Pinterest Marketing for E-commerce

Join hosts Jesse and Rich who talk with Kim Sutton from Positive Productivity podcast. The episode covers the ins and outs of Pinterest marketing, explaining how to use pins and boards to attract traffic to your store without even spending a cent. Bonus: download Kim’s Pinterest checklist for entrepreneurs — a special gift for all Ecwid listeners!

Show notes

• Introduction to Pinterest
• Vertical Images (Pins, Boards)
• Repinning and curating
• Tribes and Tailwind
• Catalogs, Pixels, and Shoppable Pins
• Kim’s gift for all Ecwid listeners: The Soul-Centered Entrepreneur’s Pinterest Checklist

Transcript

Jesse: Happy Friday, Rich!

Richard: What’s going on, Jess? How are you doing?

Jesse: I’m doing well.

Richard: That day again! Here we go.

Jesse: Yeah. It’s a good day. Towards the dog days of summer here in San Diego.

Richard: I hope our Happy Friday carries on to people. Whatever day you’re here in this. It always feels weird because we do it live and we’re here, and it’s live now if you’re listening to the studio, but we know people listen anyway. So hopefully if it’s Monday, if it’s Tuesday, if it’s Sunday night and you’re fired up, and you’re feeling it like it’s Friday.

Jesse: I think so. I think people are in the spirit of let’s start building this business because I don’t want to go to work on Monday. Maybe something like that. I don’t know. (laughing)

Richard: Unless it’s for your e-commerce business. (laughing)

Jesse: Yes. That’s the dream there. Awesome. Rich, we talked about this with several other podcasts, but basically, we do this to help people with e-commerce. We live and breathe this. So for people that are listening. If you don’t live and breathe e-commerce all the time and listen to other podcasts on your covers, this can be a little window into the world that we see.

Richard: Yeah, we’re e-commerce nerds, I think.

Jesse: Yeah, total nerds. I don’t know if we should get a T-shirt for that. (laughing)

Richard: Someone will buy it. There’s a few of us out there because it’s growing. Yeah. I’m actually really excited about today’s guest too because we’ve covered a lot of stuff. We’ve covered Ecwid itself and a lot of the functionality backward. We’ve brought in Ecwid users and spotlighted their stories and their stores. We’ve talked about almost every single social platform, but we’ve never really… I can’t remember us actually bringing this one up. I don’t even know if this word has come up.

Jesse: Maybe it has, but yeah. To that point, we’re all about trying to help you find the right way to market your business. And I’m going to go have an admission here to make publicly… I never mentioned this before, but I really love Pinterest. I think it’s pretty cool.

Richard: Are you coming out? (laughing)

Jesse: I’m coming out as a Pinterest fan. Everybody, that’s public. Today’s August 2nd or something like that. So, yes, a Pinterest fan, there’s a lot of reasons why I love it. And I think other people will, too. But instead of just me and Rich talking about it here, let’s bring on our expert here, Kim Sutton from Positive Productivity. How’s it going, Kim?

Kim: Oh, it’s going great. I’m over here laughing that you love Pinterest because you are actually part of a growing demographic. So I love to hear it.

Jesse: That’s good. Yeah. There’s this idea that Pinterest is only for Midwestern moms, right? That’s the old idea. But I’m not a Midwestern mom. And, I think Pinterest is awesome.

Richard: But maybe that’s why Kim is so good at it, not trying to pigeonhole people but Kim, aren’t you in the Midwest?

Kim: You are so right. Who do people think Pinterest is for? They think it’s for moms. Midwestern moms who are looking for clothes, crafts, and recipes. But I burn every meal I try to cook. So I just don’t cook anymore. My husband does all that. I hate shopping for clothes. OK. Sorry to all the e-commerce shops that sell clothes. I just don’t like to shop for clothes. And my husband does all the crafts, but the kids love it.

Richard: We’re breaking all the stereotypes here. This is great. Jesse’s coming out. This is awesome.

Jesse: I’m a man who loves Pinterest. You’re a Midwestern mom who doesn’t cook or shop for clothes. That’s great. (laughing)

Kim: Yes, absolutely. No, that does not mean I don’t shop for clothes. I do not operate my business without clothes. But, yeah, I still love it. It’s the number one driver to my business and to a lot of my clients’ businesses.

