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Pinterest for Coaches: How to Use it to Get Coaching Clients

Categorized as Marketing for Coaches
FEATURED Pinterest for Coaches How to Use it to Get Coaching Clients

You might think Pinterest is just a place to find new recipes or DIY home projects you can try, but you’d be wrong. It’s a great platform for marketing your coaching business, no matter what type of coach you are.

There are so many people using Pinterest, and they’re interested in all sorts of different topics. Including improving their lives and businesses in dozens of categories.

Just about every coaching niche shows up on Pinterest, so you should definitely consider it as a top marketing strategy for your coaching business. And with that in mind, I’m about to show you how we’ve used Pinterest at Lovely Impact to skyrocket our website traffic, email subscribers, and sales.

Why do we recommend Pinterest for Coaches?

Well, like I just said, you’ll find people searching for help in nearly every coaching niche. Just look at these search result keywords (aka — the most common terms searched for in these categories — and note that we didn’t even include health coaching in this search):

1 Relationship - Pinterest for Coaches
2 Finance - Pinterest for Coaches
3 Mindset - Pinterest for Coaches
4 Marketing - Pinterest for Coaches
5 Business Mindset - Pinterest for Coaches
6 Parenting - Pinterest for Coaches

Those search terms are super important (we’ll dig more into that later), and it’s great to know that so many niches are represented, but the real reasons we recommend Pinterest go a lot further than the fact that your ideal clients are there.

1. Pinterest gives you long-term results, not just instant ones.

If you’ve been using social media to get people on your website and booking calls, then you should understand the shelf-life of a social media post. Typically, anything you post on Instagram/Facebook/LinkedIn runs out of steam after a few days (or sometimes a few hours).

But not Pinterest.

Your pins on Pinterest can circulate and create traffic to your website for days, weeks, months, and even years. In fact, pins can grow exponentially the longer they exist on Pinterest. Just look at this example of one of our pins.

the impact list

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This pin was published in March of 2020. The chart you’re seeing below is the reach the pin got in six months (from October 2020 to April 2021).

7 Pin Stats - Pinterest for Coaches

You see how it’s growing in the charts, instead of decreasing? Yep, that’s going to keep happening as more and more people save it. #winning

Your content can do the same thing on Pinterest, and within a few months, you can start getting incredible amounts of attention with your pins. Need I say more?

2. You can set Pinterest up to run for you with minimal work.

If you think about traditional social media posts, in order to keep things moving (follower counts growing, engagement increasing, etc), you have to be active nearly every day. You can’t just disappear.

You have to create your content, post it, engage with others, DM people, and actively strategize how to get more of your ideal clients to find and follow you.

Not so much with Pinterest. The beauty of Pinterest is that you can set it to run on autopilot throughout the week — you only have to invest an hour or two once a week.

With the tools I’ll be sharing in this post, you’ll be able to set up your Pinterest content to publish automatically with just a little effort on your end. No need to log into Pinterest daily and post things manually (unless you’re a little extra, like us).

3. Get more traffic to your website than with social media.

As a newer coach, it’s hard to get people to go from your social media accounts to your website. Hard to get them from social media to your email list. Hard to get them from social media to booking a discovery call.

Let me show you a quick example of one of our blog posts on Instagram versus Pinterest.

Our Understanding of Your Coaching Clients’ Pain Points on Instagram:

7 Understanding Your Coaching Clients Pain Points - Pinterest for Coaches

If you look at these Post Insights, you can see we got 147 views, 5 likes, 1 save, 2 profile visits, and 1 website click (we’ll assume that’s to read the blog post). And these are all-time stats, on a post that went out on September 1, 2020.

Our Understanding Your Coaching Clients’ Pain Points on Pinterest:

9 Pin Stats - Pinterest for Coaches

On Pinterest, this post got 2.88k views, 83 pin clicks (comparable to likes), 15 saves, and 37 outbound clicks to read the blog post. And these are just the stats over 6 months. There’s a whole lot more time that pin has been circulating that isn’t accounted for in these numbers.

Our Understanding Your Coaching Clients’ Pain Points on Facebook:

I’m not even going to waste your time with a screenshot. Suffice it to say, our Facebook post got 18 views. That’s it.

So clearly, Pinterest takes the cake over social media for getting traffic to your website. Especially as a newer coach, who doesn’t yet have 10k+ followers on Instagram or a killer LinkedIn strategy.

In fact, here at Lovely Impact, we’ve abandoned Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, in favor of putting all our energy into Pinterest (and SEO — they fit like peas and carrots). So if you’ve noticed we haven’t been around much on IG when we used to post 2x a day, that’s why.

Now don’t worry — now that I’ve explained why we recommend Pinterest for coaches, I’m going to walk you through exactly how we use it for our business, and how you can steal our process (and tips, tools, and #allthethings for yourself).

