#059: What You Need to Know NOW to Get More Traffic From Pinterest with Kate Ahl

In this post, we’re delving into what you need to know NOW to get more traffic from Pinterest.

 

What’s Working Now with All of Pinterest’s New Updates

Pinterest comes out with updates and changes like any social media platform, such as Facebook or Instagram. The difference is that success on Pinterest remains virtually the same even with changes because the foundation is never updated.

If you are following good Pinterest strategies, such as…

• Using Pinterest as a search engine
• Focusing on your SEO
• Correcting problems

…you should remain untouched by these changes.

Pinterest always values good content. Be sure you are always adding valuable content to your boards and you will be good to go.

If you use Pinterest for your business, then you have likely heard of our guest this week, Kate Ahl.

Kate Ahl is the founder and owner of Simple Pin Media, a Pinterest management company.

If you want to follow Kate and get to know more about her, check out her podcast and her Facebook group. This is her third time coming on our show and she keeps all of us up-to-date on all things Pinterest. Plus, she is one of the kindest people I know and I am delighted to have her on again.

The Purpose of Pinterest

People use Pinterest to plan for the future. If someone wants to ideas, they go to Pinterest first.

Pinterest informs our decisions and gives us inspiration, and then we can take action when we are ready.

Pinterest introduces us to companies and websites that offer what we’re looking for.

Using Tailwind’s SmartLoop

Have you heard of SmartLoop? It’s the newest feature from Tailwind, the Pinterest scheduler.

Tailwind is a Pinterest approved pin scheduler and it’s really important to us because we use it to schedule all of our pins.

Smart Loop is a feature used to set your pins to go out to particular boards on a particular schedule.

Instead of manually scheduling which pins go out, to which boards and on what days, you just put the pins you would like to be dropped continually into your boards, and Smart Loop will do it on repeat.

This is helpful, especially if you have large amounts of content because everything will be pinned, without you worrying about forgetting something.

You can then focus on putting your new content out using the more traditional side of Tailwind.

Pinterest Lifted the Maximum Pins Allowed

Since Pinterest began, they had a maximum number of 200,000 pins per account.

200,000 pins may seem like a lot, but for bloggers who have been on the platform for years and who release new content on a regular basis, it was all too easy to hit this threshold.

Pinterest recently lifted the 200,000 pin threshold.

Before they made this change, bloggers and entrepreneurs had to plan out how many pins to put out over a certain length of time in order to know when they hit the max allowed.

How to Evaluate Your Pins

Don’t just do a pin dump for your Smart Loop cycle; be sure you evaluate the pins that you’re adding. Organize and revisit to make sure your content is still fresh and adds value.

Focus on what happens after people click away from Pinterest and visit your website.

Make sure each pin takes the pinner to the right place on your site and that it’s still worth keeping in your loop.

Clean up your pins as you go.

Everything you do on Pinterest should be with the goal to make it a good experience for your followers.

Gaining Followers with Tailwind’s SmartLoop

I want to share a secret tip with you guys.

Back in the day, when we had to stay under the maximum cap, we were pinning around sixty pins a day.

Now that we’ve put these Smart Loops into play, we are pinning one hundred pins a day, and our traffic has gone up.

Pinterest does change, so I am appreciating this boost right now while acknowledging that someday it may not work in our favor.

However, since it is working in our favor right now, we will continue to take advantage of it.

How to Set Up SmartLoops

You can use your Smart Loops to repeat once a year or you can also set loops to keep going repeatedly. It’s a nice feature that lets you customize the release of your loops.

You will be able to get more followers by repinning high-quality pins, as well as posting new pins as you release new content.

How to Grow Your Pinterest Followers

Make sure that you use something like Milotree to grow your followers using Pinterest rules.

Milotree will post your newest pins for you, and if they are high quality, and you have people interacting with them, it will signal to Pinterest to show that pin to more people.

Pinterest wants:

• High-quality pins
• Relevant pins
• Fresh pins

Why SmartLoop Does Not Spam Your Pinterest Boards

There is some concern over whether your account will be marked spam if you use a system like Smart Loops, but in reality, this is not a problem.

Kate has been in touch with Pinterest and they have confirmed that using Smart Loop will not get you marked as spam.

What you do need to think about though is making sure you have a good user experience. You don’t want to be putting out the same pin three times a day with low quality. You do not want viewers to look at your profile and see the same pin one hundred times.

