How to drive traffic through Instagram & Pinterest without spending large amounts of money

September 5, 2018September 5, 2018 / marissapick / 1 Comment

Often at conferences I discuss the power of visual social media. We’re living during a social media revolution and as Aristotle stated well before social media existed, “There can be no words without pictures.”

The human brain process images 60,000 times quicker than text (Click to Tweet) and 59% of executives would rather watch video than read text (Click to Tweet). Having a visual social media marketing strategy is essential and in order to cut through the noise and succeed we MUST take advantage of specific strategies, tools, tactics and tips to have a competitive edge.

Visual media has always trumped the written word when it comes to winning people’s short term attention. This guest post is from Vin Clancy who recently launched his new book Ace The Game: The 100 best growth hacks in the world right now” which is a can’t miss book this year. You can learn more about Vin by visiting his website or blog and joining his growth club to receive strategies and tips to get ahead as a marketer. I found his tips to be very helpful in leveraging Pinterest and Instagram to generate traffic and I hope you’ll find it valuable as well, enjoy!

How to drive traffic through Instagram & Pinterest without spending large amounts of money

Pinterest and Instagram are two seriously powerful platforms.

Visual media has always trumped the written word when it comes to winning people’s short term attention.

Pinterest

Despite mainstream opinion, Pinterest is no longer just a site for the female, mom demographic.

It’s a pool of regularly engaged traffic that is just ripe for the taking.

In fact, it is the 2nd biggest referrer of traffic online (after Facebook)

First you need to set up a profile with a niche in mind.

Make it fairly general to your niche, then use various boards to hyper target your audience.

Use IFTTT and deploy the “Repost from Instagram To Pinterest” feature (good Instagram content translates good Pinterest content)

Make your profile look awesome and schedule 20+ pins a day of viral content that has done well on Instagram (use non-copyright images without logos)

Use software like followinglike to auto follow people who would be interested in your product/service and let it run.

A word of warning though, this is against Pinterests terms and conditions so proceed with caution. Use proxies if you’re handing it to an intern and be conservative with the amount of people you follow/unfollow in a day.

Once you start seeing a spike in traffic work out which pins are performing the best then make your own that direct directly to your blog/website.

Using this method it’s not uncommon to see anywhere between 10k-250k shares!

If things aren’t going right straight away here’s a few things you need to do.

1) Do more research into what successful Pinterest accounts are doing

Use the search function to stalk influencer accounts and just copy what they’re doing
Find board name inspiration by searching boards
Look at the accounts that have 5000+ followers and reverse engineer

2) Optimise your profile

Make sure your account name as relevant keywords
Do the same to your description
Make sure you have 10-20 boards in your niche. Be hyper focussed.
Fill your board description with keywords
Create unique covers for all your boards

3) Repost A LOT to see what works well

From my coaching classes to my private consulting clients, everyone is trying to optimise the very little traffic they’re getting
It’s extremely difficult to work out what works if you’re hardly getting any visitors. Work on reposting a lot of popular pins 30+ a day if that’s what it takes to see what gets the best traction. Then optimise from there.

4) Engagement automation

Keep following/unfollow until you reach 500+ followers
If you don’t have any followers no one is getting alerts when you’re reposting all this content, thus no one is sharing it
Follow the followers of your identified influencers (unfollow when you’re following 10k)

5) Content Seeding with group boards

Group boards are boards you can request to contribute to.
Joining means you can repin content to an existing audience
This can greatly increase your follower growth and decrease the amount of time it takes to work out which pin style is the most shareable.
Find group boards in your niche and follow the boards steps to become a contributor. This may be email, commenting on a specific post, sending them a DM etc.
See if your influencers are part of group boards, it’s a good place to start.

6) Identify Content That Resonates

Now comes the waiting game, to figure what works and what doesn’t takes time unfortunately. So be patient!
Once you get a gist of what’s working and what isn’t start posting less of the bad stuff and more of the good stuff

Once the ball gets rolling that’s when you start making your copycat Pinterest content with your logo, and then you can start directing the traffic to your landing pages or ecommerce stores (from there it’s up to your websites to convert the clickers!)

Instagram

Moving on now to the platform some of you may prefer, Instagram.

In this section I’m going to explain the simple hashtag ladder strategy that you can use to drive up followers and build an awesome account.

Now a lot of you may be thinking that this will be a huge secret that is safe guarded by big brands and influencers alike…

Well it’s not.

It’s actually hidden in plain sight!

You know those long lists of hashtags some people put in the first comment of their photos? Well if used properly these lists can draw in followers from outside of your current audience.

