73: Kate Ahl: Course Creator, Membership Owner and Entrepreneur Strategic Steps to Master Pintere...

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Foreign guest today is Kate All. Kate is the owner and founder of Simple Pen Media, a Pinterest management and marketing company. Through their work with over 700 Pinterest accounts, they take a data driven approach to crafting a Pinterest strategy that aims to help their clients and students find the perfect person on Pin Pinterest. Kate teaches thousands of people about Pinterest marketing through various speaking engagements and her podcast Be Simple Pen Podcast. Kate, thank you so much for joining me. I'm very excited to jump into this conversation. We were chatting a few minutes before and I told you how much I absolutely love Pinterest. It's been one of the, you know, from a social media platform and I know it functions a little different. It's been one of the biggest drivers for growing my business so I'm very excited to chat with you today.

Yeah, I'm so excited to be here. Thanks so much for having this conversation with me.

So why don't you take a few minutes and tell the audience a little bit more about your entrepreneur journey and how you got to where you are today.

Yeah. Back in 2010, I had a friend come to me and ask if I would be willing to do Facebook marketing for her. She had just started her website, and it was all around helping people really navigate saving money, especially. Especially since the recession had really been pretty deep at that time, how to save money with coupons and deals online. And she said, facebook has these business pages, and I just don't have time to figure out how to use them, so can you help me? So I began to do that, and I realized I loved communicating and connecting with an audience. And then she said, well, what about coming on and helping me work on my website? So I got to know all about WordPress, all about how to do affiliate marketing, and started to wade into the waters of Pinterest for her business. And what we found was that it was driving a lot of traffic. Well, also, at the same time, our family was going through some of those really big struggles of the recession, too, as well. My husband couldn't find a job. We were living on food stamps and unemployment, and that unemployment was running out at the end of 2013. And she said to me, why don't you try to manage people's Pinterest pages, because Facebook is now changing. And I looked back at her and I said, that is such a dumb idea. Nobody's going to go for that. And she said, you don't have any other options, so you should just try it. So I spent the next couple of months deep diving into what it would look like to help people understand how to use Pinterest in a marketing way instead of a personal way so that they could get more traffic to their website. So I got a couple beta clients right at the start of 2014, and I told them, tell me every single thing that I'm doing wrong. Tell me everything I'm doing right. What's working for you? And three months later, they came back and said, this is amazing. It's such a new diversification of the traffic into my website, and I want to keep going, and I'm going to tell more people about your services. And so it really snowballed from there. Three clients turned into six and eight, and there's a lot of story in between until we get to now. But now we have 120 clients that we work with, and we also teach on the membership side too. So that's how I got into my line of work.

I love that. So she basically said, you don't have any options. So figure this out. 2014, remind me, and this is a little bit before the time that I personally started using Pinterest from a business standpoint. What was Pinterest like back then? How. And I know that it's changed a lot. Was it just you putting together pins and driving the traffic to their website? Or what exactly were you doing at that point with their Pinterest management?

Yeah. In 2014, Pinterest had a chronological feed to where you could pin something anytime and people would see it. It was like this amazing faucet of traffic. And then Pinterest, right around 2015, started to get promoted pins. So they had to change up their algorithm a little bit, and they moved away from a chronological feed into a smart feed. So then it became more about a search and discovery platform instead of just this kind of ticker of pins that went through. So we really had to help people figure out how to capture the traffic, both in their images, but also in their keywords to be very strategic, like they were on Google. So it was this change from. We were really used to social media platforms starting with this chronological feed because it generated a lot of excitement and you could get a lot of traffic. And then as they slowly move to this ads platform, you see that change. So we saw that in 2014 and 2015, and you could still pin, you know, just a basic image that would lead back to your website. But you needed to be more intentional about how you were catching people and really hitting them at this aha moment. And then Pinterest really has changed over the years to be a place where it's still search and discovery. It's not like Instagram, not like Facebook at all. But it's really helping people to open up Pinterest and have that main feed that they see be very curated to their interests and who they followed. And then, of course, now peppered in with ads.

