TJ21 – Pinterest Power Pinning With Melanie Duncan

Hello listener! Welcome back to Traffic Jam, you’re tuned in to Episode#21 of the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic, leads and sales from your website and ultimately build a profitable audience online.

Today I am going to be pretty lean on the preamble and dive straight in to the interview so allow me to start this episode by introducing my guest today, her name is Melanie Duncan, she lives in New York and runs online businesses that generate over two million dollars in annual revenue. She’s featured in major television shows like ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s The Nate Berkus Show, and now she gets to complete her set as today she’ll be appearing here on Traffic Jam. Aside from being passionate about teaching others how to create success and freedom online and her love for travel, cooking, fashion and design, Melanie is a specialist in Pinterest Traffic.

So our feature interview today is all about Pinterest. We’re talking about how to use Pinterest, tips for creating effective pins that drive traffic, the boards that you absolutely got to have in your account, where to send Pinterest traffic and why plus a whole lot more. Of course the interview is coming right up next but don’t go anywhere after that because I’ve got a whole load of traffic grabbing tips and news in the one minute traffic tip, this week’s news in traffic and of course we’ll play out the show with the Traffic Jam jam. Okay, so let’s now go to today’s interview, all about powerful Pinterest marketing with Melanie Duncan.

James: Okay, so this is Traffic Jam Episode#21 and joining me today is Melanie Duncan who I’m hoping will teach you a few things that might just give you the edge with your Pinterest Marketing. Melanie, welcome!

Melanie: Thanks for having me James; it’s going to be a lot of fun!

James: It is going to be a lot of fun! I am going to ask you a question right up here at the start. You’ve got a program called Power of Pinning which claims you can double your traffic and sales from Pinterest in less than a week, sounds like a big claim – can it really be done?

Melanie: Well it absolutely can be done, Pinterest is an absolute traffic driving powerhouse and whether you are a male or female marketer if you have the right kind of business and you understand; you have a little bit of correct marketing foundation and really increasing your traffic very quickly is entirely possible.

James: Excellent! Good! It sounds like we’ve got the right person on the call; I want to talk about having the right business as a follow up question, I have heard you say that personal brands and service businesses can quite often do more interesting stuff and often be more effective than product businesses. I am intrigued by this because I am a services business owner so I think I have some questions around that to move on and to perhaps kind of frame this maybe we can use my own business as a kind of virtual case study so to give you a background, my business offers search engine services. We help basically business owners drive traffic to their site using SEO and Google Adwords – so my question to start with is a broad one, are my potential customers really on Pinterest, researching or looking for inspiration that might influence their decision to buy something like SEO?

Melanie: Yeah, it’s a great, great question and I always love doing a podcast interview about Pinterest because it is the ultimate challenge because Pinterest is an entirely visual platform so to entirely explain and illustrate examples always challenges me a little bit but we can definitely, definitely tackle that. So what I would say is that absolutely that service providers, personal brands, Pinterest is a definite place you want to try. Now, I say try because Pinterest is still a primarily female based platform which means if you offer your service that you know women are not your ideal target, Pinterest may not be the correct place to spend your time. I say “may not be” because you see brands like Hub Spot for example, if you check out Hub Spot’s Pinterest page, they are doing a phenomenal job marketing software, business resources, educational training and e-books so it absolutely can be done but it’s got to be in line with what your market wants and what they’re currently doing online. So it’s something I don’t say every business is a perfect fit for Pinterest but it’s one of my pet peeves that a lot of social media gurus would say, oh my god, everybody should be using Twitter, everybody’s got to be on Facebook. It’s got to be in line with how you market your business; if you don’t have any visual content and you can’t possibly conceive of a way to create visual content around your brand, Pinterest is not the place you want to be spending your time. But it’s surprising sometimes when we push ourselves to think outside the box, for example you were talking about SEO marketing, there are a lot of female marketers, female business owners, small business owners and also social media strategists, content creators on the Pinterest platform so if you can create visual content around what you do so could create a cool giveaway of a video series, you can create a cool image that  actually markets that to give you a cool example, for my own personal coaching brand, I created a free gift ,something that a lot of us have on our own website, maybe on our opt in page, maybe it’s an e-book or a checklist or a free report, something like that. I actually created an image for that which most of us already have we have created something like that for an opt in page and I actually pinned that image described what the giveaway was and I linked it, so I actually went in, edited the pin, because you can upload the images from your computer, and I gave you my disclaimer, it is a little difficult to describe this- you can actually upload an image from your computer and then you can go in and add a source link so that it actually links to a source in page, and I have been doing that to generate leads with business owners, giving away checklists of my marketing strategies or free online business tools and I have actually done lead generation and list building from that so it can be done to do services, personal branding, lots of creative ways but it’s got to be in line with what you are willing to do because if you just go on Pinterest and you add a bunch of text it’s not going to be compatible with the platform.

