#239: How To Start Using Pinterest To Find Clients with Jana Osofsky

Michelle Leotta:
Well, hello there health coaches. Last week on the show we were talking about the difference between scrolling and searching very different behaviors and why our most motivated clients are probably out there right now and they're looking for your help. They are actively searching for it. They're searching on Google, which is of course number one search engine. They're searching on YouTube, which is number two, and they're searching Pinterest, which is the surprise, third largest search engine on the internet. And that's what we're going to be talking about today.

This episode is brought to you by my favorite client management tool practice better. You can save 30% for your first three months at healthcoachpower.com/pb and use code HCP30, the number 30, HCP 30.
So, my friend Jana O is back today to help clean up our dusty old Pinterest profiles and make better use of them to attract clients. Janet, thanks for joining us again.

Jana Osofsky:
Thanks for having me. I love that we're going to clean them up.

Michelle Leotta:
Yeah, I mean, those are your words. You suggested those words and I was like, yes, that's exactly what it feels like when you have, and I asked in our group the other day, I asked, who has a Pinterest profile? I'm almost everybody like said they have something, but you know, just have a couple things that you've pinned or it's just kind of random, or you don't just barely have your profile set up. And sometimes it just sits there in the background. So we are going to clean those suckers up so that they can be much more useful. And we have a follow-up training with much more, and that is happening next week on April 26th. So if you haven't already and you're just dying to know how to use Pinterest more effectively, I want you to register for that free training right now. It's over at healthcoachpower.com/pinterest.

I'm going to put that link over here in our comments for anybody who's interested. Now, if you guys are here live, tell us in the comments, do you use Pinterest for business? Do you use it for fun either? Personally, I've been pinning recipes for years and years and years, like how I do my meal planning. That's my favorite way to find recipes online. And for a long time in my own health coaching business, I was developing recipes and getting them shared on Pinterest as well. And that was huge for driving website traffic. But Pinterest is so much more than recipes. That is what I'm learning. There's so much more and there's so much more than using that as a hobby. So Jana, you got to help us today. How do we start taking advantage?

Jana Osofsky:
Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I love that you're saying that. I realized when I st... I've been working with health coaches and other types of entrepreneurs, but a lot of self-improvement in health coaches, especially for the last seven years, helping them set up Pinterest and use it to attract clients. And I remember in the beginning I talked a lot about setting up a profile and there are still some people that set up a profile, but I've learned that the vast majority of people, especially health and wellness coaches, it's not really so much about setting it up from scratch. It's about starting by cleaning it up so that we can actually start using it more optimally. Because I think what happens a lot of times is we start businesses about something we're passionate about. And I know that that happens for a lot of health coaches, is that they are starting their business because they're passionate about some particular area of health and health in general, and they want to help others experience maybe a change that they experience, for example, and share what they know and what they've learned over the years and help people to make progress toward their goals.

And so a lot of times that's reflected in their personal Pinterest profiles because they've been curating all of these amazing ideas. Some of them are food related of course, but some of them aren't food as well. And so now they have this great Pinterest profile that has a lot of stuff on it that's related to their business, but it also has a lot of stuff on it that's not related to their business because we are well-rounded humans. And we have other things that we save pins about too. Things like travel to my summer trip to Italy or my bathroom renovation or ice cream recipes for dogs, things like that. Oh, we keep talking about dogs. Dogs keep coming up in our conversations. Yeah, they have lately. Yeah. So I have kind of boiled things down and I figured I'd share today three steps that someone can take if they want to get started using Pinterest to attract clients.

Maybe you've been hearing some of the benefits of Pinterest. It's more low maintenance and less drama than social media. And as you mentioned, Michelle, that it brings a lot of people who are already looking for the things that you help with, which makes them very action taking in general. And you want more action takers in your audience and on your list, but you're not sure where to start and maybe you feel a little overwhelmed because you have all this stuff on your profile. So this is almost, if Pinterest 1 0 1 is where we start, this is almost like the prerequisite where we start with a fresh, as fresh as we can. Anyway, kind of a clean slate. So I have three steps to talk about.

Michelle Leotta:
Yeah, I have a question before you get into that. And this is on behalf of Sean who said, I have an account. Is that the same as a profile?

