47. How to Prep Your Best Content for Back-to-School Season

[00:00:00] Stephanie: Now that you've identified your best back to school content from last year, it's time to put that data to work. Let's chat about how you can prep your top content so it's fresh, optimized, and ready to perform even better on Pinterest this back to school season. Welcome back to the podcast. We're continuing our discussion of how to prepare for the back to school rush on Pinterest.

[00:00:37] Last week I gave you some tips for how to find your top performing content on Pinterest from last year's back to school season. In today's episode, we're going to talk in more detail about what you can do with that data now that you have it. We're going to focus on optimizing your posts for the influx of Pinterest traffic.

[00:00:58] Then we'll talk about deciding if you should write fresh content to capitalize on the interest in this topic. And then finally, we'll talk about creating fresh pins based on this information. First, you'll want to optimize your top back to school blog posts for Pinterest traffic. Even though we're focusing on Pinterest this month, we can't ignore the fact that you should do a little bit of work on your website. In addition to checking the post, just to make sure all of the links still work and all of the images are up to date and all of those things,

[00:01:34] you should look at this post through the eyes of a Pinterest visitor, because Pinterest users behave differently on a website than Google visitors. And so knowing that a post is popular on Pinterest, it really can impact some of the optimizations you decide to make to the post. One of the most important things that you'll want to do

[00:01:59] is make sure that your post is well organized. So someone who is clicking over from Pinterest can quickly find what they're looking for, because remember, the reason they're on your website is because they saw something that caught their eye. And if it was a particular talking point that you featured on the pin

[00:02:20] you wanna make sure that that talking point is easy to find. And so by using headers and having a very well organized blog post, it's much easier for Pinterest users to quickly find what brought them to your post to begin with. Another really important optimization to take care of is to make sure that you have pinnable images within your blog post, because oftentimes people will see something that they find interesting

[00:02:49] on Pinterest and they'll click on it instead of saving it. And so they've clicked on it and then they discover, wow, this blog post is full of great information. Make sure they have an option to go ahead and save it even if that wasn't necessarily their first instinct when they saw the pin, they just clicked on it.

[00:03:09] Give them another opportunity to pin and so have some pinnable graphics available and front and center so that they can pin that post if they want to. So now moving on from some of those blog post optimizations. Your data might also give you some insight into whether a fresh piece of content could be a good addition to your back to school strategy.

[00:03:37] So I've mentioned on the podcast that fresh URLs are absolute gold on Pinterest in today's Pinterest climate. It can be helpful to create some fresh blog posts before back to school season hits, and knowing which topics are popular with your audience can help you prioritize what fresh content to create.

[00:04:01] Just as an example, if your top two blog posts from last year were about parent communication tools, you might wanna do some keyword research to see if there are any other posts that you could write that feature parent communication tools. This will give you some shiny new URLs to use on Pinterest, and they'll be written on topics your audience clearly loves during back to school season.

[00:04:29] And while we're on the topic of creating fresh pins, I just have to mention this because it is such a hot topic in the Pinterest world right now. A lot of pinners because those new URLs are gold like I mentioned, they're finding all sorts of strategies to try and get never before seen URLs into the mix.

[00:04:50] And so one of those things that people are doing is they are taking their older blog content, and they're just copying it, duplicating it, and then republishing it with a fresh URL, and then they're just redirecting their older posts to that new URL. This is not necessarily something that I do because I much prefer to cast a wider net, and so I would rather just have that older post with the legacy pins working for me in the background.

[00:05:24] And then write a fresh piece of content that focuses on a slightly different keyword angle. By doing it this way, you're able to support more teachers and address a wider variety of pain points, and ultimately this will lead to more traffic. So to each their own, I just felt like I really needed to mention that because it is such a hot topic right now.

