Mastering Pinterest Marketing Strategies

Looking for a place to market your writing business where you may be able to be the only copywriter talking to your prospects? Pinterest may be the answer. Heather Farris, the go-to Pinterest Marketing Expert for a lot of service providers, course creators and others is our guest for the 409th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. She shared how to get started, how to find the right key words, and how to get clients off Pinterest and onto your mailing list (or buying your products). This is a good one. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: Heather's Website Heather's Pinterest Board The Copywriter Club Pinterest Board The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground   Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: It doesn’t matter how good you are as a copywriter, if your ideal clients can’t find you, you won’t have a lot of work that you really enjoy. In fact, if clients can’t find you, you may not have any work at all. Copywriters have been solving this get-found-by-clients problem in a lot of ways. They’re on Instagram posting photos and reels. They’re on Linkedin sharing client success stories and thought leadership. They guest on podcasts like this one, sharing their frameworks and processes to attract the clients they want to work with. But the problem with all of those platforms is that there are literally thousands of other copywriters doing the same thing—trying to get attention and connect with the clients they want to work with. What if you could attract clients from a search engine that’s been around for years, but it ignored by almost everyone? Hi, I’m Rob Marsh, one of the founders of The Copywriter Club. And on today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I’m chatting with Pinterest Marketing Consultant Heather Farris. Her title gives away the answer to the intro, but Heather has been helping service providers connect with their ideal clients on Pinterest for years. As you almost certainly know, Pinterest is an image based search engine with almost 500 million active monthly users. And some pretty easy-to-use tools for finding keywords so you can connect with your ideal clients. Now I’ve always thought of Pinterest as a place to find cool images, but clients? Heather set me straight and not only will you like this interview, but I’m guessing more than a few listeners will use what Heather shares to find their own clients on Pinterest.  Before we jump in with Heather… If you’re listening to this episode when it goes live, The Copywriter Accelerator is open now for the only time this year. The Accelerator is our 8-part, 16 week program that helps you build a successful freelance business whether you’re a copywriter, a content writer, or you use your writing as a strategist, a social media specialist or something else. You’ll learn how to position your business so clients want to work with you. You’ll learn what it takes to create successful products and services that solve real client problems that client’s can’t wait to buy. You’ll learn the various ways to price what you do so you get paid for the value you create, not the time that you work. You’ll set up the right processes and learn how to manage clients. You’ll get more than 29 different ideas for ways to get yourself in front of the clients you want to work with, and you’ll take the first steps toward creating a brand that resonates with you and the people you want to work with. Many of the copywriters who have gone through The Accelerator have gone on to build six figure businesses—many have even been on this podcast… like Justin Blackman, Chanti Zak, Zafira Rajan, Kirsty Fanton… the list goes on. If you want to use the strategies and ideas that helped them in your own business, go to TheCopywriterAccelerator.com now. It’s open for three more days, then closed until next year. And who knows... maybe forever. And now, let's go to our interview with Heather Farris. Heather, welcome. I'm excited to be chatting with you today. And as we usually do, let's start off with how you got to where you are. How did you become a Pinterest ad strategist, consultant, and I guess Pinterest marketing expert? Heather Farris: I just happened to fall into it, to be honest. I have a history and a college degree that I'm still paying for, painfully so. in accounting and management and finance. So I was living in a very, very small town of 13,000 people. When I graduated college, my husband was in the air force and I didn't want to have to drive an hour one way—I had a family. So that was like commute time. I didn't want to have to spend time away from them to go into Kansas city to work in an accounting firm.  I found a tiny little bookkeeping firm that was paying $12 an hour and I was making No money. And I was just looking for any way to make more money than what I was making, or at least make what I was making and have more time with my family. And I went to Pinterest one day and I searched “how to work from home”. Today, people would be searching for “side hustle” because that's the new terminology. But that's what I looked for. And I found this whole world. I had no idea it even existed. And I was using Pinterest every single day up to that point. And I found blogging. And then one thing led to another, and I was building funnels and starting to sell digital products and making courses. And yeah, here we are eight years later. Rob Marsh: So I'm curious. First off, most people, when they want to figure out how to do something, they go to Google. You immediately went to Pinterest, which is maybe why you ended up where you are. But why? Absolutely. Why? Heather Farris: Why? Yeah, because I'd been using Pinterest every day up to that point. as my main search engine. I started using it when I was 20. That's when the platform came out. It was 2010. I had a brand new baby. And I was newly married. And I didn't know how to do anything. I didn't know how to decorate. I didn't know how to cook. I didn't know how to properly clean. These are just things that you would normally learn. And I did learn some of those things at home growing up. But when you have your own place and you're trying to cook food for your new husband, It just – nothing felt right that I was finding on Google and everything was making me sick. So I went to Facebook and I typed in that third party Facebook status from third person. My sister-in-law texted me and she's like, hey, you should try this platform out. It was Pinterest and it was only in beta and I waited two weeks for my invitation to come and it came and every single thing that I was finding on there was food because all the food bloggers at the time were using Pinterest heavily. And I single-handedly taught myself how to cook. I've cooked over 3,000 recipes, Rob, from Pinterest over the years. I have fully taught myself how to do all sorts of different cuisines and cultures and baking. Rob Marsh: So while we're talking about that, how many of them were your kids willing to eat? Because most parents have five recipes in rotation, right? Heather Farris: Not very many. Yeah. Not very many. 3,000 is a lot. Rob Marsh: 3,000 recipes over 14 years. Heather Farris: That's a long time. But that's where it all started was I went there to learn how to teach myself how to cook because I was cooking literally hamburger helper and it was making me sick. So one thing led to another and it just became my main search engine. So yeah, I went there for everything. Rob Marsh: Yeah, that I see this already is a different, different way of thinking from me. So before we started recording, I told you I'm, I'm like, I have zero knowledge of Pinterest. I do have like a Pinterest account. And I think I've pinned three or four things to a board. My daughters love it. My daughters are on it all the time. Uh, but yeah, I, I don't, I don't use it, you know, much. We're going to get into that for sure. Before we do that though, uh, I want to know about your blog. You know, as you started blogging, what were you doing? What were you writing about and did you grow it? Did it start to produce money for you? Like how did that all come together? Heather Farris: Yeah. So I started that blog in July of 2017. Yes. I believe that's the right timeline. And by December, I had grown it to with Pinterest traffic. I'd grown it to over 5,000 page views a month in just that very short amount of time. I had started to apply for ads and I had started to sell a digital course on budgeting because I was blogging about motherhood and budgeting and like meal planning and all of these things. It was like a lifestyle blog that I was just sharing my life with other people. It had done really well. And I'd started to monetize with some affiliate links, and I was looking for some sponsorship opportunities. When the winter came about and the new year came around, and I had an opportunity to actually just do what I was doing for my own Pinterest account for some other bloggers. And I realized very quickly I could make a lot more money and do a lot less work by just offering what I was doing as a service to other people. So I continued Doing the blog thing for a while, I continued selling digital products. I was actually approached by companies like Trello. I had featured them on my blog and they had found out that I had featured them on my blog and they reached out and did an interview with me. There was a couple of other things like that too that had popped up, but it just kept coming around that I was really good at this thing. I was really good at doing Pinterest marketing and driving traffic to websites. And I didn't have to share my life anymore in order to still make an income. I just got in this rut where I felt like I was living my life in order to make money and I didn't want to do that. I don't want to do that today. I like privacy and yeah, it just,