Hashtags make up one of two main discovery mechanics on the site (the second being the explore page)

Hashtags are the mechanic that anyone can nail from the start, making them great to focus on for small accounts.

Each post you put on instagram can have up to 30 hashtags (and you guessed it, we’re going to use all of them!)

So we need 30 hashtags, but which ones?

To break into the ‘popular’ section of any hashtag search result you need fast and massive engagement on your post.

If your account has a lot of followers, this is pretty simple (especially if they have notifications for your account on).

The trouble is a lot of you don’t have a lot of followers or even what is considered ‘great’ engagement (+5%) so you’re unlikely to rank on this page.

Example: Say you’ve got 5,000 followers, so a 5% engagement rate would be 250 people liking one of your photos. Using a classical hashtag strategy, that 250 likes is unlikely to get you to appear in the popular results for most of the hashtags you’re using, they’re just too competitive. For the tags you do rank in, you may be an extra 10–20 likes, but it’s not enough to get any crazy growth.

So you need to ladder your hashtags so that you rank for the easier ones first.

The likes you receive from the easy to rank hashtags will then allow you to rank for your second hashtag.

The likes you generate from this will help you rank for the third (and so on and so forth)

Now this won’t fire on all cylinders every time, so maybe think about deleting the posts that don’t quite as well.

But if you have 10 posts a day and perhaps 3 or 4 it the jackpot, then you’ll be in for a few follower spikes every day.

So how do you make these ladders?

I’d suggest that for an account below 10,000 followers, you want to find a range of RELEVANT hashtags (check the popular results to make sure there’s content similar to your in them) that have been used between 10,000 and 250,000 times.

You may even want to find multiple sets of 30 hashtags, each with a roughly even distribution of hashtag uses across this range, using different sets for different posts.

The key here is that your posts normally couldn’t rank in the popular results for the hashtags that have been used 250,000 times, but they could easily rank for those that have been used 10–20,000 times. So you get some engagement from those, which pushes you into the results for the 20–40,000 tags and so on.

Of course, the more you post (to a degree) and the better the content quality, the more success you’ll have. The key point here is that if you don’t have this hashtag ladder in place, it’s much more difficult, if not impossible to get any viral results from your Instagram posts.

What do you think of this guest post? Please leave a comment below or send me a tweet @marissapick.

7 Predictions from Vin Clancy regarding the Future of Social Media

July 17, 2018 / marissapick / 1 Comment

On June 30, 2010, Mashable launched Social Media Day as a way to recognize and celebrate social media’s impact on global communication. And eight year’s later social media is now at the heart of all global communications plans and deeply integrated into many peoples daily routines and lives. With the constant changes to social media and new entrepreneurs being born everyday social media is the one component that all successful entrepreneurs, influencers and businesses have learn to understand.

Known for his cutting-edge growth hacks and genius business ideas Vin Clancy went from living on welfare in the U.K when he turned things around learning how to use the internet to make things go viral. He’s just launched his new book Ace The Game: The 100 best growth hacks in the world right now” which is a can’t miss book this year. You can learn more about Vin by visiting his website or blog and joining his growth club to receive strategies and tips to get ahead as a marketer.

The future of social media and how to know which social media platform is best to use for your brand or business

Envy,

That’s what a lot of you feel when you look at brands and influencers who generate huge amounts of traffic and sales from social media.

Don’t worry, I get it too.

Now a lot of these people are either: extremely talented, have a lot of money for ads, or have grinded their way to the top of the newsfeed. And I have the utmost respect for the vast majority of them. But saying that, there is another reason why these people/brands reached the summit of their game. It’s because they got there first.

Speed is the most valuable asset to have in this game and striking fast and hard is ideally the way to go about things. Over the past year a lot of people have asked me what the next big social platform is going to be.

Here are 7 of my predictions in regards to the future of social media.

Pinterest isn’t used to its potential and is seriously underrated for driving traffic to blogs, this won’t last forever.

With many people struggling to drive web traffic from Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to their blog many people are beginning to give up.

Whilst I think people are seriously underating the importance of SEO, there are plenty of people I know who are KILLING IT with Pinterest. One of my ex-pupils generates 100,000 impressions a month using Pinterest a month for next to nothing.
I seriously wouldn’t underestimate this platform.

There are plenty of useful automation softwares for it IFTTT, followlike, tailwind. Use these to auto-pin content and follow/unfollow people at scale.

If you’ve got a blog or ecommerce store, and a pretty decent sales funnel, then I seriously would look at driving traffic there from Pinterest. Like I said, this won’t last forever.
As Facebook throttles more and more traffic to websites, SEO will make a big comeback.