Jesse: Huh. Well, now we’re getting some golden nuggets there. So Pinterest is the number one driver of traffic to your business.

Kim: Absolutely.

Jesse: Awesome.

Richard: Wow. That’s like the quotable, twittable, Instagram 15-second thing we’ve got to cut out of the podcast.

Jesse: Yeah, we will. But you just added like another 15 seconds to it. So we have to cut that part out too. (laughing) All right. You get all this traffic from Pinterest. Let’s back up for people that are like, “OK, I kind of heard a Pinterest.” What is Pinterest? I guess that would be the question.

Kim: Well, I think we need to start by saying that what it is not, which is it is not a social media platform. And I think that’s where a lot of people get confused. It’s a search engine. And Google is getting increasingly concerned about the amount of search traffic that Pinterest is sending to sites now because it’s actually taking. Google’s keeping an eye on what Pinterest is doing because people go into Pinterest to search for stuff, not to interact with people.

Richard: I’m going to take a little analogy, and I don’t know this to be true, but in the comment, you made there. This could be very similar to people who were on Facebook, and they started to get increasingly concerned that a bunch of people was doing the number one thing people did on Facebook in this little platform back then called Instagram. And so Facebook was watching them. Again, we don’t know. I don’t work at Google. You don’t work at Google. But I wouldn’t be surprised that that could potentially eventually be it. An amazing acquisition for them if they ever wanted to buy something in the space. Because it sounds like to your point there since Google is a search engine and they own the second biggest one, too, and YouTube, which is another search engine. This could be a perfect fit for someone like that. We’re not going to go down that rabbit hole but to your point there. It’s not where people go and “Hey, how you do and what’s going on? Here’s my puppy.” They still might put a picture of their puppy, but maybe it’s because they got puppy clothes on it. They are selling puppy clothes, or they got dog food that they make for puppies. It’s just a really interesting comment you made there. That search is really what Pinterest is. Search a visual platform, which is a visual platform search. Would you say that?

Kim: Oh, absolutely. It’s today’s equivalent to the bulletin board or the vision board of 30 years ago. And while a lot of us might still have vision boards and bulletin boards, this was the place that people could go and virtually pin the things that they really liked to one place and then share those boards with other people. And then it just grew and grew and grew to what it is today.

Jesse: And it’s still growing.

Kim: Oh, absolutely.

Jesse: So if people have been slipping on Pinterest like maybe you’ve seen it before, you’ve seen somebody scrolling through on their phone. Pinterest has got a lot of action right now. Something that I’ve noticed, too. And for other people in the e-commerce game, if you look at your analytics, traffic that comes from Pinterest is way more valuable than traffic from, say, Facebook, Instagram, even Google. People on Pinterest are there looking for inspiration, but they’re also looking to buy. They don’t like your picture of your kids or your friend’s kid. You’re not going to buy that kid. But when you pin things on Pinterest, these are things that you have an interest in buying. Hint, hint, everybody! Selling stuff. Listen to this podcast! People are looking for stuff to buy on Pinterest.

Richard: It’s a good point, Jesse. I was thinking about this the other day. The way Tricia, my wife, uses Pinterest is unlike maybe Google, where they’re doing a search, and they want to buy right then. This has a combination of they could buy right then. But there’s almost an element to Kim’s statement earlier of this vision board or this planning board, where it’s the things you’re maybe planning to buy. So you’re pinning it. When you come back, and you want to make that purchase later, you’re like, “Oh, I’m going back, and I’m going back to that pin.” And that could be one of the reasons why that’s so valuable. Have you noticed something like that, Kim, or know anything about that?

Kim: Well, I just want to give a personal example if that’s OK. I have a dream house that I will build someday. And I’ve been saving pins to my dream house board for five years now because I do intend to go back. And I’ve already shared it with, I was an interior architect in my previous life. I probably shared it with the architect that I will be working with because I want him to see it and his vision as well. But just see, you have an idea. Two million pins are saved to boards every single day that are shopping pins.

Jesse: Wow! OK.

Richard: Wow!

Jesse: Shopping pins, remember? Intent e-commerce listeners.

Richard: Two million a day.

Jesse: So two million shopping pins. That means these are pins of essential products. That means it’s not just a look at this shot of the beach. This is a picture, a pin of a product that they can buy reasonably easy from this pinboard.

