How can using Pinterest more like a search engine help you sell more books? What are some of the ways to use Pinterest most effectively for book marketing? Trona Freeman gives her tips.

In the intro, KDP announce an Invite-Only KDP Beta for Audiobooks; How to Double Down on Being Human: 5 Ways to Stand Out in an Age of AI; Creative Planning with Orna Ross; Pathfinders edited by JL Collins; Kickstarter fulfillment for Writing the Shadow; In-Person Conference Tips for Introverts and Highly Sensitive People.

Today's show is sponsored by Ingram Spark, which I use to print and distribute my print-on-demand books wide to 40,000 retailers including independent bookstores, schools and universities, libraries, and more. It's your content—do more with it through IngramSpark.com.

Trona Freeman specializes in Pinterest services and marketing for small business. She has a Master's in History of Art and lives in Scotland.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

What is Pinterest and how can authors use it for book marketing
Utilizing keywords and SEO for your books
Integration between Pinterest and Shopify
Recommended tools for scheduling on Pinterest
How engaging should you be? Do you have to reply to comments?
How AI will be incorporated into the future of Pinterest

You can find Trona at services.ayelined.com

Transcript of Interview with Trona Freeman

Joanna: Trona Freeman specializes in Pinterest services and marketing for small business. She has a Master's in History of Art and lives in Scotland. So welcome to the show, Trona.

Trona: Hello, thank you so much for having me.

Joanna: Oh, I'm excited to talk about this. Before we get into it—

Tell us a bit more about you and why you focus particularly on Pinterest.

Trona: So I did my master's in history of art about 10 years ago now. Then I was going to do a PhD, but I fell pregnant with my son who's now nine. So I thought, I'm going to take something up that isn't too overwhelming, but will still keep my mind taken over, so I started blogging.

From that, I really fell in love with Pinterest and SEO, and I started learning more about it and helping other people use it. I started a newsletter, which then turned into my business, which I've had now for five years.

I think it's just an incredible way to connect with people online. So these people are actually looking for you. You're not disrupting them on their social media or anywhere else, they're actively looking for you. So that's why I love it.

Joanna: So it's really interesting, you know, Pinterest has been around for a long time, but social media has changed so much in the last decade. Like you mentioned your son is nine, I think social media has changed as much as your son has since he was born.

What is Pinterest like now? And how can authors think about it as part of their marketing ecosystem?

Trona: I think the best way to think about Pinterest is that it's actually more like a search engine than social media.

Pinterest, themselves, describe it as a visual search and discovery engine. So people go there to search for visual imagery, but it's also connected to keywords, which are really important to help you get found on there.

So it's like, if Google and Instagram had a baby, you kind of get Pinterest. So I think a lot of people still see it as social media, and there are still elements to it. So you can comment on pins, you can like pins, and so on, but in the end, it's actually a really powerful search engine.

Joanna: So I guess the other thing there is you said people are looking for things. So I think about it as how it comes up in terms of, oh, if you're doing interior design, you can find really nice bathrooms on Pinterest. It's like we don't hear about it much in terms of book marketing anymore.

So can you maybe go into some more detail in the different ways that authors could think about and use Pinterest?

Trona: So I think even as a means to storyboard your work, like on a personal level you can use it. I recently read that Stranger Things writers used it to storyboard the whole series from the looks, the inspiration. That's how a lot of other people use it as well.

But for you to attract people to you, you have to think about how people are searching for whatever you write.

So if you're a nonfiction writer, people will search things like, “how to start writing,” “writing tips,” “writing prompts,” and so on. There's actually lots and lots on there.

Journaling is really huge on Pinterest as well, which I know a lot of authors use as a means to keep up their ideas. So that's a really good way to share how your story develops, but also to attract people to your website, which then can get email signups, sales, and just more eyes on your work in general.

Joanna: Okay, so that's a nonfiction example. So let's talk a bit about fiction. So the storyboarding, I guess we can create pictures within our world. What are some other ways that fiction authors could use it?

Trona: So I did a little search earlier, and there's lots of fantasy authors coming up, there's a lot of thriller, mystery, romance, a whole lot of genres coming up. What a lot of it was to do with was “best books to read for autumns,” or “books to read in a dark night.”

So horror authors could think about how they could share their work, maybe in lists, or share pins for like “best horrors for a scary Friday night,” or something like that because —

People search Pinterest with the intent to do something.