Lots of people keep saying Facebook is killing the organic reach of pages. (I might be the first one to say this). It’s actually now been killed. Every post that a page sends out, that doesn’t have any money put behind it, and includes and external link gets seen by one, maybe even two people. What’s the point?

SEO is free (okay you might need to pay for some optimization tools, training or backlinks) but at it’s core optimizing blog posts for SEO is free.

So I reckon that more people at the bottom will be less inclined to dive into social media content marketing and more people will go back to perfecting the SEO for their articles/blog posts.

Want to get the attention of high-ticket prospects through social media? Don’t waste your time, use physical and lumpy mail. This will always be effective in my eyes.

People love receiving (cool) stuff in the mail. Do you ever get excited about a package arriving from Amazon? I know I do!  So if you can physically send something to someone, do it.

Physical mail has a 95%-100% pickup rate, especially if it’s something large like a box.  Tip: Call up the office of your prospect (influencer/CEO) and say to their assistant “we want to send x a free pair of shoes what is his/her size?” Then buy the high ticket prospect a nice pair of shoes but only send them one. Tell them in a nice letter “Now I’ve got my foot in the door, I’ll happily give you the other shoe if you agree to go for a coffee with me”

Very cheeky and everyone wants the other shoe.

4. Learn how to grow a Twitch account, this will conquer the earth in the next decade.

This platform will be huge in the coming year, not just for gamers but for everyday folk too.  In fact, it’s huge now! The Amazon owned platform now has 100+ million unique users every month.

The channel IRL (In Real Life) has people live streaming everyday things from: painting, drawing, playing music, building things.  So why not get there first for your niche and find some new customers.

Maybe I should set up the first live growth hacking channel before someone else does ….

5. People gave up on Facebook chatbots too quickly and no one has done them right yet. Everyone will have them eventually so make yours the best.

When Facebook chatbots came to town everyone went crazy for them, but I’ve seen less and less people rave about them.

For those of you who don’t know chatbots are essentially FB messenger broadcasts that pages can send to anyone who signs up to them.They’re super powerful with many still boasting a huge open rate.

Because people wanted to treat them like an email list they burnt out a lot of people who don’t want marketing messages in their Facebook messenger every other day.

Some of the best bots I’ve seen impart REAL value that people want in their inbox 3-5 times a month MAX. What a lot of brands haven’t realised is that people have joined your bot it’s because they’ve trusted you.

They’ve allowed you into their inner circle that was previously reserved for their close friends and family. Don’t betray that by selling to them everyday. (MsgHero and ManyChat are among for favourite chat bot providers)

Too many businesses are always looking for the next shiny object

A lot of startups and businesses come to me and say “You’re the guy that can get traffic out of thin air using social media? Help us!”

While there are a lot of ways to grow their traffic I always ask to see their current traffic, conversions and email list first. There’s normally a lot of things that people aren’t already doing with their current customers.

So look at your current methods before embarking on completely new strategies.

7. People are still using Twitter wrong

It’s not a broadcast network. It’s a one-to-one network at huge scale. The half life of a tweet is so short, and the feed moves so fast, that hardly anyone following over 200 people will see your one tweet a day.

So use to either send out 24 tweets a day or just simply @ the people you want to contact instead! There is software that will help you do this in an organic and human way (don’t go overboard), but this will allow you to scale and hit many people at once.

I reply to nearly everyone who tweets @ me and I’ve seen many a celebrity and influencer do the same. Start using it right.

That’s a wrap for the predictions (I’ll put my crystal ball away now)

So those are my predictions and observations about social media marketing in 2018.

Whilst this is the way I believe things will play out, It’s important to look back at times and check yourself before you decide to massively change course. If it isn’t broken don’t fix it, this is also known as the “Learn, implement, review” system. This ties into you should work out which social media platform is right for your business.

To be perfectly honest it’s actually quite simple. To start with you should already know the major places your ideal customer hangs out online and that should be your starting point (if you don’t then you have bigger problems to address first!)

Most people try and go for a multi-channel approach and hit all bases. While I too recommend this, it’s very difficult to execute right from the off if you’ve got a small team or work on your own.

If you spread yourself too thin and don’t go in hard on one platform you won’t get any results. I suggest picking one main channel to focus on, and then a secondary channel a little later down the line.

You need to then look at the competition and work out if they are having success by using this platform, then work out how you can start to attract people to your brand instead.

What do you think of Vin’s predictions, leave a comment below or send me a tweet @marissapick.

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