Jana Osofsky:
Yeah, I would say, yeah, I think of your account as your full account. So that would include if you already have a business account, your analytics dashboard and other parts where you can look at your audience insights. Whereas your profile is kind of the part that's about you, where you have your name and your bio and your boards and that type of thing. But yeah, I would say that those two are very similar and I almost use them interchangeably sometimes. Talking about Pinterest, yeah.

Michelle Leotta:
My feeling was that yes, if you have an account, you have a profile, but I bet your profile is pretty bear bones. Maybe you haven't even uploaded a photo of yourself, or maybe you haven't typed anything into the bio. It's like you just set up an account because you yourself were looking for barbecue ideas last summer and that's it.

Jana Osofsky:
Right. That definitely could show up that way too, where people just, like you said, sort of made the account to get access to the platform, but haven't really thought about what their profile says about them to people who potentially would find them as future clients.

Michelle Leotta:
Totally. Yeah. And then the other thing that I saw, cause I was just clicking through a couple people left blanks. I looked at everybody's interest profiles and a few people were even saying, yes, I'm using this to hopefully find clients. And so it's pretty standard. Here's what it looks like you guys, because I've seen enough of them and I've done it myself. If you have a cover photo, it's a nice picture of food, and then you have a beautiful headshot of yourself, and then your bio says something like, I'm a health coach and I help women get healthier and maybe I'm in California or whatever, something about you because it's like your little bio and then me or Jenna was describing, you have a bunch of boards, one's healthy desserts, one's like healthy whatever, drinks, and just all this stuff that's interesting to you. I always have a board for fermented foods and one for not healthy, a separate board from not healthy.

Cause that's where I put all cupcakes and stuff that I make for the kids. So anything that we've just talked about from barely having a profile at all to having something that you're using a little bit more as a hobbyist or something that you even feel like you're using for business, but maybe without any strategy behind it. Listen to everything Jenna's about to say, this is what you need. I could see it. I could see it in everyone's profile. I'm like, they need Jan for this and they need Jenna for that. So lay it on us. What do we need to do?

Jana Osofsky:
Yeah, and I love that you mentioned a little bit about the bio and the image of the food and things like that because there are a lot of things that you'll want to do to optimize your Pinterest profile if you truly want to use it to attract clients. And that's going to be things like doing something different probably with that profile image and updating your bio. But before we can even do that type of stuff, it really makes sense to back up, especially if you have a lot of boards and a lot of pens and clean up. So that's what we're going to talk about. So the first step I find works really well for people who have a lot of boards and a lot of pens and really want to get focused on using this now in a different way than they've ever thought about it before, is to declutter the boards.

And so I don't recommend that you worry about reorganizing pins and putting them on different boards or removing any pins. All I really want you to do is look at your boards. Now for some people that means they have 25, 30, 50 boards, maybe even more if you've been pinning a long time. And for some people it means you have less Either way. I want you to start by actually, step one is to look at all your boards and decide if there are any that are really not relevant to your business. And when I say relevant to your business, I mean really relevant to what you are doing. So if you've already, and I hope you have worked with Michelle to choose your niche and your target audience. I'm not sure if that's the words that you use, Michelle, but if you on that already, okay, good.

Then think about it that way. Which of these boards is relevant to my niche and exactly the types of outcomes that I'm helping clients with? And you want to actually either make those boards that are not relevant to that target audience and what you help with, you want to make them either secret or you want to archive them. And if you're going to make them secret, that means going into each of the board's settings and just toggling on the little toggle that says, make this board secret. And if you're going to archive it, then it means going to the three little dots and just archiving it. And it's pretty clear where to go to do that. The difference is, is that if you make the board secret, you'll still be able to pin to it. But Pinterest won't take it into consideration when trying to understand, I'm going to personify Pinterest for a second, and the algorithm who to show your pins to and what you're all about as a business.

And then if you archive them, that means they're really out of the way. You won't see them anymore. They'll be way at the bottom of your boards when you're logged in and you can always univ them. So none of this is permanent, so don't worry. Don't be like, Ooh, I don't know what if I should do this because I don't know whether this is the right move or whatnot, can always go and change these things. Toggle it back to you, not secret, univ it, whatever, but if you archive it, it's way out of the way. But you can't pin to it anymore either. So if you want to keep using your Pinterest profile for your personal reasons, then the ones that you think you'll keep pinning to, you might want to make those secret instead of archiving them. That's kind of the difference there.

