[00:01] show you how one of my websites was completely spared from the March Google completely spared from the March Google apocalypse it sticks because the March update really was like an apocalypse for so
[00:16] really was like an apocalypse for so many websites it's funny because my wife who you know she knows what I do and she understands what I do to some extent but she's not super active in it she doesn't have her own blog I know right but
[00:28] yesterday she had C something on Google and she's like nothing is helpful all I got was Reddit and it wasn't helpful and and I was like yeah it's not she's like
[00:40] I ended up going over to Bing and I told her exactly this is the problem with Google right now it's not just that it's harming us it's that their product sucks really cool that happened that helped save one of my websites from that update
[00:54] this is the traffic from cook for folks this is uh page views right the page view event so you can see right in here I mean this right here is March 8th this is the time frame right in here when that update and then it rolled out we
[01:08] several weeks and I mean My Traffic declined a little bit but nothing like declined a little bit but nothing like we're seeing on a lot of blog websites and honestly this is a website I haven't I haven't hardly touched the content in
[01:22] two and a half years I mean I did a video well two and a half years ago website was failing and what needed to be done to fix it and I just haven't had time to fix it it hasn't been the priority and so this website with
[01:37] frankly not our best content on it is sitting out there and it's the one that didn't lose traffic and it's because of one thing that's been being done on it what's going on here with traffic when I look at Google as a source of traffic
[01:52] let's see how this website's doing in Google search holy I mean look at that it's a cliff it literally like drops from one day to the next to 25% of what I had I lost almost 75% of traffic overnight and then it continues to
[02:08] slowly decline that is why are we not seeing that over here well let's look at Google analytics you can see organic declining but not nearly at the same Pace I mean look at that but look at
[02:21] what's what's happening at the same time that organic search is declining this purple line right here that's organic social organic social is increasing now organic search is not dropping the same way as Google search consolle so what's
[02:34] going on there well when I break it out by actually where the source of my by actually where the source of my traffic is Bing Bing is my top source for organic well for any traffic Bing it's literally never happened on one of
[02:46] my websites before let's look at organic social and what's going on here that it's Pinterest Pinterest is what saved me now here's what's interesting a couple of years ago we looked into Pinterest in fact probably about about
[02:59] four years ago we went pretty hard on Pinterest we took the top Pinterest course out there that everybody was taking we uh had an employee who was her taking we uh had an employee who was her whole job was to take our content and
[03:14] implement the Pinterest strategy right do exactly what that course said to do their algorithm changed to the point where because they didn't want to lose people from their platform they made it so that if people clicked on your pins
[03:27] and went to the blog posts those pins were more suppressed unless you were paying to have those pins boosted they wanted to keep people on the platform they didn't want people leaving the Facebook platform and so content that
[03:43] would Point people away and that was being successful at pointing people away that content wasn't being shown nearly as much in people's feeds well at some their lesson and they realized the only reason people use our platform at all is
[03:57] because it helps them find really good helpful content but that helpful content doesn't sit on Pinterest it sits on their websites and so now it's actually flipped and I didn't know that cuz frankly Pinterest is not the main focus
[04:11] of my attention until one of our members in Project 24 brought this to my attention she's been successfully using Pinterest for many years to drive traffic to her Etsy store and to her blog and it's been her full-time income
[04:24] for a long time so she volunteered to teach other project 24 members how to use Pinterest successfully and she used cook for folks as her case study and this is what happened this is outbound clicks through my Pinterest account on
[04:37] cook for folks now I was really fortunate in my timing that right around the time that I was going to start losing a lot of traffic from Google I traffic from Pinterest and it's really
[04:49] exact timeline she said it would she said it would take at least a few months probably around 4 months for that traffic to really start to pick up and so that's really cool it helped my website to essentially keep the exact
[05:04] really cool thing happened I got to show you something else in the analytics I wasn't planning to share here I'm excited about what my engagement time has done the cool thing is when I look at versus a year ago the engagement time
[05:18] with my content when they actually came to the website from the beginning of the year until now it's 15% higher than it used to be the people coming to the website are now spending more time on the site it's like it's a better fit for
[05:31] Pinterest is doing a better job of helping people find what they want than something else really cool with you this comes from another member of project 24 this project 24 member says I started aite in October 2023 you might think
