banner across the top of it. Some people loved it. Some people hated it. They end up getting rid of it, but they still have a gift section. So if you go to the Pinterest home page under navigation, there is a gift section, and the on leeway to be put in that gift section is toe have a price in your caption. So the dollar sign and the numeric value now it's cool is it's just another way to get more exposure because people go to that gift section to shop. So if you offer something that you know is popular is a gift or an album or, you know, framed printer, Iraq canvas or something like that, that's something that would be perfect to add a price to and then get put in their mega database in the gift section. So I love that. I think that's really cool. All right, Couple more questions about types of products to be pinning or aboard from Team Millie Mount, who I love that earlier told us that they were actually in their marketing team meeting. Watching this court, they're meeting. So we love that. Any thoughts on pinning competitors products as a comparison to your own? Yes, great question. Um, I personally don't do it because it is a way Teoh, you know, someone comes to your pages were interested in monogrammed pillows. I don't necessarily want to show one of my competitors pillows that might be more expensive or less expensive. Or just Maurin line like my board isn't really they're free advertising. That being said head back toward Depends clause. You may work in an industry where it is highly collaborative, where you promote them. They promote you. That's just the way it works. And in that case, you absolutely can. You can pin their stuff, you know you share audiences, and I will be talking about with competitors. Actually recommend following your competitors because there's a strategy to use to actually get in front of their audience will be talking about actually tomorrow. We're talking about that strategy for growing a follower base, but I don't tend to pin other competitors products on my site. It depends on your industry. And whether that something if they were pending, it's bunch of my stuff. I might be feel a little more generous, but for the most part, I tend to keep my content cater to my brand. Valerie and I s solutions for you wants to know what about affiliate products. Like if she wanted to promote your Melanie's Pinterest course. Yes, yes. So that is kind of a tricky topic, because Pinterest is kind of in the gray area about affiliate lengths right now. First of all, when it started, it was like an open frontier. You could kind of pin whatever you want. Affiliate links. There's a bunch of stuff, good stuff and bad stuff that happened from that. But I think they ended up kind of totally scaling back, and for a while they wouldn't allow any affiliate links. And then as what normally happens, they kind of came upon a middle ground. So right now there are some like if you do Billy links, they normally get flagged as spam. They won't work, But there are some affiliate links, some Amazon links and things like that that do still seem to be able to be working again. Everything is evolving in real time. So based upon people, watch this course. I don't know what the practice will be at that point, but I actually have in the past seen people be very successful with recommending other people's products and actually using an affiliate link something that a lot of really big bloggers I know do is. There's a company called our style. Maybe you've seen this when you clicked on a link before, but actually, you know, they could pin a picture of pants from your some online shop pop store and use their affiliate link and then people by those pants, they get the affiliate commission. So there is still some affiliate activity. I'm not totally against it. I mean, if its products and services you're already endorsing, you're already using. I don't necessarily see why you wouldn't share that, but not a lawyer. But what I hear from my lawyers that you always have to disclaim it. You have to tell them this is just, by the way, this is an affiliate link, right? But putting up all the things that you love and links to that I am, as many people know, a huge fan of diva girl. And so that's gonna be one of my boards will be all about Excuse me, curly hair. Not that I'm getting any cut from D Row, but again, it's all those things that you love. Exactly. But yeah, I do. I encourage people like if there's products or services that you feel comfortable endorsing, this can be a great way to get them out there in a way to actually a little bit of a kickback. So a question just kind of a bigger question from energy. How popular our business boards in the B two B space. I always get this question. Us will tell me, understand this better, because to me, it seems pretty seamless. Like if you're working B two c business consumer B two b, business to business. A lot of times, you know, the other business can kind of be thought of as a consumer, and like I said, I might be totally missing it here. I'm not, you know, a know it all, or by any means. But I think when doing B two b, you just need to focus on you know, how are you creating value for other businesses you'd want to work with? You know, we talked about his professionals. Maybe you want to write content that helps other professionals in your field as a business. If you're selling to other businesses, what is the relevant content you could be creating? What are the products you want to be recommending? Something I do on my business page for online Educate A. Me is. I actually recommend other business. Resource is, you know, software. I use things like that because other business owners want to learn about that stuff. They want to know about the cool re sources and tools also. So I think it's just framing your content in a way that is then valuable to other business says versus directly to a consumer. Okay, here's a pretty specific question from H. J. W, he says. I currently have products on my business page, but I find that I have to put things in order of categories or alphabetically. What would you do for trending products? You normally want to put popular boards at the top of the page, but this tends to be out of order for my boards. Is this something you would do? Well, OSI going on here? Just getting in terms of they want to arrange their boards alphabetically or what is the I think I'm missing the question. Yeah, I think the question is, if you, um So if he's categorizing or alphabetize ing, how do you adjust for trends? So right, a liberation, maybe putting the adjective before the trending topic. I I I wouldn't get too crazy about it. I don't know. I don't know that your boards need to be alphabetical. Granted, I don't know this business inside and out, So maybe I'm missing something, but I wouldn't worry too much about it. You know, if you've got a trending board, maybe just put it before a and then when you're done moving back to the bottom. But I can't. I wouldn't I wouldn't lose too much sleep