My Pinterest journey & results

If you listen to any episodes before, read the blog or been on any of my social accounts, you’ll see that I am a big fan of Pinterest. It’s no lie, I just really love it. I think it is so useful for businesses to gain exposure, for traffic and to get people under their websites and at the end of the day, that is exactly what we need. Yes, social media is great. Yes, all these different places that we can market our business and growing an email list are fundamental in my opinion to a successful business, but your website is going to be the thing that keeps people coming back. The website, the way it’s designed and content that you put on there, all of those things and more are going to make people purchase from you and are going to make people return.

Everyone says this, but it’s completely true, any of these social media platforms could disappear, even Pinterest could disappear, but the effort you put it will already have been reaped. You’re trying to get traffic to your website, and even if Pinterest were to disappear (it’s probably not going to disappear!), it’s not going to be as terrible as if Instagram disappeared because you spent all of your effort building up an audience there.

My Pinterest Journey started like many people’s a long time ago. I joined pretty early on in the Pinterest existence. I was a hobby pinner like so many and still am a hobby pinner. I still love to add things to my dream kitchen or my dream bathroom boards and still go there and look for fashion advice and generally browse various different content. It is a really nice positive space, which I’ll get into later. When I started as a Pinne I definitely had boards when I planned my wedding. That was a big thing and every business iteration and every business I’ve ever dreamed about, or run has had a Pinterest board so it was always going somewhere that I’ve gathered my thoughts.

Then I became a blogger when I moved to Malaysia and started doing travel blogging. I started using it as a blogger and I started to understand that actually Pinterest was not just a place where I could collect my ideas, it was a place where I could get people to save my pins and go to my website and find me. So often you want to be found online for various reasons…business, blogging, whatever and actually getting that exposure is really difficult. Quite early on I realised that Pinterest was going to be key to getting traffic to my website. Then as I moved into running a business in the last few years, I have been using it to pin my content and to gain exposure to my brand and pinning product pins and linking things like my Etsy shop so that people can go to both. I’m just really finding that it does drive quite a lot of traffic to my website; it does increase my exposure and it’s a really nice place to spend some time.

Then in the last year or so, I have grown and developed and done training and become more of a Pinterest mentor, helping other businesses to use it for their own success: for growing their traffic, growing their brand, growing their sales and creating spaces where customers or potential customers or even just people that want to have a look at their type of project can go and have a really positive experience.

So, that’s kind of my background with Pinterest. I’ve created courses, help businesses grow. I’ve worked with people one-on-one, I’ve worked with businesses, I’ve been a blogger and pinned for my own

benefit, I’ve been in business, and pinned for the benefit of my business. I have been the hobby pinner because, you know, who isn’t? We all love a bit of Pinterest.

I thought I’d also get into some of the kind to some of the Pinterest stats that I’m seeing personally, and for some of my clients, so you can see how powerful is because I know that taking on a new platform, investing in more marketing in terms of time and money can actually be a big commitment and you want some proof before you can do that, right? So I thought I’d share some of my results with you.

My first one is that 90% of my email list is from Pinterest. 90% have come over from something I’ve created on Pinterest and signed up to my email list and 90% of those people have stayed on my email list for more than two months. It is a really good way to find your ideal client or customer, the person who wants to hear what you’ve got to say. You can bring those people to your website.

20% of my website traffic comes from Pinterest, so to put into perspective about 30% comes from Instagram, 20% from Pinterest. I spend a lot more time working on my Instagram strategy, captions, pictures, all that thing that I do on Pinterest a lot, lot, lot more time. For me, the investment of time that I spend with Pinterest is really worth it. I have lowered my bounce rate since I’ve been using Pinterest to 45%. If you listened to my podcast from two weeks ago, I did an episode about website growth, sales growth and how to improve your website for both of those things. We talked about how a bounce rate of under 41% is excellent, anything between 41 and 50 is still really good, so I’m in that really good area. Previously was kind of like 60% and anything over 60% is not as good and shows people are leaving the website straight off the page they land on. Bounce rate has a huge impact on your SEO, because Google thinks that people are going there and bouncing after the first page and not finding what they are looking for. Google search’s whole thing is about making sure people find what they’re looking for.

It has increased my session time to over 5 minutes, so people on average are spending over 5 minutes. That means some people spending a lot longer, some people spend a lot less, but the session time that you have also has a huge impact on your SEO rating. If people are going there and spending a lot of time there, Google thinks it’s great place to be, so it will give a big boost and I have seen that in my organic search traffic, I have become tenth spot. My wife that’s only going six months but I have become tenth spot for some searches is and I think fourth or fifth spot for others, and that’s really powerful.

20% of the users coming over to my website are going to see more than wo pages, so not just coming, clicking into something else and leaving, actually going on further than that and looking at third, fourth, fifth page. So that’s also really powerful and some of that is to do the user journey that I set up, because I have every page that has been created, I have designed where people are going to go next and things that will they will find useful. That is helpful for SEO but it is so helpful for your customer or your visitor to go to the website, find out they’re interested in, like it, move on to something that’s related and move on again. They can find all of the answers they are after in one visit to one website, instead of having to go back to the beginning, back to Google search again, start another journey with some other website, so it really does increase customer retention but also customer happiness and that’s really important in my opinion.

On to a couple of customers that I’ve been working with. On one particular account, the context is that this person had not been pinning regularly for a while, and then within 30 days saw a 1000% growth in engagement on Pinterest, a 78% growth on saved pins, which is great for your Pinterest, and 115%

growth in website traffic from Pinterest. That’s really quite amazing and is what you’re after, right?Another client regularly gets 12% of her traffic from Pinterest, so you can see that if you’re using Pinterest regularly from my results from other people’s results that you can actually really grow that traffic and we all know that’s really important.

I think one of the main things that I love about it, and I find you keeps me going back is that is something that was said in the July Pinterest report, which was that pinners like going to the platform as it’s seen as a positive space. It’s seen as somewhere that they can go and plan their life events, plan their future and think about really positive experiences. I think that every time I go there, I feel like that there’s no comparison that goes on on Pinterest and yes, it’s not a social platform. Sometimes you’ll go onto other social platforms to do your marketing and you feel the comparison set in and that can be quite a negative experience, whereas with Pinterest it’s a very positive experience. You’re seeing other people’s pins, you’re seeing nice images, you’re finding tips and helpful advice and it’s becoming part of your Pinterest Boards, so I think that there’s something really lovely about it being that positive space and as a business owner spending time in positive space is just so beneficial.

So that’s my Pinterest journey. That’s where I came from, that’s why I love it so much, that’s why I think it’s a really great tool for business owners. That’s why I offer a course that is aimed at helping people design a structure that works for their business. It’s not a ‘one size fits all’ thing, it’s about designing the strategy and moulding it to fit with who you are and what you want to achieve on there. If you’re interested, head over to the website, there is places where you can sign up for information. There is information on the pages or send me a message – I’ll be happy to talk to you about it.

It’s not right for everybody, and I think that’s a really important thing to say. You have to be in the right place as a business owner and be able to give it some time and have a bit of patience. Results take time with Pinterest, but when you get them, they are big. So, have a have a think and see if it’s right for you and if it is, send me a DM on Instagram or email me.

I hope you found that it useful. if you want to chat some more, my details in the show notes. I’m here to help.