The And She Looked Up Podcast
Every other week The And She Looked Up Podcast sits down with inspiring Canadian women who create for a living. We talk about their creative journeys and their best business tips, as well as the creative and business mindset issues all creative entrepreneurs struggle with. This podcast is for Canadian artists, makers and creators who want to find a way to make a living doing what they love. Your host, Melissa Hartfiel, left a 20 year career in corporate retail and has been happily self-employed as a working creative since 2010. She's a graphic designer, illustrator, writer, community co-founder and has owned and operated a multi-six figure a year creative content business. She resides just outside of Vancouver, BC.
The And She Looked Up Podcast
Prep for the Holiday EP6: Early, Essential Marketing with Pinterest and Blogging
We're up to Task #6 in our Prep For the Holidays checklist for creatives. This week, we're working on early marketing tasks with two powerful platforms that need time to reach their full potential. We're talking about blogging and Pinterest - and why starting these two tasks early is crucial for a successful holiday campaign.
Don't limit your potential this holiday season - build your community, increase visibility, and drive traffic to your products by working ahead. Get ready to create a thriving online presence and make this holiday season your most successful yet!
Mentioned in this episode:
Simple Pin Media and The Simple Pin Podcast
wordpress.com
wordpress.org
blogger.com
And She Looked Up Episode 135: Blogging to Drive Traffic (and Build SEO) For Your Creative Business
This episode is brought to you by our Premium Subscriber Community on Patreon and Buzzsprout
You can find Melissa at finelimedesigns.com, finelimeillustrations.com or on Instagram @finelimedesigns.
You can connect with the podcast on:
- Instagram at @andshelookedup
- YouTube
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For a list of all available episodes, please visit:
And She Looked Up Creative Hour Podcast
Each week The And She Looked Up Podcast sits down with inspiring Canadian women who create for a living. We talk about their creative journeys and their best business tips, as well as the creative and business mindset issues all creative entrepreneurs struggle with. This podcast is for Canadian artists, makers and creators who want to find a way to make a living doing what they love.
Your host, Melissa Hartfiel (@finelimedesigns), left a 20 year career in corporate retail and has been happily self-employed as a working creative since 2010. She's a graphic designer, writer and illustrator as well as the co-founder of a multi-six figure a year business in the digital content space. She resides just outside of Vancouver, BC.
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the and she Looked Up podcast. As always, I am your host, melissa, and today we are here for episode 6 of the Prep for the Holidays mini-sode series. So, if you are new to this series, this is something we are doing this year to help makers, artists, creative service providers and content creators, like bloggers and YouTubers, get ready for the busy holiday selling season. So the premise behind each episode is that it covers off one task that you should be working on to get yourself ready for the holiday selling season, and the idea being that when that task airs is around the time that you should be working on that particular task in your business. So, if you are watching on YouTube, I will put a link to our playlist that has the entire prep for the holiday series in it, and if you are listening on your favorite podcast app, you can go back and listen to all of the episodes. However you enjoy listening to your podcast, they should all be identified as Prep for the Holidays episodes, so it should be easy for you to find them. And, yeah, let's jump in to this week's task, which is okay. So at this point, we are well into August and there's a lot of things going on that you probably want to be working on simultaneously, so choosing a task for this week's episode was a little bit difficult, because I felt like there was four or five different things that we could talk about, but the one that I chose is to work on blog posts and Pinterest pins, and the reason I chose this is because these really do need to be things that you work on early on, because it can take a little while for things to start get rolling with them. They need a little bit of time to start snowballing for lack of a better word and so I thought it would be better to cover this now, so that it's something that you can work on as soon as possible, but continue to work on as we get closer to the winter months and the holiday season.
Speaker 1:So if you are a content creator, like a blogger or a YouTuber, then you are probably already fully aware of the fact that you need to be working on your content for the holiday season. Already, you're probably well on your way. If you're not, then you need to get on that. It's something you do need to be working on If you're a YouTuber and you're planning on participating in Vlogmas, which I know is something that sort of happens on YouTube every December, then now is definitely the time where you want to start planning for that content if not filming some of it in advance, because it's quite a slog and if you're not familiar with Vlogmas, this is where YouTube creators try to release one new video a day throughout the month of December, or up until December 25th. So that's a lot of content, and if you've ever created video content, you know that the editing process and all the behind the scenes can take some time. So if you can start planning those out or even shooting bits of those now, if you're taking part, this is a great time to do that.
Speaker 1:Now, for the rest of us, who may not necessarily consider ourselves content creators, there is a very valid argument for creating content to support your creative business. There's a lot of different ways you can do this. You can do this with social media content, which is things like reels and stories and TikToks or short form video on YouTube. But there's another very powerful way that you can work on this too, actually and that's what we're going to be talking about today One is Pinterest and one is blogging.
