Want some juicy, behind-the-scenes details about a *real* Pinterest account set up?
What follows here 😉 is the story of a coach who started out knowing almost NOTHING about Pinterest marketing!
And now, after enrolling in Pinterest with Purpose (my self-paced course) and implementing the course work, she’s:
✔️ Seeing her impressions and Pinterest-driven website visits growing
✔️ Publishing multiple pins each time she creates just ONE piece of content
✔️ Confident that her Pinterest profile will generate leads around the clock -– even while she’s on vacation or holiday
✔️ More focused on her clients and the work she loves – not worrying about her marketing plan
✔️ Steadily growing her audience each month using Pinterest – with minimal work
… and that’s (literally!) just the beginning of her Pinterest marketing success story!
Read on to learn…
How “Pinterest with Purpose” helped Yvonne optimize her Pinterest profile for lead generation and increased her audience by 305%.
(P.S. – This piece was researched and written by contributor Hannah Fleace, Content & Case Study Specialist!)
The Course Student:
Yvonne van Dalen is a photographer and photography success coach. She helps overwhelmed photographers boost their business, income, and free time. She runs her photography studio VaVaVonne and her coaching practice, Photographers Coach Academy.
The Problem: Yvonne wanted a low-hustle way to generate consistent leads for her coaching practice.
Tired of the seemingly never-ending cycle of content creation and posting to social media, Yvonne wanted a better way to generate consistent leads for her coaching practice.
In her own photography business, Yvonne looked to Pinterest for inspiration and ideas. And she knew other photographers and their ideal clients frequently used the platform to find ideas, inspiration, and solutions, too.
She started pinning for her business in 2018 but was initially underwhelmed with the results.
“I had no clue on how to set Pinterest up in a way that would really attract the people that I want to be seen by,” Yvonne said.
In addition to Pinterest, she did plenty of marketing for her coaching practice on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook, but she was frustrated that her content disappeared in a few hours. Blog posts she spent hours on were buried in newsfeeds and lost in algorithms.
She wanted an evergreen system that allowed her content to get in front of the people who needed it, when they were searching for it.
“Every week I faced this struggle of having to come up with five or seven new posts, and I would think, ‘What’s the use?’,” Yvonne said. “Because next week, it’s all down, down, down in the timeline, and no one is going to see it anymore.”
But Yvonne noticed that she was seeing someone else’s content all the time.
“Every time I got on Pinterest, I would see Jana,” Yvonne said. “You know when you buy a blue coat and suddenly everyone seems to have a blue coat? That’s the way she shows up, but it’s clear that there is a structure and a strategy behind it, and that’s what I wanted.”
She learned about “Pinterest with Purpose,” Jana’s self-paced online course that teaches coaches and service-based entrepreneurs how to generate consistent leads using Pinterest. Based on the same methods Jana has used for more than three years with her 1:1 and intensive clients, Yvonne knew immediately it was the right investment.
“I was so ready to leave behind the moments of feeling constantly behind,” Yvonne said. “Feeling like I’m constantly struggling to keep up with that pace of social media. I was fed up with it — having to post every day, sometimes even multiple times a day. It was just un-doable.”
The Solution: The Pinterest marketing course for online coaches!
From the very first lesson of Pinterest with Purpose, Yvonne was blown away.
“The very first thing I learned from Jana is that Pinterest is not social media,” Yvonne said. “It’s a search engine — like if Google and Instagram had a baby. It’s information plus images.”
She’d been creating pins for a while — doing things she thought were correct, making her Pinterest look the way she thought it should. Her content from Facebook and Instagram was automatically added to Pinterest, but nothing was automated or optimized for keywords.
Part of that was because she didn’t know what the entire Pinterest funnel looked like from start to finish.
“I remember in the first lesson, Jana explained exactly what the strategy would look like and what parts I’d need to look at and change. But she said to wait with changing stuff around or implementing until later lessons,” Yvonne said. “And I loved that because it took the pressure off. She was really clear about what to do and when to do it, and I loved that structure.”
In the next chapters, Yvonne cleaned up and optimized her profile using the steps and guidance Jana outlined. She learned how to keyword-optimize her profile, name, and bio, create boards that stood out, and how to do keyword strategy and research.
“It’s truly a no-brainer the whole way through,” Yvonne said. “I had so many ah-ha moments and was easily able to implement everything.”
One of her biggest ah-ha moments was learning how much she needed to pin for her business. Jana’s course shares a simple strategy to turn one piece of content into multiple lead-generating pins that circulate in Pinterest forever.
“It really has nothing to do with posting every day, and I love creating content that lasts a long time,” Yvonne said. “This course constantly affirmed me, and helped me rethink how to use my content. It’s helped me be more creative and that is something I really love.”