So it can be something as little as just cozying up at a fire. Or it can be more gifting ideas, maybe people are looking for gifts to give to the friend who loves writing and reading.

So there's actually lots and lots of opportunities on there. I think one of the best things to do is just start with your genre, and pop it in the little search bar and see what Pinterest comes back with. Then see if you can think about how you can use those ideas that are coming up in your content or pins that you create.

Joanna: Oh, there's so much I want to go into. So just for people listening, I've been using it for probably a decade now.

My Pinterest handle is JFPenn, so I've mainly used it for fiction. Let's go into the idea, “best books to read for autumn,” for example. We're recording this in October. You mentioned the “how to write” as a kind of niche or the “how to journal.” A similar thing could be “best books to read for writing a novel,” or something like that. So the same kind of idea could be used. Can you just go into that? So when you say a pin—

Can you explain what a pin is? What are some best practices around the image, and the text, and the keywords?

Trona: So a pin is sort of little bookmark that you can share onto Pinterest, and then people will then save that onto those boards.

The pins can appear in your home feeds, so if you're just having a scroll through it, Pinterest can share out your pins to people that they think will engage with it.

Or you can be found through the search feeds, so that's somebody popping in the search terms that we were just talking about there, and then you have the opportunity to come up. So yeah, there's lots of opportunities to get found.

You can also be featured by Pinterest. They have seasonal trends that can come up, so they do feature writers and authors and ideas around that as well.

Joanna: Just to be even more basic because I think you're taking for granted people know what a pin is. So it's essentially an image.

Trona: Yes, it's an image. So that can either be a still image, which would be a standard pin, or you can have a video pin, and an idea pin. They're kind of similar, but they're still standard idea pens, even though they're video pins. It's very complicated at the moment.

The main thing is that you have a standard pin, which is your regular two by three image that you pop up, your video pin, or your idea pen. Your idea pin is very similar to a TikTok, a real, the stories that you share on Instagram. They're the same size, so it's a good way to repurpose content.

Joanna: Okay, so the two-by-three, so it is like a book cover size. For people in their minds, it's a book cover.

But if you're doing, “best books to read for autumn,” some of these pins are much longer than two by three, I've noticed. So if we're doing like, let's say we've got, “10 books to read for autumn.”

Do we make a super, super long kind of article-style image?

Trona: So what Pinterest will do if they're too long, they'll truncate them.

People used to do something called giraffe pins, and they were these ones that you saw and they were really, really long. They're good because they take up a lot of room on your screen, so that you click on them.

So they will get truncated if they're too long. So the two by three is their recommended size, but you can play about with the pixels. So they recommend that you do minimum 1000 by 1500 pixels. So if you're sharing that from your website, that can pull a lot of memory from your website, so you can upload directly to Pinterest.

Joanna: So in Canva, so I use canva.com to do a lot of my images, and I know they have a lot of Pinterest designs that you can take and use as your own.

But I know people listening are like, okay, that's the kind of list posts that people can use, but what if I've got pictures? So for example, my BooksAndTravel.page website, which is my travel site, has articles in it about my travels. A lot of those images are not the two by three size, and I do pin the images from my site. So how is that? Because I'm kind of doing that in the hope that people will click on them and I get traffic back to Books and Travel.

What's the best practice for attaching images to your site?

Trona: So what I would recommend doing then is taking the image that you have from your website, and then using it in the template that you're describing on Canva. So that will be the optimal size for Pinterest.

Then you can upload directly to Pinterest and just add your pin description and the URL, which will then link back to your website.

So you don't have to have the image on your website, but it can really help if you do. So maybe you would want to add a Pinterest image at the very bottom of your blog post, for example, that's what a lot of people do. Then it's easy to be shared that way.

Joanna: Yes, so I did start doing that originally, but I've got so many sort of really nice pictures, but they're not that size. So when I do scroll on Pinterest, I do it generally on my desktop, so it doesn't really matter what the image sizes are, but I guess they do it that size for a mobile-type device.

Trona: Yeah, and a lot of people do use their mobile for Pinterest. So that's why you want to make sure that if you are creating the pin images, and you are writing texts on the pin image, that it is a size that can be easily read, so people aren't struggling. Plus, it's more eye catching.

It's a quicker way for people to understand if the pin is for them if you add a little bit of textual overlay that is easily readable.

Joanna: Okay, so let's come back to the keywords and the search terms that people might put in. Again, it's kind of funny the sort of longtail keywords that people do around stuff.