Kim: Absolutely.

Jesse: All right. How come we haven’t done a Pinterest podcast, Rich?

Richard: We didn’t have Kim yet.

Jesse: OK. That’s true. All right.

Richard: Well, there are some new things coming along with Ecwid too, so that it’s timely as well. But if we go back to the 101, you’re saying it’s a search, you’re saying it’s a visual search, back to the vision board and things that you’re planning to do.

Jesse: I think it’s almost like a combo of Google and Instagram together, it’s visual, and you can follow people, but it usually starts with a search and then people get down a rabbit hole of looking at different things.

Richard: What are some of the things that people actually do there? Since you say, it’s not social, but you are finding other people’s pins like there is a form of a social element to it. If someone had never heard of Pinterest, what should they expect when they get on Pinterest a lot?

Kim: Vertical images. And I think when we look at social media separate from Pinterest, we see a lot of squares, but on Pinterest, we see a lot of really tall vertical images which really highlight the subject that we’re either talking about or promoting. The skyscraper images, but what you can expect is it starts to aggregate. When you go into Pinterest, it starts to notice what you really like, and it puts it in front of your face more as do a lot of different platforms. YouTube does that when it starts to see what you like to watch. It will start putting more of that in front of you. But what a lot of users have done is set up different boards where they make collections of images that tend to be all around one topic. Сan I just give an example?

Richard: Of course, we’d love an example.

Kim: Let’s just say there’s an e-commerce shop that is selling kitchenware. There might be a board for plates. There might be a bowl for cups and spoons. Different things because… if you open up an IKEA catalog at any given point… No, IKEA actually doesn’t do that, but just imagine one page that was all spoons and made it really easy to find.

Jesse: We’ve had on our recent podcast here, our example has been a pancake spatula. If you’re selling pancake spatulas, you could have a pinboard for pancake recipes and spatulas and one for spatula techniques. I don’t know. Is that thing…

Richard: Certain pancake pans.

Jesse: Yeah, absolutely. And you can get in super niche areas where the people that are gonna follow that board, they really feel, they really enjoy pancakes, and they’re likely a customer of yours. And you can apply that to your specific niche.

Kim: Absolutely. You touched on a really good point there without even knowing it. I don’t know, or maybe you did know it. But even when you’re just talking about pancakes, you could have separate boards, one for pancake pans, but another one for pancake art because people are… I’ve seen some great pancake artists who make these elaborate designs on their pancakes. But that would inspire people to buy the extra apparatus that it would take to make the pancake art.

Richard: I’ve never really thought about this. But something in your comments made me think about it. Is there a way… we don’t have to get into the actually explaining how to, I just want to know yes or no at this point in time with Pinterest. Is there a way to relatively easy make one picture go on multiple boards? Say, you have this pancake art and could it be on a unique artboard. It’s a thing you can make with this pinboard. I know this is a crazy analogy, but I was just wrong with that pancake spatula thing for a second. But can you make one picture relatively easy go to multiple boards?

Kim: Absolutely. And there’s the easy way. And it’s not so easy way, but it’s still easy. You can repin manually to as many different boards as you want to. Or there are tools. I’m just going to throw out Tailwind here that can do that for you. You just tell it which boards you want that pin repin to. And what’s great about that is that every time you repin, your followers are seeing it again. They may not have seen it the first time. I know you’ve talked about Twitter before, I think, but the average time spent on Pinterest purposes is 14.2 minutes. If it’s not that the pin’s seen in the last 14.2 minutes, you’re going to want to make sure that you’re shuffling it into the feed again and again and again.

Richard: That is super interesting because I’ve thought about that. The lifespan is short, but it’s still potentially long. Based on what you just stated. Like a tweet, it comes, and it goes. But since it’s a search engine also, it could come up via search. It could come up via this repin. But to bring back and tie together why I made that comment. Think you sell clothes and you sell kids’ clothes. And here’s a kid’s blue shirt. This could be under blue kids’ clothes. This could be under children’s clothes. This could be under just blue shirts, right? It could be in all these places. And then if you use a tool like you’re referring to Tailwind or I’m sure there are various tools out there, and then you start repinning this as people are searching for those things. Now they have multiple locations, multiple data points… I guess different data points is fine. Say multiple places they can go to find this. How do you recommend someone actually gets started? Say, they’re just getting rolling. Is it pretty easy to set up with another platform? Or you set up with an email, how do you get started?