The Pinterest Workflow: How it Works to Get You Coaching Clients

Before we go any further, I want to explain how Pinterest works (and what you need to make it work for you) so you can decide right away if it’s the right strategy for your coaching business.

Write a blog → Pin the blog → People click → Read the blog → Opt-in to your email list → Read your emails → Start to trust you → Book a call

Pinterest is really dependent on you putting out your own content for this particular system to work (aka blog posts, articles, podcast episodes, etc), so if you don’t have any interest in blogging or one of those other options, I’ll save you some time and tell you to quit reading now. But please, if you change your mind, come back later!

If you do create content for your coaching business or are ready to get started, read on, my friend. We’re diving into the nitty-gritty from here on out.

What You Need to Make Pinterest Work for Your Coaching Business

Here’s exactly what you need to have in order to make Pinterest work for your coaching business:

1. A Blog

I’m not gonna dig too deep into the how and why of blogging — that’s not what this post is all about. But basically, you’ll need a place where you publish your custom content in order to then pin it on Pinterest.

To get the most out of Pinterest, you’ll want to be publishing content on a regular basis. The more you pin on Pinterest, the faster your account will grow. More views, more traffic to your website. So you’ll want to be posting a minimum of two new blog posts every month (but we really recommend at least one post a week for our marketing clients).

2. A Business Pinterest Account

If you’ve been using Pinterest in your personal life, you know how it works. Great! But using it as a business owner is slightly different. And your account as a business owner is a little bit different, too. I’ll walk you through setting up a business Pinterest account below, but for now, just know you won’t be using the same personal account you’ve been using to find new recipes.

3. Pin Designs

You’ll share your content on Pinterest through pins, which means you’ll need pin designs that match your branding. Don’t worry, I’ve got some great pin design templates to share with you later if the thought of creating your own makes you break out in a cold sweat!

4. A Free Offer

Once you start pinning your blog posts and get people on your website, you’ll need a freebie offer to entice people to sign up for your email list. The free offer is the fastest way to convert your blog visitors, so making the freebie valuable enough for them to subscribe to your list is important.

5. An Email Marketing Platform

You’re going to need an email marketing platform like Active Campaign to collect subscribers to your email list (and run an email list, when it comes to that). You might be wondering why I’m saying you need email marketing when we’re talking about Pinterest, but it’s one piece of the whole funnel. Stay with me.

6. A Welcome Email + Follow-Up Sequence

The welcome email should be light and friendly, as well as the subsequent follow-ups. This will help set a positive tone for future interactions between you and your customer. The first communication with new customers is paramount in setting an early tone of friendliness that greatly influences how they feel about their experience buying from you later on down the road.

7. Calls-To-Action

The call-to-action you use in your emails can be the difference between new clients and crickets. You need to make sure you’re using CTAs in your emails in order to get people to book calls with you.

Setting Up Your Pinterest Account

Now we’re into the fun part, my friend. The part where you actually get to take action and do something to start seeing the results you want. I’m so excited for you!

Create a business Pinterest account

This is quick and easy. Head to Pinterest and click the big ‘Sign Up’ button in the top right corner. Then, in the window that pops up, look to the bottom where it says ‘Create a Business Account’ and click that.

If you already have a personal Pinterest account, I highly recommend just going ahead and creating a new business account attached to your biz email address. It’s way more work than it’s worth to try to turn your existing personal account into a business account. Trust me.

Once you enter your email and password to create your account, you’ll enter your basic profile information.

Your business name, your website address, your country, and your language. If you have your profile photo picked out, go ahead and add it. Otherwise you’ll do it a little bit later.

10 Build Your Profile - Pinterest for Coaches

On the next screen, you’re describing the focus of your business.

In the first dropdown, you’ll choose the focus of your brand. If one of the categories fits what you coach people on (like health or fitness), go with that. If not, you’re going to select ‘Other’ and type in the kind of coaching you do.

Below that, select the top 3 goals for Pinterest. I suggest going with ‘Drive traffic to your site’, ‘Create content on Pinterest to grow an audience’, and ‘Grow brand awareness’. Those are going to let Pinterest know that you’re focused on building a quality audience.

11 Describe your business - Pinterest for Coaches

Next up, you’re choosing the option for ‘Contractor or Service Provider’.

12 Describe Your Business - Pinterest for Coaches

When you get to the next screen, you can select yes or no to your interest in running Pinterest ads. All they’ll do is send you an email offering to connect you with a Pinterest ads expert.

On the ‘Where would you like to start?’ screen, choose ‘Showcase your brand’. Because that’s the next thing we’re going to tackle in this post: setting up your profile.

13 Where would you like to start - Pinterest for Coaches

Edit your profile

You should be on this page:

14 Edit your profile - Pinterest for Coaches

This is where you’re going to edit all of your profile details so you can be found by your dream clients. To get to this page, all you have to do is click on the down arrow in the top right corner next to your profile picture and then click on ‘Settings’.