So let's talk about that for a little bit, because I'm not sure that the. Not everybody listening here might not know the difference between Pinterest and maybe like, Instagram and how it functions. Can you walk through that a little bit?

Yeah, definitely. So we go to Instagram, where we're going there, because we hope to get lost in the stories of people's lives. We follow people and we either scroll through the Feed or we move through stories and we're meeting people really where they're at in the moment. And if we don't see it over there in that moment, then it has passed. It may be something you'll never see again. Whereas when people go to Pinterest, they don't really care about you. They care about a solution to their problem, or they want to dream into the future, or they want to look for products that they can integrate into everyday life. And so the big distinguisher is people go to Instagram to follow somebody, maybe an influencer, and people go to Pinterest because it's quiet, there's not a lot of conversation. The joke is it's the introverts platform. And we see the habits over there very similar to Google, but you get pictures instead of bunch of words. And so that's how we distinguish the two. You're really using them for two very, very different purposes.

So in 2015, things started to change with Pinterest. Walk us through some of the next few years and tell us a little bit about how you migrated or when you added online courses or your membership. I know you have a membership today, so walk us through the evolution of your business from 2015 to what it looks like today.

Yeah, so in 2015, people were still struggling with how do I go from a personal Pinterest user? Because Pinterest had started in 2010 and a lot of people had adopted to it really quickly as this place to go find the ideas that are. We're just kind of like magical. People would say, oh, man, these are such great aha tips or life hacks or any of that. And so businesses were trying to figure out, okay, how do we integrate into that? And one of the things we saw in 2015, 2016, 2017, was that Pinterest was changing all the time. And so in 2015, right at the end, beginning of 2016, I thought, well, I'm going to create a course to teach people how to use Pinterest in a really effective way that can hopefully withstand the changes. Right. Like I won't have to do as many changes. I can teach people and they can see how to use Pinterest in the right way. Instead of what I was seeing around kind of the Internet was all these different explanations for how Pinterest worked. And some were really getting people into the weeds of Pinterest and they were spending hours and hours and hours on Pinterest marketing and not as many hours on their business. So I wanted to create a course that felt like A roadmap to work people through Pinterest marketing in a way that kept building one on the other, on the other, on the other side. Well, the weird thing for me at the time was that I had grown my clients and my client work and I had a team, and that was going really well. And so I wanted to be able to also take that data and that experience I had with all these clients and put it into a course. So I opened up. I called it the Simple Pin Master course. I opened it up in 2016, and I launched it through a webinar model, and I loved it. But then Pinterest changed, and then I would have to go back and change all these videos or I'd have to rerecord them. And people would get really frustrated because in the video, I might have described that the three dots were in this location, but Pinterest had moved it to another location. And so I found that it was going to be a course that was going to have to be updated every six months. So we updated every six months until late 2018, when I realized this model wasn't really working for Pinterest anymore, because Pinterest wasn't evergreen. It wasn't something that stayed one way. And then it kind of kept going for at least. I could get at least two years right out of these. These videos. I could really only get six months. And sometimes I would record them, release an update, and Pinterest would change the next week. And so what I found for me in the course model was that it was becoming really labor intensive and wasn't really hitting students where they needed to hit. And that's when we moved to a membership model because we realized we could still have a learning library. We could still have this, tons of videos and courses and all of that. But what people needed was that coaching through the changes. And I think that's what's unique about creating a course around social media, was that I just learned that I was get. I was also getting caught in the weeds as a course creator, and I needed to pop out of it and be a little more nibble and nimble and agile to teach. And so we moved to that model. It felt. It just felt so much better for us as far as Pinterest changing all the time. And. And through this time, too, from 2015 to now, Pinterest has added their ads platform, and that's changed a ton. And then they added video into it, and then they now have story pins. So I think I learned a lot about really how to serve People through a course with something that was ever changing. It was like a moving target. I just couldn't, I just couldn't hit on it. And I felt like I was spending so much time updating and not as much time really hustling and getting new customers.