Can you give us some more tips on keywords for our books?

Trona: So what to do is just go to Pinterest and play about with the words that are related to whatever you write about.

So say you have a blog post, for example, and it's about how to start as a writer for beginners, that's actually really popular on there. So if you go on and just do that search, you will also get little guided searches, those little bubbles at the top, and those are further keywords that you can use. The more of those keywords that show up means that there's a bigger search, which is brilliant because then you can use lots of different keywords.

If you want to do a different pin later, you can then use those keywords to attract a slightly different traffic because people search slightly differently all the time. So if you do use different keywords, it allows you to hit different traffic throughout the year as well. So that's where you would want to use the seasonal keywords as well. So like we've just mentioned there about Halloween and Christmas, that will help keep your pin relevant.

Going back to the keyword research, just have a look at what's coming up, have a look at what keywords are relevant for what you're writing about, and then you can use them in your pin description, your pin title, and if you're going to use a textual overlay, you can use them on that as well.

It's not only a good way for the people to quickly see if it's for them—because if they are scrolling and finding what they want, you know, the quicker we grab their attention, the better—but Pinterest can also read the text on the overlay, which helps with SEO. It can speed up indexing and know how to distribute it quicker.

Joanna: Okay, so again, using an example of a blog post, but let's use an example of a book. People listening, they're like, I want to sell my book, so either I want to direct people to Amazon to buy my book, or I want to direct it for me. We'll come back directly to Shopify, but in terms of we want to send traffic to a store.

So I mean, I guess the very basic thing is do we upload a book cover and then link that to wherever we want people to click through?

Is shopping a good intent for people on Pinterest?

Trona: Yes. So Pinterest is moving much more towards shoppable pins. So you can tag your pin even with an affiliate link. So you can get that little bit extra on your book sale as well.

So you can add your Amazon link and target, which then just makes it more shoppable. It's easier for people to see the intent behind that this is something that you want people to purchase from. It's not a blog post or an idea, this is shopping intent.

Pinterest will pick that up too, and they will put it under that search for shopping. It's very similar to a Google SEO, where the intent behind the search is important. So there will be different intent between someone just starting out looking on how to start being an author, to someone who's actually looking for the best books to read on a holiday, for example. The intent is different.

Joanna: So let's talk about Shopify because the reason I wanted to talk to you is because I have my two stores and I've read, in fact, I got approached by a Pinterest paid ad person from Pinterest, and they said, “Look, we think you should do paid Pinterest ads,” and I was like, whoa, I haven't even been anywhere near Pinterest for years.

Can you talk a bit about the integration between Pinterest and Shopify?

Trona: So currently, there's a couple of different ways that you can link your Shopify store to Pinterest.

They have the Pinterest for Shopify app, which kind of does it all for you, or you can link manually by adding the Pinterest tag to Shopify. The Pinterest tag is very similar to Facebook Pixel, for example.

Even if you're not going to run Pinterest ads, you get access to something called conversion insights. This is a deeper insight than your standard analytics, so I do recommend that you add that even if you're not going to run ads and you're just going to do completely organic stuff on Pinterest. It just gives you much better insight, and it's pretty straightforward. Shopify and Pinterest work really well together.

Joanna: So I did that as soon as I spoke to this guy, and I said to him, look, I am interested, but I'm gonna come back once I've actually done something. But I did add that tag, and as you said, it's like the Meta Pixel, but neither of these words are good words, I think. It's just some code that you put in your site, it's not difficult.

So once we've got that on the site, so you mentioned there, organic. Now, yes, you can pay for Pinterest ads, but let's just talk about that organic side.

Is organic search really just about doing the SEO work?

And doing these descriptions and titles and things?

Trona: Yeah. So again, just think about it as being this sort of visual search engine. Have a look at how people are using it, how you can fit your products, your blog posts, your articles, and anything you have to do that you can share with people, and create your pins around it.

Once you start to see traction on there, have a look at your analytics. You can see which pins are driving the most engagement, traffic, and so on to your website.

Saves are important, too. They're a really powerful part of Pinterest algorithm. Even though we would prefer to have traffic to our site, Pinterest put a heavier weight on saves. So that's very important too.

And typically, what I have seen over the five years is the pins that get more saves are ones that are really pretty, and they don't have a textual overlay. Those are ones that people want to save to their boards, and maybe like a book aesthetic. That's actually really popular on there, you know, pretty settings of a mug with a book, and so on.

