Are you a new Podcaster looking for effective ways to grow your podcast audience? Maybe you’ve been podcasting for a while now and you’ve plateaued in your audience growth.
Hi There, I’m Adeola, and in this post, I’ll be sharing a ten step strategy you can use to grow your podcast audience using Pinterest.
Before I get into this post, I first want to share a couple stats with you about Pinterest.
1. Pinterest is a visual search engine, NOT a social media platform
2. Pinterest drives 10x more traffic than Facebook and Instagram combined
10 Easy Steps Every Podcast Host Needs To Know About How To Grow Their Podcast Audience With Pinterest
1. Open a Business Account with a Search Engine Optimized Profile Name
If you already use Pinterest for personal use, I suggest opening another account for your podcast or podcast blog. You should make sure it’s a business account, so that you’ll get access to analytics and Pinterest ads.
After opening a business account, the next thing you want to do is to choose a search engine optimized (SEO) profile name. Your profile name will usually be your podcast name. However, to increase your chances of getting found on Pinterest, you should also add a target keyword your listeners or audience will be typing into search engines.
For example, if your podcast name is Women of Color and you talk about personal finance for black women, your profile name will be Women of Color | Personal Finance Tips For Black Women.
To get more character space, it’s recommended to write this long profile name on your phone. Editing your profile name on desktop has a mote limited character space.
2. Write a Keyword Rich Profile Description.
When a pinner lands on your profile, they need to know what your profile is all about and why they should follow your profile and pin your content.
Your profile description is where you will introduce your podcast to your audience, what it’s all about, who you serve and what the listener can look forward to.
If you have a free download on your blog, you should let them know about it as well, so that they can check out your site right away.
3. Create at least 7 Boards with Keyword Optimized board names and pin relevant pins to each board.
The next thing you want to do is to create around 7 boards with keyword rich names. Remember that Pinterest is a search engine.
To increase your chances of getting found online, you should include relevant keywords your target audience will be looking for online.
For example, relevant board names for a personal finance board will be Budgeting, Savings, Retirement, Credit card debt, mortgage, investing e.t.c.
After creating these boards, you should add at least 10 relevant pins to each board. It’s very easy to do that nowadays because Pinterest will recommend pins that relates to that board. And all you have to do is to click save, to add them to the board.
Essentially, you want your profile to be a resource centre for your target listeners.
4. Create Beautiful Pin Images For Your Podcast Episodes
What most people don’t know yet is that Pinterest is actually a Visual Search Engine.
To quickly establish an audience on Pinterest and grow your podcast audience, you will need to design beautiful and click-worthy images they will actually click on.
You must first ensure that your images are vertically long images with a 2:3 dimension. If you’re going to be using Canva to design your pins, you can use the Pinterest template which is 735px X 1102px.
Then, you should use bold colors that will catch someone’s attention on the platform. If you have your own brand colors, you can use them. Although you can play around with colors until you find the perfect color combination. In terms of font styles, you should choose bold fonts that are easy to read. You can also use feminine font styles if your audience are mostly women.
The next thing to consider is to write click-worthy titles with a search engine optimized keyword. This way, when someone performs a search on Pinterest with a keyword that’s on your pin, Pinterest will show your pin to the reader. Another cool thing to note is that Pinterest pins comes up in google search and google images. So if you want to boost your page rank, you need to take Pinterest very seriously.
You can also add a mock-up of your free download if you have one. Anything to get someone to click on your pin to go to your website.
5. Create Pinterest Videos About Your Products
Video searched on Pinterest have increased up to 3,000%, in the last year, depending on the niche you’re in. To quickly grow an audience, I recommend converting your podcast episodes into 1 minute videos. If you’ve already created some for Instagram, you can bring them over to Pinterest. Just make sure that you choose a click-worthy video cover.
Also make sure your videos meets the 9:16 or 1:1 format. Avoid YouTube 16:9 dimension because Pinterest will completely ignore the video and it won’t show it to your followers. So I like to upload 9:16 videos because it makes Pinterest happy.
6. Write a Search Engine Optimized Pin Description and always include target links for each pin.
Please keep in mind that Pinterest is a search engine platform with a social aspect to it. To increase the lifespan of your pins, you should write an enticing and keyword rich pin description. You should also include links to the target page that relates to the pin on your website.
This is why it’s very important for Podcasters to have their own website, because if you want Pinterest to work for you and be able to quickly grow an audience, you should create a blog for your podcast. This way, you can send listeners to a specific landing page and also get them to take other actions on your site, such as signing up to your newsletter, webinar etc.
7. Pin all your podcast episodes and blog posts to Pinterest
After you’ve set up an optimized pinterest profile, you now want to design click-worthy pins for the rest of your podcast episodes or blog posts. If you are crunch on time and don’t know where to start, you can start by designing pins for your top ten episodes.
To speed things up, use the same template and just change up the title on each pin. Upload them to Pinterest, write an enticing description and include a link to the episode and pin it to the right board.
8. Optimize Your Website for Pinterest
Aside from optimizing your Pinterest profile, you also want to optimize your website for Pinners (Pinterest users). There are over 250 million active Pinterest users who loves to save new ideas to their boards. If you want your readers to help spread the word about your podcast on your behalf for free, you should make things easy for them.
By this I mean adding pinnable images to your posts and encouraging readers to pin them to their boards. Remember those pins you created in step four and seven? You should add those pins to your blog posts so that a pinner visiting your website will be able to pin the image to their Pinterest board.
To help with SEO, you should add a keyword rich alt-text to your images, so that when a Pinner pins an image to their board, Pinterest will use the alt text as the pin title. Most Pinterest users don’t know anything about SEO and they won’t be bothered with writing an optimized description and everything I’ve shared so far.
Now when the pinner pins that image to Pinterest with the alt text, the next time another Pinner puts in a search query with the alt text, Pinterest will pull up that pin. And the next thing you know, you’re getting free traffic from a Pin someone else posted to Pinterest on your behalf!
Because Pinterest is an authority site, it also helps with backlinks and rankings!
How awesome is that!
9. Schedule Your Pins Using A Scheduling Tool
Pinterest is a long term game and to stay on top of the game, you will need to keep adding fresh content to your profile. To do that, I recommend using a scheduling tool to automate the process. The best tool out there is Tailwind and that’s what I use.
Tailwind allows you to schedule a month’s worth of content within 30 minutes! I don’t know about any other social media platform where I can schedule 30 days worth of content in 30 minutes.
Instead of pinning all your pins from step seven to Pinterest all at once, you can have Tailwind schedule them to go out on specific dates. You can also have it post the pins to related boards on your behalf.
10. Study Your Analytics and Let it Drive Your Strategies
To determine if your Pinterest strategies are working, you will need to get familiar with your analytics. What I love about Pinterest is that the analytics tells you what pins and boards are performing well. This includes other people’s pins that you pinned to your boards.
For example, if you have pins with a high impression but very little clicks, you might want to take a look at your keywords, call to action, pin design, colors, fonts, imagery and the relevancy of your posts.
If your pin has a low impression, you should take a look at the size and create another pin with a more optimized size.
If you want to quickly grow your podcast audience, you should be using your analytics to determine what content to create next, based on what’s doing really well on your profile.
This is a basic SEO strategy.
Conclusion
I suggest giving yourself about 3 months to familiarize yourself with Pinterest and always remember that Pinterest isn’t social media, it’s a search engine. This means that you should be thinking long term with every pin you create. You should also ensure that your website is optimized for SEO so that Pinterest and Google can get to work faster on your behalf.
Do you currently use Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog? What questions do you have for us with regards to how to use Pinterest to grow your podcast audience?
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