Pinterest is a visual search engine. And this itself tells you that Pinterest should be
a great place to promote a photography business. People love sharing beautiful images, landscapes,
unique unusual photos and so on. So it’s true that great photos can get a ton of repins
on Pinterest.
But how do you use Pinterest to actually get clients to your photography business? This
question doesn’t have a short answer, and that’s why I decided to talk about it in
my video today.
Hi, I’m Anastasia of anastasiablogger.com. I’m a Pinterest marketing expert and on
this channel, I share my Pinterest and online business tips on Thursdays. If that’s what
you want to learn about, you know all the buttons you need to click, right? ☺ Subscribe,
and hit the bell button to get notified about my new tutorials!
This video today will be helpful not only if you are a photographer looking for clients,
but also for several other types of businesses inside the photography niche. For example,
if you share photography tips or sell photography educational content, I will show you some
really good examples of how people promote them on Pinterest.
Also, if you are offering Pinterest management services to clients who run a photography
business, this video will also help you learn the best practices that work for this particular
niche.
So, let’s get started!
First and foremost, to promote your business on Pinterest, you need to have a business
account and verify your site on Pinterest. I don’t like repeating myself in the videos,
so I’ll just direct you to my previous tutorials. If you are a complete beginner and you need
to create a business account on Pinterest from scratch, I have another video and you
will find a link to it in the top right corner and in the description below this video.
The second step would be analyzing your niche and building your boards on Pinterest. Again,
in the description below this video, I will give you all the links to my tutorials that
will show you how to set up your account, how to create boards, and everything you need
as a new account owner on Pinterest step by step. Step one, step two, and so on.
So I’d like to first start with showing you how you can investigate how popular is
your particular type of business inside photography niche. When you go to pinterest.com slash
categories, you see this page that is shown to all the new users once they first sign
up on this platform. And you will see here that one of the big categories on Pinterest
is Photography. If we open it, we’ll see that this category has 91.8 million followers
right now. And while you’re scrolling down this page, you will see here how popular these
pins that are on this niche like 44,000 repins, almost 100,000 repins for this pins.
But when you reach the bottom part of the page, you will see several subcategories or
subtopics inside the photography big niche and you will see that the popular ones that
we can find here - wedding photography, street photography, nature photography, animal photography.
Then for the journalism, but let me just show you some of them that I already opened. For
example, for wedding photography, you will find out that it has almost 18 million followers
on Pinterest and I encourage you to investigate further what kind of pins are getting so much
traction on Pinterest and why. And whether or not they’re related to your niche. For
example, I found this particular pin quite interesting. It has about 14,000 repins on
Pinterest so I open the pin itself, I see that it’s linked to a site of a wedding
photographer. Well, I already know that she’s a wedding photographer. And because I already
went to her site and I wanted to show you her Pinterest account.
You will see that it is almost 1 million monthly viewers. If you look at her boards you will
find out that she’s specifying the description where she’s located, in Arizona, right.
So she’s looking for clients in this state. And then she shows some examples of her work.
And then you will see that she’s not only saving pins that are focused on wedding photography.
She has some other boards that are not directly related to wedding photography. She has some
family photo ideas boards and other types of photography. So that’s why I’m trying
to always say that on Pinterest, it’s important to have a little bit broader field when you’re
building your boards. You shouldn’t be focused or super niched down if you want to get good
traction on Pinterest. When you’re going to discover more of these
topics related to the initial photography category, you will see that in the related
topics, you will find some very good ideas for the titles of your boards. For example
here, we’re looking at wedding photography poses and it has about 42,000 followers on
Pinterest. And here you will find more ideas for your board titles, for example, groom
poses. If you’re focused on wedding photography, definitely some of these keywords are going
to be in your board titles. Now, the other topic for example street photography
has 1 million followers. Animal photography 136,000 followers. Kid photography, about
10,000 followers, and so on. Another place where you can also look for
information about how big is your audience on Pinterest is Pinterest Analytics Audience
Insights. Then you will go to Audience, inside All Pinterest users so click on this button.