Use our profile below as a reference so you can see where all this content shows up.

14 Profile Example - Pinterest for Coaches

Here are the steps you need to take on this page:

  1. Add a photo for your business — as of the time of this post, we use our heart icon, but that’s only because we live a couple of thousand miles apart and haven’t had a chance to get brand photos done together yet (thanks, pandemic).
  2. Change your Pinterest username to match your brand.
  3. Add your bio — make sure you include what type of coach you are, the types of clients you work with, and what you can help them with. If you have room within the character limits, include emojis to add interest, and also add a call-to-action about your freebie to let people know they can find it on your site (when you have one ready).
  4. Make sure your website domain is correct (and goes to the SSL version of your site — starting with https:// instead of http://).
  5. Add your business email address to your account so people can reach out to you directly if needed.

That’s all the info you need to add. If you want to go further, feel free!

Verify your domain with Pinterest

The next step to getting your account set up is to claim your domain (and any other social profiles) that you’ll be pinning from.

When you’re in your account settings, you should see an option in the left sidebar that says ‘Claim’. Click on that, and then you’ll be on this screen:

15 Claim - Pinterest for Coaches

Now you can go down the list on this page and claim anything you have accounts for. But I’m just going to walk you through the website portion.

First step, click on the ‘Claim’ button next to Websites. You’ll see this window pop up:

16 Choose How You Want To Claim - Pinterest for Coaches

Now it’s time to choose how you’ll verify your domain. There are 3 options for doing this, and the way you go will depend on your website setup.

Add HTML tag — Paste this tag into the <head> section of your website.

If you’re one of our website clients on Showit (or you already have a website on Showit), you’re going to go with this option.

Log into your Showit website editor, and then go page by page on your site (including your blog templates) and add the code you’ve copied from Pinterest to the ‘Custom Head HTML’ code block under the Advanced Settings. Yes, you need to add the code to every single page of your site to make sure all content and images that get pinned from any page are attributed to your website.

17 Showit - Pinterest for Coaches

If you’re not on Showit, you’ll need to determine which is the best option for your website setup.

The above will work if you have access to directly edit your website <head>.

Upload HTML file — Upload this HTML tag to your website’s root directory.

If you have FTP access to your site, this is a good option for you. You’ll add this to the folder where your website installation lives. It’s typically inside the folder called ‘public_html’.

Add TXT record — Add this verification record to your domain host.

If you’ve heard the term ‘DNS records’ before and feel comfortable editing them, you can add the TXT record to your website hosting’s DNS records.

Researching Your Audience + Organizing Your Content

Ready to start pinning your content? Me too!

But first, you have to get some organization and planning done. Don’t groan, it’s super important and kinda fun!

Pinterest doesn’t work unless you use it effectively, which means you have to plan ahead for what your dream clients are looking for, and how you’ll get it in front of their eyes. And that means doing some keyword research and creating the boards you’ll pin your content to.

Don’t worry, this is not some idle assignment I’m giving you, and researching keywords is not nearly as painful or complicated as researching hashtags for social media platforms.

Done well, your keyword research will lead to immediate growth of your Pinterest account and immediate results for your content. And those keywords will help you pick the boards you create on your Pinterest account. Two birds, one stone.

Pinterest Keywords

Pinterest functions like a search engine. Kinda like Google.

That means when people type something into the search bar on Pinterest, they’re presented with a collection of pins that most closely relate to their search term. And Pinterest is able to tell that a pin relates because of the words you use in the pin title or description — aka keywords.

This is a really great opportunity for you because you can do some keyword research on Pinterest, and figure out exactly what keywords people are searching for related to your brand. Then, you can use those keywords to get your pins in front of your audience.

It’s a lot less ambiguous than social media hashtags, and a lot easier than SEO (which we’re still a big fan of), because when you write quality titles and descriptions for your pins that include the best keywords that people are actually looking for, your content shows up when someone looks for it. Without all the complicated optimization required by SEO or the hopeful guessing of hashtags.

So let’s dive into how Pinterest keyword research works for coaches.

Pinterest Keyword Research

The best thing about keyword research on Pinterest is that you can just use the search bar to figure out what your dream coaching clients are looking for.

Remember at the start of this post, I shared some screenshots of search results in a few niches? Yeah, you’re going to start out with the same thing.

Now, there are TWO methods we recommend for finding keywords, and they’re both extremely valuable. So I’ll walk you through both of them.

1. Use the native search function.

The search bar function is best used for your keywords that have the terms ‘coach’ or ‘coaching’ in them. That’s because the second option (the Ads keyword tool) doesn’t recognize those two terms. Silly, but true. So we’re going to do some keyword research for general coaching terms here, then use the next tool for more niche topics.

