Ep 112: How Writers Can Use Pinterest To Grow Their Audience With Cara Ray & Heather Farris

Okay, that's helpful.

So you mentioned earlier, you use Pinterest as your search engine.

Is that right? So you use it like you would use Google.

So explain to me, why do you use it that way? Because I think most people think of going to Pinterest as, to look for a recipe or inspiration for their home remodeling project, or it doesn't seem like an easy or smooth or parallel transition for a writer who my audience is mostly Christian women writers.

So there's a lot of fiction writers and there's nonfiction writers.

So making that transition to Pinterest, number one, I think might be kind of like a mind shift, but also like the whole search engine thing, that's kind of a new concept to me

yeah so similarly to how you might want your books to show up on google you would be thinking about that for pinterest so pinterest users actually use pinterest like you said the same way that they might use google so they they have like the same formats of like keywords so very technical not creative at all and i know your audience is a very creative bunch so Bear with me.

There are informational based keywords, drain style keywords, and those two are like the big buckets.

And then there's kind of like these phases of customer journey in between where people are looking for like more consideration.

like this versus this.

Okay.

So the platform offers those types of search results because people like me have placed content on the platform using those keywords.

So Pinterest actually developed their first iteration of their search engine in 2011.

Now the platform was launched in 2010 and they noticed really quickly, they gave us a search bar and they gave us a catalog of keywords interests that we could filter by.

So very early on, I could search for living room and then I could search by furniture instead of art or something like that.

And then they noticed that people were searching, searching, searching for things and the results would come up.

And creators back then were not really doing a lot in terms of SEO.

They were just putting on chicken parmesan casserole and that would come up because that's just what was being served.

It was the only content at the time.

So when they introduced that first iteration of the search engine, they introduced kind of the guided search feature, which some people might notice if they go to Pinterest today, may search for writing prompts and then there's bubbles that will pop up underneath a search bar and you can click on those and it'll change the search term that's guided search so that was the original iteration they've built on built on that over the years now where a writer might find this useful depending on how they market their books or their blogs or their sub stack or whatever they're writing those pieces of work that you're marketing someone is searching for that So then the question to tie those two things together is, how is Kara searching for this on the internet and how can I get it to surface for her? And really diving into that individual piece that you wrote, whether it's a book in physical copy or an e-book or a sub stack that you write on weekly newsletters, whatever it is, there is a way that people are actively looking for that.

So you mentioned that a lot of your writers and your audience are Christian women and they may write fiction or nonfiction.

Maybe they're writing devotionals.

People on Pinterest are actually searching for that.

Christian devotional, weekly devotional, daily devotional, devotional for, and then insert an adjective.

Yeah.