And then inside the categories, you will see there’s a category art. Unfortunately, I
cannot find the photography categories separately but if I look inside art category, I’ll
see here that there is photography. It’s quite a popular subcategory inside art. And
art is one of the top as well - one of the top categories.
I’d like to go really quickly over the basics for you to understand what you need to do
step by step on your account. So first one to create your account, you probably
need to use your profile picture that either is your photo or represents somehow what kind
of photography you offer to clients. And then explain in the title of your profile if it’s
important for you that you want to only get clients in your specific location. I would
recommend to have your location right here in the name of your Pinterest profile and
then you have a field for description. It’s a little bit longer so here you can add some
information about the type of photography you’re selling and you can also mention
again the location if it is important for you. In this case, I like that this photographer
mentions what kind or what style of photos she’s offering to her clients.
My next tip would be maybe specifically for this profile how she could improve her presence
on Pinterest is by using vertical photos or vertical images. Maybe she could even repurpose
the same photos that she already has on her profile that they’re horizontal. But she
could add something on top like maybe she could make a small collage of two photos and
then on top of it she could add a text overlay to generate more clicks and to have taller
images. Because that’s how this platform works. On Pinterest, you have to know that
images have to be vertical. 80% of the audience on mobile devices. That’s how the platform
works - in the vertical format. So if you have a lot of horizontal images, you’re
just losing a lot of exposure on Pinterest and losing some traffic to your competitors
who spend the extra time and effort for creating those vertical images.
The recommended image ratio on Pinterest is 2:3 and the maximum height of your image can
be 1:2 when it gets taller than 1:2 image ratio, Pinterest is gonna cut off the bottom
part of the pin and your pins will not get as much distribution because they’re too
tall. Another thing missing from this account’s
pins is her either her domain name or some logo some kind because there’s no any kind
of watermark on her photos and this is bad because Pinterest platform has this particular
problem of stolen pins so it’s very easy for people who want to redirect traffic from
your images to their site. It’s very easy for them to steal your content and it’s
harder for you to prove that it really is your content when you don’t have any kind
of watermark or at least your domain name somewhere at the bottom of the pin at least.
So I mentioned that you could create those taller pins just making a simple collage image.
A few of your photos and a text overlay on top. And if you want to know what is the easiest
way in creating these pin images. The easiest way and it’s a free tool is Canva. I know
that most of the photographers are pretty comfortable with Photoshop but actually, even
for professional graphic designers, I think that for this kind of collages, because Canva
has these special grids, it is actually easier to create these kinds of pins in Canva. It’s
a free online tool available to everyone and I have a video tutorial about creating pins
in Canva. I’ll give you the link to this video in the top right corner and in the description
below this video. And then I’d like also to give you tip about
how you can manage your Pinterest account without spending too much time on the platform
because as a business owner as a photographer, you want to spend most of your time working
with your clients and Pinterest is probably just one of the platforms you’re using to
drive traffic to your website. So I would say that if you’re doing everything manually
on Pinterest, you’re either doing not enough pinning because Pinterest recommends 15-25
pins a day. It’s like the average that most successful accounts are saving on the platform
right now. So if you don’t have the time to save many pins on Pinterest, then you probably
might want to look at the authorized Pinterest scheduler called Tailwind. It will allow you
to save each of your pins to several boards relevant to the content, to the keywords on
your pin title and description of your pin. The scheduler will help save each of your
pins to several relevant boards that’s actually helping you get exposure to a bigger audience
on Pinterest because each of your boards might have slightly different keywords also related
to the keywords that you have in your title of your pin and description of your pin, but
slightly different keywords. So you’re going to show your pin to a bigger audience rather
than a few saved once to just one board on your Pinterest account.