To get started, navigate to your home feed inside your business Pinterest account. You can do that by clicking the down arrow next to ‘Business’ in the top left corner of your screen, and then clicking on ‘Home feed’.

18 Business Hub - Pinterest for Coaches

We get to your home feed before doing keyword research because when you search from within your business hub, it defaults to searching through only your own pins, and sometimes the keyword recommendations we’re relying on don’t all show up. Weird Pinterest glitch that you can avoid by going to your Home Feed first.

Next, click on the search bar icon on the right-hand menu of your screen.

18 Menu - Pinterest For Coaches

That will now open up the search bar drop-down, and we’re ready to start typing in our keyword suggestions.

First up, I’ve typed in the word ‘coach’ so I can show you the unique situation coaches will find themselves in on Pinterest….

19 Coach Search - Pinterest for Coaches

The term ‘coach’ by itself is going to default to the Coach brand. You know, the designer? Purses and bags and shoes, oh my!

That means we have to be a little more specific when looking for any keywords that have ‘coach’ in them. Because otherwise, your content will start showing up in front of people that are looking for bags, and won’t show up in front of the people who actually need your services — because you haven’t optimized your pins properly. Rookie mistake. Don’t fall for it.

Instead, I’ll focus on the term ‘coaching’.

20 Coach Search - Pinterest for Coaches

There we go, a little closer to what I was looking for.

What you see here is the top 8 most-searched terms related to ‘coaching’. Our job is now to weed out the ones we don’t need (like coaching volleyball), and record the ones that can be used for your business.

Now to take things further, I’m going to add another word to this search term. Multi-word keywords are called long-tail keywords, and they’re more powerful than a single-word keywords.

Here’s why: if I’m looking for a purse, and I type ‘purse’ into the search bar, I’m going to get a ton of different types of bags, different designers, different styles, etc. But if I’m specifically looking for an elegant black clutch to go with my gorgeous cocktail dress, I’m going to need to be more specific. Otherwise, I have to weed through all the purses that don’t fit what I’m looking for.

21 Purses - Pinterest for Coaches
22 Purses - Pinterest for Coaches

The same goes for you and your dream clients. If they’ve used Pinterest at all, they already know that in order to get the best results, they should type in more specific search terms. And that means you need to be using more specific keywords in your content so you show up in front of your dream clients.

So,  your next step in keyword research is taking the first term you started with, and adding more words to it.

This time, I’ve used ‘health coaching’.

22 Health Coaching

Now I’ve got keywords that are more specifically geared towards what the ideal clients of a health coach would potentially search.

See how this works?

When you use the native search bar to do keyword research for you, you’re going to constantly adjust what you’re typing in so you can get more specific about what your dream clients are looking for. 

Get creative with this task. Don’t only look for keywords with the words ‘coach’ or ‘coaching’ in them. Look for the topics that you help your clients with. Think about all the conversations you have with your current clients, and research them on Pinterest. That will give you a broad list of keywords to start working with.

At Lovely Impact, we use keywords related to building a coaching business, but we also use keywords about website templates, branding design, marketing skills and tasks, social media, blogging, copywriting, personal development, and so much more. Because those are the topics our clients are searching for.

The search bar helps you narrow down to specific niche keywords that you would never have considered using before. And that’s why it’s great.

But the search function is also time-consuming, so we have option number two to help you get a jump start on your keyword research.

2. Use the keyword finder tool within your Pinterest Ads account.

If the search bar helps you get specific niche keywords that will work for you one by one, then this ads tool trick helps you get a large volume of keywords in one quick search.

The thing to remember about this tool is that it’s going to give you a broad list of keywords that may not actually pertain to your specific business. So you’re going to have to weed through them and delete any that don’t work for you.

Let’s get started.

Click on the ‘Ads’ dropdown menu, and choose ‘Create Ad’. Note: this only works if you have a business Pinterest account, so if you’re not seeing the Ads option, you have to go back and create a business account first. Then come back to this.

Pinterest Ads account

Now, you’ll find yourself on this page:

Pinterest Campaign Objective

Choose ‘Brand Awareness’ as your campaign objective, name your campaign as something like ‘TESTING’, set an imaginary budget for daily and lifetime spend limits, and then most importantly, set the Campaign status to ‘Paused’. This will make sure your ad doesn’t actually start running after you finish playing around with keywords.

Now click Continue.

This next page is the money. Or, what we’re looking for.

25 Ad group details - Pinterest for Coaches

Name your Ad Group something like ‘Keyword Search’ (just so you know what you’re looking at later and don’t accidentally publish this ad). In the Targeting Strategy section, select ‘Find new customers’. You can skip over the Audience Lists section.

The Keywords & Interests section is what we’re going for. Expand that little down arrow and open this panel. Where it has the options for ‘Add Interests’ and ‘Add Keywords’, click on Add Keywords. This is where we’ll be working.