over. Maybe are we are We're gonna be talking about that later. How to order yet your boards. Is that Is that an option? Just to say do it alphabetically? No, A. All you can really do is manually drag and drop where you want the board placement. Awesome back. Teoh, We were talking earlier about all these different categories of the power of Pinterest. Felisha. Okay, once you superimpose a quote on your own image, how do you link it to your page without actually having it on your website? So we talked a little bit about having on your blogger. What have you But what What are ways? If you don't actually have it physically online and sure, let me just happened. I can actually show you pretty easily on my all use. My board is an example. So if I was on online edge academy, actually on my board page and I wanted to upload something from cozy Oh, that I had saved on my computer. If you click this plus button right up here, you can upload a pin at it from a website and you can even create a board here. So I would probably choose upload pin. Also, if I was on same I blogged post board and I wanted to add up into this board specifically, you'll see that there is an add a pin just right here. You can click that and shoes from a computer from a website or from Pinterest. So you have those options there. So if I wanted, I don't have any images preloaded on my computer, but I would actually choose, You know, from computer. Choose my file and it would pin it. But here's what you need to know. So when you actually Pinette, you go through, you choose which board you want it to go on. You write your caption. It will pin it, but it won't link anywhere. There's an extra step that's really important. After it's been pinned, you have to hover over or click on the image. So if I click on it, you'll see this option right down here. This little looks like a little pencil, but again, if I just hover over it like you saw, it also pops up here in the top, right? And when you click this this, this is the important part. This is the special sauce, the source code, and this is where you would then want to put a link to your website or put a link to that blawg post that ties into the quote. That's what you'll want to dio, and this is You can edit this at any time so you can go ahead If you want to go back to pins, you're going Oh my God, I haven't done this. You can click on them, Edit them any time you can change where they link, You know, say you're sending to a sales page in your sales ends and you want to send it somewhere else. You can go in and edit it, but that is when you're uploading. Always remember that extra step, which is to go in and add the link so it actually links somewhere, because when you pull it up from your computer, Pinterest has no way of knowing where you where it's supposed to go. We link from a few pence, only further website. They get where it's coming. It's coming from, but not when it's just uploaded from your website. Um, tough, Toodle had asked. I'm a photographer, and I'm unsure of what to pin for my business. I don't want to pin the competition as we talked about, but if I pinned myself, it seems sales E. Do I just pin things my clients would be interested in? That's not my specialty. For example, is a wedding photographer pinning venues or flowers, and I know you and I talked about this yesterday that some people, especially creatives, especially creative entrepreneurs, out of a hard time promoting themselves. Absolutely so. And I know we are going to go into this right about what type of content Teoh a pin. But your thoughts for tough tootle on that tough tootle great question. Love these names. Uh, first of all, I just want to reframe this really quickly because this is a I mean, that's a much bigger topic that's really, really important to talk about. People when you talk about selling, tend to get really uncomfortable, and they feel like it's something bad or something they shouldn't be doing, or they're just very self conscious and uncomfortable with it. And I really think if what you're selling of what you're offering is a value, you need to think of it differently. You're not selling. You are providing a solution for a problem that your customer client has. You know, if you are getting married, your problem is you need to find someone to dock a document that for you you're not necessarily trying to create a need or desire they don't already have. They're gonna hire someone and So I think you just have to try and think of the value that you're providing and be proud of that and be okay putting it out there. But to get back to the specific question about what this person should be pinning yes, of course, pinning venues and ideas and, you know, talking about using your extra, your own expertise and sharing like here are five shots to make sure you get on your wedding day. Doesn't every bride want to know that I mean going into it? Hopefully, it's your first time or you know your first few times, and so you don't really know you're on expert, but a photographer knows that. They know there's a five shots that every bride is going toe want. Sharing stuff like that is really, really valuable. But I would encourage you. You know, the reason you're doing what you do. The reason you're developing and promoting your craft is because you know that there is some value to put out there in the marketplace, and so don't hold back from sharing that you don't selling doesn't have to be sales. It doesn't have to be cramming content down someone's throat it could be doing a very helpful service and really providing a lot of value in the marketplace. This is really tremendous. Not only are we learning so much about unleashing Pinterest, but things that you're telling us are going to apply Yes, across social minutes. Great. And it's almost time for our brakes. I'm hoping you can tell us what's going to happen after our 45 minute breaking. With what we should make sure I'm on topic. I don't want to mixed up together, but after lunch to be have Christine coming in. We do make your brand stand out with our guests. So I am so excited. I'm gonna pull the seat in here too. But Christine is gonna come in and she is a fantastically talented graphic designer. And I actually saw Christine stuff on Pinterest, and I thought, This girl gets it. This woman gets that she understands how to take her craft and promote it in a way that is so engaging invaluable on this platform. So what? Christine's really going to get in the nitty gritty is how do you create visual content around a service around a product in a way that is she's gonna walk you through basics. She's gonna do some actual tutorials but also walk you through the mindset of how are you going to create content that does kind of break through the clutter and break through the noise and stand out and really grab people's attention, so it's going to be really valuable for everyone to tune into that.

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

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