The Ultimate Photographer's Guide to Pinterest by Megan Breukelman

LEARN PINTEREST STRATEGIES TO GROW AND SCALE YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY BUSINESS

THE ULTIMATE PHOTOGRAPHER'S GUIDE TO PINTEREST MEGAN BREUKELMAN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

QUICK FACTS ABOUT PINTEREST

PINTEREST KEYWORD STRATEGY

OPTIMIZING SEO ON PINTEREST

CREATING BOARDS ON PINTEREST

WHAT TO PIN FOR YOUR PINTEREST

HOW OFTEN SHOULD YOU BE PINNING?

TOOLS TO MAKE PINNING EASIER

CREATING PINS THAT CONVERT

TRACKING PINTEREST SUCCESS

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN As a photographer, it’s important to explore new channels to drive an audience to your work. With Pinterest being an inherently visual tool, it is a perfect platform for photographers. It’s pretty much the only platform where almost nothing else matters besides your visuals. When I say almost, I mean that there are plenty of ways to improve and enhance your Pinterest to drive traffic to your photography business. Pinterest is a low-effort and high-reward platform that you can schedule in bulk and pretty much forget about. This is why it’s an especially important platform for photographers, who already wear a few too many hats. With shooting, editing, bookkeeping, contracts, galleries, social, web, blogging–– you get the point–– already on your plate, let’s make this small addition with a high reward.

A BIT ABOUT MEGAN Hi there! I’m a photographer, editor and host of the Photo Opp Podcast. I love to help photographers grow and scale profitable businesses. Pinterest is a platform I’ve become very passionate about over the years. When I updated my strategy for 2020, I found Pinterest started to yield awesome results for driving traffic and even bringing in some potential clients for my photography business. This platform is one that’s been ignored for years by creatives when honestly, it’s been one of the biggest assets in my business. That’s why I’ve put together this guide to share exactly how I’m using Pinterest to boost my business. No fluff, no secret upsells – this is just a simple guide on how to use the Pinterest platform for your photography business.

QUICK FACTS ABOUT PINTEREST

8 OF 10

52%

73%

MOTHERS ARE PINTEREST USERS

OF MILLENNIALS USE PINTEREST EVERY MONTH

OF WOMEN AGES 25-54 ARE USING PINTEREST

58%

85%

335 MILLION

SAY PINTEREST HELPS INFORM BUYING DECISIONS

OF WOMEN ON PINTEREST USE IT FOR PLANNING

ACTIVE USERS ON PINTEREST PER MONTH

KEYWORD STRATEGY Pinterest should be looked at as a search engine as opposed to a social network. It is an inherently visual tool, and you can find friends on the platform, but it does not mean it’s an actual social network. You don’t log onto Pinterest to see what your friends are posting. You log onto Pinterest to search for ideas and pin inspiration. As opposed to typical social media platforms, the half-life of a pin is also much longer. With Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc. posts usually show up in others’ feeds for a few hours at most. With pins, they can show up anywhere from 3 months to a year onward, and some pins have shown to be viral even longer. Since Pinterest is a search engine, this means there’s an opportunity to optimize like you would with your website and blog. There are SEO strategies that are specific to Pinterest as a search engine. Let’s run through how to best optimize your Pinterest profile for search as a photographer.

OPTIMIZE YOUR PROFILE YOUR NAME The first step is to optimize your Pinterest profile. Your username on Pinterest should reflect your photography brand, whether that’s simply your full name or a special photography business name. Make sure that your username and the name on your profile are both relevant to your business. An example: Username: brooklynweddingphoto Name: Brooklyn Wedding Photo - Wedding Photographers in NYC

KEYWORD STRATEGY YOUR DESCRIPTION Ensure that your profile description captures keywords that you want to be found for. Write this the same way that you would write the meta description on a webpage. Consider search terms that your potential clients would look for. An example: Brooklyn wedding photographers capturing comfortable, candid wedding photography in New York. Let's make some magic.

YOUR COVER PHOTO Pinterest is less focused on profile pages and more about the pins themselves. That doesn’t mean you can’t make the landing page experience a memorable one for those who do find themselves on your page! You can use a highlight reel video or specific board as your “cover photo” to build a cohesive experience.

