Stefan Ciacio — How To Drive Massive Traffic Using Pinterest

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Hustle and Float Shark with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf. Joe Fear.

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Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, brought to you by evergreenprofits.com My name is Matt Wolfe and I am here with my very attractive.

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Partner, Joe Fear.

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All right, so today. Today we've got. This is going to be an interesting episode because it's a topic we've never actually covered.

I don't think many guys have talked about this topic.

Yeah, it is.

They will soon, though.

That's true. That's true. So today we're actually talking about Pinterest and how to actually drive traffic to your website using Pinterest. In fact, our guest today has has a niche website where he's driving 100,000 visitors per month through Pinterest and he.

Actually names that site. So you can even do some digging around and back engineer stuff if you really are that motivated because it's actually kind of interesting. Go ahead.

So today's guest is Stefan Ciancio and he's got this whole Pinterest strategy. They've actually developed a software to automate a lot of this Pinterest stuff. And so on this call, we're going to dive into the exact strategy that you should follow to. To get a lot of traffic through Pinterest. And then we're also going to talk about this tool and how this tool actually automates all those processes for you. So pretty fun stuff and excited to dig in with Stefan.

Hey, man. New traffic sources. Something that's easy, untapped. It's a pretty good plan. And yeah, all the procedures are here and some extra tools to help you out if you want to. So good stuff. Let's get into it.

Awesome. Hey, Stefan, how are you doing today? Thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me, guys. Really excited to be here.

Right on.

Awesome. So we actually met at this year's 2018 Traffic and Conversion Summit and had a good time chatting about all sorts of business stuff. But one thing that grabbed our attention in particular was that you and a lot of your clients are doing really, really awesome stuff with Pinterest. So we were really, really excited about that because Pinterest is a world that we've literally never dove into, so. So we're excited to actually chat about Pinterest and the opportunities there and some of the strategies that you have around Pinterest and I think we can have a fun conversation around that stuff.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Pinterest is one of those things that I think many people just think of people posting pictures of, like, cute little puppies. And it actually is a huge, huge traffic source for tons of different niches. So, yeah, I'm really excited to kind of dive into that today and talk about that.

And that was. Yeah, it was interesting because I think it may be a couple weeks before actually meeting you in that mastermind at Traffic and Conversion. It was our support lady and she kind of sells a bunch of stuff for us as well, named Patty. And she was like, man, are you guys on Pinterest at all? And she was kind of getting in our heads a little bit about it before we even met you. So when we did meet you and Matt got to talk to you a little further, we're like, oh, damn. All right, cool. This is like, meant to be. We gotta dig in.

Yeah, yeah. All right, so let's go ahead and jump back a little bit. Before we get into the Pinterest stuff, I want to let our audience get to know you a little bit. Can you tell us what you were doing before you started doing what you do now and kind of give us that progression of how you got into getting into the Pinterest stuff and developing software around Pinterest? But let's give us that little bit of backstory and take our listeners back a little bit.

Yeah, absolutely. Previously, before doing anything online, I was actually a mechanical engineer and I totally hated everything about the 9 to 5. So I guess you could say it's a little bit stereotypical in that way. You know, former, former nine to fiver going into like the online sphere. But you know, that being said, I had a full time job. I kind of just hated it and I wanted to do something different. Now. I had no intentions of actually quitting my job at the time, but I actually started learning about the whole, like, earning online or different things that you could do with the Internet through a co worker who knew someone that was like going to like thrift shops and garage sales and slinging products on ebay. And you know, that's something that everyone who works online now knows about. But at the time, for me, it was like, you know, mind blowing, like, oh my God, that sounds like such a good idea. So I actually started off just selling stuff on ebay that I got at garage sales, like in my free time. And I was on YouTube one day and I was actually watching videos of other people doing this Just to see like what they were selling. And I saw a video in like the related videos. It was talking about how I make money on Kindle or something. So I was kind of intrigued, kind of like not really sure what it was about. But I basically moved in from that point. I moved into like the Kindle publishing market. So I was actually publishing books on Kindle. And from there I remember seeing a lot of people in their Kindle books, had these links going to like squeeze pages or all these other sorts of like stuff that they were promoting. And from there I kind of got into the whole affiliate marketing sphere because I'm like, oh, there's people slinging other people's products and making money digitally and I didn't have to ship anything and I didn't have to do anything like that. So that kind of intrigued me. So from there I kind of just got into affiliate marketing and that sphere and actually I actually built a website that's. I don't know if this site is this site like so basically it's not anything like, I guess dirty you could say, but it's kind of funny. It's a dog niche website. It's like for, you know, cute dogs and we sell like e comm stuff. But the name, I didn't even think of the name at the time, but the name is Doggy Desires.

So I just didn't think about like in my head I'm like, oh, that sounds like a great name for like a dog niche.

So Doggy Desires is out and about. And at the time when I was doing Doggy Desires, you know, I was doing some SEO stuff and I was like, okay, cool, I'll build this up with SEO. And it was getting, I was getting some decent success. And at that point I actually kind of just like was looking around for other ways that I could start doing traffic to this niche site. So basically, long story short.

I eventually discovered Pinterest. And with Pinterest traffic, basically.

I saw that especially for niche related things like dogs or cats or basically things where anyone is really passionate about that niche, you can drive a lot of traffic. So I kind of just started playing around on Pinterest. Long story short, I kind of discovered what methods were really working to drive traffic. And I think with within two months I had gotten up to about 100,000 visitors to that website for Pinterest.