Michelle Leotta:
This was very, it seems so obvious, but when you were helping me with this, I was like, oh yeah, that makes so much sense. And even just personally, I had boards that were maybe food for toddlers and I don't have toddlers anymore. Oh, that's also not relevant to my target market. So that was one to archive. We're not even using that one anymore. But then others, my not healthy board where I put my now world famous according to my children cupcakes that are made in an ice cream cone, which I do for their birthdays, and they just think it's the coolest thing ever. Once a year they get the cupcake cone. And so anyway, that I turned into a secret board. Cause any recipes like that, I want to be able to continue to access for myself, but they're not relevant again to my business or to my target market. So it just helped to just clean it up and just think through the eyes of not me as a user, but for a client that I would hope to attract. What would they be interested in and useful? What would they want from me? And actually I was left with not that many boards because I had been approaching it. I was the user. And that's really the difference between using the platform for ourselves versus using it as a marketing tool.

Jana Osofsky:
Right, exactly. And I want to mention a couple of things about this step because sometimes I get a little resistance from people on it. And so some people listening might be like, Ooh, I don't know if I want to do this. So, first of all, the first piece of resistance might be around the idea that, well, isn't it a good idea to show my prospective clients that I'm a well-rounded person? So if I keep my boards public and people can see that I have a board about a bathroom renovation, even though it has nothing to do with my business, and I have a board about my summer trip to Italy, even though it has nothing to do with my business, that kind of humanize me. And the answer to that is no. The answer is remember, Pinterest is actually a search engine. It's not social media.

And so people don't really go to Pinterest looking to find people to follow, and they don't really care about your Italy trip. They don't really care about those other things. What they care about is the thing that they went to Pinterest looking for solutions about. And if they go to Pinterest looking for solutions about the thing that you help with, whether that is fertility or whether it is P C O S remedies or whatever that thing is, you want them to be able to find you. And that's the other piece that I want to make really clear about doing this step, even though it might feel a little stretchy for some people, is that when you make these boards secret or archive them, you help people find you when they're looking for your things because you're helping Pinterest understand what your account is about. If you keep your dog ice cream recipes and your bathroom renovation recipes, I mean boards and your Italy boards, you're confusing Pinterest and you're making it harder for Pinterest to know who to show your profile to and who to show your boards and your pins to. So if we truly want to use Pinterest as a way to attract clients, even though it might feel a little stretchy, you want to really remember this is a search engine, not social media. I'm going to make my Pinterest profile all about the thing that I help clients with. Does that make sense?

Michelle Leotta:
Okay. It makes so much sense. It's like when you say it, it's so obvious, but then 0% of us think that way from the get go. We all set it up with our own interest in mind and we're not thinking about the algorithm, et cetera, et cetera. So that's super helpful. And what Anna said is so important to remember, Pinterest is not social media. People do not follow you because they want to get to know you, right? They follow you because you post great cupcake recipes or whatever it is.

Jana Osofsky:
Yeah. They follow you because they've decided based on your pin or your profile that there's something about you that they want to learn. They want to learn the thing that you teach or that you help with or that you coach around. Yeah.

Michelle Leotta:
Great. So that's step one. Yes, clean it up. Clean up boards.

Jana Osofsky:
Yes. And I love that you said Michelle, and I hope that some people experience this too, that once you do that clean up, you actually don't have that many boards left because that's going to make it so much easier to do the next couple of steps. And that is going to, when you have 35 boards or 50 boards, I had a client that had 120 something boards once that I cleaned up for her. It makes it hard to imagine tackling these next steps. But if you do that decluttering first, just like any decluttering in our houses or whatever, it makes things easier. So the next step is to actually do some keyword research. And so you'll want to go into Pinterest and do some keyword research. And I know it sounds boring and hard, but it really isn't. It's actually fun because you get to find out what people are looking for around the thing that you're passionate about. And it's actually not hard because if you have a system to follow the one that I have and that I teach, it's just not hard. It's, it's a little bit, I don't want to say tedious, because it really is fun because the more you do it, the more you start to get excited. You're like, Ooh, people are searching that I, that's great to know it. Write it down.

Michelle Leotta:
I think it's fascinating actually.