If you want to get people to act and come over to your website, typically adding texts drives that traffic more.

You might think what you're sharing is really obvious, but really tell people what you want them to do. You know, “Come over to my website. Find out more.” Those simple call to action can really help boost traffic to your site. And when you get a good insight to what is happening, then I would recommend putting some money behind those organic pins that work really well.

Joanna: Yeah, it's so interesting thinking about this. I'm really trying to figure out what I should do. I've got this old Pinterest—well, it's not old, I have been updating it for every book—but I look at it, and I'm like, oh my goodness, I have really old pins on this.

Should I spend time cleaning up my Pinterest account? Or should I just start with new pins?

Trona: I would recommend just starting with new pins.

So with Pinterest, there's no set engagement time. So for example, if you put a pin up and nothing happens, I wouldn't recommend taking that down because it can suddenly start taking off in months, and even years. That's very typical. A lot of people have traffic from pins from 3, 4, 5 years ago.

So you just never know when something's going to take off. So unless it really has nothing to do with what you do anymore, you know, you really hate what you've attached it to or something like that, then you can delete it. But otherwise, just start from where you are, and then you can optimize your boards and your pins going forward.

What I would recommend doing is just go through those keywords, research, which you can do in the search, but Pinterest also has a trends tool, which is similar to Google Trends. So you can go in there and have a little deep dive at what keywords are more popular than others, which ones are coming up seasonally, and then you can use those too.

The only thing with that is that Pinterest has said that not all the keywords are trending currently. So if there's a keyword on there that you're not getting any details back on, any analytics information or whatever, go back to Pinterest and put it in their search bar there, and if you're coming up with more information there, use what they're showing there.

The trends tool is really good. It will tell you when things are going to take off, or you can look historically back at it and see when you can use things in the future.

So once you get all the information there, you can start putting them on your profile, and that includes your name. So you could maybe put that you help authors or whatever else that you do, just a little blurb in your name. Then in your profile bio, put some keywords in there. But keep it organic, use it like you're speaking to somebody and just explaining what you do, what your books are about, how you can help somebody.

Then similarly, put it through your boards. Have your board title, have that very clearly named. So that would be, “How to start as an author,” for example, and “Writing prompts,” and so on.

Then you could even have some seasonal boards, “Christmas gift Ideas for book lovers,” for example. Then the board description, have a couple of paragraphs, again, organic, like you're talking to your friend or somebody who's interested in your work, and use those keywords throughout that.

Then start popping your pins on there. You want to use those keywords on your pin titles, your pin description, and have those also corresponding to the landing page. Pinterest uses something called pin cohesion, it's a big part of sort of combating spam and making sure that what the pin is talking about is matched by the landing page. So you want to have that close or synonymous with what the pin is about and what the landing page is about.

Joanna: That's great. So again, let's come back to a few things. So we're talking about boards, and I think board is actually a good word. It's like a grouping, and on the screen, a board has got loads of pins. So it's like an image with pinned images on board, so I think that's quite good.

So for my fiction, each board is the name of the book. So I might have a board for Stone of Fire. Now, Stone of Fire is not really an SEO term, it's a descriptor for my book.

So I have a Pinterest board per book, and in each of my books in my author's note, I say, “You can see pictures about this book on Pinterest,” so I need to keep all those boards per book.

But if I'm thinking about, all right, I'm going to revitalize my Pinterest—

Would I create a board around each series?

For example, “ARKANE action-adventure, supernatural thrillers,” and then I would put new pins on that board for the whole series.

Trona: Yeah. So you could probably create three to four pins per book, and those could go through three to four boards, for example.

So the main thing to keep in mind when creating boards is make sure that you're putting your pin into relevant boards. So you could, for example, if we take a fantasy book of yours, you could have a general board for fantasy books, “Best fantasy books this year,” something like that. Then you could also put it in, “A gift guide for fantasy lover,” people who love fantasy books, and you could pop it in there because that that could help with the seasonal idea.

Then you could have a really general board for your book, so that would be, “Fiction books,” and then have a description that explains the kinds of pins that they'd find there. And that could be a wide range of stuff, so it could have your other books on there as well.

So it's just thinking about all the sort of little buckets that you could plop your book into, all the content that those books cover, and how people would then find them using those keywords on Pinterest.

