In this episode, Daniel Hall, Internet marketing and Pinterest expert, shares, why authors should use Pinterest to promote their books and their businesses, what makes Pinterest unique, and tips and tricks to get the most out of your Pinterest marketing.

Resources mentioned

Daniel Hall’s handle on Pinterest: Real Fast Results
Free Pinterest Course: www.realfastsocialgraphics.com

Pretty Links Plugin for WordPress
Alternative that Ellen uses (This is an affiliate link) http://ellenlikes.com/prettylink
Canva for graphics www.canva.com
Free Canva Training from Ellen Violette at:

3 Key Points

Pinterest is a search engine so you can find what you are looking for based on the topic.

Pinterest encourages sharing, which can get your posts in front of a huge audience.

Pinterest allows you to embed links into your graphics unlike other sites and they are shared each time your graphic is shared as well.

 Show Notes

[0:51]  Daniel Hall. Daniel Hall is a USA Today and wall Street Journal bestselling author, speaker, consultant, coach, lawyer from Texas Tech University, nurse, and host of the top rated Real Fast Results podcast. He’s also the creator of the popular Real Fast Training Program designed to help authors, speakers, coaches, consultants, trainers, internet marketers, and entrepreneurs effectively grow their business faster and more profitably and effortlessly.

[1:41]  Why is Pinterest great for authors?

[1:51]  Pinterest is by far one of the most effective social media platforms. The first thing is that Pinterest does a really good job of allowing its users to organize themselves around key subjects, and keywords, and different passions that people have. And that goes for both fiction and nonfiction authors.

Let’s say, for example, that you are a romance writer, and your book is set in France. There are going to be boards. And on Pinterest, people can organize “boards” that are related to whatever subject matter that they’re into.

In non-fiction, there are boards for authors, there are boards for digital publishers, there are boards for course creators, there’s boards for affiliate marketers, and on and on and on and on it goes. So just about any subject matter under the sun, you’re going to have people interested in that and passionate about that using Pinterest. Essentially, people organize themselves. That is your core demographic. The demographic that you’re endeavoring to sell your books to, have already congregated around boards and follow boards on Pinterest related to that subject matter.

What is a board? (for people who don’t know) A board is… Well, let’s step back one more step.

[5:59]   Pinterest is essentially an online bulletin board. You’ve had an analog bulletin board with cork boards and thumbtacks and you put up pictures and notes and things like that up on it. Well, that’s essentially what Pinterest is, except it’s all online.

[6:50] When you sign up with Pinterest you pin your own stuff into whatever it is that you like and you can have whatever kind of boards you want. But then how does it benefit you when you go to somebody else’s board?

[7:08] Pinterest is not so much as a social media platform;  is mostly a search engine of human-curated graphics. Mostly static images, but you can also post things like videos and animated gifs and cinemographs and things like that as well. So, you can put up content in the form of these pins or images.

A pin is an image and an image is a pin in context of this interview. So, every pin on Pinterest is made up of some kind of graphic and these graphics are, in effect, graphical representations of short articles related to their subject matter. It’s a graphic, an image of some kind that you put those same bullet points and the same high-quality content that you might use in an article.

So basically, they are graphical representations of articles, for the most part. So here’s how people find you

[9:36]     There’s two ways that Daniel went into in the interview.  A person may have several boards related to one topic. For instance, Paris- like Paris hotspots, Paris at night, romantic dinners in Paris. And each one of these is a discreet board that you control. Remember, Pinterest is a search engine. So, people find you not because they follow you, but because they go to Pinterest, use it as a search engine and find whatever topic it is they’re interested in. And if you put together really good quality content, Pinterest shows them or is likely to show them your pin. Even though that person searching for your stuff, doesn’t know you from Adam. So, people find you basically on the quality of your content.

[10:57] Is there SEO for that? Keywords?

[11:00]   Yes. So, you want to name the pin itself-you can put in a title for every pin. You have, Daniel thinks, 400 characters underneath in what’s called a title description that you could use keywords. And in addition to that, you can name the pin, the actual image that they’re uploading to Pinterest, with those same keywords, just to make it easier for it to be found. So, let’s say that people find you and then they say, “Oh, I really like this pin.” And this brings me to the third big beautiful thing about Pinterest is, Pinterest actually actively encourages sharing-sharing is the backbone of Pinterest.And when you find a pin you like, Pinterest prompts you to save that image to one of your boards.

[12:48] And it does it for all Pinterest users. So, that’s really, really valuable. Now what’s even more valuable  is that Pinterest allows you, and in fact encourages you to embed a link behind that graphic, which is the opposite of Facebook.

[13:27] Pinterest, unlike Facebook, and Twitter, and LinkedIn, Pinterest will show your stuff, your pins, your images to anyone who is an active user. In other words, not just people that are your friends or that follow you. Anyone.

