PART 1 : MY PINNING STRATEGY
My strategy came together when I started to think of Pinterest as a platform more like Google than Facebook. Pinterest is a visual search engine that relies on keywords. I started being very intentional about my keywords. I added them to all my board titles, board descriptions, and pins. I used the search filters on Pinterest as my guide to find the most popular keywords. I put myself in the shoes of someone searching on Pinterest, to create an experience on our page that would actually help them. And here were some other components of my strategy: • Not just pinning our own content, but thinking of myself as a curator. I pin: – 50% from Catch My Party – 35% repins on Pinterest – 15% from blogs I love • Upping the number of pins per day from 15 pins to 50 • Using a scheduler (I recommend Tailwind) so I could spread out our pins throughout the day
Then, we noticed that Instagram was the new “it” place to be, so we built the same pop-up for our Instagram account. We programmed it to alternate with our Pinterest pop-up, so visitors to our site would see one when they visited the first time, and the other when they came back. Currently our Instagram following is over 75k, thanks in large part to what we built.
THE BIRTH OF MILOTREE
After both our pop-ups worked, and we could see how effective they were, we stepped back and thought why not help other bloggers grow their Pinterest and Instagram following by sharing our tool with them. So we launched MiloTree, where we give bloggers their own free personalized pop-up to embed on their blogs. We let bloggers customize it the way they want. They can install it as a Pinterest pop-up, an Instagram pop-up, or have it alternate between the two. For an additional fee, we offer analytics and other custom features. It works on almost all platforms, and we have an easy WordPress plugin people can use.
• Following new “power pinners” daily to show Pinterest I’m active on the platform And we did other things to help us grow, too: • Confirming our Pinterest account • Adding Rich Pins so there’s more data in our pins • Adding the Pin-It Button across our site and blog, to make it easy for other people to pin our content
PART 2 : ASK YOUR AUDIENCE FOR HELP
With our pinning strategy in place, we needed to find a way to ask our Catch My Party visitors to follow us on Pinterest. Who better to champion you than your own audience? But we didn’t want to stick an annoying pop-up up on our site because we care way too much about our users’ experience. So we built our own pop-up tool. Our goal was to make it personal and inviting. The tool automatically pulled our Pinterest description, Pinterest photo, and last four pins into the pop-up. This way people got a taste of our account before ever committing, and they saw that we were serious about Pinterest. We also optimized it for speed so it would be lightening fast. And we had it discretely bounce up from the bottom of the page where it would be noticeable, but not distracting or intrusive. I get turned off by pop-ups that shake in my face. So we launched it on our site, and it started working immediately. We grew our following by over 100k that next year.
And here’s the exciting part (and came from feedback from bloggers using our tool): We’re launching a Facebook pop-up soon, and another version that will capture email sign-ups. Soon you’ll be able to choose to grow Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, and/or your email list using one simple free, well-optimized pop-up.
WHAT WE LEARNED
If you can get through a challenging period, like we did two years ago, good things are usually on the other side. Catch My Party is thriving, and we now have a sister business, MiloTree, to help other bloggers grow their followings. There’s something very satisfying about scratching your own business “itch.” But there’s something even more satisfying when you get to help others do it, too!