Speaker 1:So Pinterest is a platform that a lot of people use to plan, so they tend to be looking on Pinterest in advance for things, and the type of planning that they tend to do on Pinterest can be anything from the fashion look that they want to have for a particular season, or if they're figuring out what they want to purchase fashion-wise for a season. It's used for planning for home decor renovations or just freshening up your indoor or outdoor space. It's used for party and entertaining and hosting ideas. So this can obviously mean Christmas, but it can also mean Halloween, canadian and American Thanksgiving. Canadian Thanksgiving is very early it's prior to Halloween and American Thanksgiving is quite late. It could also be things like Diwali, hanukkah, kwanzaa all of the festivities that happen in this last part of the year. So people are not only planning their entertaining and their decor and food and all of that. They're also planning their gift giving, and so this is a great time to start getting pins up on Pinterest that direct back to your products. Now, this is one of the reasons why last week, we talked about creating mock-ups.
Speaker 1:You might not quite be ready. You might not quite be ready. You might not quite be ready. You might. That didn't sound right. You might not quite be ready to have actual Etsy listings yet, although the sooner you can get those up the better, because people do start purchasing well in advance. I had my first Christmas sale back in June, so people start early. So as soon as you're in a position to get your product listings up, you should get them up, even if it seems early, because people are shopping and they're also pinning those products. So if they can pin your content from Etsy or from your own shop, they will do that. You can also pin your own content from Etsy or your shop and get it out there, because Pinterest takes a little. While Pinterest pins very rarely take off within the first few days or even the first few weeks of you pinning them. They can take many weeks, months in some cases, and in some cases it can be almost a year. So you really want to get a jump on that, if you can, so create pins.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to get into in depth into how to pin to Pinterest from a e-commerce perspective, because that's a whole episode in itself, but I will direct you to Simple Pin Media and their podcast, the Simple Pin Podcast. They have lots of episodes on how to use Pinterest to your advantage as a small product business or as an e-commerce business. So I highly recommend checking that out. I'll put a link to them in the show notes, but that's definitely something that you want to be very cognizant of, because people do use. They use Pinterest as almost a kind of wishlist or a dream list or that kind of thing. So if you can get in front of them on a platform like that, that is so much better, and this is where you can use your mock-ups. If you don't have listings already, you can, but you need to direct them back to something. So you might want to consider creating blog content. If you're on Etsy, it can be really hard to create blog content because there's no blog component to Etsy, but there are lots of free blogging platforms out there. There is wordpresscom, which allows you to set up a free WordPress blog that is hosted by WordPress. There's nothing you need to do. There is also Blogger, which is another free platform that you can set up and create blogs blog posts that talk about your products or that talk about things relating to your products, and you can create Pinterest pins that lead back to those blog posts.
Speaker 1:Blogging is an incredibly powerful tool for driving traffic and for getting found through SEO. I know a lot of people get very frustrated with Etsy and threaten to leave and start their own website. When you start your own website, that comes with a whole host of challenges as well, and one of the biggest challenges is getting people to find your website, and this is where blogging comes into play. Blogging is a great way to build SEO and to drive traffic, but it takes a bit of work and some planning, so it's something you definitely want to consider If you already have your own e-commerce website. So, whether you're on Shopify, squarespace, wix, um, wordpressorg, which is the paid for uh hosted where you have to host the website, and if you're using WooCommerce, you would be using WordPress, um, those are platforms that come with blogging tools. So if you haven't used them, now is the time to start and you want to give yourself a little bit of an education on um blog structure.
Speaker 1:All of those things are very important for SEO and we have done a whole episode about a season ago on blogging for SEO and to build traffic. It is episode 135. I will put a link to it in the show notes and in the YouTube video notes for you to check out, but blogging is an extremely powerful tool to get found. Again, it is not one of those things that takes off overnight, but once it starts to take off, it builds and you tend to have a much longer. For one thing, it gives you a much longer lasting piece of content than anything you do on social media besides Pinterest or YouTube.
Speaker 1:I don't really consider YouTube social media. I consider it a visual blogging platform. It's a video platform, so these are really great platforms. A YouTube channel is another way to drive traffic to your products as well. It's a great way to build a community around what you do. There are so many successful creators and artists using YouTube for this purpose, and so if that is something that is of interest to you, you might want to check that out Again.
Speaker 1:These are all things that you're going to need to do a little bit of extra research on your own. I am simply pointing out that if they are tools that you want to use and they can be very powerful tools then now is the time to get a jump on those, because, as I said, you're not going to see the results overnight. You're not even going to see the results next week, but you might start to see the results next month and the month after that, and it's going to continue to build. And if you can keep blogging throughout the year, you can also use blogging as a tool to help you with big holidays like Valentine's Day, mother's Day and just day-to-day sales outside of the big seasonal holidays. So definitely something to think about if you haven't.
Speaker 1:And again, using Pinterest is another great way to build traffic. These are all tools to have in your toolbox so you're not relying on one stream of getting found, like Etsy, or only your YouTube channel, or only TikTok or only Instagram. It's always nice to have other ways to build your community and to get found and to drive traffic to your product. So that is it for this week. I hope you found this episode helpful and we'll be back next week with another tip to help you get prepped for the holidays. So that is it for now and we'll talk to you all soon.