Kim: The first step is to register for an account with your business. And I do recommend making it a business account which is free. You would sign up with a perk for a personal account first and then upgraded to a business account. It’s only a couple of steps. But the reason why I would do that is that you can see all the analytics. See which boards are performing best, see which pins are performing best, because as in any case in our business, we want to know what’s performing the best. We don’t want to pin more of them. And then the second step that I would really recommend is creating some type of strategy for what the most important boards should be. Now, there are profiles out there that may only have five boards. That’s great. I personally have 100 boards. I am not saying it in any way that you need 100 boards, but it’s really great to know from the start what you’re gonna have so that you can start creating the content and even sourcing other people’s content to go into your boards.

Richard: So that leads to another question. How does that work when you see something you like on someone else’s board or another pin, but you think it fits your board or fits your vision or it’s something you’d like to. Is there a reason that that would be good for you to pin to your board? Other than the obvious, it inspires you visually, or it’s something you want to get later. Would there be a reason as a business you would want to pin somebody else’s things on your board?

Kim: Absolutely. Because the person whose pin you just repinned will get a notification that you pinned it to your board. They’ll come over, see what you’re doing, and they may follow you. They might start pinning your stuff. And the moment they follow you, your pins are going to start showing up in their feet.

Jesse: Rich, I have a couple of different business accounts. And yeah, I get pinned all the time, people repin your stuff, and I haven’t done anything in a while. These are pins that I have maybe made… I don’t know like a year ago, and there’s still interest in there. People keep pinning them all over the place.

Richard: What about if… you guys we’re talking about, and you both know more about Pinterest, an idea. That’s not the place I play yet. We’ll see. Maybe Jesse can convert me. (laughing) Say someone had a shoppable pin, and then you like it and you repin it. Am I now also driving traffic towards their site?

Kim: When you repin it now your audience sees it as well. It’s almost like a Facebook share. If you shared a piece of my content, now all of your friends or followers see my content now to. Which is fabulous.

Richard: What if it’s shoppable though, say you have something that goes directly to one of your product pages, and someone else pins it, and they pin it. Will that pin that they just pinned lead back to your product?

Kim: Absolutely. The link carries as many times as it’s repinned.

Richard: Wow. That’s awesome.

Jesse: Yeah. That’s why I’m excited about Pinterest. A lot of the things we talk about, you create all this content, and then it disappears. With Pinterest, it does live on for a bit. You do this work, and with Pinterest, you have to build more of a skyscraper image. That’s a little bit of work there. But it does tend to live on way, way longer. And there we use shoppable all the time for other platforms. This is more of a rich pin, rich shopping pin. At the end of the day, it leads back to your store, so people can buy. That’s why it’s also so awesome for e-commerce stores, in my opinion.

Kim: The pins that are sending the most traffic to my site — just to inspire people — our blog articles from 2013-2015. Now I don’t want to date stamp this for you because it’s not my show, but let’s just say that that’s more than a few years old.

Jesse: Yeah. You wrote this. You did the work for these blogs years ago. Then you made the pins, which… OK, let’s ask that question. You did a blog post. You do all the stuff on your blog. Now, you made a pin for that blog post. How long does that take?

Kim: Five minutes tops in Canva.

Jesse: Okay. Good. Canva.com for everybody, which referenced many times, if you want to make a quick pin, go to Canva. It’s five minutes. And now you’re still getting traffic. Now six years later here, you’re still getting traffic from that pin in that blog post.

Kim: I am. And this might inspire you too, Jesse, but I’m even pinning all of my own podcast episodes now, and it’s driving traffic to my podcast episodes.

Jesse: Okay. Love it. Love the hot tip there on the podcast. Unfortunately, I have a new job to do. But yes. And Ecwid does have, we are trying to stay active on Pinterest as well. There are some Pinterest boards. Shout out to Karina, who’s managing it. We’ve got to get the podcast there now, too. You can also put a video there. We put some of our recent videos in there, the videos of Tim and me, by the way, Tim’s the star. All right. I could go a lot of different directions with this. Let’s try to bring it back to the people that have heard of Pinterest, have heard of Pinterest and are doing a little bit of stuff on Instagram and Facebook and all this stuff. For them to get started, it’s really maybe adopting a similar strategy, but applying it on Pinterest with a new image? Would that be a fair place to start or should they put a little more thought into it before they start their first pinboards?