And I can completely relate to what you're saying because I, I used, I don't do it right now, but I used to do Facebook ads management and also had a Facebook ads course and it was constantly changing and I was always so frustrated about it. So can definitely relate to that. Tell it. And I have also questions about the story pins and the video and all that. But one question I have for you right now is tell us a little bit about how you designed your membership and when did you launch your membership?

Yeah, I launched my membership in May of 20. Oh I feel like the years run together. I believe it was May of 2019. And we had a. I wanted it initially to be self hosted. So we have a WordPress site and we used Access Ally and we built it on our website where it would have a learning library and then it would have a coaching element of every two weeks we would meet with them and then we would have a community forum, a Facebook group where people could ask questions and we could share up to date changes on Pinterest or any news that had come out. And that was really good up until probably about six months ago where we did switch our membership to Kajabi because we wanted to get away from self hosting because there was so much coding. And I just feel like the tech can make you, you can just drown in the tech basically and get so caught up in all that frustration. So we moved to Kajabi and that has been so much better and actually a lot better experience for our students as well because it, it's just very straightforward and very user friendly.

And I know that a lot of people listening, they're like, should I, you know, should I host it on my own website or should I, you know, use a platform like Teachable or Kajabi? And I always, you know, say go with the people who know what they're doing the platform so you don't have to worry about all that back end stuff. And I've done a lot of these interviews, Kate, and you're not the only person that has told me that and has told, you know, kind of walked us through why that you made that switch. So in your membership. Let's talk about a little bit about your traffic strategies. How did students find you or how, you know, what are you doing to get people into your funnel? Do you keep it open all the time? Is it evergreen or do you have specific launches that you're doing?

Yeah, this has been such a great question or a great, I guess, experience for us to move through with the. So it's called the Collective and it's really centered around organic Pinterest marketing. Well, I have to say we just started a second membership just about Pinterest ads. So what we're doing, which is really interesting, is with the Collective, we did an open cart all the time. Time we thought, you know, people, we want people to ebb and flow. We want people to come in and out. And so what we'll do is we will start with lead magnets that are free, really robust, and take them through an email nurture sequence and then offer them a code at the end that's a discounted code to get them into the membership. And we have a pretty strong email strategy. And I love my sweet spot is really talking to the warm audience. What has been the challenge for us is to get the cold audience. So we've spent this last year really looking at what are the pain points that people have on Pinterest that are not in our audience and what are their pain points based on their level too. Because there's people who are coming to us that maybe they're moving away from Instagram or they want to diversify and they're saying, how do I use Pinterest? They're really back at this basic level. So then we begin to think, okay, how can we really connect with our, the cold audience in this very new way, like the beginner and then maybe those who are intermediate. So we did do Facebook ads over the last 15 months primarily with those lead magnets. And then we had another strategy we layered on top of that was to do challenges that was new. We've done two so far and we committed to three because we wanted to get enough data based on the three that we did. And that was just to a three month membership so we could get them in for three months. And what we found is that if we could get them in for three months and they loved our community, they were going to continue. So we did these five day challenges and that has been fantastic for cold leads because we, that's where we were really struggling. So we just got done with one of those and we have toyed with the idea of a webinar model, kind of this master class model, which we will try with our other membership, the promoted PINS membership that will be an open closed cart model. So we kind of have this great ability to have two going along at the same time to be able to test what works with one and what works with the other one. And I think if anything, I've learned that everything requires a lot of testing and a lot of patience and it definitely doesn't happen overnight.

I didn't know that you had two different memberships, one for organic and one for pay. Do you find that you have some members that are in both of your membership or, or is it just, you know, somebody focuses on organic, that's all they do. And then some people focus on paid.

Yeah, we do have some that will join both, but we have found that there's a lot of people who are afraid of ads or really nervous about them. And so they might have a, a team member who's already working on their organic Pinterest strategy. So they wouldn't need the collective, they would need our society, which is just for ads. So they'll join that. And other people don't want to ever spend money on ads. They just don't believe that that's a part of their business. So they will only stay with the collective. So it's really interesting. We're still learning a lot about the, the people that we're, we're serving. We also get a lot of people who come to us who do this as a business. So either there's people who are Pinterest managers or virtual assistants that they are just doing organic and then they're also doing ads. So we get a lot of those people coming to us as well.