I was just kind of shocked at how well it was working because for the most part it was pretty passive. Once you set it up and you set it up the right way, I Was basically, I guess over this call, we'll get into the technical side of how it actually works. But basically, long story short, by following certain tactics, I was able to get over 100,000 visitors on that particular site. Right now, I've literally not published a new piece of content or done anything, like, for months, and it's still getting anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 visitors a day. So once I start pumping more content, actually, like, actively promoting, I'm pretty sure it'll go back into the hundreds of thousands per month. So it's really, really powerful. It works super well. I think a lot of people still don't really know about it, but for the people that do know about it, like, they're. They're doing really, really well with it. So I kind of got into that, and from there, pretty much I had a lot of connections in kind of, like, the affiliate marketing space and all that stuff. Just kind of like how we met at the convention. I have all these connections that I've met online or at conventions, and I partnered up with someone I had worked on stuff previously before to basically set up a software that automated a lot of the tasks that were required to get this Pinterest traffic. So more or less, we kind of created a software that we're now using that just kind of. We used to, like, do all those, like, tedious tasks that you don't want to be doing yourself because you want to be focusing on other stuff in your business. And more or less, like, we set it up in a way that it just kind of drives the traffic for us now, and it just kind of has worked out super well. So that's kind of, I guess, the progression, how I got started and then how I started doing affiliate marketing and driving traffic, and more or less, that's kind of how the software was born. Just because, you know, it was a real need, it solved a real problem, and it's just kind of been working out super well.

Yeah, no, that's awesome. I mean, that's. That's kind of a similar story to what we get from a lot of guests where, you know, us as entrepreneurs, we're kind of like, hey, let's try this. Oh, cool. That actually works. It makes some money, but it's not quite as much as I want to make. Let's try this, right? And then eventually. Eventually you kind of land on that one thing that you're like, all right, this is it. This is my thing. And it seems like the Pinterest and the software tools you're developing Kind of, you know, that that's, that's where you landed. And, and it's, it's, it's, it's awesome because it's a fairly, I mean, I don't know, I haven't done a ton of research on it, but it feels like a fairly wide open niche. There's not a lot of people out there in our world teaching Pinterest.

Well, I was about to say like it feels like an untapped whole platform that you can then leverage because I like how you approach things. Like as you were talking there, I was like, huh, you were like literally just connecting dots. But I mean the big thing, like you said with Kindle, you're kind of like leveraging a platform there for traffic, for affiliate marketing, you know. But like with this one now you have Pinterest, even bigger market. I mean for probably obviously Kindle markets massive, but at least you could sell a lot more with this thing.

Yeah, well, I mean it's legitimately a combination of the sort of things you did in the past, right. You started with ebay, that's sort of the E commerce world, you know, selling physical products. Then you went into Kindle, which is a very content based business. You create content and you sell that content. Well, it seems like Pinterest is sort of a very good marrying of the two. You're driving people to content which then sells various products on your doggy site. At least that was my takeaway from that.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And that's actually a really great point. It kind of just combines everything that I've done previously and I've got tons of different monetization that I try with this. I mean on my websites I've got AdSense, I've got Drop shipping, I've got affiliate marketing, I build email lists. So I kind of do it all as, as actually monetizing the traffic. That being said, yeah, absolutely. Like the Pinterest model is so cool because you can actually use content and like, you know, content when done properly can drive a crap ton of highly converting people to offers and all sorts of other things as well as that. What's cool about Pinterest is even if you do E commerce, you can actually set up what's called product pins so you can actually sell your products directly on Pinterest.

Oh dang.

So really, really cool. You know, even for anyone who's doing E Comm. Pinterest, Pinterest is really, honestly very, very powerful. And you're right, it's not really talked about by a lot of People. I have seen it here and there by some people, but for the most part it doesn't seem to be something that a lot of people are really talking about. I guess I'm kind of. I'm kind of shocked about that, but I'm also kind of happy about that because, you know, it's, It's. I guess it is kind of untapped and it's been working out pretty well.

So I'm curious, and this is kind of a.

It's always something I think about is what made you want to create software around this and sell it, you know, and kind of make it a little broader. Like, do you have a bigger goal kind of in mind with just kind.

Of seemed like it worked. And it seemed like one of those slam dunk ideas that you just didn't want to let get away. It just seemed so perfect. Like there was so many, like, for the people that are doing Pinterest, it's like, it just seemed like something like this didn't really exist out there in this form and it would be like such a good thing to get out there. And like, you know, when you're entrepreneur, it's like you want to solve a problem. And like, I guess like for myself and like my business partner, it just seemed like, wow. Like, not only, you know, I guess there's multiple reasons. One, it would work really well for us, and two, it's something that truly could solve a big problem, which of course can lead to great, great profits. So, you know, those are pretty much the reasons.

No, I love it.

It just kind of like shined out at us and we're like, oh, let's do this.

Cool. Now, with going back to the various monetization strategies, you said you're testing, you know, E commerce and various methods of E commerce, like dropshipping and things like that. You've got adsense. What's the biggest revenue driver for you right now? You know, driving Pinterest to a site. What drives the most revenue back to you?

So I say right now, in terms of that, the number one basically is right now AdSense. And that's only because at the moment I'm actually building a kind of, I guess you could say a 40 niche site more towards teaching people how to do this kind of stuff. And I'm going to be eventually focusing a lot of selling products on that. Like, but right now, for the moment, it's AdSense. Just because I have like, mostly niche sites that I just drive the passive traffic to. And it's just easier for Me, I do collect some from drop shipping at the moment. But that being said, I'm not like, actively pushing that. I'm just kind of like, I guess you could say I'm in a phase where I'm building something bigger to use with Pinterest traffic. And at the moment, like, I'm just passively collecting AdSense money from the traffic. So that's what's cool about it is that, like, you could just set up AdSense, like, for a lot of people I know, they don't even really want to get involved past, like, driving traffic and making money.

Yeah, I mean, it's all free traffic too. Right. So, I mean, it's not like you're going out and driving Google Ads or Facebook ads and then sort of trying to arbitrage the paid traffic into Google AdSense traffic. It seems like it's gotten to a point where it's pretty passive traffic. So correct me if I'm wrong, but you're basically going and creating content on a blog. That content has AdSense embedded in it, and then that content is sort of automatically getting shared to Pinterest group boards, right?