James: Got it! Well I think Hub Spot is a very interesting case study to look at because they would be aligned with the type of businesses that perhaps our listener base here at Traffic Jam might have. What sort of stuff are they doing? Are they using the kind of example you just gave of visualizing opt in gifts and reports, what are those guys up to?

Melanie: Yeah, absolutely! So they have an entire board the last time I checked, the last time I checked it was called marketing e-books and it was exactly what I kind of explained to you which is they have full different pins, each pin is an image of an e-book that is on a particular topic like Facebook Marketing or Twitter Marketing or email marketing – anything like that and each of the pins links to a different opt in page where they do their normal Hub Spot email form where you answer a couple of questions and then in exchange for that information they go ahead and email you that free e-book.

James: Got it, got it! Cool, well I think we might have covered how a service business might use in terms of the content they prepare. How would a service business or in fact any business to be honest – how would they go about increasing their following because I am using Pinterest recently actively, the Traffic Jam always get a visual content always posted to Pinterest but I find it hard to increase the number of followers on my account, what’s some strategies around that?

Melanie: Yeah absolutely James and thank you for asking that because that’s something that comes up with a lot of people and what I found is the hardest is just to get the first 100 followers. After you hit around 100 it seems to become a tipping point where it then becomes easier to organically start to develop exposure and everyone does regardless of the size of your audience is as soon as you make the move to try out Pinterest to integrate your social media marketing; If you are using Pinterest you probably are also using Facebook or Twitter and other social media platforms and I think the biggest mistake a lot of us make is we us them isolated and something that I had done from the very beginning is I always integrate all of my social media accounts so if you go to my Facebook page which is the entrepreneurus academy you’ll see that I actually have a Pinterest tab on my Facebook page that you can get by going to Woobox.com/Pinterest and I will also, since most of us have been using Facebook for longer than we’ve been using Pinterest we most likely have more followers on Facebook than we do on Pinterest just because there are more people on Facebook and most of us have been using it for longer building our audiences, every week, once or twice I will post a link with a different pin I have updated, if you want to link your personal Facebook and your Pinterest account you can do that so your activity actually publishes on your Facebook. You can’t link it to a business page on Facebook but there’s a lot of ways to get reporting, letting people know on Twitter. Emailing your list, if you’ve got a list as soon as you join Pinterest and you have some sort of a strategy behind you which you definitely can get like you are talking at my power pinterest program, Power of Pinning, we show you that strategy and then you want to reach out to your audience, let them know that you are on Pinterest and also tell them why they should follow you, it’s not enough to just say hey I’m on Pinterest but are you going to be giving behind the scenes access, are there going to be special offers just for your Pinterest followers? You’ve got to make it sound sort of an exciting incentive but reach out to your audience however large or small it currently is and let them get you to that first 100 follower mark.

James: Got it! So really what we are trying to do here is increase the amounts of touch points across multiple platforms, I guess that’s the real strategy here right Melanie?

Melanie: Absolutely!

James: Great! Well let’s take the conversation a little further about what makes good content in Pinterest. What type of content in your experience gets the highest engagement?