The course also helped Yvonne understand how she could take her long-form, SEO-packed blogs and reuse them to reach different demographics and audiences on Pinterest.
“I loved that she made everything implementable straight away,” Yvonne said. “When I got to the sections on graphics, titles, and descriptions, I was immediately able to implement bits and pieces at a time.”
The Early Results: The first week
After just a couple days of implementing Jana’s strategies, Yvonne’s Pinterest impressions, engagement, and audience soared!
“I went from basically zero to 3,000 views almost overnight,” Yvonne said. “After making just a few tweaks to my profiles and pins, my Pinterest impressions went up 100% to 200% every day.”
Just a couple days after she started pinning with Jana’s strategy, her audience jumped from 617 to more than 2.25k. Her impressions (the total number of times her pins were shown) leapt from 1.33k to 4.72k and her engagements (the total number of engagements on her pins) went from 46 to 118.
This early action gave Yvonne some good motivation to continue optimizing and pinning – helping her see what was possible over time!
(See analytics screenshots showing impressions on August 11 – before Yvonne implemented the course material – and then on August 15 after implementing!)
Ongoing Results: The first 6 months
A check-in with Yvonne in February of 2021 revealed that her Pinterest profile continues to grow – and visits to her website are gaining traction, too.
During the 90 days leading up to February 6 when this screenshot (below) was taken, her monthly impressions grew steadily.
When Yvonne decided to take time off in December, she stopped posting to Pinterest as frequently. But because she set up her account strategically in August and posted consistently for four months, Pinterest continued to produce results for her.
Even when she wasn’t active, potential clients still found her pins in their searches and their feeds. On any other marketing channel, her account would’ve been lost under mountains of incoming content and a fickle algorithm.
“The amazing thing,” Yvonne said, “is that I needed to take some time off in December, and I didn’t do anything on Pinterest during that time. But Pinterest continued to produce results for me. People were still finding my pins in their searches and feeds – because I pinned them months ago! What other marketing channel can do that for you?”
Sixty-two people visited her site from Pinterest in the 90 days leading up to this recent check in on Yvonne’s analytics. (She even had website visits in December, when she didn’t pin on Pinterest at all!)
Note: This type of steady, slow growth in outbound clicks is very normal in the beginning. Seeing some initial website clicks in the first 3 to 6+ months is a sign of a healthy account. Newly-optimized Pinterest accounts often take some time to gain traction. And then results can start to snowball – with very minimal effort required!
More Ongoing Results: Clarity, time savings, & more passive visibility – with Pinterest!
Using the “Pinterest with Purpose” strategy, Yvonne has already started to save hours of time each week drafting and pushing out content. And this time savings will snowball over time, as her Pinterest account grows. Instead of being a content mill, she can rely more on the residual results of Pinterest as well as repurposing what she already has for different audiences.
The analytics from Pinterest – and Jana’s guidance – also helped Yvonne get clear on exactly what she should focus on in her Pinterest marketing. With specific strategies and the guidance from the course, Yvonne can focus on fewer, more powerful needle-moving activities on Pinterest.
“Pinterest is a really saturated place for photography, but it boils down to having the right search terms, the right descriptions, knowing how to speak the language of your client,” Yvonne said. “Jana teaches all that and it made such a difference. Now, when people search for coaching and photography, they see my name or they see the Photographers Coach Academy. They just see it.”
One of the biggest draws for signing up for the course was Jana’s teaching style.
“Jana is someone who wants you to get the most out of your efforts and time,” Yvonne said. “I’ve done so many workshops and trainings where I would come out the end of it and know that I have something to do but not knowing how to do it. You get these really fancy trainings and retreats that do nothing for your business.”
She said Jana’s course was a far cry from the giant, empty promises of a lot of courses on the market. Her advice to anyone who wants to automate their lead generation and reclaim their time with Pinterest is to invest in Jana’s course.
“Pinterest is a smarter way to use your time and your efforts in your marketing,” Yvonne said. “I’m totally converted! I started out thinking, ‘Okay, this going to be about what my pins should look like.’ But it’s so much more. It’s an entire philosophy that made me go ‘Ah-ha!’ and ‘Eureka!’ the whole time. This course really is a must.”
If you’re reading this – and you’d love to learn and implement what Yvonne learned – you can enroll in Pinterest with Purpose here!
It’s a self-study e-course that reveals the methods I’ve been refining with my 1:1 clients for three+ years now.
It reveals the strategies that work for coaches, service providers, and course creators. It takes you, step-by-step, through the process of getting your Pinterest profile set up optimally – so you can use it to grow your audience and land clients!
Check it out and enroll here!