That's correct. Yeah. So that's one of the ways you can also link articles that have AdSense or you can link to articles that have, like, links to, like, products that you want to sell. Like, I have some. I have some Amazon associate stuff that I do where I pretty much in the post, it'll be like top five dog houses for you to check out in 2018 or something. And I'll just have like a review post linking to, like, stuff on Amazon. So you could also do that. And that works really well in the dog group boards. So you have so many different ways that you can go about this. But if you're lazy, the easiest way is obviously just slap AdSense on it and then, you know, sling that around Pinterest, you know, let it do its thing and you're just going to collect passively from that. So, yeah, so I do some of that right now, though. I'm just kind of really excited to be building something bigger. Like, I have that authority site that I'm building that is eventually going to be, you know, they use Pinterest traffic to that and it's going to be really, really great. But in the meantime, like I said, like, the niche sites, they just, you don't even really have to do much with them once you set them up, they just kind of like passively collect. So it's been really great.

Yeah. Now we're both Obviously very newbie to Pinterest. So I have a couple questions about the actual platform itself. With Pinterest, so if I go and post something on Twitter, right? I'll post it, and then 20 minutes after I post it, it's pretty much gone, right? Everybody else on Twitter has made it disappear because all these other tweets got stacked on top of it. And that tweet is pretty much gonna be never seen again. Now, with Pinterest, if I was to pin something to Pinterest, does it sort of float around and get seen forever, or does it eventually get new pins stacked on top of it, and then nobody ever really sees that pin again?

So it's kind of interesting with Pinterest because there's a lot of moving parts. So Pinterest, on top of just being a platform to post stuff, it's also a search engine. So you can literally, on your main Pinterest page, you can type in certain keywords, and then certain posts are gonna come up for those keywords. So what's interesting is recently, I'd say a few months ago, Pinterest kind of had, like, an old way that their algorithm worked where it was pretty much if you posted into group boards, like, you were just guaranteed like, a ton. A ton. Okay, so I guess I should back up a minute and just tell you guys about group boards first. So there's something on Pinterest called a group board. So basically what a group board is, it's kind of like a Facebook group. And the way it works is that that group board is filled with people who basically are passionate about something. So it might be a group board about dogs. Right? So basically the way it works is on that group board, anyone who's posting to it will post pins, because that's the way Pinterest works, is you post these things called pins into those group boards, and those pins actually have are clickable, and they could go to any link that you want. So that's where pretty much the traffic can come from. Because that pin, you can link it to your website, you can link it to a squeeze page, and you can even link it to affiliate links if you really wanted to. Pinterest is actually right as of this moment, cool with affiliate links. So you can actually link them directly to affiliate links, which is really, really cool. That being said, you want to get your pin seen, because your pin, anyone who clicks it, is going to go to whatever, you know, wherever you backlink to. So basically, you want to get them in these things called group boards, which is where all the people who are interested in a certain niche congregate. So before, I'd say, a few months ago, basically the way Pinterest works is if you just posted in group boards, like all day. Like, if you posted all day, you would get a ton of traffic just because you had the most exposure, the most visual exposure in those group boards. So a few months ago, what Pinterest did is they actually changed their algorithm a little bit. And what's interesting is they made it an engagement algorithm. So what this means is if you were just spamming group boards, posting in the group boards, like, you know, 20 times a day. And well, that's. That's bad for two reasons. First reason is if it's a quality group board, basically the owner is going to be pissed off because it's to get in these group boards. There's someone who actually creates the group board and they kind of manage it. And for most of these people, that's like their baby. So they don't want you in there spamming. So if you were posting multiple times a day, a lot of times, you know, if it was like a group board where the owner didn't really care, you could still get a ton of traffic. But these days, if you do that, your engagement is going to be so low that, like, basically no one is going to interact with these pins. Because to back up, I guess another quick second, basically, when you post your pins into these group boards, not only are you getting the initial exposure of the people in the group board seeing the pin, but they have the ability to do what's called a share, share that to their own personal Pinterest profile. So that's where the viral traffic element comes in. And what's really cool is on Facebook, if you post something into a group, like basically a Facebook group, that content cannot be shared outside of the group. But on Pinterest, if you post something into a group board, the people in the group board can actually share that content outside of the group.

Nice. I like that.

So it creates a viral element that does not exist on other, you know, I guess on Facebook. So that's what's kind of cool about Pinterest, is that you can actually go viral just by posting these group boards. And it's really cool the way that works. There's also no like button on Pinterest. So what that means is that if people want to interact with your content, they're forced to do what's called the share. And that share is what gets you additional exposure. So with that being said, if you're. Nowadays, if you're posting into a group board and you're posting like 20 times a day, you're not going to get many shares. And when you don't get many shares, your content is not going to rank in the search engines. So in the Pinterest search engine. So like, for example, let's say you have a pin that's like about dogs and then people click on it, it goes to an article about dogs on your website with Google Adsense on it. So let's say you have that and then you post it and you have like a little caption in there because you want to make sure you fill your caption in and it's like, you know, how to help 10 ways to teach your dog how to roll over or something like that, right? So let's say that you have that in there and you add your hashtags. So another thing I should mention that Pinterest has hashtags now. So you're setting up your pin, you're adding a description and you add a few hashtags like dog or, you know, cute dog or something like that, and you're ready to put it, you're ready to pin it into group boards. If you post one time, like, let's say you post this once a day into like 10 different group boards, right? So you only posted once into those group boards. However, because you only posted once and you didn't post 50 times, your one post got all the engagements. So maybe it got like, you know, 20 shares or 30 shares or something. That's going to look very good to Pinterest's algorithm. And what that means is that now your post, people who type in dog or anything like that in the search engines, you're going to start ranking your content higher in the search engine on Pinterest. So the way you kind of have to play the game now is actually, it's actually less work, which is cool because you don't want, you don't have to post so much stuff. But you could take some of your content and basically really optimize it with a description and hashtags and then put it into group boards. And you're, since you only have one or two posts at a time that you're putting in there, those will get all the engagement and that'll actually rank you in the Pinterest search engine for that, for whatever topics. So it's really an engagement game now. So less content is actually more effective. And more or less that's kind of how it works. Now, as far as setting that up, I know I threw a lot in there, but more or less that's kind of how it works. I hope that was clear, and I'm obviously happy to answer questions because I know I threw a lot in a short time.

Definitely. Yeah, I wrote down a few other questions, but did you have something you wanted to ask first or no.