Melanie: Great question. So you heard me say it before, visual, visual, visual! That does not mean it has to be pretty but the most engaging content on Pinterest is something that is inspiring, it is something that is visually engaging – something as simple as a basic checklist or an infographic. Anytime you can take information and turn it in to a visual platform, that really, really seems to increase the engagement because people are in discovery mode in Pinterest and so they are looking to discover new information, new brands, new products and so you always want to have a very visual format whether you are selling a product or a service but as I mentioned things like lists, visual checklists, infographics, even quotes, like some sort of an informational quote or a simple tip, you don’t want to have more than 10 words in the actual pin, you should have more visual information than textual information so keeping things very colorful and visual attractive design, if you can do cool typography but really I found that checklists and also videos, you can actually pin videos from YouTube and those seem to get really, really high engagement on Pinterest as well!

James: Great! I was going to ask you about videos, I think it is probably an untapped element of Pinterest, what about sound? Because you can use even soundcloud embeds I think or at least you could do at one point, how do they do, are they effective as well?

Melanie: You know that is really interesting, I have seen that a little bit – the sound embedding like in mp3 files, I haven’t personally tested that because my stance on it is I am moving towards visual content so sound is okay but I think really with a personal brand I would always do video or something where they could be direct to camera, face to face, or I’ll use screenflow or camtasia if you have a pc and I’ll do little three minute clips because video tutorials or little presentations but I don’t want to miss out on the visual component since Pinterest is a visual platform.

James: Yeah, got it and have you got some sort of sneaky Melanie Duncan tools that are really cool for creating pins?

Melanie: Well, you’ll probably crack out but one of them is entirely free and it’s called PicMonkey.com and they do have a paid version if you want to upgrade and get a lot of extra tools but it’s a really great free program that you can use to overlay text on images so a lot of times if I am putting an image on a blog post or if I’ve got a new video up and I want to overlay some text on an image I use picmonkey because you can add little banners, you can add text, really similar to what you can do on photoshop or real illustrator but picmonkey is free and really simple. You can even add buttons so you can add little shapes and I’ll add clickable buttons, just a circle and I’ll say click here cause we do find that adding calls to action on the images on Pinterest increases the engagement by 80%.

James: Love it, love it! That’s some gold there, really great advice. Well we’ve covered what it kind of looks like and what sort of media works. What about pin size? Is there some sort of format being used by various marketers? What’s most effective?

Melanie: Yes! Absolutely! Well we do see pins that are taller than they are wider and they have more height than width seem to get more engagement simply because it doesn’t limit the amount of height within reason – I think if it’s a really tall one they’d start to shorten them an give an expand option but in most cases they won’t strictly limit the heights so you can get three to four times the amount of real estate screen than news feed if you do taller pins. The follow up question everyone asks me is what is the proper pixel ratio? If you go and Google Pinterest you know pin ratio, it is changing all the time, people will say 800×300 or 1000×220, really what I found, I haven’t found that much of a difference in terms of little minute changes is the pixel ratio. What is most important is that you’ve got the height that’s 2 times larger than the width that way regardless of the pixel ratio you’re still getting more height than the news feed.

James: Great! And I think things like infographics would probably lend themselves in that format right?

Melanie: Absolutely!

James: Yeah, good stuff. Cool! As you know already I’m an SEO guy and Pinterest in itself is its own giant search engine. What tips do you have to get more search traffic with Pinterest?

Melanie: Search is a fascinating topic to talk about with Pinterest. When it first rolled out we had follow links with everything so it was really exciting then there was no follow links then there was follow links again, so I think currently right now the current stance is that there are no-follow links when you pin something but they do provide some SEO juice so I make it a big strategy to make sure to include a lot of my keywords in my board titles. In the actual descriptions of my pins, I use my keywords and most importantly, I try and rank my page for SEO juice so I will use keywords like business, marketing, pinterest in the about section of my Pinterest profile. Because I found if you do enough keywords and you have a bit of a followers and you do a bit of momentum on your Pinterest page, it’s a lot easier to rank with your keywords with your Pinterest account than maybe your website, just because you know the importance of a root domain. So having a Pinterest account, they already have such a nice substancial root domain so I can get my Pinterest page to rank for things that I can’t get my independent website rank for as easily.

James: Got it and what about sort of search habits if you like of people on Pinterest itself? I mean if someone was going in to Pinterest and actually doing a search within the Pinterest ecosystem, are they using the same types of keywords that they would do on a Google search perhaps?