Kim: A little bit more thought, but not a lot is necessary. I just want to make a one really important point, that because Pinterest is a search engine, you want to make sure that you are naming your graphic appropriately because it’s not just looking at the title of your pin. When you upload an image, you give it a title on Pinterest, but you also want to make sure that when you saved a file in Canva or to your computer, that you’re giving it a great name.

Jesse: All right, guys, that’s another like back to SEO 101 there. So pancake spatula. If you’re here making your pancake spatula pin, you name the file “pancake-spatula” or whatever, and then you label it. Use those same keywords. This is repeated across the board in all the podcasts, but use the keywords that you think people will search for. Awesome tip.

Richard: You do know now that we transcribe this. And we’ve talked about this enough time. You do know we’re almost mandating that we’re gonna have to create a pancake spatula site.

Jesse: Yeah, I think we’re going to own the keyword pancake spatula, and no one will be able to start a store because we’re just gonna blow everybody off the water with this and we don’t sell them. (laughing)

Richard: Yet.

Jesse: Yet, got it. So naming is a very important thing. Organic pinboards. Is it important for somebody that’s getting started to start pinning from other boards right away? Or how do they start getting interest to their pinboards?

Kim: Pinterest places more favor and more weight on boards that have at least 10 pins on them. Even if you don’t pin them all in one straight shot, if you use a scheduling tool, make sure that you’re scheduling 10 pins to go on that board as soon as possible. Now, another point for your boards is also to make sure that you’re naming your boards appropriately. I’ve seen so many boards, they have cutesy names. Let’s just use pancake spatula here. Don’t name it “pancake flippers,” “funny pancake flippers” or something that people wouldn’t be searching for, which they could definitely be looking for that. But make it pretty obvious because if people are searching for pancake special, your board is going to come up closer to the top of the search results, if you named the board appropriately. There’s also a description that you want to think about for your boards. And while the pins themselves will have a place to link back to your site, the boards don’t. So make sure that in the board description you include a link to let’s just say the pancake spatula category within your shop.

Richard: That’s a good point. You’re thinking category when you’re putting a link on the board. You’re thinking product page, directly to probably what they’re looking at in the pin itself. The actual pin.

Kim: Right. Absolutely. For my podcast board, the description for the podcast board sends them back to my overall podcast page. But the podcast pins themselves take them back to their individual episodes.

Richard: Good point. So I have a question. Here we go back thinking of the listener, and they’re going: “Hey, guys, wait a minute, hold on. Remember, this is my side hustle business right now. I’m committed to building this business, but you, Jesse and Rich, you told me about YouTube. You told me about Instagram. I have to be in so many places. Can I repurpose photos I’ve had from somewhere else to get this going or do I have to start whole new photos with?”

Kim: You can absolutely repurpose. But when you have time, I would recommend converting them all to tall images rather than square or short and wide. Because the more real estate you can take up on the homepage, the more attention you’re going to get and the more click-throughs and engagement.

Jesse: Yeah, and Rich, that was a good point. I think maybe we mentioned it briefly in the intro. But you probably cannot be everywhere all at once. You can’t do fancy YouTube videos, be active on Facebook and Instagram and your store and blah blah like all these things. But for some people, Pinterest is probably the perfect place. And for some people it’s YouTube and for some people, Facebook. I don’t want to say you have to do all these, but let’s talk about who is Pinterest perfect for? Kim, can you shed some light there? There’s a ton of recipes, so maybe food, people that sell food would Pinterest might be perfect for. But what are some other niches that would be perfect for Pinterest?

Kim: I don’t know if this is how you want me to answer the question, but I got to be totally honest.

Jesse: Be honest.

Kim: If you have content, if you have blog articles, podcasts, episodes, products for sale in your shop if you have, a blog that shares recipes, any of the above. Pinterest is perfect for you. More and more every single day, more people are registering. They’re going there. They’re finding infographics, and they’re embedding them in their own shop. Yes, you have to be careful, that’s not your intellectual property. You need permission to do that. But I go to Pinterest when I’m looking for a great infographic on a specific subject. So if you have content to share, Pinterest is a great place to go.