No, go for it.

Cool. Now, I did actually make a few notes here. Now, when it comes to. All right, let's start here. So is there. Have you found that there's an ideal frequency, an ideal amount of tags, an ideal image type? Can you sort of help us dissect what a good Pinterest post looks like?

Absolutely. Those are great questions. So the first thing you mentioned was about how many hashtags you should have. So ideally you don't want to have like 20 hashtags, because that's just not going to look good. I would say a good place to start is three hashtags per pin that you set up. So when you set up your pin, you'll have the image you add there. You'll have the link you want to send people to. If they click the image, then you'll have a description and you'll have the ability to add hashtags. For the hashtag portion, I would say you want to add basically around three if you really want to go up to five. Personally, I would not recommend doing something like 20 hashtags because to me, it just kind of looks a little desperate. I don't know how Pinterest really likes that sort of thing, but three to five is, like, really good. And it's, you know, it makes sense because you can have three to five hashtags that are really targeted to whatever you're putting in there. It doesn't look like you're just putting any old hashtag.

Cool. Now, with hashtags, I just want to stop you there for a second. With hashtags, is there a good way to find out which hashtags to be using? Because obviously you want to try to tap into hashtags that people are searching for or clicking on.

So as you actually type in the hashtag, what's cool on Pinterest is it'll pop up a little box as you're typing it in to show you how many people are under that hashtag or using that hashtag hashtag. So generally speaking, I try to go for the ones that have more.

Like, you know, more, I guess, people more popular. Like, it'll pop up the numbers next to the hashtag of how many people, I guess are using that hashtag. So I try to go for those and it'll say like, you know, like dogs or whatever. And I'll say 50,000 hashtags or cats or 25,000 hashtags. So. And then maybe it'll be like, you know, angry dogs or something. Have like 1000 hashtags. So I try to go for the ones that are still relevant, but have more, I guess, more hashtags. Tallies under that little box that pops up.

Got it. Okay. And then as far as, like, the image type, you know, size, shape, that kind of stuff, what do you recommend there?

That's an excellent question. So basically, on Pinterest, the way it works at the moment, I can't speak for if they're going to ever change this, but at the moment, if you post something, because, like, when you scroll through Pinterest, it just kind of lists all the pins. Like, if you type in dogs into the search engine on Pinterest, it'll just list a bunch of pins as you go down.

The height of the pins. Actually, Pinterest does not seem to currently restrict you. There might be, like a really tall maximum height, but they don't standardize all the pins to one height. So what that means is if you have a really long pin, as people are scrolling down the page, like, if you have a really tall or long pin, you're going to get more real estate of that page with that pin. So what does that mean? It means that if someone's scrolling and there's like a really short height pin and yours is next to it and yours takes up like five times the amount of space because of how tall it is compared to the other pin. Guess which one is the eyes are gonna go to most of the time? It's gonna go to the big one. So you really want to try to do super tall pin posts, I guess. So if you can make your image something like, for example, 1500 high by like 400 wide, that would be perfect because you're really maximizing the height of that pin and making sure that you're gonna get the most exposure to it as people scroll down the page and they do kind of keep the width the same. So I think it's around 400 or 500, but they kind of standardize that. So the width is always the same, but the height, you can really maximize your real estate on someone's screen, which is really, really cool. By making sure that your image is.

Nice and tall, we're actually Looking at our own board right now or all of our pins and yeah, I mean we have, I think ours are pretty standard banner size, but I'm just looking at like a few other pins mixed in there. And then there's the tall ones, like the skyscrapers, I guess the ones with the bright text light background, I mean immediately are just standing out on the page to me.

Yeah, for sure.

I know Matt is like your cursor.

You're like, yeah, no, like as you were talking I was like pointing to this stuff on the screen to Joe of like, yep, which one stands out here? I mean it's pretty clear that the tall ones stand out. It does look like they do cut off the tall ones to like it's about the height of 3.

My size pins I guess. So that's not really a good measurement. But yeah, I mean with our Pinterest, what we've been doing, and obviously it's not necessarily the right way to do it, but is we've actually been just sharing the featured image on our blog post. And the featured image on our blog post is sort of like a, you know, like a three by five sort of dimension.

Right, right. So yeah, at the end of the day, like, I mean you'll still get traffic if you use the smaller images, but if you really want to maximize those, you know, getting that long image and just really maxing out to like the maximum amount they'll allow, you will just really get you the most real estate. Especially when you consider like, let's say you have 50 images over time. That's going to be so much more when your images are all long compared to like really short, you know.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Now do you have, do you have a good way to create these longer images? Because my natural tendency is to make processes out of stuff, automate stuff, make it as quick as possible. That's why pretty much everything we share is our featured image. Because that's just the simplest image to share. It's already made for the blog post. Do you have any sort of tips or way that somebody can quickly get a pinnable image ready for any blog post they put out?

Yeah, so I mean like, you know, as far as like finding royalty free images, that would be a good background. You could obviously use sites like Pixabay.

You know, stuff like that to find like a background image. But believe it or not, what we've actually done in our software Board Commander is actually we've added in a feature to make this super easy for people because inside Board Commander basically You can type in a certain keyword like maybe dogs and it'll actually pull in a bunch of royalty free images and you can actually take that royalty free image, edit it, you could crop it to be really tall, add text over it and literally within about a minute have like a viral type pin that's tall and perfect for your niche, ready to go and you can actually pin it directly to your Pinterest from within the software. So that actually makes it super easy for us to do it and for anyone else who's looking to do that to just kind of get something really quickly out there that is viral optimized, you know, height wise and has like nice bright text on it and uses a royalty free image so that you're not getting any sort of trouble. So that's kind of been what we use. That's kind of why we added it in because that's why we, that's, that's what we used to create our pins. If you really want to get, you know, other things you could do, you could hire people on Fiverr or, you know, but that over time that could obviously end up being very expensive. So, you know, that's what we use. It's built in for us and it just kind of, it's really easy for us to just get those viral pins created.

