10 Simple Steps to Grow Your Podcast Audience with Pinterest

by Adeola Adegbusi

Are you a new podcaster looking for effective ways to grow your podcast audience? Or maybe you’ve been podcasting for a while now and your audience growth has plateaued. Either way, I’m here to help! I’m Adeola, and I’m going to be sharing with you a 10-step strategy that you can use to grow your podcast audience using Pinterest. Before delving into said strategy, there are two major facts about Pinterest that you should know:

1. Pinterest is a visual search engine, NOT a social media platform.

2. Pinterest drives 10x more traffic than Facebook and Instagram combined. So whether you’re currently on Pinterest or not, it can be an invaluable tool once you learn to maximize the ways it can work for you. 

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1. Open a Pinterest business account

If you already use Pinterest for personal use, I suggest opening another account for your podcast or podcast blog. You should make sure it’s a business account so that you’ll get access to analytics and Pinterest ads.

After opening a business account, the next thing you want to do is choose a search engine optimized (SEO) profile name. Your profile name will usually be your podcast name. However, to increase your chances of getting found on Pinterest, you should also add a target keyword that your listeners or audience will likely be typing into search engines.

For example, if your podcast name is​ Women of Color ​and you talk about ​personal finance for black women,​ your profile name will be Women of Color | Personal Finance Tips For Black Women. To get more character space, it’s recommended to write this long profile name on your phone. Character space is more limited when editing your profile name on your desktop.

2. Write a keyword-rich profile description

When a Pinner (Pinterest user) lands on your profile, they need to know what your profile is all about and why they should follow your profile and pin your content. Your profile description is where you will introduce your podcast to your audience, what it’s all about, what communities you serve, and what the listener can look forward to.

3. Create at least 7 boards with keyword-optimized board names, and pin relevant pins to each board

The next thing you want to do is create around seven boards with keyword-rich names. Remember that Pinterest is a search engine, after all. 

To increase your chances of getting found online, you should include relevant keywords that your target audience will be looking for online. For example, relevant board names for a personal finance board will be Budgeting, Savings, Retirement, Credit Card Debt, Mortgage, Investing, etc.

After creating these boards, you should add at least 10 relevant pins to each board. It’s very easy to do that nowadays because Pinterest will recommend pins that relate to that board. And all you have to do is to click “save” to add them to the board. Essentially, you want your profile to be a resource center for your target listeners.

4. Create beautiful pin images for your podcast episodes

To quickly establish an audience on Pinterest and grow your podcast audience, you will need to design beautiful and click-worthy images that people will actually want to click on.

You must first ensure that your images are vertically-long images with a 2:3 dimension. If you’re going to be using Canva to design your pins, you can use the Pinterest template which is 735px by 1102px.

Then, you should use bold colors that will catch someone’s attention on the platform. If you have your own brand colors, you can use them, although you can also play around with colors until you find the perfect combination. In terms of font styles, you should choose bold fonts that are easy to read.

The next thing to consider is to write click-worthy titles with a search engine optimized keyword. This way, when someone performs a search on Pinterest with a keyword that’s on your pin, Pinterest will show your pin to the reader. Another cool thing to note is that Pinterest pins come up in Google Search and Google Images. So if you want to boost your page rank, you need to be as intentional as possible when organizing your Pinterest page.

5. Create Pinterest videos about your products

Video searches on Pinterest have increased in the last year. With that in mind, I recommend converting your podcast episodes into one-minute videos. If you’ve already created some for Instagram, you can bring them over to Pinterest. Just make sure that you choose a click-worthy thumbnail image for these videos.

Also, make sure your videos meet the 9:16 or 1:1 format. Avoid YouTube’s 16:9 dimension because Pinterest will completely ignore the video and won’t show it to your followers.

Read Next: How to Sell on Your Podcast

6. Write a search engine optimized pin description

It is vital to write an enticing and keyword-rich pin description not only for your Pinterest profile but for each of your pins as well. This increases the lifespan of your pins. You should also include links to the target page that relates to the pin on your website.

This is why it’s very important for podcasters to have their own website because if you want Pinterest to work for you and help quickly grow an audience, you should have your Pinterest page redirecting people to your podcast blog. This way, you can send listeners to a specific landing page and also get them to take other actions on your site, such as signing up for your newsletter, webinar, etc.

7. Pin all your podcast episodes and blog posts

After having set up an optimized Pinterest profile, you now want to design click-worthy pins for the rest of your podcast episodes or blog posts. If you are short on time and don’t know where to start, you can start by designing pins for your top ten episodes, or your ten most recent episodes.

To speed things up, use the same template and just change up the title on each pin. Upload them to Pinterest, write an enticing description and include a link to the episode and pin it to the right board.

8. Optimize your website for Pinterest

Aside from optimizing your Pinterest profile, you also want to optimize your website for Pinners. There are over 250 million active Pinterest users who love to save new ideas to their boards. If you want your readers to help spread the word about your podcast on your behalf for free, you should make it easy for them to do so.

By this, I mean adding pinnable images to your posts and encouraging readers to pin them to their boards. Remember those pins you created in Step #4 and Step #7? You should add those pins to your blog posts so that a Pinner visiting your website will be able to pin the image to their Pinterest board.

To help with SEO, you should add a keyword-rich alt text to your images, so that when a Pinner pins an image to their board, Pinterest will use the alt text as the pin title. Most Pinterest users don’t know anything about SEO and won’t be bothered with writing an optimized description and everything I’ve shared so far.

Now when the Pinner pins that image to Pinterest with the alt text, the next time another Pinner puts in a search query with the alt text, Pinterest will pull up that pin. And the next thing you know, you’re getting free traffic from a pin someone else posted to Pinterest on your behalf! Because Pinterest is an authority site, it also helps with backlinks and rankings! How awesome is that!

9. Schedule your pins using a scheduling tool

Pinterest is a long-term game, and to stay on top of that game you will need to keep adding fresh content to your profile. To do that, I recommend using a scheduling tool to automate the process. The best tool out there is Tailwind, which is what I use. Currently, it’s compatible with Pinterest and Instagram.

Tailwind allows you to schedule a month’s worth of content within 30 minutes! I don’t know about any other online platform where I can schedule 30 days’ worth of content in 30 minutes.

Instead of pinning all your pins from step #7 to Pinterest all at once, you can have Tailwind schedule them to go out on specific dates. You can also have it post the pins to related boards on your behalf.

Get started with Tailwind here – save time, maximize your reach and measure success on Pinterest.

10. Study your analytics and let them drive your strategies

To determine if your Pinterest strategies are working, you will need to get familiar with your analytics. What I love about Pinterest is that the analytics tell you what pins and boards are performing well. This includes other people’s pins that you pinned to your boards.

For example, if you have pins with a high impression but very few clicks, you might want to take a look at your keywords, call to action, pin design, colors, fonts, imagery, and the relevance of your posts. If your pin has a low impression, you should take a look at the size of it and create another pin with an optimized size.

You should be using your analytics to determine what content to create next, based on what’s doing really well on your profile. This is a basic SEO strategy that can work wonders for growing your podcast audience once you get the hang of it.

Conclusion

I suggest giving yourself about three months to familiarize yourself with Pinterest, and always remember that Pinterest isn’t a social media platform, it’s a search engine. This means that you should be thinking long-term with every pin you create. You should also ensure that your website is optimized for SEO so that Pinterest and Google can get to work faster on your behalf.

Do you currently use Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog? What questions do you have for us with regards to how to use Pinterest to grow your podcast audience?