[05:45] website because the helpful content update stuff was like in the thick of it right and they just reached 30,000 sessions a month a couple of days ago this was end of May so this just recently happened 30,000 sessions a
[06:00] month since October that's really good growth they said I applied to journey by media Vine so now they're going to have media Vine ads on their website my main traffic source is Pinterest Google traffic is zero hope to diversify my
[06:13] perhaps Facebook that's tremendous growth and it's the kind of growth that we often don't even see with a lot of our members on Google just organically doing that they just did Pinterest now I love one of the follow-up questions that
[06:27] was asked by another project 24 member amazing well done out of curiosity did Pinterest courses or people to learn and Implement your Pinterest strategy you know they're looking for Pinterest help and and they came here to the community
[06:40] today to try to ask where's the best source of information for Pinterest and the original poster says there's a project 24 course by Cara that I found helpful which explains everything you need to know other than this I did not
[06:52] take any courses so project 24 members if you're looking to do Pinterest go take the course if you haven't already I L went through it myself because I need to do this on my secret project website so I got to work I went through the
[07:06] course in my own system that I hadn't taken yet and I started my own Pinterest taken yet and I started my own Pinterest and here it is for my Secret website now and you can see I've just started like this is brand new I've got four pins
[07:20] scheduled out to go over the next few days but I need to create a lot more pins than this because part of the strategy is essentially to have one or day so let me show you a little bit of what it takes to do this first I need to
[07:34] figure out what to pin now there are a lot of methods taught in the course keywords are trending well on Pinterest and stuff and a lot of what you could do to be successful here is you can take the data from what works really well
[07:49] with your own pins and that data is incredibly useful for being able to generate new pins as well as new content for your website kind of like how we use Google search console or at least we did and how you could actually use Bings Web
[08:02] Master uh tools to be able to figure out what searches you're ranking well for and what searches are are getting you a lot of Impressions but that you don't actually have very good content for and that can help you know what content
[08:15] people are looking for and what content you should create Pinterest is the same getting really good data of content we should be adding and we're really not because well again it's not the top priority this site though is is a
[08:29] priority for me in fact it's something I'm going to be showing you while I while I build it and so we're going to do the work over here and as we start to really good data and when that happens I'm excited to show it to you so what
[08:42] else can we do well one of the things car I recommended is look at your blog posts what is working the best what's bringing you the most traffic um go look in your search console or your being Web Master tools and see which blog posts
[08:54] are showing up the most getting the most Impressions and that can just give you a general idea of people in general and just go create some pins for that eventually you probably end up creating pins for all of your posts and honestly
[09:08] I think that's basically what we need to do is create pins for all of our posts do really well on Pinterest it might be very different from what's working well with Bing or Google or anybody else and it's good for your account to be very
[09:20] active but it doesn't do you any good to be creating dozens of pins for just a handful of posts go create a few pins for all of your posts okay and now because a total nerd I do have a little spreadsheet and this spreadsheet helps
[09:33] me track which of my articles have pins when those pins went out what the descriptions were that I used for those pins what tags I used in them um the link to the article and then actually a link back to the pin some of these I
[09:46] haven't put the pin Link in yet because um the pin wasn't live the last time I to go out so we're going to use this to keep track now here I am on Pinterest and I'm using this as inspiration this is just my home feed right so it's
[10:01] showing me a bunch of stuff that's related to the content in my own pins and what I'm doing is I'm I'm looking at some of the designs to decide what sort of designs I want to use for my pins now one of the things that's going to save
[10:14] you a ton of time is to create some templates I don't care what tool you use I think Cara uses canva I use Photoshop because I have Photoshop and here's what I have I have a Photoshop Design This is a template here where I've set the
[10:27] canvas to be the size that I want to use for my pins then I've actually created over here I've got four different templates so there's one there's one there's one and literally I can just add a picture change the text in any of
[10:41] have four I'm probably going to want at least a dozen templates eventually so quick let's find something here on Pinterest we like this is so simple font as them I'm definitely going to change it to be more myself but this
[10:56] very similar to this they just have kind of this cool edging right makes it kind of look like a cloud it's kind of like this with text sort of in the middle so let's go ahead and we're going to pick an article we'll go with this one about
[11:11] the images that I have in there those are both stock photos um I could take a to go ahead and use one of the images that's already in here go ahead and copy this image and there we have it so now I can just reuse that template any time um