KEYWORD STRATEGY OPTIMIZE PIN DESCRIPTIONS Your pin descriptions are important for the searchability of your Pinterest content. Although few people take the time to look at your captions, Pinterestâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s internal search engine does read your descriptions. Use strong and thoughtful keywording to help the algorithm to find your content. This does not mean keyword stuffing, where you throw a bunch of keywords into a description. Just like with putting together your website, you want your SEO practices to be clean and intentional. An example: YES: Intimate romantic wedding photography at MyMoon Brooklyn. Restaurant wedding venue in Brooklyn with an industrial vibe. This Brooklyn wedding venue is a perfect intimate Brooklyn wedding venue. NO: rustic venue, intimate venue, brooklyn venue, mymoon, mymoon brooklyn

OPTIMIZE BOARD DESCRIPTIONS When you create a board on Pinterest, you have to add a description to the board. While you are writing these board descriptions, ensure that you use keywords that resonate with your ideal clients. Getting location-specific with your keywords is helpful to wedding, family and general localized photography businesses. Write concise, thoughtful board descriptions that incorporate your important keywords. This will help your boards to be found in more searches where your potential clients are looking.

CREATING BOARDS Let’s talk about creating boards on Pinterest. Is there a specific way to go about it? Should you dump all of your photography onto one board? Let’s break it down about how you should break it down, and why you should break it down. The most important place to start is creating your board names. When creating a Pinterest board, there are many who create boards and name them “Someday… <3” and it’s a wedding-themed board, or “Yummy!” and it’s a recipes board. Be thoughtful about what you’re naming your boards on Pinterest.

GET SPECIFIC WITH BOARDS Getting granular with your boards can help you break down into specific niche areas. Rather than putting together a board called “Fashion Photography”, this could be broken down into several boards. There are tons of different styles of fashion photos, lots of settings for fashion shoots, lots of genres to explore. The more you niche down, the easier it is to scale up. People on Pinterest aren’t usually just searching “fashion photos”, they’re more likely to be searching for “dark moody fashion photos” or “beach summer fashion photography”.

KEEP THE BOARDS RELEVANT TO YOUR NICHE Create boards that are relevant to your niche. If you are a family photographer, for example, there are going to be Pinterest boards about posing, attire, locations, seasonal ideas for family photoshoots. A fashion photographer, however, would have boards that are focused on styling, lighting, hair, makeup, models, and so on. Think within your niche when you are creating boards about what it is that is important to your audience.

CREATING BOARDS GET LOCAL WITH IT If you’re a consumer photographer, it’s pretty likely that the majority of your work is taking place locally. Whether that’s wedding photography with a large local community of vendors, or family photography with local clients, it’s important to think small scale. Create boards that are based around local things people might search. An example of this would be to create a board for “Dumbo Engagement Photos” if you’re a New York City wedding photographer. Dumbo is a common spot in Brooklyn for engagement photography, which means plenty of people are searching for photos that have already been taken there. Rather than just creating a board of “Engagement Photos”, think smaller.

USING PINTEREST FOR PERSONAL INSPIRATION If you still want to use the Pinterest platform for your own inspiration, I recommend making a personal account. This will help you understand your business account better and track performance. It will also keep your audience from being confused as to what you’re pinning about. When someone is looking for a wedding photographer, for example, they’re not going to continue to investigate someone’s Pinterest profile if they get there and it’s suddenly wedding photos, and chicken parm recipes, and DIY cabinets, and interior design inspiration, and so on and so forth. If you’re using Pinterest for business, treat the account as such.

PINNING STRATEGY Let’s get down to the pinning strategy for Pinterest. What is the best content to pin for photographers? Obviously the place to start is your own photography. But beyond that, there are a lot of opportunities when it comes to pinning on Pinterest as a photographer. You’re not just going to put pretty pins up and the job is done. There are a variety of types of pins, and a variety of places you can link them to.

ORIGINAL CONTENT Use original content when creating Pinterest pins. This is especially easy for photographers, as your content should pretty much always be original. When creating pins for Pinterest, use unique designs or photos for each pin to ensure you don’t look like spam. Pinterest favors original content. Even if you re-pin from the same blog post five times, having five different images to accompany those links will make your content much more findable.