Joanna: Yeah, I think I haven't really thought about what people are looking for. I've really thought about that I'm just driving people to it to provide a different view of my books.

But what you're talking about is exactly right and what I'm trying to get to, so it's really changing the mindset to what will people be looking for. So I make a pin, and I can pin that on multiple boards.

Trona: Yeah, just the only thing I would recommend is if you are doing that to multiple boards, don't do all at once because otherwise it can be seen as spam. So just make sure that you're spreading it out over a length of time.

That is going to be completely dependent on how much content you share in between that. So if somebody goes to your Pinterest profile and looks at your created feed currently—that'll probably change, it changes all the time, but currently it's the created feed—and they see the same pin over again, it's kind of off putting.

You can change the image on the one pin, but still have it linking to the URL. So you can use different images, which I recommend doing. So you could have, for example, two plain images of a photo, and then maybe another one with a textual overlay. So you could get the saves on it, and then you can also get the traffic driving out.

Joanna: Okay, so scheduling is something I really like doing.

What tools do you recommend for scheduling?

So we don't have to spend all our time on this.

Trona: So I really like Tailwind still. Pinterest also has their own scheduling app on there as well, but that doesn't allow you to share out to different boards in the same way that Tailwind can, and you then can't change the pin description and the Pinterest scheduler like you can with Tailwind.

So I think Tailwind is just easier because you can change your pin description and the images in a way that you can't on Pinterest, and then you can share them out to your boards through Tailwind. Then you can put the gap in between of a few days, a week, a month, whatever it needs to be.

So I do really recommend Tailwind. I think they have one for about 100 pins per month now, which may have changed, but it's a good way to get started to see if that's going to be useful for you when you're scheduling.

It means that you can sit down on a Monday, for example, and put all your pins out for the whole month, or the week, or however you plan to keep on top of it, and then you don't need to think about it.

Joanna: Yes, well, that's exactly why. I mean, just for context, I'm really looking at changing I mean, I think we all are, of kind of changing the way we use social media, even though Pinterest, as you said, is more like a search engine.

So I'm kind of taking the energy that I used to put into Twitter, or X, and really looking at Pinterest. But also I think now with Shopify, with that integration, I just feel like the energy and the time that I used to spend on one place, I could spend more, the better time, here on Pinterest because I like the idea of it. I like the visual images. So I really like that.

I did have another question around engagement, and you mentioned saves. So I love tattoos, I don't have them myself, but I'm pretty into tattoos.

So when I do go on Pinterest, I often see tattoos, and I like them, and I save them to my boards, like my Desecration board, and that series has a lot of tattoos. So that is sort of me engaging by saving to my own boards. So should we also be doing that? Like if I just schedule stuff and never go in there—

Should I be going in and saving and engaging?

Trona: So you do not need to do that. Pinterest has said themself that you can pin all your own pins, you do not have to do anybody else's. There was a math going about years ago that you had to pin 80% your own and 20% somebody else's. Pinterest came out and said that that's absolutely not true.

The good thing with going into Pinterest and doing that is that you keep on top of what's happening on the platform. So you do not have to do it, but I think it can be good to pop in every now and again so you keep on top of the changes because Pinterest is a fast-changing platform, especially over the last couple of years. I think next year, we will see more changes.

There was a lot of changes at the top and other people brought in, which looks like it's heading to be even more shoppable than it is now. So I do think popping in there just to keep on top of what's happening on there is good, but you do not need to do that.

Joanna: That's awesome. And—

What about comments?

Because this is what drives me nuts, like I don't want to respond to comments. I just don't want to be on social media in general. So do I have to watch what people type?

Trona: No, not really. So a while ago, you used to get really, really odd comments, and I don't know why it happened. I don't know if people were doing it, like if it helped them bookmark it or kept it organized for themselves. I don't know. But sometimes you will get a nice comment, and obviously, it's nice to comment back, but you do not have to. It's not something that you need to do. I have clients that are very successful on Pinterest, and they don't do anything like that.

Joanna: Yes, that's another reason I like this. I kind of, originally, I think when I went on Instagram, I thought that Instagram would be that way. But to my distress, there's actually quite a lot of chatting involved on Instagram!

That's fine, and I like it a little bit, but I certainly don't want another social media thing where I have to be social. But like you're saying, this doesn't have to be that way. So that's interesting.