Jana Osofsky:
Yeah, it's a little time consuming. You probably want to spend an hour or two on it, but it's not hard. So I promise it's not hard. And so what you want to do when you do your keyword research is end up with some phrases that you find that are being searched around your space, around the thing that you coach around. So that's going to be step two is to do that keyword research.

Michelle Leotta:
And it really is interesting you guys, because you'll be like, oh no, it'll click. Oh, people are searching for X, Y, Z, I have that. I help with that. I'm the person. So then you're like, oh, I get it. I understand how this process works. And it's just so fascinating because things that you would never think anyone is searching for, they are, and we don't got to put ourselves in their shoes that sometimes it's hard to do that. But when you literally are looking at the data that says, oh no, we got plenty of searches of whatever, ice cream cupcake cones. Then you're like, okay.

Jana Osofsky:
Yep, I love it.

Michelle Leotta:
That's a great piece of content.

Jana Osofsky:
I actually built it into my process to ask people who take my courses when they are learning keyword research to email me with keywords that surprise them that they're excited about. And it's so fun to get those emails because they're just, I can tell right through the email that they're just lit up about it. So, I promise it's really fun. It's not as boring as it sounds. Keyword research. It's really fun. And it sets you up for step three, which is to go back to those boards that you did not archive, that you did not make secret and rename them. So if you have a board that had a name before that wasn't keyword optimized, now that you have your keyword research done, you can rename that board with something that is keyword optimized. So I don't know why, but a lot of people call their Pinterest boards things like Yum when they're food. So that would be an example of one that's not keyword word optimized. So if you have one, let's say you teach plant-based eating and you have boards that are all plant all, yum, yum, yum. Desserts, all plants or something like that.

Michelle Leotta:
No, for real. That's what people name their boards.

Jana Osofsky:
Yeah, something cute and that you think is just cute because in the moment you were like, that's boring to just name it plant-based desserts. Now because you did your keyword research, you're going to go, oh, okay, and we're going to name that board plant-based desserts because you're going to discover that that's actually what people are searching for. And we want those key boards to be keyword optimized. And then if you see any big gaps, because you only maybe had six or seven boards left, let's say, and you renamed the ones that needed to be renamed, and there's a bunch of holes in it where you have things that you do a lot of content creation about or that are a big part of your frameworks and things or what you teach, let's say instead of framework, then you want to create a few new boards as well.

And I usually recommend a start with around 10 or 15 roughly optimized boards. If you want a few more, that's totally fine, but you want to get yourself now to the point where you have 10 or 15 boards that have names that are actually keywords, not just things that are yum, yummy, yum plants. So that's the third step is to then round out rename and kind of round out the boards you have so that they match up with the things that you are an expert on and create content about. And we want to have around 10 or 15 boards, and then you can move on to tackling things like, okay, what do I want in my things like that? What do I want people to do next when they find me, when they find my profile and my boards? Things like that.

Michelle Leotta:
But just actually having a set of boards that are worth looking at and make sense to somebody. Such a good place to start. I have a question. Oh, go ahead.

Jana Osofsky:
And I just want to make sure it is, you're right, that's part of it. But remember, a big part of it is signaling to Pinterest what we're about, so that when people search for something like plant-based desserts or what was one of the examples we were using yesterday, fitness safety during pregnancy or something like that, Pinterest knows to match you up with those searches. That's the other big part of why we're doing this, not just to help people know what we're about, but to help the algorithm know what we're about. So sorry to talk over you, Michelle.

Michelle Leotta:
No, no, no. That's very good point. Yes. And when you were talking, I was just thinking of the example. Okay. Maybe in my health coaching practice, let's say I work with women who have Hashimoto's disease, and when I do my board cleanup and I get rid of my kitchen renovation and whatever, all my stuff, maybe I'm only left with a couple boards that still make sense. And there's a big gaping hole though, because something I know I'm always talking to my clients about is going. So in that case, I thought, oh, well, I would create a board that says like gluten-free meals or maybe gluten-free breakfast or gluten-free, whatever. But because I, in this case, work with women who have Hashimoto's disease, and there's so many different reasons to go gluten-free, like would I name the board gluten-free breakfast for Hashimotos?

Jana Osofsky:
Probably. Yeah. I would let your keyword research and your keyword plan kind of dictate that, and I talk about how to make those decisions a little bit more in other places, but that would probably end up being what it is, because generally I lean towards being more specific instead of more general. So I like that idea a lot. I would go that direction.