26 Keywords & Interests - Pinterest for Coaches

Now, this tool is a little funny. Not funny as in ha-ha, but funny as in it takes some getting used to.

If I type in the words ‘coach’ or ‘coaching’ in the search bar, I get zero results. Zip, zilch, nada. The same goes for ‘health coach’, ‘relationship coach’, ‘parenting coach’, ‘spiritual coach’, and ‘mindset coach’. But weirdly enough, ‘business coach’ and ‘life coach’ both get results. (All the keywords for both those terms are included in our free Pinterest Keyword download.)

27 Add keywords - Pinterest for Coaches

This means that you’re going to use this tool to search for your niche topics. You know, the things you discuss with your clients that don’t actually have the words ‘coach’ or ‘coaching’ in them.

Example time. If you’re a health coach, simply try things like ‘health’, ‘meal plan’, ‘weight’, ‘healthy’, and ‘fitness’. If the term has results, they’ll show up as soon as you finish typing (no need to hit enter), and you can add them to your list on the left by clicking the ‘Add all results’ button directly below the search bar.

28 Meal Plan - Pinterest for Coaches

After you’ve added them, you can keep searching for more terms until you run out of ideas, adding the results to the list on the left, and when you’re done looking, you can copy all of the terms from the left panel and paste them into whatever document you’re using to track your keywords.

This will save you from having to manually type each keyword out like you do for the search bar results.

29 Fitness - Pinterest for Coaches

Wrapping Up Keyword Research

Now that you’ve got your long list of keywords to start with, make sure you go through them in detail and delete any that don’t really fit your brand. And if you’re not sure whether a keyword is right for you or not, just pop it into the search bar on Pinterest and see what type of content comes up. If it aligns with what your clients need, great, use it. If not, dump it like week-old chinese food.

Once you’re done with your research, you can click back to your account and it will take you out of the ads setup, without publishing your ad. The good news is it’ll still be there waiting for you next time you need to do some keyword research, and you can just click back into it and get back to the keywords tool to find some more.

Creating + Organizing Your Pinterest Boards

Now, the boards on your Pinterest account are how you organize the content you pin, whether it’s your own or someone else’s.

Keeping your boards organized is both professional, and helpful in increasing your number of followers. A cluttered profile will make a lot of people hit the back button in search of someone else because it confuses them too much to try and sift through the mess.

Your best bet is to create a user-friendly Pinterest profile that’s easily searchable by topic, aka board. That means short board titles, simple board covers that minimize visual distraction, and board descriptions that explain exactly what type of content people can expect to find pinned to each of your boards.

Board Titles

Pinterest boards are directly searchable, which means you want to use the keywords you’ve found as titles for your boards whenever possible. Because it means more people will find your boards.

Besides that, make sure your board titles are incredibly clear and direct — they should explain exactly what people will find on each of your boards.

Also, keep them short. Because when viewed on your profile, the board titles get cut off after a single line.

Board Covers

Take a look at our Pinterest profile on the left, compared to another profile on the right that doesn’t use board covers:

30 Board Covers - Pinterest for Coaches

Can you see how cluttered the profile on the right appears to be, compared to ours? That’s something that subtly turns people off of your Pinterest account.

Creating board covers for each board on your profile is a quick and easy way to keep things looking visually appealing, and also brand your Pinterest profile to look like your business.

They’re super easy to create:

  1. Use a square graphic that’s 600×600 px.
  2. Keep the colors simple and solid.
  3. Consider including your logo or business name.
  4. Write the title of your board directly on the cover graphic.

We recommend Canva for quickly designing your board covers.

Once you’ve got the covers created, upload each one directly to the board it relates to, then edit your board directly and choose that image as the board cover.

31 Edit your board - Pinterest for Coaches

Board Descriptions

Now it’s time to fill out your board descriptions. These are super important because just like with your board titles, the descriptions are directly searchable. So if you include the right keywords in your board descriptions, people will find your boards in their search results.

This searchability is why we did keyword research first — because while you probably already have a lot of ideas for boards to create on your Pinterest account, the keywords you’ve found could definitely inspire board ideas you never would have considered otherwise and will help you write descriptions that actually get you somewhere.

Let’s take a look at one of our most popular board’s description:

32 Business tips for coaches - Pinterest For Coaches

For this board, we’ve titled it with the main keyword we wanted to hit on, and then wrote a description that tells people exactly what to expect.

The first two sentences are traditional sentences that people can read and clearly understand, and then we added some keywords at the end to draw in our ideal customers.

You can follow this exact same format for each of your board descriptions. Tell them what you’ll be pinning to the board, and then include some bonus keywords to help it get more search results.

Start Pinning Your Content on Pinterest

Alright, let’s talk about the content you’ll pin! Hooray! This is what we’ve been building towards, and what really makes Pinterest valuable: getting eyes on your content.