Richard: Let me clarify just to make sure. You’re saying don’t go all over the web and then take an infographic and put it on your Pinterest. But if someone has an infographic on Pinterest, you’re more than welcome to repin it.

Kim: You are more than welcome to reprint it. Ask the permission before you reshare it to your site.

Richard: Okay. I just want to clarify. Got it.

Jesse: Never steal stuff online. You’re just asking for trouble.

Richard: Because some people are saying: “Wait, you just said I could repin someone else’s things.” So I just wanted to clarify. You’re talking about going out, finding something somewhere else and bringing it. But if you just see an infographic that you like, you’re more than welcome to repin it on your board. And it’s all good. You’re saying more or less then, I guess it comes back to your comment of it’s a search engine. Maybe that’s why people… going back to our initial conversation there when we were pigeonholing, or we think the world had pigeonholed that this is Midwestern moms looking for recipes.

Jesse: Yeah, and I didn’t mean to pigeonhole.

Richard: I know, because you like it, you just got done saying it. You blew the pigeonhole right out of the gate. And I know that’s not what you meant, but I’m saying I know even myself included when I first heard about it. That’s what I heard about, it was recipes, it was pictures of things that were inspiring. But I was off playing on all those other platforms that we discussed and you never really got in there. Kind of going back to your comment since it’s a search engine. Is there a way to possibly discover… let’s say someone has an idea of something they want to do and then you could go into Google and you could look at searches and Google AdWords and Keyword Planner and see: “Oh, there’s this many people search for that and only this many requests for that.” Is there a way to look at the stats in Pinterest and almost game-like “Hey, here I have 10 things in my mind of things I’d like to sell. Holy moly, look at all those searches for that thing.” Is there any tool or anything that gives you insights as to what kind of searches are going on in Pinterest?

Kim: I have not seen a way to look at the number of searches in Pinterest but a real key indicator — you can see how many times a pin has been repinned. So if you see that there’s one idea, this one pin has only been pinned once, and you can see it right there. But this other idea that pen has been repinned 10000 times, that may be an indicator.

Richard: Got it. So we don’t have a place where we can go and look at hard stats but…

Kim: Not that I know of but I’m not going to say that for sure.

Richard: I’m sure there is. I don’t know of it because again I don’t pin it that much. But so in reading between the lines here what you’re saying is take your 10 ideas that you have in this hypothetical. Write those 10 ideas down, go into Pinterest, look them up, find the one that has the most engagement, and give that one a shot. If they’re all equal and you desire to do those things and your ability to actually make margin on those things. Other things come into play, but if someone was trying to reverse engineer, man where do I start, there are so many things. I was hoping she would answer that it’s a super narrow niche of exactly what I want to do, but she says no, this is a search engine and people are going there looking for all kinds of things. They’re looking for plants, are looking for houses, they’re looking for how to rebuild a car, they’re looking for recipes too. They’re looking for a clue, they’re looking for everything it sounds like.

Kim: They are, they are. But I want to go back to the recipe points. There are 1.7 billion recipe pins on Pinterest, but that’s not to say that’s… I mean there are billions, and there are 75 billion ideas on Pinterest, so if only 1.7 out of those 75 billion ideas are recipes, think about everything else that’s out there right now.

Jesse: Yeah, yeah. I would encourage everybody. Most people listening to this podcast have an e-commerce store. Take the products you have and look on Pinterest right now and see what’s out there. It’s very likely that there are other people, their competitors out there, their opinion things. You might want to get in that game. And from who should be doing it is yes, everybody. But there some people that are really going to benefit from it. They might be like: “All right, I’m done with Facebook ads, I’m going to Pinterest.” I think it’s definitely for me one of the top few things you should be testing and if it happens to work for you, you dedicate a lot of time towards it. I wish I had more time for myself personally, but that’s because I have this Pinterest addiction now that I have to feed. I want to get into a little bit of tactical for people that are listening. By the way, everything we’ve mentioned here before, this is all free. So you are spending your time to attract traffic to your store for free. We haven’t talked about any ads yet, but Pinterest is making a lot of moves in the e-commerce world right now. On the Ecwid side, we have now integrated the pixel, so you can do one click, and the pixel is installed. That’s going to start tracking and getting analytics, and it will be good for advertising in the future. That’s coming in the future. But mostly Pinterest now allows you to import your product catalog into Pinterest. So you do need to sign up for the business account like Kim mentioned. Definitely, want to get the business accounts. There’s no reason not to. And then there’s a couple of ways to get your product catalog in there depending on when you listen to this. It will be different, but you can always use your Google feed to get in there, eventually will have a direct connection, so get your product feed in there. What that does is it essentially allows your prices and your product information to go directly into Pinterest.