[11:25] with a different photo see there's one where I have I could put a picture below a picture above or one tall picture and then help put that in the middle we'll I'm going to save this and we'll export the image I'll go ahead and title the
[11:39] post most of the time that's probably what you want to do all right and then in our description we want to be a we want to write out a description that's things people are going to search and let's insert those phrases Pinterest is
[11:54] definitely more of a keyword based uh search algorithm than Google Google is it's very less very much less semantic based and more based on the specific of a description here and optimize it based on the things that people are
[12:09] likely to be searching here all right so without too much keyword stuffing we've got everything in there we need I'm going to click publish description now here's the cool thing I could take that exact same image and I
[12:23] I could even leave it in the exact same template and I could just change the words in the template and Pinterest will see that as a unique pin and so even if two pins look basically the same but they have a difference in them the
[12:37] they have a difference in them the pixels have changed um and I mean again could just ch choose a different template or just change the words just a little bit and suddenly I have a unique pin and for every one of these articles
[12:51] that I pin I'll probably want to generate at least two or three unique pins but potentially even more than that and we'll schedule at least one a day for the next while and we're going to see how successful this becomes over
[13:05] this I'm going to schedule this to go out on the 18th I believe and then I'm going to click schedule you could see how especially once I have templates made this could be done very fast and I can generate a pin
[13:21] every five minutes and in the course of an hour I could generate enough pins to last several weeks maybe even the whole month and you can schedule out pins for the whole the next 30 days at any given time so this can become a very simple
[13:35] and mostly automated system for you and it's something that you could assistant at some point I mean you could even use AI to help you generate all of to share a couple of little things to help you with Pinterest the first one
[13:49] help you with Pinterest the first one here is that having somewhere to send people is critical for Pinterest you can get your pins pinned and be followed by lots of people but it doesn't actually do you any good unless you have
[14:04] somewhere to send them so having your website with your blog content to send people to is really valuable really important and so all the work you've done already to create blog content is not going to waste we're just going to
[14:17] and that blog content you've created is use Pinterest to send people to YouTube videos and you could do like Cara and use Pinterest to send people over to your Etsy store but using it to send
[14:29] people over to your own website where you can capture them on an email list and get them more and more engaged with your brand and your business is going to second thing is that Pinterest is not going to do a ton for building your
[14:43] brand Pinterest is essentially like another search engine while it's true that people can choose to follow you they can follow your account so that when you pin stuff it's way more likely to show up in their home feed it's still
[14:57] not going to do a ton to give you a recognizable brand and build you a lot of Rapport that said just like when you create blog content you want to make really good blog content so that when people read it they're like man that was
[15:09] really helpful and they're more likely to remember you remember your brand remember how helpful your stuff was I've done that many times when I read a mental note of who that was and oftentimes I'll see more of their
[15:22] content show up either in a search result maybe in my Google discover feed if people have a good experience with your pins because they're not misleading and the content behind them was good they're going to be more likely to
[15:35] likely to repin your pins and they're going to be a lot more likely to click on your pins when they see them in the future but it's still mostly a search engine so this isn't the main brand building thing that we're going to be
[15:48] doing to help make our brand really really strong it's just one of the ways more traffic to our website since we can no longer reasonably rely on Google so in future videos we're going to talk about other ways and we're going to go
[16:03] more into Pinterest and share these results but we'll talk about other ways that we're going to be driving traffic to our website which is ultimately where we want people to end up but we're also going to dive a lot deeper on ways that
[16:15] you can strengthen your brand build rapport build trust and build name recognition within your industry you can do this and it's going to be so much better than it ever was before when we were focused on much more passive
[16:29] approach building a brand and having a reputation is going to make your business so many times stronger than it ever was before and that's going to help make it way more successful too and that's it for today so like I said if
[16:43] you're in Project 24 go do the Pinterest course if you haven't already and figure out if Pinterest is right for your blog and if you're not in Project 24 well at you can see the link to that in the description that way you can get access
[16:56] stuff we're going to have lot of cool things to share as we work through this things to share as we work through this project I hope to see you there