That's, that's good. Yeah. And another resource I guess people could use is what, Canva or Snappa. That's, that's what we use for pretty much all of our featured images. And yeah, we were just in Snappa and saw there was a little Pinterest pin kind of template in there.

So that's an option in Snappa. The default Pinterest pin size is 735 by 1102.

Yeah, that's kind of random.

Seems kind of random, but it's like a, it's a, it's a tall graphic. So yeah, it's in there.

It speaks to what you were saying.

Now with Pinterest, is there any way to. Again, I'm all about the systems and processes and automation and that kind of stuff. Is there any way to make it. So anytime we make. And I actually don't know the answer to this question before I ask it, but is there any way to automate the posting of pins? Let's say I make a new blog post every other day, which we actually do on our blog. Is there any way to make it? So every time I make a blog post it just automatically gets pinned or is it still kind of a manual process?

So you're saying as far as just getting the stuff onto Pinterest.

Yeah. Is there some sort of automation where, for example, if I wanted to, I don't have this set up, but if I wanted to with my email platform, every time a new blog post goes live, I could have my email platform automatically pull from the RSS feed and email my list. Or on Twitter, I could sync it up with my rss. So every time there's a new blog post, there's an automatic tweet that goes out. Is there anything like that for Pinterest right now?

The closest that I know right now for doing that is like, if you have, like, a WordPress site, there's certain plugins that will allow you to just, you know, basically share your post to your own Pinterest. That's probably the closest I know as far as automating as far as taking that content and actually, like, directly posting Pinterest at the moment. What I do personally is I just kind of create. I just upload the pin to Pinterest and add the link to my content, only just because it takes, like, five seconds. But as far as automating that, yeah, pretty much the closest I would say is there's some WordPress plugins out there that would do that for me. I guess I never really thought about that too much, only because it's never really taken me too long to actually get that post up there because it's pretty much like, you know, upload the image and then add a link. So that's. That's probably your best bet if you want to kind of try to automate, that is, there's some WordPress plugins that will share that for you directly to your Pinterest.

Very cool.

Now, if you want to go a little archaic, you just hire someone really cheap in the Philippines and not have to worry about the tech so much.

Another option.

That's where my head's going. I'm like, too many variables to systemize, I think.

I think that's sort of like my hierarchy of decision making. A. Can I automate it? No. Okay. Can I outsource it? No. Okay. Damn it. I guess I better do it.

Yeah. You can always hire someone, though.

Yeah, that's true.

I want to go back really quick and Unless you had something.

I had one last question about, you know, Pinterest in general.

Well, yeah, that's what we're chatting about.

Well, I didn't know if we were going to shift it over to talking about the software or not.

No, no, go for it.

So the last question I wrote down was, is there any benefit to creating your own group board and actually hosting a group board from your own Pinterest?

That's actually an excellent question. And absolutely, there is absolutely value in creating your own group board. And the cool thing about having your own group board is that when you're part of being other people's group boards, basically they have certain rules sometimes, like how many times you couldn't post a day. Or sometimes they even have limits. Like you can only post once a week or once a month. So if you're automating, if you're doing, using something to automate all of your pinning into these group boards, you know, sometimes it can be annoying with like all the different rules and you have to make sure that you have the right rules set up for each one so you don't accidentally pin too many times into the, into the right group board. So when you control the group board, you, you make the own rules. You know, you can't kick yourself out of your own group board unless you really want to. You know, you can, you can control the rules of that group board for yourself. So, you know, maybe you say everyone in there can only post twice a day, but you're the owner, you can end up posting in there maybe four times a day if you wanted to, as far as spreading that out. So having your own group board, the one thing I'll say is that obviously compared to having all these other built up group boards where you could just start posting and get traffic, creating your own group board will take some time. But if you're in it for the long haul and you're willing to wait at least a couple months, you could have a really, really great traffic source by controlling your own group boards. So that is definitely something that you could do and definitely something that will benefit you in the long run.

And would people just kind of find the group board and sign up? I mean, how, how does, how would a new group board that I create even get exposure?

So you, there's a few ways that you could do it. If you just have it on your, on your site and you have like a lot of followers on Pinterest, over time, people will start applying to that group board. They'll message you and say, like, I would like to get in this group board. Another thing you could do is obviously in the description of the group board, you could say, you know, accepting new, accepting new group board contributors, please message me or whatever, or you can give some instruction to get people in and what you could do is you can actually invite people to that group board. So if you look on Pinterest you can take like, you know, if you see certain profiles that are really, really good in your niche, you can, you know, basically message a bunch of them and say, hey, I've got a new group board. This is going to be a high end group board. I'm not letting just anyone in. You have to have a certain amount of follow on your profile or something like that. And it will take some time to build it up. But like I said, once it starts going like, let's say you eventually get to like a few hundred people in there, that's when, when you're gonna start getting organic. People coming to you and saying hey, you know, they're in their head, they're like, okay, there's a few hundred people in there. It's worth it for me to approach them to try to get in. So you'll start getting people coming to you to want to get in the group board. And like I said, it'll just kind of be a snowball effect. So like, you know, once you get to those thousand people in the group board, then all of a sudden even more people want to join it. So it takes time to grow it. But over time, if you're willing to be patient, it will be a very solid traffic source. But obviously compared to just getting into an existing report and posting, it's going to take longer to build up that traffic channel. But again, it's just a nice powerful piece of the puzzle to have.

So what you just said, actually, and I think we kind of, we didn't really talk about this too much but demographics on Pinterest and actually finding a group board that feels fits for the right audience. Can you chat about that? Because I think that's the big thing that most people, they think Pinterest and like you said, it's like cute dogs or it's mainly women on there posting whatever crafty, DIY projects. That's what my brain always thought of Pinterest as and I honestly still use it. If I have a crafty thing in the backyard, I'm like, oh cool, how do I make a pallet couch?

Currently personally use Pinterest all the time right now for home projects. Like we did a shiplap wall and I'm like, I better look on Pinterest, right?

And this is a two parter that probably will lead to your software which is done on purpose. But talk about the demographics really quick.

And just to kind of explain who's on Pinterest for one.