Richard: We didn’t talk about this prior, but I’m assuming… and you know what that means sometimes, so hopefully it’s not going that way. If they’ve listened to previous episodes and they’ve already set up that feed, it’s gonna be a lot easier.

Jesse: It should be a piece of cake. But I say that knowing that… OK, don’t email me on this. (laughing)

Richard: Stick to the support.

Jesse: Yeah, it’s OK to support. (laughing)

Richard: “Jesse said…”

Jesse: Ok, It’s should be pretty easy. It should be a few minutes to get your products there. But now that allows the rich pin functionality which is kind of the big thing in Pinterest. Kim, let me redirect this back to you. Have you worked with some e-commerce clients in the past? This would help.

Richard: E-commerce is a big question. We don’t really necessarily even care if they’re selling a book or info. They’re selling something online, and Pinterest led to sales.

Kim: I’ve worked with myself. (laughing)

Richard: That’s the best. We like it. That’s why they’re listening to the show. They’re trying to help build their businesses work. That’s perfect.

Kim: Yes. I work with a lot of business and life coaches who do have products to sell. Not in the way that we might be talking about here but they are selling products online. Pinterest has been a great way to do it. And what we do is we make sure that we set up rich pins which I know with what you’re doing and making it so easy to get the pixel installed. The rich pins, and don’t let me overwhelm you at all, it’s such an easy thing even if your tech skills are close to zero. It’s an easy way to add more information to every single pin so that it’s easier to shop. It’s easier to find out about what you’re selling. And it’s just easier to know if you do or do not want to buy the product from directly within Pinterest.

Jesse: Yeah. That’s what I was looking to get to. And unfortunately, as much as I like Pinterest, I don’t quite understand it. And the rich pin functionality is basically what you’re enabling by doing this catalog integration. That’s going to be super key for e-commerce businesses so that the price is and when people are scrolling through Pinterest they see that price, and it’s connected back to your store. It’s sort of like why wouldn’t you connect us, you should definitely do it. Do the steps and get that done. That was the point I was getting at.

Richard: I have one quick question for you, Kim. I think it’s a quick question. We talked about how you want to name the pins. And we talked about the importance of naming the board, and how to link pins to the actual product page, and linking your board to the category page in this e-commerce play here. But what about the naming of your account? Is there anything that matters there? Because you look at Instagram as cousin so to speak, it’s a visual discovery process, not necessarily searching the same. But is there a reason maybe “travel dreams” or naming it some bigger? Can you get a little more playful there or should you still stick to this is exactly what it’s about?

Kim: When people are searching on Pinterest for you, you want to make it really easy to find. With just an easier example, Richie, if the name of your shop is Travel Dreams, you want somebody to be able to go on Pinterest, search for travel dreams and find you really easily.

Richard: The reason why I ask that is Jesse, and I’ve been doing e-commerce for so long that we even messed around in the early days of what we would call virtual real estate. Like we’re just domain buying junkies. And when you think of all the people that are on all these platforms and have bought all these names. Sometimes it’s hard to say: “I’m going to get… this is gonna be my name, and it’s going to be my exact same name on all my social platforms and on Pinterest and my email”. I totally get and understand your answer. You basically try to be as congruent as possible. But if it can’t be the exact match of your name of your website or store, you still want to name it something that either invokes that emotion, some sort of word that they’re typing in. I guess maybe the question would be do accounts come up in the search to or only what you’ve pinned and or put on boards?

Kim: You have the option to click over to accounts when you do a search. It’ll ask you if you want to look at the people. All the Pinterest users, whether you have a business account or a personal account, they refer to you as people, not a user. I would make sure if it can’t be the exact same as your shop, get it as close as you can but make sure that your user name is still keyword, Rich. And then also you do have a bio. I was actually just googling, full confession, I can’t remember how many characters. It’s not a whole lot of characters that you have for your bio, but you could put the name of your company in there. But also do a little bit of keyword loading or… is that the right expression? Load up your bio.

