Travel and lifestyle blogger, Leah, has a thriving social media marketing consulting service on the side.
Leah specializes in marketing through Pinterest and it's been great!
She helps clients leverage the power and reach of the unique image-based social media platform, enabling them to access enormous audiences through engaging visual content.
Naturally, she's had a lot of success with her own Pinterest presence as well.
In fact, that's how she got into social media consulting in the first place.
Leah loves Pinterest, and she learned everything she could find about how to succeed on the platform.
Eventually, she got so good at it that she was able to bring in thousands of dollars per month helping her clients achieve the same levels of success.
In a recent interview with Making Cents of Cents, Leah offers some of the tips and strategies she uses for herself and her consulting clients.
Check it out:
Gain the Experience
First and foremost, it was important for me to understand how regular users interact with the platform.
As a long-time Pinterest user myself, I was able to analyze my own habits:
- What I looked for in a pin
- What type of content I was typically drawn to, and
- What made me actually click through to visit a website.
I realized I didn't so much think of Pinterest as a social platform for interacting with others, but a content discovery tool or as some people like to call it, a visual search engine.
This insight from a user's perspective was crucial to my understanding of how to market effectively to other users later on.
Next, I needed to understand exactly how a business would benefit from utilizing Pinterest.
Generating traffic is just one example—Pinterest is also an extremely effective tool for capturing leads as well as generating sales of both physical and digital products.
An active Pinterest profile is also an excellent way to boost brand awareness and engagement; with these business objectives in mind, it was time to start figuring out what strategies actually worked.
In the early stages, it helped me immensely to seek out training programs, videos, and tutorials to see what successful accounts looked like and what practices they were using that were proving effective.
Of course, what works well for one brand won't necessarily work well for another, and what works with today's Pinterest algorithms won't necessarily work with tomorrow's, which meant my process of testing new techniques had be on-going in order for me to continue to grow and achieve my goals.
This is the only true way to learn what works on a given platform, after all—trial and error.
Using my own Pinterest business account as the guinea pig, I was able to gain this experience of learning through trial and error.
As I mentioned earlier, I was also fortunate enough to be hired for Pinterest by friend of mine and thus grew my knowledge base even faster by managing two accounts.
Of course, managing just my own account certainly would have sufficed.
Land Your First Client
Landing the first client is always one of the most difficult steps for a new freelancer; after the first, you'll feel much more confident and the second and the third will come much easier!
The important thing is to let as many people know about your services as possible—if no one knows what you offer, no one can hire you, which means that you'll never make money with Pinterest.
One of the ways I let people know about my one-on-one Pinterest consultations was by advertising the service at the end of my Pinterest how-to blog post.
I linked to a separate page that outlined exactly what the client would get from our session along with proof of the impressive results I had achieved in the past (a few screenshots of my Pinterest analytics worked just fine for this).
There are also plenty of great online marketplaces where you can offer such a service.
On forums like these, it often helps to set your pricing on the lower end of the spectrum until you have a few clients under your belt who can provide positive references.
Finally, don't forget to tell your friends and family! Word of mouth can go a long way.
Even if they don't personally have a need for your service, they might just know someone who does.
You can even offer people you know a special discounted rate as incentive to hire you; having at least one happy client will greatly increase your chances of getting another, especially if they provide you with a glowing review or testimonial.
Diversify Your Offerings
In the beginning, I made the mistake of turning away clients simply because they didn’t want to pay my fixed monthly rate for account management services.
What I should have done instead was modify what I provided until the service matched the price point they were comfortable with. This way, I still earn what I think I’m worth, and they still get my services at a price they are willing to pay.
These days, I am much more open to negotiation and because of it, I rarely have to turn a new client away for lack of time on my part or a lack of funds on theirs.
Additionally, not everyone who contacts me wants their account fully managed.
Some of them simply want pins created because they don’t think they are creative.
Others want personalized advice on how to optimize their own account and in-depth training for using a scheduling app; this is what my one-on-one Skype consultations are for.
Be flexible with your offerings without undermining yourself. Never lower your rates; adapt your services to match their price point.
You can find more intriguing details in the full post from Making Cents of Cents.
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