Sure, absolutely. So more or less on Pinterest, it's definitely more female dominated as far as the people who search on Pinterest. And what's really cool is the average order value of items bought on Pinterest is higher than the average order value of items bought on Facebook by almost double. And it's a little bit more than the average order value of items bought on Amazon. The demographic on Pinterest that's really interesting is it's mostly, I guess you could say people that have more affluent people that have money to spend. So it's the rough demographic is like people on Pinterest have more money than the average person on Facebook as far as average order value goes. So it's kind of a nice pool of people. Like I guess the stereotype could be, you know, a lot of people who are just in middle class that look on Pinterest. So for someone who's looking on the entrepreneur side, it's a great pool of people to be taken from as far as like finding finding traffic. So it's definitely more female dominated. That being said, you will find people on there for just about everything. So there's even financial related group boards, there's stay at home moms that start blogs for financial blogs or even like niche blogs, lifestyle blogs. So more or less like, if you're in more of like a specific niche like dogs or cats or pets or dating or travel or anything like that, there's absolutely. Or you know, home decor or anything like that, or do it yourself, tons and tons of niche related stuff. But even if you're in like the financial niche or you're in some sort of like Internet marketing or make money niche, there is actually a surprising amount of group boards and a surprising amount of people on there that use Pinterest to drive tons and tons of traffic to their websites. There's a lot of bloggers especially that are in the make money or finance niche and they're actually doing super, super well driving traffic on Pinterest.

They're probably the only ones on there.

Well, I actually, when I was messing around with it, I actually found quite a bit of group boards for bloggers, for affiliate marketers, for social media managers, like all that kind of stuff. There's a lot of group boards on those topics for. For sure.

Yeah, exactly. And it's really, really cool as far as that goes. It's pretty diverse as far as like what you would want to do on there. And in general, the people on there do seem to have more spending power, at least as far as the statistics go. And I have noticed that. That it just kind of seems like these are people that if you are selling stuff, they're gonna be more interested and you're gonna get higher average order values. And it's just a great pool of people that you should be marketing to, I guess.

I love it. I mean, just the fact that, I mean, I've noticed just. And I know everyone else has on Facebook, just posting, even on your own damn wall now. Like, I posted something the other day and it's like I would. I used to get. I remember with an image, something engaging and then just whatever words. Like I would get probably fairly consistently 5 or 50 to 70 people liking or so. And it's like now it's like crickets. I'm like, dude. And you know, obviously Facebook pages have like, no power. It's pay to play. Facebook groups have some ability to drive traffic, but you can't share outside of a group, like you said. So, I mean, Pinterest just seems like prime for the picking for everybody.

It's prime for marketers to come in and ruin that too.

Well, that's what I want to be careful about. I'm like, I don't want to spread the word too much, but obviously that's your job. But going back to demographics, we talked about that. And this might lead to your software because I know it kind of helps you out, but. But can you talk about. And I don't know if we briefly chatted about this, but finding boards that is a good match for your demographic, for whatever product you're selling. Website, obviously you have hashtags and stuff, but how do you actually find boards.

And know you can get some traffic from these things?

That's a great question. So basically a great place to start. You can actually start with this website called pingroupy.com. the thing about Pingroupee is that generally speaking, their database is like, super out of date. However, it's a great place to start. So if you go to pingroupy.com, you can actually find some big group words in your niche.

Hey, Stefan, can you spell that for us real quick? I just want to make sure we get that right.

Absolutely. P I N G R O u p I e dot com.

Okay, cool. Thank you.

So pingroupee.com is a great site that you can go to just to kind of get an idea of some of the big group boards in your niche. And once you do, you can actually go to Pinterest and You can see who the owner of that group board is. It'll usually be the first. So at the top it'll, it'll show like the name of the group board and it'll have like a little circle of a person next to it. That circle is the owner of the group board. So you can actually click on that little circle and go to the profile of the owner of that group board. And chances are they're usually in a bunch of other group boards, whether it's their own group boards or whether they're just in other people. So you, what you would do is you would scroll down on that person's profile, the person who you got to by going to their group board, and you would look at all the boards that they're in. So one thing to know on Pinterest is that there's two types of boards. There's personal boards, which means that's just your own board on your profile and only you can post to it. And then there's group boards, which is what we've kind of been talking about on this call. So the way that you could tell if something is a regular group board or regular personal board or a group board is a little circle on the board. Okay. You'll see a little circle in the bottom left hand corner. So what you could do on this person's profile, scroll down and see if there are in any other boards that have a little circle on them. Okay. So basically if you scroll down and do that, you'll most likely usually find after you search a few, that at least one or two or three of them have a bunch of group boards that they're in with that little circle. So you can build a list of all these other group boards that these people are in. And that's one way that you can go about kind of creating a big list of people that are, that are group boards that people are in. So that's kind of how we used to do it, I guess you could say back in the day. And that's, that's still a nice manual way of doing that as far as creating, finding group boards. So the one thing with that is that we ran into is that the, basically some group boards are super active. And getting a post into those group boards can lead to something like hundreds of hundreds of repins or shares. Because some group boards are like very, very restrictive on who they let in. And you need to have like really quality content. And then there's group boards that are like total cr, where it's like anyone could post in them and you're not going to get any engagement. So it's almost like not worth your time. So the tricky thing for us was basically finding the group boards that were actually worth our time. Okay. And the way now that we, the kind of way now that we do that is actually through our software. So we actually have a tool in the software now that basically.

More or less like you can analyze a group board before applying to it. So you can take the URL of the group board, you could check it and we have what's called the average repin rate or average share rate because shares used to be called repins, that's why I call them repins, but it's really share now. So basically the average share rate. So like for example, you can see how many average shares your PIN or any PIN that gets posted in that group board will get. So on average. So like for example, let's say I post one PIN into a group board and the average share rate is 2.4 shares. So what that means is for every one pin that I'll put in that group board, I'll get 2.4 shares. So you might, you might analyze a group board in our software and see that the average share rate is like something like 10 shares per poor pin. And that's, that's excellent. That means that for every time you post into that group board, you're getting 10 shares on average and some of them will return that you're only going to get like 0.1 shares. Which means that that group board is not very engaged. The people in there are not, not the type of people that you really want to be spending your time trying to get attention from anyway. They're not really engaged. So that has been a really important factor for us in terms of finding which group boards are actually worth our time and saving us time from applying to these group boards and then starting to post into them only to find out two, three weeks later that it was a total waste of time because that's a dud group board.