Understanding the Types of Pinterest Pins

Pinterest allows three distinct types of content on its platform: static pins, video pins, and idea pins. Each creates different results, and you need to understand what they can do for your coaching business.

Static pins

These are the OG of Pinterest. The pins you’ve seen for years and years, since the start of the platform.

They’re a single image, usually with text over them, that people click on to navigate to your blog post or website and read what you’ve got to say. They have a title and description, and the keywords you use can get them in front of more eyes.

People can also repin this content to their own boards, which makes it show up to their followers. That re-pinning is what makes your pin go viral. Someone shares it with their audience, their people re-pin it to their boards, and so on and so forth.

These pins are evergreen, meaning they can be distributed around Pinterest for months and years into the future.

Video pins

There’s no denying that video content is way more impactful than images, and Pinterest got on board with video pins.

Video pins are a single video, with a minimum length of 4 seconds, and a maximum length of 15 minutes. They work just like static pins because they have a title, and description, use keywords and link to your website. The only real difference is that they’re more eye-catching in the feed than a boring ole’ photo.

They’re re-pinnable, just like static pins, and can gain momentum to hit viral status. And also just like static pins, they’re totally evergreen.

Idea pins

Idea pins are Pinterest’s newest type of content. They introduced idea pins as a strategy for keeping their users on the Pinterest platform.

Think about it for a second: both static and video pins link out to someone else’s website. Users find what they’re interested in, then leave Pinterest to access it. And Pinterest isn’t happy with it anymore.

They make their money through Pinterest ads, and if users are constantly leaving Pinterest to read blog posts elsewhere, they’re losing revenue. Therefore, idea pins.

Idea pins are kinda like Instagram stories. You can upload images, videos, tutorials, whatever you want — and have people learn/explore/love your brand right then and there.

You can create 20 ‘pages’ per idea pin, and each page can be a single image or up to 60 seconds of video. That basically means you could create a 20-minute-long idea pin. And while you’re building your idea pin, you can overlay text right on the pages in Pinterest’s idea pin creator.

33 Design Your Pages - Pinterest For Coaches

The other half of the content puzzle for idea pins includes a title, the board you want to pin it to, and a description (in the form of ingredients, supplies, or notes). You can also add tagged topics from Pinterest’s pre-defined list, which can help increase your reach to new viewers.

34 Add the basics - Pinterest For Coaches
35 Add a list - Pinterest For Coaches

Idea pins are re-pinnable, and they also have a ‘like’ option so people can show their appreciation. If you’ve been seeing little hearts under random pins in your feed, it’s because they’re idea pins and people are engaging with them.

These pins tend to be hot when you create them, and for a few days afterward, but then they die off. Again, they’re like Instagram stories: great for engagement and immediate results, but not necessarily evergreen, because they lose momentum quickly.

Creating Content to Pin

Ok, it should be no surprise (if you’ve been paying attention to this post) that creating content to pin on Pinterest is key to making Pinterest work for your coaching business as a marketing strategy.

You can’t just create an account and start pinning everyone else’s stuff or random recipes and Halloween decorations. You need an actual content strategy of your own, original stuff to share.

Because getting people on your website is the goal.

What to Write About

If you look around (or search) on Pinterest, you’ll quickly discover that there’s practically no limit to what you can write about on your blog to get discovered on Pinterest.

Well, as long as you follow Pinterest’s Community Guidelines, that is. I’ll save you some reading and fill you in: no adult content, no exploitation, no violence, no harassment or discrimination of any kind, and no fakeness. Basically, nothing shady. Or you will be banned. Period.

Otherwise, you’re in the clear as long as you’re acting with integrity.

It’s up to you to brainstorm the types of content you’ll write about, but remember this: the more related your topics are to the problems your dream clients face, the more likely they are to find you on Pinterest.

Once you’ve got a list of ideas to write about, you just have to sit down and actually put them into written form. And if you need help with that, we got you, boo. Check out this post on how to plan a coaching blog post.

Types of Blog Posts That Perform Well on Pinterest

Certain types of content perform better than others, especially on Pinterest.

People using the platform are generally looking for ideas or solutions to solve their problems or research something they’re interested in, so keep that in mind with your blog headlines. A blog titled “About Me” or “How I Became a Coach” is not going to be specific enough to get them to click.

Instead, focus on educating and inspiring your future clients. Get creative with how you share that information, and get suuuuper creative with the titles of your posts, because those titles are what people will look at on Pinterest to decide whether to click or not.

Here are a few types of blog content that generally perform well on Pinterest:

  1. Tutorials & How-Tos (How To Change Your Daily Habits & Feel Better)
  2. Listicles (9 Surprising Ways to Love Your Job More Without Finding a New One)
  3. Checklists (Stop Wasting Hours of Your Time Every Day with This Checklist)
  4. Personal Stories (The Secret Method I Used to Build a Better Relationship with My Daughter)

Whenever you’re writing a piece of blog content, think about how you can spin it to fit into one of the above types (even if it’s only loosely).