[00:05:49] You've optimized your top content for Pinterest traffic and you've decided if you need to add some fresh blog content to the mix, now it's time to create some fresh pins for your back to school content. One of the limitations of the new Google Analytics is that you can't easily identify which pins on Pinterest are bringing you the most traffic to a post.

[00:06:13] The analytics just tell you that Pinterest as a whole is sending you a lot of traffic to a particular post during this season. And this is why I like to track my pins in Airtable. So I have a table with all of my pins. It has the image so I can quickly reference it. It has the date I pinned it, the title, the description, and all of that information.

[00:06:39] And then it also links to my content table where I have the links to all of my blog posts. And so when I link them up in that way, I can see at a glance which pins I've created for a particular post. And so all I have to do is open up that field in Airtable and then I can just do a quick visual scan of the types of pins that I've already made for that post.

[00:07:08] But the problem is that if I haven't kept a close eye on these pins, I won't really know which of those are doing the heavy lifting for my account. And so this is when you might wanna do a little bit of legwork on Pinterest. Once you've used Google Analytics to figure out which post you want to investigate further, you'll head over to Pinterest and go straight to the search bar and just search for a broad keyword that would encompass

[00:07:38] most of the pins you created for that post. So for example, I might use the phrase morning work and hope that I can see most of the pins for my blog post about morning work ideas for the whole year. So I would type that into the search bar and then adjust the results. Next to the search bar, it will likely say all pins, but that's a dropdown menu. You can

[00:08:04] press on that and then switch it to just your pins, and then from there you can scroll through the results to look for pins that have the best stats. Now, keep in mind that these stats are from just the past three months. You can open up the stats for any of those individual pins and kind of look at the graph and see what the numbers were.

[00:08:27] But really, I feel like just looking at the past three months can often give you an idea of which pins are the strongest. And the other thing to keep in mind is that this only includes the pins that you have created or saved. Some of your top pins are going to be pins that people have saved directly from your website, and so those won't be included.

[00:08:52] But looking through your own saved pins, it can still give you an idea of which pins did the best for that particular post. And then once you've had a chance to get a feel for your best pins for that post, it's time to create some fresh pins. I would suggest making at least five to 10 fresh pins for that piece of content, but I would break down that top performing pin

[00:09:19] into its different elements. So what font did I use ? What colors did I use? What product image, what keyword, you know, just look at all of the different elements on that pin. And then I would break it up and use one element on each of your new pins. So I might take the photo from the top performing pin and use the exact same photo on a fresh pin, but then change everything else.

[00:09:48] Or I would use the key word or something very similar on a new pin, but then change everything else and so on. You might do the colors on one or the fonts on another, but basically take the things that succeeded on that one pin and kind of test out what elements were the most successful. The other thing that you could do is make just basically an identical version of the top performing pin and just change up the colors and then change up the description because that's a really good clue to Pinterest that it's a fresh pin.

[00:10:28] But if that pin design clearly got a lot of traction and grabbed people's attention, make another one and just change up the colors and see what happens. You can also try to widen your reach by breaking out of your branding to create fresh pins. This can really encourage more people to click since it won't look like something they've seen before.

[00:10:51] ' cause like I've mentioned in previous episodes, those legacy pins, those old faithful pins, they are in the search results consistently. So when people log into Pinterest and search for a similar keyword that they did last time and they see that same pin, maybe it's a fresh pin, but it looks the same as something they've seen every year-

[00:11:16] they're less likely to click on it. And so branching out from your branding so that it doesn't look like one of your pins, it might actually encourage people to click because it looks fresh, it looks like something they haven't seen before. Once you've optimized your blog post for Pinterest traffic, you've written a fresh blog post if you need to, and you've created new pins, it's time to get ready to schedule.

[00:11:42] In next week's episode, we're going to talk about the best timing for your pinning activity during the back to school season. If you're finding these episodes helpful, I would love it if you could let me know by leaving a review for the podcast. I am so grateful when you take the time to leave a review because it helps me plan more of the content that you are enjoying.