PINNING BLOG CONTENT If you’ve created a lot of blog content for your photography business, now is the time to use it. Creating and sharing blog content is a major asset for driving traffic from Pinterest. Using pins to drive traffic to your blog not only increases the traffic to your site, but can inform and educate potential clients. Pinterest is a major resource for education – there are tons of people on Pinterest looking for inspiration, how-to’s, DIYs and guides. Think about what your potential clients are searching for. How can you help them? How can you answer their questions? From full photography session posts, to style guides, to posing tips, all of these are really important offerings for educational purposes. This is ready-made content waiting for you to share.

PINNING STRATEGY DRIVE EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS WITH PINTEREST Drive email subscribers to a list by offering freebies on Pinterest. Use Pinterest to build your email list as a photographer by offering a download or freebie in exchange for an email signup. This could be something like a free preset or checklist – lead magnets that attract people to your audience. Link your pin to a signup form that will give your subscribers their download quickly and easily, and build your list in exchange. Building an email list can lead directly to sales.

PIN TO DRIVE AFFILIATE LINK SALES Are you using affiliate links to drive sales from your blog or social content? Why not use pins to drive sales directly from affiliate links that you love? Remember to disclose that the pins are affiliated, of course. Creating an enticing pin that shows an obvious passion for your affiliated products is an easy way to drive affiliate link sales. An example of this can be a checklist or a simple how-to.

HOW MANY PINS PER DAY? Alright, so now that you know what you’re pinning and where you’re pinning it, let’s talk about frequency. Start with trying anywhere from 10-30 pins per day (I know, it’s a lot, hear me out) to keep up a consistent pinning schedule. Not every pin is going to bring success and tons of traffic – that being said, there are certain pins that may go “viral” and batch posting pins helps you to determine what content of yours is resonating. For the pins that don’t go viral, these may get a few traffic hits here and there which do collectively build up when you’ve got anywhere from 300-900 pins posting per month.

PINNING STRATEGY BATCHING YOUR PINTEREST CONTENT Batching your Pinterest content will make it super easy to keep a consistent pin schedule. This usually takes about half a day when you’re using simple design software. As a photographer, you also already have the advantage of having a ton of visuals at your disposal. Posting straight-up photos from blog posts you’ve already made can be one way to fill in your Pinterest schedule.

CAN YOU PIN TOO MUCH? The answer is definitely: yes. After a certain number of daily pins, which can be anywhere from 40-50 and upward, your Pinterest account can seem spammy and not useful to the Pinterest search engine. Especially if the content you are posting is not wholly original (repeating the same graphics or photos for example), you don’t want to create more work for fewer results. Keeping your daily pins to about 10-30 is a good midpoint for creating a consistent and engaging Pinterest schedule.

PINNING FROM OTHERS Stick to pinning primarily from your content. Whether that’s content from your site, blog, social networks, affiliate links, email forms – make sure that your pins are driving traffic for your business. If you guest post or are featured on a different site, then that may be a good time to pin from other sites. Driving traffic to content that is relative to your business is key. Another good way to share pins from others is if your work has been featured on another collaborator’s blog. For example, with wedding photographers, if a venue blogs and features your work, this is a great opportunity to re-share as a pin.

PINTEREST TOOLS These are the tools that I use to streamline my Pinterest strategy. Creating and scheduling pins is made so much easier, allowing me to focus more time on the actual strategy of my Pinterest marketing as opposed to the creating and posting of pins. Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t waste time handmaking and singularly posting each pin when you can easily batch and make more time for your business. The links to these tools are affiliated as they are tools that I very much stand by and use on a daily basis. I am very passionate about these tools, and I hope you find them useful!

PINTEREST TOOLS CANVA Canva is a great tool for creating pin graphics in a batch. Using Canva, you can create a template for different types of pins and then just fill in the blanks every time you go to create new pins. It’s a dragand-drop design platform that is quick, easy and allows you to get the size just right for Pinterest. Create different templates on Canva for blog posts, how-to’s, color palettes, and other ideas you can contribute to your audience.

TAILWIND PIN SCHEDULING Tailwind makes life infinitely easier when it comes to Pinterest. This platform allows you to schedule pins in bulk. From there, you can choose the timing of each pin or shuffle the pins around to create more of a shuffle of content. That way you’re not blasting out 20 pins from the same blog post on the same day. It allows your schedule to breathe and for the Pinterest search engine to see a variety of content from you in a non-spammy way.