Designing Your Pins

Once you’ve got blog posts to share on Pinterest, you need to create the actual pins you’ll publish. 

To my designer’s heart, this is the fun part. But if you just groaned, I understand. Not everyone loves designing stuff.

The good news is that creating pin graphics is not nearly as painful as it used to be, because there are many pin template options you can take advantage of.

Tailwind Create

If you’re using Tailwind for pinning (which we’ll be getting into shortly in this post), you can utilize their Tailwind Create editor to generate pin designs automatically when uploading your content to Tailwind.

Canva

Use Canva for your coaching biz design needs? Awesome. They have a collection of pin template designs you can get started with. Not on Canva yet? Check it out here.

Pre-Designed Pin Templates

If you want something that matches your brand a little better, you might want to consider purchasing a pack of pin templates. 

We have a pack of all the pin templates you need to be included in our Pinterest Mastery for Coaches Toolkit, or you can find some on Creative Market like these. Both of these options come as Canva templates, meaning you can add them to your Canva account and use them over and over again. You just change the colors to match your branding, and off you go.

Automating Your Content on Pinterest

Now, here’s the thing about Pinterest: it works best when you’re pinning consistently, multiple times throughout the day, on a daily basis.

But who the hell has time to go pin at random points throughout their work day? Certainly not us! Not to mention we have zero interest in interrupting our weekends to go pin something. Just sayin’.

But you can actually take all that nonsense out of the mix by using a handy tool we’re desperately in love with, Tailwind.

What the Heck is Tailwind?

Tailwind is the secret to our Pinterest success. No, seriously.

When you use Tailwind, you can schedule all of your pins at the ideal times for your audience for the next month. Yes, really.

So let us give you a quick demonstration of how we use it for Lovely Impact.

When we publish a blog post, we also bulk-create our pins for that blog post. Then, we upload them all to our Tailwind account. We add our titles, descriptions, and links, and click save.

Once we do that, all of our pins are saved in our drafts folder. We don’t have to do any more editing to them before they get published — whether they’re published today or two months from now.

36- Tailwind For Coaches

Every week, we go into our Pinterest and Tailwind accounts, and bulk schedules our pins for the next seven days. We rotate through the newest and oldest content, giving our Pinterest feed a good mix of blog posts, instead of publishing one new post over and over for the week.

Now you might have noticed we said we like to schedule a week’s worth of content at a time, instead of doing a whole month. Here’s why: we publish new blog content pretty much every week, and we don’t want to wait a month for that new content to get added to our Pinterest account.

Instead, we schedule weekly, and then everything that went live on the blog the previous week can get added into the mix ASAP.

But if you don’t publish a lot of new content every week like we do, you can pre-schedule your Tailwind account for as long as it makes sense for your situation.

Publishing to Multiple Boards Per Pin

Here’s our most favorite part about using Tailwind: you can schedule one single pin to publish to Board A, then Board B 10 days later, Board C 10 days after that, and so on and so forth, up to 10 different boards.

It would take you at least 5–6 minutes to manually publish a pin to multiple boards every time if you weren’t using Tailwind. But when you do use it, it’s literally seconds, and your content publishes at spread-out intervals, so you don’t have the same pin repeating back to back.

This is the premier reason why we pay to play on Tailwind. The convenience.

37 Tailwind - Pinterest For Coaches

See this pin? We’ve set it up to publish to all of these six boards, 17 days apart. That’s how you make your blog content spread further on Pinterest.

It’s not just getting added to Pinterest once when we first publish our blog post — this one pin is getting added to Pinterest six times over the next three months.

Now, there are a lot of things we love about Tailwind, but we’re not going to cover them all here. Instead, we’ve got a separate post you can check out here that will give you all the details you need to make a decision on whether it’s right for you.

Understanding Pinterest Analytics

37 Understanding Analytics - Pinterest For Coaches

The great thing about a business Pinterest account is that it includes analytics reporting so you can see exactly how your content is performing.

They give you more stats than any other platform, meaning you can track all sorts of things, depending on your specific goals for your content.

In order to make use of Pinterest analytics, there are two requirements: 1) have a business Pinterest account, and 2) confirm/claim your website. Both are things we’ve talked about earlier in the post, so if you don’t see the analytics tab in your menu, check that you’ve done both of these things.

What analytics does Pinterest offer?

Pinterest has a ton of valuable content in the Analytics tab, including some that are still in development. Because they’re constantly improving their platform.

Much of what you’ll find here will help you decide on what kinds of content to put out next…

  • Oh, my motivational quotes are doing really well…I should create more!
  • Huh, my story posts aren’t getting any attention…not going to waste my time on those anymore!
  • Umm, why the heck is a bunch of men checking out my “how to step into your woman’s power” post…? (jk on this one ?)

