Pinterest Tips & Tricks from Kyla Herbes, House of Hipsters Blog

On Friday the guest speaker on our weekly Designer Discussions on Clubhouse was Kyla Herbes, digital content creator and home decor blogger at the hugely popular House of Hipsters blog. She is also an incredibly savvy Pinterest expert with lots of insights from her time working at Pinterest (yes, she actually worked for them creating pins for brands) and her uber-successful blogging career.

Here is the gist of what she shared in the Clubhouse talk.

Pinterest is a visual search engine, not just a place where you pin your favorite things.   Remember that you are a brand, so you need to act like a brand and focus on pinning what your audience likes, not only what you like.

Here are some tips for when you get started:

• Create a business account, or change your personal into a business account.
• Claim your website and other linked accounts so they talk to each other.
• Have a properly named brand board and supporting boards.
• To boost SEO, add keywords to everything, especially tag your images. (When you create an image for a blog or anything for Pinterest, in Photoshop go to file, save file info, and save keywords.)
• Use overlay text on images, keep fonts small and don’t be overly promotional.
• Pinterest wants video. Post your reels and TikToks. Don’t upload the video directly, use a link to get the traffic to your platform.
• Always include a CTA (Call To Action) to let people know what you want them to do and what you can offer. Otherwise, they get distracted by ads since the Pinterest feed pairs relevant ads with your content.
• Make the board names specific and the copy relatable to your audience. Don’t use design speak.

A few other things to keep in mind

• Pin mostly your own stuff, not others’.
• Use original not corporate-looking images.
• Pin whatever you can when you can.
• Beautiful pics help sell Pinterest ads but don’t help YOU.
• Your goal  is for people to click through to your website, blog, IG, etc

MOST IMPORTANTLY
Keyword, keyword, keyword!!! Include your keywords anywhere you can - title, description, image tags, overlay, and alt text.

Since most of you probably have an account, here are Kyla’s tips for optimizing it:

• Start from scratch BUT keep your account (make sure it’s a business account).
• Keep boards you don’t want and make them secret or archive them - don’t delete them because you would lose the followers.
• Make a board for your brand.
• Then break out supporting boards and move pins from secret and archived boards to the relevant new boards.
• Keep pins that lead back to your website

There were many more topics we touched on including affiliate links, how to convert people to your e-mail list, and how to get rid of those pesky white dots that lead people to buy products from brands totally unrelated to your pins. 

For more Pinterest wisdom from Kyla, go to her House of Hipsters website and download her free guide “Dominating Pinterest - Tips & Trick For Pinning Like A Pro”.

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