Again I have a detailed tutorial on how to use Tailwind scheduler. If you feel that you’re
spending way too much time on Pinterest and you still want to maintain the same level
of activity on the platform, then check out the video. I’ll give you a link on the top
right corner and on the description below this video.
Now I’m going to show you a couple of examples that are doing particularly great on Pinterest
and they will be from different types of photography business. For example, this company, they
are a creative photography showing behind the scenes. They have a strong presence on
Instagram and Youtube and also on Pinterest now that we’re looking at. Their account
is at 6.7 million monthly viewers and what I find really interesting about this account
they have just a few boards and they mostly have about video pins that I think that they
are creating these video pins from the content they already have on other platforms. So if
it’s your case, you can also repurpose content like they’re doing.
If I open some of these videos like what they’re doing here, they’re basically showing some
tips about photography and they have a lot of engagements. Unfortunately, we cannot see
the number of repins here but I can assure you that these pins are getting viral fast
because they have super high engagements. As you can see from this example, Pinterest
doesn’t have to be a hard hustle because they just uploaded here the content that they
already have on other platforms. And it works great for them. Their account is doing really
well. And they’re sending traffic to their Youtube videos. You see they’re linking
to Youtube videos here or to their site directly. And also we can see on their site they’re
selling some Lightroom presets. And from these pins, they’re sending traffic from Pinterest
directly to their presets. And now another interesting example here is
this account that is promoting some Photoshop tips, photography tips. And basically, it’s
an educational site for beginner photographers. And we can see here that she’s not selling
actually her own services. But she’s mostly selling educational content about photography
niche and she has a membership site for beginner photographers. If we look at her account,
in particular, we’ll see here that she has 1.3 million monthly viewers on Pinterest.
She has a lot of boards in this case and her strategy is kind of different. If we look
at her account, we’ll find out here that most of her pins are linked to some educational
content. In this case, in particular, in her podcast episodes. And then she’s always
adding some text overlay on top of the pins. If you look at her pins you will realize that
she must use this text overlays with How To and other attractive call to action phrases
that will help her get actual traffic from these pins. Otherwise, it will just be a pretty
picture of a girl. And maybe some people would save it as an idea for whatever their kid
photography session. But they wouldn’t have a reason to click through. Now, with this
text overlay, she explains why the users need to click through and what they will learn
from this article. Again, when I was looking for some popular
pins, I found this one with lots of engagements and a ton of comments. That’s what actually,
just for your information if you don’t know how to understand which pins are popular or
viral on Pinterest, if you see a ton of engagements and comments. In this case, we don’t have
photos but either photos or comments. If they have many of them, it indicates usually that
the pin is going viral. In this case, this professional photographer showing her behind
the scenes. It’s just a simple video that she basically fast-forwarded whatever she
was doing to create this scene. And if you look at her site and go from this
pin to the post, you will realize that she also sells some photography tips. You can
see here that she’s trying to monetize her site and she’s selling her photography ebook
challenge. Then she also has one on one consultations for beginner photographers.
And then I also found this particularly popular pin with 36 comments and when I click through,
I realized that this type of photography business is very different from what I was showing
to you so far. It’s a business based on photo retouching services and they are also
sending a lot of traffic to their site from Pinterest.
This is how their Pinterest account looks. They have 9 million monthly viewers. You can
see their boards. It’s about 6 boards but they have a lot of pins on each of these boards.
You can see that it’s over 4000. And you will realize that here they’re focusing
very well on the main keyword related to their services. Retouch photos or digital retouching.
I think that in their case, it’s easier to create these engaging photos because they
can show before and after, and that’s what they’re doing in most photos. They basically
show examples of the work and then it goes to their page.
If you have some interesting tips I missed in this video and you think they could help
others, share them in the comment section below this video!
Now, I’m signing off for today, stay safe, stay healthy! And before you leave, here are
my other videos perfectly complementary to what I shared with you today. Check them out
here and there, and I’ll see you in the next videos!