Melanie: You know it’s a little funky, we don’t see the majority of people are going on to Pinterest and using the search box heavily, the majority of people are using the platform simply by following other accounts and then seeing what is visible and their newsfeed. There is a little search going around trending topics so let’s say for example around Christmas you’re going to see people searching for Christmas cookie recipes and that sort of thing but in terms of actually understanding how to gain Pinterest for search results, right now there is no strategy with what you can do, sometimes it seems that if you’ve got enough repins you’ll get ranked higher for search but searching on Pinterest as a search stategy,  I don’t really recommend putting so much time and effort in to it until they really become a little more transparent about what algorithm they are going to be using for that.

James: Which I am sure they probably won’t do in a distant future right? So I think we can forget that one. Cool! Well you’re obviously on Traffic Jam Melanie and our focus here is teaching strategies that will increase traffic. How will our listener effectively drive traffic from Pinterest to their website?

Melanie: The best way is by having pins like I said earlier that have text overlay. So something I do is I create what I call teaser pins so if I have a new blog post or a new video or a new podcast, or something like that, instead of just uploading the basic image what I will do is create an image with 5 or 6 words that really gets people’s curiosity peaked. So maybe it’s like the three biggest mistakes you should never make on Pinterest and I’ll create a really cool graphic on picmonkey or photoshop, and I’ll overlay that teaser text, upload it to my Pinterest and link that to my blogpost or link that to my video or whatever I’ve got on my site, my content, because this little bite-sized pieces of content are fantastic for driving traffic particularly if you add like I said a call to action in the image so something that looks like a little button because if you click on the image in Pinterest that will take the person automatically to wherever that source link hooked up to but I also for an additional traffic driving strategy, I will add a call to action so I tell them exactly what I tell them to do, a call to action actually in my caption- that text area below the image and I will say click here to learn the three biggest mistakes you should never make on Pinterest and I actually would type in the URL. If you type in a URL in to the caption it would automatically be hyperlinked just gives you another way for people to click and find a way to your site.

James: Love it! And of course you get a little bit more link juice there right because you’ve got an extra hyperlink situated in that piece of content. Love it! That’s killer stuff; well I guess we should also talk about where that traffic should go to, we’re of course sending it to our website but what would you recommend in terms of a landing page or place to actually drive the traffic directly to?

Melanie: Well the most important thing is to send it somewhere specific. You don’t want to have a bunch of pins that link to your homepage. Whatever you are promising- you are talking about, if you are promoting a product or some sort of information you want it to link directly to whatever you are promising or you want it to be the most consistent experience for them as possible. So you just want it to be very consistent, if you are doing an opt-in or some sort of giveaway that we talked about like an e-book or report, you want to make sure that then links directly to an opt in page with a picture of that exact offer that you are offering in the pin with a few simple steps. People’s attention spans are short, you want to make it as direct and as easy as possible for them to – whatever the conversion is – to buy the product, to sign up for the offer, to download the e-book. Just make it very quick and direct and simple.

James: Yeah I got it and I’m sure repeating that image on that landing page to make that visual reference to where they’ve come from really does help increase conversions. Okay, I’ve got a few more questions for you and the first one is around sort of timing of when to pin. Is there any particular times of day that are more effective or perhaps a schedule that works particularly well?

Melanie: Of course and this is another one of the topics where everyone has their own opinions. Some say that Saturday mornings are the time where the most Pinterest activity. It is kind of interesting, but as always, you need to test. It really depends on your audience. Just because the majority of people are on Saturday morning, you might find that your audience – maybe they’re moms and they’re taking their kids on soccer games on Saturday mornings so they’re not on Pinterest on Saturday, they’re on Pinterest at 10o’clock at night after the kids are in bed or something like that. You want to know when your audience is on and you will be able to gauge that just by posting content seeing if there is a particular day of the week or time that seems to be the most activity but rule of thumb standard, they say Saturday mornings, early in the morning, or late at night during the week and if you do want to schedule there is a software called Pingraphy and it’s a paid software but it will allow you to upload your pins in bulk kind of like HootSuite would allow you to do except they don’t have a Pinterest extension yet and you can upload your pins in bulk for the week, schedule them out at various dates and times and they will post them for you.