[14:30]And the fifth big thing about Pinterest is it’s archival in nature. So not only can everyone find your stuff, but your stuff is actually find-able even years into the future.

[15:09] In fact, Daniel’s partner on a Pinterest course, John Kremer, who wrote 1,001 Ways to Market Your Books has a graphic up on Pinterest that to date has actually generated over 168,000 clicks to his website for free. So, something can go viral just like that and do very, very well.

[16:46] How is Pinterest different from Instagram?

Instagram is much more person-centric. You got these people, these kids scantily-clad showing off their rear end. There’s a lot of that going on, on Instagram. And that’s a lot of what drives Instagram. And on Pinterest, it has the most affluent and most active buyers. So, whereas Instagram is personality centric Pinterest is very topic centric.

And when you embed a link behind one of the images that you’re posting to Pinterest, anytime that image is shared, that link goes with it. So, let’s say you say, “Oh, I’d like to have that on my own board related to Parisian romantic restaurants, going back the example,” you click and add it to your board. And not only does that stay where it was, wherever you found it, but now it gets added to your board with the link.

[19:43] So, you could have this beautiful exponential sharing that goes on Pinterest, such that your stuff, like the graph that Daniel was just telling us about, has so far generated 168,000 link or clicks, that was actually shared at least when they last counted at least 1.4 million times.

[20:19] Do you have any tips to making pins go viral, if that’s possible?

Daniel said he had many.

2[0:36] So, first and foremost, Pinterest is not an infographic website and they don’t get shared very much-they get shared some, but they certainly don’t get clicked on a lot. And that’s really what you want.

[22:28] So, instead of these fancy infographics, make a bookmark-sized graphic-long and thin,  like a 300 by 800 pixels, or 400 by 1200 pixels, something that’s taller than it is wide.

And the reason for that is, it takes up more real estate on the Pinterest home board. And of course, that’s what your job is. Your job is to get the attention of somebody that might be interested in your content here. So, make it in other words, long and thin. Bookmark shaped.

Second big tip is, do… Let’s go back to Paris and Romantic Parisian restaurants. You could actually list, have a headline, and then have a list of your top five picks. You can have a pin name, the top five most romantic restaurants in Paris and list them out. And then post that to your board. Now you’ve got a value-added document. Because if someone were going to Paris and looking for romantic places,  Now they have a list of very cool places to check out. In other words, value has been provided to them.

[24:52] So, do tips related to whatever your subject matter is, and you could slice and dice this in just so many different ways. So basically, you can have as many pins as is related to your primary subject matter. And then maybe even a picture of your book or your book cover at the very bottom of that with a link. And you can actually make the link go directly to your Amazon listing.

[25:34] Do you use Canva to make those graphs?

[25:37]  Daniel shared that he does use Canva but John likes to use a PowerPoint and MS Word.

[26:03]   So the other big thing that you could do is Quote Graphics. So, once again, let’s say that you’re doing this sort of the same romantic spots in Paris. And you can go too googly or there’s a site called brainyquote.com and look for quotes about Paris romance essentially. And you’re probably going to find some really great quotes on love in Paris, romance in Paris, et cetera. point people back to your book. Or you could pull actual quotes out of your own book and do that as well. So those are the two main things.

[27:08] If people want to reach you on Pinterest, how do they reach you?

[27:13] Daniel’s handle is realfastresults, which reminded him that if you get the free Pinterest business account, you can name your Pinterest profile anything you want.

[27:50] Daniel added a special tip for men. . Pinterest is 70-75% affluent females primarily so if you’re male you want to appear non-threatening, so women feel safe connecting with you.

[28:45] Exactly. So, if you’re a male, use a profile picture with you and a woman. Daniel doesn’t care if it’s your wife, your lover, or your best friend, your neighbor, a niece, and aunts, a stranger, Just do it.

Then, Daniel added that you could link directly from your graphic to your book on Amazon for example. His strong suggestion is that you first take them to a page on your blog that you own. Because social media rules are always changing. So, if you’re going to send somebody directly to an Amazon page or any other page of a site that you don’t own and control that you get what’s called the pretty links plugin for your WordPress site (Or, http://ellenlikes.com/prettylink that’s what Ellen uses. This is an affiliate link.) , and you make a link using that service such that in case Amazon changes later, at least you control the underlying link.

[30:26] You could also send them back to your own home page, or your author blog, or your podcast. And Daniel recommends doing that. So, if you’re an author, think of your email list as being synonymous with your platform so you can continue the relationship-that’s the best way.

[31:38] Closing Thoughts

Of all the things that you could be doing on social media to market yourself and your book, this is the one and only thing that Daniel  knows to do that something you do today can potentially benefit you five and ten years from today. Nothing else in social media is going to do that for you that he knows of.

Daniel and John have a free course on Pinterest, so if you’re interested in learning more go to: www.realfastsocialgraphics.com.  to get it.

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