That has been really, really important for us. And I guess it did segue into our software because that's what we use to kind of analyze what group boards are worth your time and which ones are not.

Exactly. And let's chat about the software because I think that's a, I mean it seems like a no brainer if you are going to take Pinterest seriously. And I think you should because, I mean, I know we should because my mind goes a little wild when I think of a lot of traffic input, but my mind doesn't want to stop there. Like, I think, okay, add some retargeting in there on Facebook, YouTube and Google, which is what we already do. And that's like pretty much hands off after you set it off. And if you have an offer, I mean, like, hold on. Holy crap, there's so much traffic to work with.

Now, one thing I think might be kind of cool, real quickly, can I sort of break down what sort of my re explanation of what your Pinterest process is and then you can tell us how your tool actually saves us a bunch of those steps.

That sounds great. Yeah.

So this is sort of what I've gathered, what I've collected and I have used your tool and I have gone through a lot of your training. So this is sort of what I've pieced together from everything I've been through. But essentially you're going to go and you're going to create a Pinterest account and you're going to try to get that Pinterest account up to a minimum of 100 followers before you start requesting to go to group boards.

Right?

And once you've got that hundred followers on your Pinterest, then you can now start actually sharing into group boards. So you'll make your posts into your regular boards and then share those posts also into group boards. Those group boards are essentially where the traffic comes from. Now that's obviously a very, very high level overview of the process and it actually brought up another really super, super quick question. Is the hundred follower limit, is that something that's imposed by Pinterest or is that something that you guys just recommend? Because it's sort of like a best practice thing.

That's a good question. And more or less it's a best practice thing. The more followers you have, like for example, let's say you're a group board owner and then you have a bunch of people with like zero followers just requesting to get in your group board and you don't want, you don't want the people in your group or to be pissed off. So more or less it just kind of differentiates you a little bit from all the kind of like spam profiles that might be started that have no followers and have no intention of putting out good content to basically try to get in your group board. And actually in the process that you mentioned, another really important thing that we sort of talked about, but I guess didn't touch on too powerfully, is you need to have some decent content and you need to have A really nice looking pin. Because if you have like, you know, total spam and you're not providing any value through nice pins or nice content, no one's really going to take you seriously. And that's not to say you can't sell. You can absolutely sell and have pins that go to products or all sorts of other things, but people generally want to see that you at least have nice quality viral pins and that your, your content is at least halfway decent. So that's really, really important. And as far as like content being halfway decent, I mean, I'm not talking about you have to write a beautiful 2000 word article. Doesn't even have to be like that. It could be a 250 to 500 word article. It could even be top 10 doghouses, like I said. But it needs to provide some sort of value to the end user. So that's really, really important as a differentiating factor. Cool.

So we only have a few more minutes left here, so let's go ahead and dive into the tool. The tool is called Board Commander. Can you kind of tell us what, what portions of this process that that tool automates for you and you know how that's beneficial to use that tool versus just kind of doing everything manually?

Absolutely. So the first thing is it has an auto follow feature, which means that you can actually specify.

Where you want.

To pull followers from. Want to start following to get your first follow. So it's kind of just follow for follow for you, just so you can get those initial followers when you're starting out. So you can actually type in a profile in your niche of someone who has a ton of followers because those will be the best people for you to have as your followers as. So you can basically create a pool of people that you want to pull from and it'll just start kind of following those people for you. Now obviously this is not ideal in the long run. The purpose is just if you're starting out, it'll get you those initial followers. You need just to have a little bit of a background and make your profile look a little authoritative. And basically from there also we have an unfollow tool. So let's say you have a thousand people that you followed and only 300 followed you back. You'll have 300 people following you and you'll have the thousand people that you're following. It doesn't look very authoritative. So that unfollow tool will actually clean up a lot of the people that you would have to manually go in and unfollow it'll just do that for you and reduce those numbers down significantly so that now let's say it'll be like you have 300 followers and only 100 people and you're only following 100 people. So now that looks much more authoritative. So from there we actually have a full pinning feature. So like it'll do all of your pinning for you. Not only will it do pinning into group boards, but it'll actually build your regular boards because you want to have a lot of content on your profile. That way anyone in the, in your niche that comes to your profile says, oh, this is someone worth following, they have a lot of great stuff. So basically you could set it up so every day the software will add to your regular boards and also pin your content into group boards for you. That's where the traffic to your website or wherever you want to send it is going to come from. So it'll do all of that for you. Now obviously from there the other thing that we mentioned was you actually need to have a pin that is, that looks good and is going to actually get attention. So to do that we actually have a viral image tool in there that will create those. You can use royalty free images as a background, do a bunch of other things and basically within, like very quickly create a quality pin. You can basically pin directly to Pinterest for the software or just download the pin and use it for whatever option you want. It's a pretty quality graphics suite in there that we have. And you can, I mean if you really wanted to, you could use it for things other than Pinterest. But we kind of created it for the purpose of making those viral image pins. Another thing that we said that we have that's really, really powerful is you can actually find group boards right in the tool. So if you type in dogs, it'll pull tons of group boards related to dogs. And we have stats that pull with it too, like how many people are in the group board, how active is the group board, just to give you an idea. And then if you see a group board you like, you can actually add all those into a repository in board commander of your favorite boards and that way you could keep track of the ones that you want to apply to, etc. And you could also analyze them with our group board analyzer to see what the average repin rate is. So it's even worth your time because you might see a group board with like 20,000 people. But let's say you run it through our analyzer, it might be Totally dead for the past year. So it just really makes sure that you. You cure, you. You shortlist all of the best group boards that are worth trying to get into for your niche and just saves you a ton of time in the long run.

And more or less, those are kind of the features that we have right now. And it's just been a huge time saver for us. And as you can see, it does automate a lot of these tedious tasks that you would otherwise have to do manually in terms of starting to follow the process of getting Pinterest traffic.