James: Got it. Now will there be any repercussions with that? I mean that would be a strategy perhaps you would not use on a platform like Twitter where people might expect a kind of immediate response and if you are not available to do that it looks kind of a bit anti-social if you like but with Pinterest is it kind of okay to schedule those in advance?

Melanie: Absolutely, particularly when you look at the alternative, for a business owner particularly if they are not scheduling their pins on something like Pingraphy that means that at various points throughout their work day which is very, very valuable time they are then going to Pinterest, doing their pin, most likely getting sucked in and getting distracted when they should be doing other things. The reason that Pinterest works so well for marketing is because it is very, very engaging – it pulls you in. So for me, I know my temptations and I won’t go on platforms during my crucial affective hours because I have to be focused on other things.

James: Well I can vouch that in fact, the lady who will be editing this podcast episode, Chall I often find her getting lost in Pinterest when she’s apparently researching so she’ll laugh at that when we talk about it but it is one of those quite consuming platforms right? You can go down a rabbit hole and find yourself out on the other side maybe an hour or two later.

Melanie: Exactly!

James: Great! Well my kind of pinultimate question is probably about how to actually put the boards together, and I am looking at the moment at your entrepreneuress Pinterest profile and you’ve got boards here that consists of About Me, you’ve got testimonials there, you’ve got Melanie TV, you’ve got some references to the media that you’ve appeared in, are there any kinds of staple boards that you would suggest to a kind of good themes for the majority of people or is it just literally whatever you feel is kind of appropriate or fits your brand yourself.

Melanie: I think there is definitely a five or ten boards that every business should have and exactly if you look on Pinterest.com/entrepreneuress you’ll see an example of those which is – I have a blog post board, it’s literally just an index of all the different blog posts on my site, the little teaser images that we just talked about. I also have different boards that will talk about different events I am hosting. I will have boards full of testimonials for my clients. I do some sort of TV board or video board is really cool! It kind of feels like a Pinterest video channel so whether it is content that you are curating which is fantastic, whether it’s you delivering the content or it’s other content from your industry that is going to serve your audience, having some sort of a video board. Press is great is great if you have some place to feature press articles and I do think an about me board whether you are selling products or products and services, we all buy from people so a board that shows a little behind the scenes of the business that tells your story and the story of your business is effective. That’s not going to drive traffic necessarily but it’s a nice complement to maybe other traffic driving content on your page.

James: Yeah and I’m sure those types of things would definitely build rapport and perhaps credibility as well so I can see how they can be extremely useful. Well Melanie you’re not just a one trick pony, you teach more of the topics that we discuss here in Traffic Jam in your online edge academy, tell us a little bit about that program.

Melanie: Yeah absolutely! My background is I’ve been starting online businesses, e-commerce businesses since I was in college and my first two businesses which are still alive and well are a custom home décor company and a custom apparel company; in fact we’re one of the largest apparels for sororities and fraternities. I know it’s more of a US things but for college students we do really fun custom apparel for them all across the nation so I have gotten my feet wet on online marketing for six or seven years now and I found that there is a lot of people who need across the board information about what we should be doing online and how to integrate it all together. As many great courses there are on Facebook, there are on Pinterest or on email marketing and sometimes you need a broader scope on how to bring it along together so along with my husband who has been my business partner since college we founded the Online Edge Academy which gives people a simple and integrated way to integrate or to use all of their online marketing together and actually get results.

James: Sounds excellent! Well if that’s picked any ears for any of our listeners out there, Melanie could you answer the question as to whom might it be a good for- any particular requirements?

Melanie: It is great for people who already have a business- that is one of our main requirements. It is not for if you are interested in starting one or you need help in selecting an idea. Online Academy is for business owners who already are generating revenue, it doesn’t have to be millions of dollars but there is some cash flow in the business because we do talk about paid traffic strategies, you have to have to be able to have some money to put forward in these resources and strategies that we are teaching inside the academy so you should have a business that is generating income but it is equally as important for you to be either a service provider, or a product or an e-commerce experience in both so a good fit for both types of business owners.