TAILWIND TRIBES Tailwind Tribes are a great way to connect to other pinners. These are groups on Tailwind where you can add your pins and see the pins of other collaborators, and pin each others’ work. In exchange, your pins will get more repins and views.

PINS THAT CONVERT You know what to pin, where to pin it, and how to make the pins. Now it’s time to think about what your pins are going to look like. It can be easy to just throw a bunch of images onto Pinterest, but let’s dive beyond that into pins that actually create conversion. So which types of pins can you create that will actually convert into traffic? Let’s talk about creating pins that convert.

GET THE SIZE RIGHT Pinterest pins used to be absolutely wild in terms of size! The more space the pin took up, the better. That’s no longer the case, as Pinterest is more strict about the size your pin should be. The optimal size for your pins as of 2020 is 1000x1500, which creates a vertical pin that takes up some room but leaves room to see lots of other pins in your feed. When you use Canva to create Pinterest pins, you can automatically set this by selecting “Pinterest Pin” from the size options.

USE TEXT ON YOUR PINS Use text on your pins to tell people exactly what they need to know about your content. If your blog post is something like “10 ideas for posing for photos”, they’re not going to gather that by just a picture of someone striking a pose. Tell your audience what it is they’re going to get from you right off the bat.

PINS THAT CONVERT USE A LOT OF IMAGES Use a lot of images for your pins. You can create collages to better illustrate your point while designing your pin. You can also create images that are strictly collages of photos which can be used as inspiration for some. If you have a lot of images from a particular event, for example, you can create some collage images that link right back to the blog post.

TEST WHICH IMAGES PERFORM BETTER Keep track of your analytics to see which images and pins are performing better. Perhaps there is something about your pins that is throwing people off or not converting the way you need them to. Adjust your pins accordingly based on what you’re seeing success from. Everyone’s content on Pinterest is going to be different, and there’s no “secret formula” to a good-looking pin – you have to work that out for yourself. Save your pin designs as templates so you can use the more successful designs over and over again.

TRACKING SUCCESS Tracking success with Pinterest is simple using the native Pinterest analytics tool. Right on the platform, you can learn more about what is going right and what isn’t working with your pins. You can see right in the analytics platform which pins are gaining traction, which pins have had steady traction, and how your Pinterest’s health is overall.

USING ANALYTICS Track by impressions, saves and link clicks to understand how viewers are interacting with your pins. If they’re clicking the links a lot, it means something has caught their attention they want to know more about. If they’re saving the pins, it could mean that they’re inspired and want to revisit the content. When your pins get a lot of impressions, it means that your SEO is working well and they’re showing up in people’s searches and feeds.

TRACK WITHIN GOOGLE ANALYTICS On top of tracking directly in Pinterest analytics, you can track your social referrals from Pinterest through Google Analytics. This is a great way to get a big-picture view of how your Pinterest content affects your website traffic. As you begin to dive deeper into your Pinterest strategy, you may see the percentage of traffic rise from Pinterest referrals.

TRACKING SUCCESS DO MONTHLY VIEWS MATTER? On your Pinterest profile, you’ll notice that unlike most other platforms, followers are a secondary thought. Right at the top of your profile, you’ll see Monthly Viewers instead. This number fluctuates frequently and is, pretty much, a vanity metric. Those monthly viewers aren’t the same number of people who are flowing through to your website. Focus on the statistics for your Pinterest that really matter like clicks and saves, as opposed to just viewers of your pins. Having a high number for monthly viewers is a sign that your pins are showing up in searches, but don’t freak out if that number isn’t 100k+.

USING PINTEREST FOR YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY BUSINESS APPLY, EXPERIMENT, TRACK Pinterest is an undervalued resource for photographers to market themselves. You can generate photography clients, bring traffic to your website to improve its ranking, build upon your online following, drive affiliate sales and build your email list â&#x20AC;&#x201C; there are so many possibilities with this platform. For consumer photographers, Pinterest is extremely valuable as it informs purchasing decisions from users. Give this platform a try for the sake of your photography business. Show up where other photographers are forgetting to put their energy. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s worth it for the potential growth you can gain.