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BBP 015: What makes a good pin? With Carly Campbell

Resources Mentioned:

About Carly Campbell

Carly is a full time stay at home mom, full time blogger who loves helping other moms learn how to use Pinterest to make their blogs profitable! You can find out more about her at https://mommyonpurpose.com/

Shownotes

Hey Boss, welcome to the Blogger Breakthrough Podcast, I’m your host, Liz Stapleton from ElizabethStapleton.com and founder of the Blogger Breakthrough Summit. 

I’m currently hard at work putting together for the 2021 Summit, so I thought it would be fun to share some of the amazing information that was shared by the 2020 speakers. 

Remember if you want to make sure you’re the first to hear about registration opening for the 2021 summit – be sure to join the Summit’s newsletter, bloggerbreakthrough.com/newsletter

Now sessions were 30-45 minutes long and since I promised to never have an episode be more than 15 minutes. So I’ve pulled out snippets to make sure these podcast episodes stay short and sweet.

Today I’m sharing a bit of Pinterest knowledge from Carly Campbell, let’s dive in…

[00:01:04].820] – Carly
Consistent, like Pinterest traffic fluctuates. It goes up and down for sure.

[00:01:07].720] – Liz
But you want to compare it year over year to see if you’re growing in the right direction, because especially niche wise, they’re certain seasons that do better. You know? Most most niches have some kind of season to them where it’s going to be up and down.

[00:01:21].020] – Carly
Absolutely. And there are ways that you can insulate yourself against that on Pinterest over time. But certainly in the first year, there is not a lot you can do about that.

[00:01:31].270] – Liz
Let’s talk about what is a good pin?

[00:01:32].870] – Carly
What is a good pin? That is a loaded question.

[00:01:35].900] – Liz It sure is!

[00:01:36].830] – Liz
I mean, there’s a lot of aspects to it, right? You’ve got the graphics, you’ve got the call-to-action in the title. You’ve got the keywords. You’ve got the description. You’ve got maybe hashtags, although I’ve been experimenting with not hashtags, because I feel like their fading.

[00:01:51].260] – Carly
I’ve quit hashtags. I completely quit hashtags in October.

[00:01:54].920] – Liz
Yeah, yeah. I not long after that I was like, you know what, these Pins that don’t have hashtags seem to be doing better.

[00:02:01].040] – Carly
I haven’t seen…I will definitely I will say I have not seen a decline anywhere since quitting hashtags. I saw a definite, definite uptick to begin with, but I don’t think it was related. I think it was very seasonal.

And since then, I’ve leveled back down because the seasonal stuff is dead. But I don’t feel like that’s got anything to do with hashtags.

[00:02:23].560] – Liz
Yeah, because I feel like Pinterest invested in hashtags. Right? And they like, from an engineering standpoint, the reality is that people searching on Pinterest, aren’t using hashtags so it wasn’t really…

[00:02:35].430] – Carly
That’s right. Everything comes back to user intent. What is the end user doing? And when you mentioned earlier, click through. What is it our Pin? What makes a good Pin that is going to encourage a user to click through it?

[00:02:49].000] – Liz Yeah.

[00:02:49].660] – Carly
And that is, that right there is what a good pin is, but there’s so much in there. So can the user read your pin when the scrolling on their phone? Because that’s where.

[00:02:57].790] – Liz
It gets small because a lot of bloggers. I always tell them, because I do mine and Google slides. I tell them don’t look at the slide, look at the thumbnail on the side and see if you can read it

[00:03:06].250] – Carly
That’s such! Yeah, that’s exactly it! After you pin that thing, go straight to your phone. If you’re not in Google Slides, then it’s hard to look at them small, go straight to your phone and check it out and look at what it looks like in, you know, 1 inch x 1/2 inch. Because if you cannot read that text on that Pin and text is really important for a click through. You can get a lot of saves on a pin that has no text.

[00:03:30].030] – Liz Yes.

[00:03:30].800] – Carly
But that text is your call to action. It’s your thing that’s going to encourage somebody to click. Tell them what’s on the other side of that picture.

[00:03:38].390] – Liz Yeah, yeah.

[00:03:38].870] – Carly
So and so reading it is so important on the phone, which means that the contrast between your image in your text has to be good.You have to be really careful about script fonts versus clear bold fonts.If I, especially for niches, this is the one that always gets me, like travel niches or food niches, where the…

[00:04:03].350] – Liz
I feel like they’re always using scripts.

[00:04:05].600] – Carly
Always scripts, but also where the end user doesn’t always use the word as a regular part of their vocabulary. So like, the name of an Italian town. If you’re planning a trip to Italy and you’re searching on Pinterest, you might know that name, kind of, you kind of know you’re looking for Italian town name and you see it written out in non cursive. What’s that called? Why am I blanking on this?

[00:04:34].340] – Liz Just regular, plain font?

[00:04:34].530]

Yeah. Part of your brain will immediately understand what you’re reading. But if you have to slow down to read it in script font, the user is going to default to clicking on the pin right next to yours, competing with yours, that they read first. So if yours is in font they’re going to click on the one they can read first. You know, I’m trying to think of a name of an Italian town that would be difficult to read. I haven’t been to a ton of Italian towns.

[00:04:59].620] – Liz
Me either! I’m trying to think and I’m like?

[00:05:04].460] – Carly
Rome is not a good example because Rome is so.

[00:05:06].180] – Liz
Tuscany? Tuscany in a scripty font would be hard to read.

[00:05:11].310] – Carly
Tuscany! Yeah, you probably don’t use that word every day.

[00:05:15].140] – Carly
But if you’re looking for Tuscany vacation ideas, the ones that are easy to read, you’re going to click on them first. Okay, so make that font bigger too. Fill the space that you have, you know?

[00:05:26].180] – Liz
And in that, sticking with our Italy travel example, right… If your pin is clearly says Tuscany travel ideas or whatever in that description, because they may not be searching Tuscany specifically. You want to use Tuscany in your in your description? Yes. We also would be like if you’re looking for some great travel ideas when you go to Italy.

[00:05:45].750] – Carly Yes.

[00:05:46].120] – Liz
These are fantastic things to do in Tuscany, you know?

[00:05:49].730] – Carly Totally!

[00:05:49].970] – Liz
Like step out, so that the keywords that they’re searching for, they’re probably looking at like Italy travel ideas.

[00:05:55].220] – Carly Totally!

Wrap Up

And on that note, I want to say thank you for joining me today. I hope this episode helped give you a bit more perspective and understanding of Pinterest. Join me next week when I’ll be sharing some lessons from Grayson Bell on wordpress mistakes you should avoid.

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