I can’t tell you how many times people have said to me “If I was starting my business from scratch, I would have focused on Pinterest first”. When we begin our businesses, most of us try to do ‘all the things’ to build our businesses, right?
I love Pinterest. I’ve built my business around it so I’m pretty thankful for it, but when I was just starting out, I too, tried to do all the things. Flipping from one thing to the next, buying all the courses, trying all the social media platforms, trying to appeal to everyone…
And yes, Pinterest was just another shiny object that I thought I’d try out.
If you ask anyone who’s actually using Pinterest for their business with any kind of effort they’ll likely tell you it’s their #1 traffic source. It was mine within a couple of months of using it and well, that was it.
I devoured it, changed my business model and starting teaching others how to use it effectively.
Now I’ve used Pinterest pretty successfully for the past few years, but then it started to plateau, so I decided to switch up my strategy. If you read the title of this post, I think you know what I did next…
Yes I started to get really strategic about the content I was sharing. Whilst yes I was sharing my own content (an absolute must), I also started to share content from my competitors too.
So let me share with you the 3 reasons why I did this and why it was a game changer!
1: Serve Your Audience
If you know your audience well and truly want to serve them, then you need to show them that! By making it about them allows you to tap into what they need. Sometimes that content isn’t going to be yours. It may be some amazing content that your competitor has created that you think would be helpful to your audience. It also establishes your trust and credibility.
2: Reciprocity
I began sharing my competitor’s content through a resource call Tailwind Tribes. Much like group boards, Tribes are a place where you and your fellow Tribe members (including your competitors) add new and old content and anyone in that tribe can add it to their posting schedule to go out on Pinterest. So yes, I shared theirs and they shared mine.
3: Share Audiences
When reciprocity occurs it’s done strategically. I know I’ll be sharing content from a handful of my competitors who create fantastic content that will be relevant to my audience – and they do the same! Sharing each other’s audiences allows us both to piggy back on each other’s audiences and provide value at the same time. Do this well and it will boost your visibility like crazy! Within 2 weeks of doing this my monthly viewers on Pinterest went from 120k per month to 960k.
Extra tip: Be consistent! Your visibility (and life) can ebb and flow according to how much effort and consistency you put in. Within the last month I’ve been less consistent and it’s dropped to 200k. The key is knowing what you need to do change the game!
I do hope these strategies will help you to increase your visibility on Pinterest but remember to ensure you know who your audience is and have a good content plan in place first!