Jesse: Yeah, keyword stuffing.

Kim: In your bio, so that one if they’re searching for you, if they’re searching for a specific type of product that you specialize in, you can put it right in there. And it will help your search results as well.

Jesse: All comes back to that SEO 101. Don’t get too cutesy with your name and your description. Use the words that people use to describe what you do and what you sell, and it will probably work. Good advice to keep repeating. Kim, if you’ve done any advertising on Pinterest, have you played wrong with that at all?

Kim: I have played with it, but I really haven’t put a lot of time or money into it. Full confession. For me, it didn’t work really well. But I don’t do a ton of paid advertising anyway, and it’s not something that I want to spend a lot of my time learning. I’m sure that it’s working wonderfully for some people. It’s just for me it didn’t.

Jesse: Fair enough. Actually, let’s take a look at the positive side. You’re getting all this traffic from Pinterest, and you don’t actually pay to advertise there. Even better.

Kim: Yes.

Jesse: And now for the advertising nerds out there, there are so many different options to advertise on Pinterest. I would say even a little bit overwhelming. But you can do remarketing, you can do “act alike” which is “a look-alike” in the Pinterest world. So many different formats. I won’t even get into all the different options on there but just to let people know, you can do a ton of different advertising options. Not trying to get you to go start advertising today but do want to encourage you to start out the process and start getting going organically on Pinterest. Then you can have it when we bring you on a podcast. Kim, you can say Pinterest was your number one advertising source or advertising traffic source I should say. Awesome. Now I want to do one little more expert level thing here. Kim, you’d mentioned the name Tailwind, so it’s Tailwind.com I believe. Can you give a little description of what, how you were able to use this tool to boost your traffic from Pinterest?

Kim: Sure. I just want to share that I have my business, I have my podcast, I have five kids. So the amount of time that I can spend to actually put into life Pinterest marketing, it’s few and far between because I have a lot of other places that my attention is going. So what Tailwind allows me to do is schedule pins and Instagram posts to go out in the future. Usually, right now, my Pinterest queue is loaded for the next month, and I don’t need to worry about pinning anything in real-time​.

Jesse: Perfect. So you can go on vacation.

Kim: Yes, please, hook me up. (laughing)

Richard: What is this vacation you speak of? (laughing)

Kim: But I also want to share if you don’t mind that I also use Tailwind to do a ​smart loop and this is what I was talking about before. I have designated some pins to be smart-looped, which means it will constantly just keep on recycling them. It doesn’t do them any closer usually than 30 days apart. Pinterest doesn’t like any closer if you’re using a ​smart loop. I don’t want to contradict what I was talking about earlier. Pin to as many boards as you possibly want. But if you’re going to pin the same pin to the same board, you want to give it a little bit of time just so that you’re not making Pinterest mad, but that’s why I use a smart loop. It’s repinning my pins and every time I see it repin something, I know I can see it in my traffic to my site because I can see where they’re going. I was like “Oh, that article went out today again, that podcast went out again today.” I can see that traffic.

Richard: Is this Tailwind a freemium model? Can people get started for free and check it out or is it paid? Does it have different tiers?

Kim: Yes to both. You can get started for free. And then if you need greater capacity and volume, then you can upgrade.

Richard: Awesome. Got it.

Jesse: Cool. We’ll include that on the blog post page on Ecwid.com/blog/podcast. Got to get my shout out there for URL. Kim this has really been helpful, I think. I hope a lot of listeners out there were able to pull some ideas, how to get started on Pinterest. If they’re looking to learn more from you, how they can build their Pinterest business or beyond, where can they find out more from you?

Kim: All right. I’d love to offer a Pinterest marketing checklist to listeners.

Jesse: Please do.

Kim: Which you can find at thekimsutton.com/pinterest-checklist.

Jesse: All right.

Richard: Awesome. Cool. Thank you so much, Kim. This has been fantastic. Normally, I am pretty versed in this subject, and this is one of those times where I was furiously taking notes the whole time, and I got to admit you guys might converted me too.

Jesse: All right, that’s good. Rich, we’ll get you on the pinboards. Kim, thank you so much for appearing.

Kim: Thank you for having me.