Very cool.

Yeah. And I actually have used the tool. I actually haven't used all the features yet, but essentially you've got your follow Unfollow so you can get up to that hundred followers and beyond. You know, I think one of the things you mentioned in there is there's really no need to turn off that feature of follow unfollow as you go forward. You know, just keep on collecting followers in perpetuity forever.

Exactly.

I haven't used the Group Board Explorer tool where you can find other group.

Boards, but I am right now and it's actually pretty damn amazing. I'm doing the analyzer. I'm just like kind of dicking around here as you're talking. I was like, oh, this is actually really cool.

I've used the feature where it actually posts a group board. So essentially the group board feature is you. You kind of pick a board inside of your existing Pinterest and anything that posts to that board, you can make it automatically post to specific groups. So maybe you have a couple groups that you're in around affiliate marketing. Well, if you have an affiliate marketing board, the tool will automatically repost anything that goes into that affiliate marketing board to those related affiliate marketing groups. Is that an accurate explanation?

Just so I totally understood what you said. Say it one more time. Sorry about that.

So basically you would create a board, say, affiliate marketing. For our example, we'd have a board about content related to affiliate marketing. And anything I post in that, I can make it automatically post to group boards related to affiliate marketing Marketing.

Exactly. You could also. Yeah, exactly. And you could also get the software to auto post into that. Into that board as well. If you want to pin stuff that's already circulating Pinterest. Because all of your on Pinterest, all of your content doesn't have to be your only content. You could repin other people's stuff as well. And that actually does get you additional traffic when you start pinning other people's Stuff into your own boards, because on search engines it'll say repinned by whoever. And a lot of times you'll get traffic that way to your profile. So you do want to add other people's content just to like. Because, like, sometimes having, you know, 200 pieces of your own content could be a little hard when you're starting out. So you always do want to, you know, have at least some content from other people, and that'll actually get you some traffic as well.

Very cool.

Got it.

Makes sense.

Well, we've got to wrap up here. We've got just a few more minutes. So one question that we always like to ask our guests at the end of the show, and I don't want to get ahead of myself. Did you have any other questions related to this?

No, we're good to go.

Okay, cool. So one question we always like to ask is, do you have any book that has sort of, you know, you recommend often or it's really sort of changed your perspective on business or, you know, we like to give people a book recommendation after listening to the show.

Yeah. So I guess the one that I definitely could recommend is that I've finished recently for the second time is Awaken the Giant within by Tony Robbins. So. So maybe it's a little stereotypical to use a Tony Robbins book, but it has really helped me and helped me overcome some limiting beliefs, especially when it comes to business, to really allow me to go into the unknown and create something that I guess to the quote, unquote, average person is not possible to do. So I would say, in terms of raising limiting. Awaken the Giant within by Tony Robbins. Totally recommend it for anyone who hasn't read it.

Awesome book. Yep.

Yeah, that's a good one, man. Well, I guess wrapping it all up. Where do you want people to. To go after this, this whole podcast here?

So basically we. I guess I could say the. The notes for this podcast, through talking with Joe and Matt here, we have a obviously very special deal for you guys. So you'll be able to get. I mean, do you guys want me to go into the details real quick?

Sure, go for it, man.

Okay. All right, so great. So what we'll do is we'll actually give you guys 10 seeds of board Commander, meaning you could connect up to 10 Pinterest accounts for whatever option you would really like. And we'll also have full training as far as not only software tutorials, but actual marketing training that you can go in and follow to show you how to set up Pinterest. Traffic for whatever level you're at. If you're new, it will even show you how to get started. If you already have a business or site, it'll show you how to get more exposure and more traffic that way. We're also going to include some of our own case studies of personal websites we have and the results that we're actually getting. So it's always good to see the final product.

And we'll also let you guys into our private support and kind of mastermind for Board Commander as well, where people are always posting and getting results. So that's a really, really great tool to have in your arsenal. So that'll be in the notes for this podcast, and you'll be able to get a really great deal on all those things.

That's right, man. Thank you so much. And yeah, it's in everything you just said. It's high, high, high value. Because, yeah, like I said, Matt's gone through the training I've gone through. Not the training itself, but definitely the tool itself, the software. I mean, there's just so much to do in there. So, again, like I said, if, like, you're serious, if you actually want to try out Pinterest, this is what you need.

And it's called Board Commander. Just to reiterate what the name of the product is, it's called Board Commander, and we will make sure it's linked up in the show notes with, you know, the special deal that Stefan's got there. And. Very cool.

That's about it, man. But this is super cool. Thanks for kind of opening our eyes to, like, a whole new traffic source that's untapped.

I'm hoping to send you a case study of my own soon. And, yeah, you can post it wherever you want. So working on it.

Yeah, that'll be. That would be excellent. We're always looking for new, awesome case studies, so. But in general, thank you so much for having me on, guys. And I'm excited to kind of talk about this because, as you said, not too many people really know about it or kind of use it, so it's cool to spread the word a little bit.

Cool, man.

Well, appreciate it. Thanks again.

Have a good one, man. See you.

All right, guys, thanks so much.

Bye.

Bye.

All right, thank you. And I hope you just enjoyed this episode you just listened to. Now, right now, before we sign off, I have a few things I would love for you to do. So the very first thing is to go find our guest on Facebook and tell them that you loved their episode with us. That's going to help them just feel good about themselves, but also it's going to spread the word a little bit more for us. So go find them on Facebook. Everybody's on Facebook. And go say that you love their episode and maybe one cool thing that you learn there. The second thing is to go to itunes and subscribe to our podcast. Just look up Hustle and Flowchart and hit the subscribe button. And the very last thing, the third thing is to leave us a review on itunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and help us spread the word more. That's how more people are going to get this awesome knowledge, this, this cool podcast training and a whole bunch of other cool free training that we give out@evergreen profits.com so that's about it. Go find them on Facebook, go subscribe on itunes and leave us a review. You would be amazing if you did that, but you're always amazing. So thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.

You're awesome.