Is there any type of business that ads tend to work better for on Pinterest?

Yeah, we tend to think those who are selling an actual physical or digital product or you know exactly how much your email subscriber is worth to you. If people can have a strong metric attached to whatever their conversion is, we tell them that that's the number one way to go. And it also has to be a lower cost product. It's hard to have ads work unless they're like awareness ads for something that's a more expensive product. Because it takes a long time for Pinterest users to decide to buy. They're not immediate. They are gatherers. They gather a lot of information. So when it comes to a smaller priced product, something like, you know, a candle or something like that, that might be easier to get them to buy right away. But if it's something like a 2 or $300 product, you would want to go the route of really getting them on your to nurture them or offering them a discount code.

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So let's talk a little bit about numbers and you can pick one of your latest launches and go through the go through that. I know you just had a challenge, I believe for your organic membership. How are things like for you today? Like generally how many people do you get into a challenge and how does that convert for you?

Yeah, I will say that's really fresh in my mind just because we had one in January and then we had one in April. And I will say one of the big distinguishing factors from January to April and the biggest aha moment for me was I hadn't really owned the element of selling and pitching. I think that I had had a bad experience a couple years ago when somebody was guiding me through courses and webinars and they had given me a webinar model with a pitch at the end. And it was very, I don't know, a good word for it. Sleazy, I guess, like salesman, like or.

Just didn't fit your personality.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It did not fit my personality at all. And so I really rejected this whole idea of selling. And I realized going to our launch into this April launch, mid April challenge, I, I realized, hey, I don't have a pitch ready. I don't have. I don't even know if I sold last time in our January challenge. And so I reached out to a couple friends and I said, can I see what you're doing in your webinar model, in your challenges? What are you saying to people at the end? Because I just need to read it. And that was probably the number one factor that helped our sales boost that this second time compared to the first time. So that first challenge, we did five days. We got people in through Facebook ads, cold leads. I think we paid in that one because Facebook ads have changed so much in the last couple of months. We paid probably around $4 a lead at that time, and we got maybe around 2,400 people into the challenge, and we only ended up selling. I think I maybe sold one on the final day of the challenge because I didn't pitch. I really didn't sell them on it, but I delivered great information, and I gave them a lot of value. People came back and said, this was so helpful. I learned so much. I probably told them I probably taught too much. So then going into the second one, when we got to the end, I really prepared a really structured pitch that felt like me. And I sold. Sold eight right away at the end of our challenge, and then we sold 24 in the first 24 hours with a bonus. And then we kept our cart, that sale open. Carts open all the time, but we kept that sale open until Thursday. And I think we ended our numbers, including we do a strategic down sell at the end for one month, two days after the cart closes. For that, I think we ended up with 68, and before we ended up with 42. So it was a really. It made a lot of difference between January and April.

Yeah, that's a huge difference. And that just, you know, kind of shows everybody just keep at it, tweaking it, figuring out what you need to change in your challenge. Did you only. What did you do. Did at the end? Did you do, like, a webinar with the sales pitch or what? Were you just. Just talking about it throughout the entire challenge?

Yeah, I would say that probably on day three was when I had all these aha moments, and people were sharing with me more what they did in their challenge. And I hadn't talked about it a lot up until that point, and I realized I should have been planting the seed. So I would say on day five, what I did every single day was broken down into just teaching time. In the morning, they got it in their email. It was a prerecorded video where I could teach them. And then in the afternoon, we went live for 30 minutes, and that 30 minutes was really following up on what that to that day's topic was and then giving people the ability to ask questions. So then on that Friday, I still followed that same model, but then I started it out with, hey, I'm going to talk to you about a special deal I have at the end to continue this conversation with me to continue coaching and we're going to go into how we can keep this momentum up, up. Because I felt like that was such a big part too, that people were really engaging throughout the week and they were commenting and they were loving it and I wanted to capture that. So we still held that same type of system that we had for every single day of the week. I just made it more of a sale at the end of that particular day. But I will tell you, one of the things I learned right away is that we are going to shorten our challenge. We're going to do three days and then we're going to do a break and then on day five, I think I am going to do more of the webinar like model at the end because I really want to see how that works.