But if you are peppering the same pin every once in a while onto different boards, that’s totally fine.

Be very intentional about your keywords and descriptions because Pinterest is using them to decide what to show to viewers based on what they search.

Video on Pinterest

Video was first rolled out for big companies to promote themselves. But now anyone can upload a video naturally.

Kate’s best video tips:

• Less than a minute in length
• 1:1 ratio  (square)
• Catchy enough to make them visit your site
• Keywords in your descriptions
• Upload pins to relevant boards

On the Pinterest app, we’re seeing that videos pop up closer to the top during a search. The videos that take up the entire width of your phone screen are paid for. You can only get those with a promoted pin campaign.

How to Use Hashtags on Pinterest

The key to hashtags is relevance. Pinterest is using hashtags as another type of search term.

Be specific and intentional on how you use them.

Do not use hashtags to replace keywords, but put your hashtags at the end as a bonus.

As marketers, we see Pinterest through a different lens. We see it as a way to market our products and hook our readers.

But our users are on the platform solely because they find it helpful.

Sticking with one or two hashtags will help more than ten. You can take it slow and test different hashtags to see which works best for you.

Pinterest has said to not go back and update your hashtags. It will not help in any way because they’re using a chronological format.

Using Pinterest Like Your Friends

Ask people in your life who are not marketers how they use Pinterest and you’ll learn a lot about user behavior.

Even when I go onto Pinterest looking for ideas, to me it’s a totally different platform than what I use when I’m working on my business.

I use secret boards to keep my personal boards and my business boards disconnected from each other. It’s kind of like I have two personalities on there.

Commenting On Pins

Pins with lots of comments are going to rank higher, and that’s something we can think about as pinners. Pinterest encourages you to comment on things, but we don’t think about that all the time as marketers.

When people are commenting on your pins, you should respond and maybe direct them to your website for more content like the pins they’re commenting and posting pictures on.

As Kate commented on more pins, she began to notice that she was getting followers from the genre of those pins. People feel more inclined to follow you if they feel some kind of connection.

Pinterest Communities

It is very labor intensive for a business owner to entice people to leave a platform like Facebook that is already community centered and join a community on Pinterest which has much more of a loner vibe.

It’s also a lot of work to manage communities in two different places.

For those reasons and others, Kate has decided not to use the communities feature on Pinterest.

Pinterest throws out new ideas all the time to see if people will hop into it and enjoy using it.

Just because I am not seeing the benefits of communities, it doesn’t mean my audience isn’t.

Remember, Pinterest is there to serve the user, not the marketer.

When Pinterest tries new features, it’s because they are trying to find ways they can become more valuable to the user and how they can keep them on their platform longer.

Kate’s Course

Kate created a course for SmartLoop called Tailwind Smart Loop Simplified.

One of Tailwind’s priorities is providing value to its customers. They want to be sure they aren’t wasting their customers’ time.

Kate created a course that hit three pain points:

• How to set up Smart Loop
• How to use it properly
• How to use it most effectively

The course is set up so that people can be up and running confidently in about an hour and a half.

They go into all the information you need to know about the different types of loops and how you can use them.

Connect with Kate

You can go to simplepinmedia.com to find Kate’s podcast and newsletter. 

Guest Suggestions

If you like our blog, or if you have any recommendations for guests we should have on the show, please reach out to me at jillian@milotree.com.

And be sure to comment below and tell me your favorite Pinterest strategy! I love hearing from you.

If you’re looking for more followers, subscribers, and sales, MiloTree can help you do it faster and more easily than you are doing it now.

But it can’t help you unless you take the first step and add it to your site today. Head over to MiloTree.com. Sign up now and receive your first 30 days free.

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Interview Timestamps

•  0:58 Pinterest Strategies for Changing Features  
•  3:35 The Purpose of Pinterest
•  5:38 Using Smart Loop
•  7:05 Lifting the Maximum Pins Threshold
•  9:52 Evaluate Your Pins
• 11:08 Gaining Followers with Smart Loop  
• 13:07 Setting Loops
• 14:15 Growing your Followers
• 18:00 Smart Loop Is Not Spam
• 20:45 Video on Pinterest
• 24:04 How to Use Hashtags on Pinterest
• 29:02 Using Pinterest like Your Friends
• 31:00 Commenting On Pins
• 33:47 Pinterest Communities
• 37:20 Kate’s Course

Get Full Podcast Transcript Here

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