But those are the kinds of things you could learn about your content and what you’re sharing on Pinterest.

So let’s get a birds-eye-view of what you can find in your analytics in order to help you understand and grow your Pinterest account and create the kind of content that will do well on the platform.

The Overview

38 Analytics Overview - Pinterest For Coaches

The Overview panel is Pinterest’s way of giving you a quick snapshot of your account’s recent activity and performance.

You can see things like:

– How many pins were saved from your site in the last 30 days

– How much traffic (clicks) has your site received from Pinterest in the last 30 days

– The number of people who have engaged with your pins in the last 30 days

– Your top-performing pins in the last 30 days

This is valuable information because it allows you to see what content is resonating with your audience and driving traffic to your site.

And note that you can change the timeframe you’re looking at — you’re not limited to just the last 30 days.

Audience Insights

39 Audience Insights - Pinterest For Coaches

The Audience Insights panel is Pinterest’s way of giving you insights into the people who are engaging with your content.

You can see things like:

– The gender split of your audience

– The age range of your audience

– The location of your audience

– The interests of your audience

This information is valuable because it allows you to understand who your target audience is and what they’re interested in.

40 Trends - Pinterest For Coaches

The Trends panel is Pinterest’s way of giving you insights into the trends that are happening on the platform.

You can see things like:

– The top trending topics

– The top trending pins

– The top trending searches

This information is valuable because it allows you to understand what content is resonating with Pinterest users and what they’re searching for.

Growing Your Pinterest Audience

Just like on all social media platforms, your follower count is not the most important number to focus on.

True, you want people to follow you. Because the more people who follow you, the more frequently they’ll see your content.

But not everyone hits the follow button on Pinterest. Especially if they’re searching for a specific topic or keyword. Instead, they’ll click through to your blog or website, and only follow you if they find you again, or consider you particularly useful.

Basically, if they like what they see, they’ll stick around for more.

So how can you make sure you’re set up for people to like what they see more often than not?

Here are a few tips that will help you grow your audience:

  1. Pin consistently, and often. You’re way less likely to grow a great Pinterest audience if you allow big gaps in your posting schedule. If someone forgets about you and your awesome content before they see something new from you again, they’ll never follow you.
  2. Don’t pin random crap just for the sake of pinning. By all means, share other people’s pins. But make sure you vet the pinner and their content. If you’re sharing spammy content from unworthy sources, you’re going to lose trust with people.
  3. Use Rich Pins. Pinterest gives priority to rich pins in their algorithm, so take the time to set them up for your website. It’s a little bit of time spent for a lifetime Pinterest account boost.
  4. Get your followers from other platforms to follow you on Pinterest. If they like you already, it’ll be easier to get them on your follower list. And then that will be social proof to other people that you’re someone worth following.
  5. Utilize keywords as much as possible. Sometimes it can feel like a time-suck to find new keywords, but variety is the spice of life and will help you find new followers by putting your content in front of new people who need you.

Pro Tip

Grab The Pinterest for Coaches Checklist

Organization is key to success in any marketing strategy! So we created a FREE checklist to help you set up, plan, and organize your Pinterest marketing strategy for your coaching business.

Before you move on, we strongly suggest you sign-up for our Resource Library and download your free checklist.

Pinterest-Checklist

Can you see why we recommend Pinterest for coaches?

The possibilities are endless. All it takes is a little effort, creativity, and time.

Final Thoughts — Pinterest for Coaches

It’s time, friend. Go, build your name on Pinterest.

You know what to do. And to help you along, you can download our FREE Pinterest for Coaches Checklist from our resource library to make sure you’ve completed all the steps.

So get on Pinterest, and once you’re there, give us a follow!

And if you have any questions, tips, or comments, please leave them below 🙂

About The Author

Hey! I’m Cass, a brand coach and the Co-Founder & Chief Brand Officer at Lovely Impact, a website template shop for coaches. I help coaches elevate their businesses with beautiful branding and websites. Here on our blog, my content focuses on branding, web design, and storytelling.

By Cass

Hey! I’m Cass, a brand coach and the Co-Founder & Chief Brand Officer at Lovely Impact, a website template shop for coaches. I help coaches elevate their businesses with beautiful branding and websites. Here on our blog, my content focuses on branding, web design, and storytelling.

4 comments

  1. This blog is awesome! It lays everything out in a clear, succinct manner that helps people go from 0 to shining. Thank you, thank you for taking the time to put this together.

    1. Hey Tricia! Thanks a ton for your fantastic feedback! We’re so glad you found our Pinterest guide clear and helpful. It’s all about helping you go from zero to shining, indeed! Your appreciation for our effort means a lot to us. Keep shining and pinning your way to success!

    1. Wow, Tammie, that’s such a huge compliment! Thank you for sharing that with us. We’re over the moon to hear our post outshone an entire class! Stick with us for more insights that pack a punch.

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