Michelle Leotta:
Good. Because I'm thinking if people are just looking for gluten free, it could be for a hundred different reasons, and they find me great, but they're not part of my target market, so...

Jana Osofsky:
Right.

Michelle Leotta:
No, maybe not the right person.

Jana Osofsky:
There might be kind of a conversation, and this might be something we'll talk about more later on when we do our more detailed training, but maybe thinking about whether or not your ideal people, maybe they just found out they have Hashimoto's disease, but they don't even really know yet that gluten-free could help. You know what I mean? So what are they searching? Are they searching gluten-free before they know that or are they searching? So that's part hashimo, the thought process. Yeah.

Michelle Leotta:
Hashimotos diet or something

Jana Osofsky:
Like that. Yes. Yeah.

Michelle Leotta:
Yeah. Yes. Now it is all starting to make sense. So good. You brought up the fact that we have that training coming up next week, we're going to be talking about three secrets to attract clients using Pinterest, and you can sign up for free. It's at health coach power.com/pinterest. What do you think is the biggest mistake that people continue to make the hardest habit to break once even maybe after someone's gone through your course or they've heard it a hundred times? I just feel like we always fall into the same traps. I see it in various marketing work that I do with coaches, and I'm just curious what you see.

Jana Osofsky:
Yeah, I don't know if this is specific enough, but the thing that's coming to mind is we always kind of have to be regularly touching base with the fact that Pinterest is a search engine, so it works more like Google than it works Instagram, for example, or other social networks that we might be active on. And that shows up in a lot of different ways. You might think to yourself like, oh, I haven't commented on other people's pins in a while, or something like that. You don't have to do that on Pinterest. It's not part of the deal. Or you might think like, oh, the pin that I just pinned yesterday didn't get 1200 views, but instead you're not, you're forgetting that the pin that you pinned two months ago got 1200 views. So there's different ways that shows up, but I think it all rolls into the idea that we're trained on social media. Our brains are very social media oriented, so we have to remember that there's certain things you do differently on Pinterest and certain approaches you have to take for Pinterest success, and they all kind of are based on the idea that it's a search engine, not social media. So I think just remembering those things, and even I sometimes occasionally backslide into social media thinking on the platform, but I catch myself and just remind myself that it's search engine and that we need to treat it that way.

Michelle Leotta:
We're not getting our dopamine hits when we wake up in the morning and see that we got all these likes on our most recent posts. It just doesn't work like that, which is why we love it, which is really good. But you're right, we're trained to think about it the other way.

Jana Osofsky:
Yeah, we love it for the reason, for that reason that it doesn't have those negative effects. Pinterest is a happier place in corner of the internet. We don't have to have all the drama that happens on social media, but sometimes it feels weird because we're almost expecting it to feel like social media. So you're like, Hmm, what's going on here? Yeah.

Michelle Leotta:
Ok. That was a really good one, and I'll share one before we go. When you were talking about naming the boards, you said something and I was like, you know what? For everybody listening, even if you never use Pinterest ever in your entire life, this idea of using words that are very clear can seem boring, but whether you're doing it for the sake of searchability or you're doing it just for the sake of clarity, anytime you're writing, you're writing a headline, you have a new freebie or have a webinar, there's this tendency for us to want to be cutesy and clever with our titles. We want to use alliteration, we want to use some cliche, we want it to rhyme, and that does nothing for your marketing. Clarity is always better. It's okay if it's a little bit boring. It doesn't have to be catchy. We just want people to add a glance, understand what the heck it is

Jana Osofsky:
And what's in it for them too. That's the part that it's hard to understand what's in it for me if I don't even understand what it is. So

Michelle Leotta:
That's exactly right. So I think there's so many things that you're teaching us about Pinterest that like yes, are very particular to the platform, but just good marketing in general. So again, if you guys haven't signed up yet, you're going to learn so much next week when we do a little bit of a deeper dive, you can join. I mean, why wouldn't you want to join Janet and I again? We have so much fun. We have so much to share with you and it's completely free. So sign up now. It's at healthcoachpower.com/pinterest, and that's happening on April 26th. Jana, I will see them.

Jana Osofsky:
Great.

Michelle Leotta:
Take care everybody. Bye-bye.