James: Excellent! Good and I can see that you’re probably closed right now but I know there is a waiting list so if anyone is interested they should head on over to Online Edge Academy and register details there, Melanie?

Melanie: Yes, we do a wait list actually. We only launch every one or two months we open it up because we found that it’s such a social component and we have so many amazing business owners in there that we like people to join in groups so they don’t just come in to the academy and everyone’s already best friends and talking and they go oh no I’m all alone. We do it almost like in greek life in fraternities and sororities where you have a group of people where you rush and you go in to the academy together where you have people starting at the same place as you.

James: Excellent! Well, Melanie would you like to give any particular call to action at the end of this podcast, send people off anywhere other than the ones that we’ve mentioned during today’s interview?

Melanie: Yes so if you want to learn more about this strategy, learn more about how I built my multi-million dollar e-commerce online, if you head to MelanieDuncan.com you can sign up for my email list there and I send free video training every week. I also host once or twice a month, I do invitation only online free training. You have to be on that list to get the invite so MelanieDuncan.com, sign up for my email list there and you will get little videos from me every week, they’re lots of fun!

James: Excellent! Melanie that sounds really, really good, so I’ll make sure that those links are all placed within the show notes in today’s episode which is Episode#21 of Traffic Jam. Melanie thanks for your time today, it’s been a blast.

Melanie: Thanks for having me.

This week’s news in traffic: Google plans to launch the new product endorsement ad which will incorporate photos, comments and names of Google+ users who have liked the product or company serving the ads. These new ads are similar in concept to social ads in Facebook however they are being met with the usual resistance from those who believe that advertising such like this is an invasion of privacy and unfairly commercializes internet user’s images.

This week Four Square opened up Four Square ads to all small businesses around the world. These new ads are similar to a Facebook or Google ad and that they’re featuring the Four Square results and are marked with promoted and in a stand out color. Four Square say creating a Four Square ad is super simple. All a business owner needs to do is go to foursquare.com/ads and build their ad. They do that by choosing a great photo of their space and either offering a special or highlighting a great customer tip. They then set their monthly budget and set their ad live for people nearby to see. If you are a business who’s already tried Four Square ads, I’d love to hear your feedback please post your comments about your experience with Four Square ads over at the Traffic Jam episode 21 page.

Facebook have announced that their own remarketing platform integrated in to Facebook custom audiences will soon be released. Currently remarketing to people who have visited your website or mobile app on Facebook can be done using third party tools like adroll and perfect audience which are connected to Facebook exchange. Facebook say we anticipate that marketers will use FBX, Facebook Exchange and website and mobile app custom audiences in different ways. For advertisers who have a large number of products and advertise to multiple audiences, FBX is the better solution. For businesses that don’t typically work with third parties website and mobile app custom audiences will allow them to show ads to the people who have been to their site on mobile app and still use Facebook’s targeting abilities.

The one minute traffic tip: this valuable tip is deserving of a mention as I have been investing my time a lot in it recently and it’s something that from the outside appears difficult, however, it is surprisingly easy. And that is getting free publicity. But of course there is no such thing as free publicity right? Well wrong! Getting featured on the news or in a daily newspaper can actually be quite straightforward and cost you no more than a little time and a free email. So how do you get featured? Well, you just ask. Reporters are on the lookout for experts who can write or just provide quotes on specialized projects. Now I suggest you make a list of publications that are relevant in your market and then contact each editor with your bio or profile and tell them why featuring you will benefit their publication. You can also subscribe at helpareporter.com and receive notifications when reporters are looking for a source right on deadline. Just by reaching out to reporters in the last two weeks alone, I’ve been featured in one of the Middle East’s largest business magazines with a full page feature and on prime time TV news so it really is that easy!

That brings Episode #21 to a close. Join me back on Traffic Jam next week where I’ll be talking to Rand Fishkin from Moz.com all about SEO and inbound marketing. For more tips and training to help you build your audience checks out the latest post at veravo.com.

To play out this week’s episode Melanie Duncan has chosen a track by her current favorite artist Lana Del Ray, and if you watched the movie The Great Gatsby then it’s a track you may well recognize. The track title is Young and Beautiful, this is the DH Orchestra version, and here it is right now.