And are you going to shorten it because you're just finding that people lose interest or they drop off during a five day challenge?

Yeah, we actually found that it wasn't so much they dropped off, it was that I have a propensity to over teach because I want. It's just my natural tendency is to go into giving them so much and we found that people just couldn't catch up a little bit. So we needed to add this catch up day and then on day five, give them a little bit of something else but really lead them towards the membership.

And you mentioned that your collective membership is opened all year, but during this time you just had some special bonuses for them.

Yeah, we had special bonuses and a discount.

Okay.

Yeah. So then if they joined for the three months, they would get a discounted rate plus they would get some special bonuses.

So Kate, you've had a lot going on. You've already had two launches this year. What else do you see in your business for, for the remainder of the year?

Yeah, great question. So with Simplepen and how we've grown it, we have the agency side which is really the clients on the organic and the promoted and then the teaching side. And one of the things this year was we really had to get strategic about the planning and the strategy and the vision for each one of those departments. So we implemented a new tool called eos. It was through the Book of Traction. And so for us this year it's really getting smart about tracking our data, looking at where people are coming in, looking at the collective and saying, okay, how long have people been on our list? How long does it take them to join? What pathway do they join through? And I also, I think with coming upon eight years of Being in business, we have a lot of data to look back on, but we just haven't used it. So I would say this year feels strategic, and it feels very like we're getting into honing in on who and how we can really connect with them, where they're at, and give them what it is they need in their business to be successful when it comes to Pinterest marketing.

And you mentioned that was based on the book Traction.

Yeah, Correct. Okay, yeah, there's a book and they have a whole suite of books that help facilitate it, but they have Traction and rocket fuel, and then EOS is entrepreneurial operating system, and that's the model that they teach.

Okay, very good closing question. You've been doing this for a while. You have a lot of experience both as a course creator, a membership owner, and an entrepreneur, and running an agency. What advice do you have for other online course creators or entrepreneurs out there?

You know, I think the biggest thing, and this actually happened when I started my course for the first time is I really got caught up in the comparison trap of what other people were doing. And so I found myself really kind of chasing other people's success and their model instead of putting my head down and going, okay, who do I serve? Clients, customer community. I don't serve other influencers. I don't serve other course creators. So how can I ensure that I keep so laser focused on that? And I think that's the advice I would give to people is you have this idea and you have this unique way that you do things. Don't get caught up in other people's income reports or how much other people make. Really just stay focused on who is in front of you and has said, yes, I want to learn from you and give them that and give them that in your unique way that you present it. So I think that's. That's what I would pass on in the wisdom that I have from when I got caught up in creating courses. I was really looking at how other people were creating courses instead of how I should do it.

And I think that's some great advice. And I think a lot of people can relate to what you personally went through in terms of the comparison to other people out there. And you don't want to do that because you ended up going down. You launched a course, right? And you just, you learned that that wasn't the best way to deliver the content that you need to deliver and end up switching anyway. So that is some great advice there, Kate. Where can people find you?

Yeah, I'm@simplepin media.com and then at SimplePen Media on all social channels. Pinterest is one that we are really active on. So if you want to go there and just see what it is we're doing and playing around with. I know we didn't get a chance to talk too much about pins and story pins, but we've been experimenting with them a lot. So if you go to our profile, you can see what we're doing and what some of those look like just to get examples.

And I was just thinking what I wanted to mention. We have to have you back on just to do more of a teaching Pinterest type podcast episode and dig into some of that.

Yeah, I would love to. Anytime.

Thank you so much, Kate for joining us. We loved hearing about your story and all the things that you have accomplished in your business.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you love the show, we'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform and show us some love there. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.