So you mentioned all the changes going on. So I love Midjourney, I'm using DALL-E and other AI tools to create images. I specifically asked the Pinterest guy, is it okay to pin AI-created images? And he said, yes, absolutely fine.

What do you recommend with AI-created images?

Is it just creating them around the world of our fiction? Or any thoughts on that?

Trona: So Pinterest is actually going to bring their own AI.

Joanna: Of course they are. Everyone is!

Trona: I can't remember what it's called, but they announced it in one of their webinars they do every now and again. I think it's going to come next year. It is to help make pins more quickly. So yeah, I'm looking forward to that. I think the Pinterest one will be really good because they have something called Pinterest Labs, which they have been running for years and years, and this is where they develop AI. It's very cutting edge, and it's very, very good.

So I suspect the new one will be very useful. But yeah, currently, you can create your images around the context of your book because that will help people understand what the book is about. And then again, you can either embed them on your own website, or you can upload them directly to Pinterest via Pinterest itself, or a scheduling tool like Tailwind.

Joanna: So I think that's another reason I'm excited about this because I love creating images kind of off my characters, and a lot of us are doing that.

Even though some people are worried about using these in book covers, which in some cases is understandable, although I do, but I mean, this is putting an image and then linking it to your book. So no one's paying for that image, so I guess I think that's fine, however you feel about it. So okay, that's really interesting that they're gonna come up with that.

Anything else that you think might be coming?

Trona: As I said, I think we're going to see it becomes more shoppable which is going to be very interesting. I think they might have their own shopping cart in Pinterest, so that will make things much easier.

But yeah, AI just seems to be taken over at the moment, and Pinterest is already cutting edge in that. They have a lot of stuff on their Medium page which you can have a look at. A lot of its algorithm and heavily engineer-driven, but it's very interesting if you're looking for a deeper dive in how Pinterest works and what they're going to do next. It's very interesting.

Yeah, I think we're going to definitely see more shoppable features. They're going to include their Shuffles app on it, which is kind of aimed at Gen Z. Gen Z has been using it to create collages around outfit choice, that type of thing, and those are going to be shoppable as well, I believe.

Joanna: Nice.

Trona: Yeah, I think that's gonna be really interesting. It's gonna be a really fun way to connect with people, I think.

One of the great things about Pinterest is that it's overwhelmingly people's happy place online.

I think it's something like eight out of ten people say it's their safe, happy place. It's really good to get inspired. It's where they go to just think about themselves, what they want to learn and find out. That's a really inspiring way to connect with your audience.

Joanna: Yes, that's another reason I like it.

From what I've seen and experienced, it's not political, it's not filled with hate, unlike some other platforms we could mention.

It is very much, like you say, it's a happy place. And people do go to purchase, that's the other thing about it, they go to buy stuff, which I think is really interesting. Okay, so are there any other tools? So you've mentioned Tailwind, that was the main tool. We've talked about Canva, obviously for images.

Any other tools or tips that you have?

Trona: I think those are my favorite one. Canva, absolutely, as well. What I do recommend doing because if you go to Canva and search for Pinterest templates, you might find that a lot of people are already using those.

So instead of that, you can search for like Instagram ad template, Facebook template, whatever, and then just resize it for Pinterest. It's a really good way to get an original template for yourself that other people aren't using.

Joanna: That's a good tip.

Trona: I like that one.

Joanna: And just so people know, there's an auto-resize button, as well.

Trona: Yeah, that's true, and that's changing currently as well, isn't it?

Joanna: Yes, their Magic Create. There's also loads of AI-powered stuff within Canva. I do think that there's a lot more potential imagination involved in this, particularly for fiction, which is why I'm excited about it. But—

Any big mistakes that you see authors or other creators making with Pinterest?

Trona: I think the main one is that people think it's another social media platform.

That's not your fault, or anybody's fault, that's absolutely how a lot of other places describe it. But Pinterest doesn't do such a good job at letting people understand that that's not what they are.

They are this powerful visual search and discovery engine. I think when you understand that, it really shifts your perspective on it as a platform. It's about how you can connect with people, rather than just putting your own stuff out there, like on Instagram, for example. It's less about you and more about them and how you can help them and inspire them in some way.

Joanna: Now, I love that I'm definitely going to try and change my mindset, and as you say, think more Google search and SEO search engine optimization than social media. So tell us what kind of help and services and courses do you offer in terms of Pinterest.

Let people know where they can find you online.

Trona: So I have a wide range of services. I actually do SEO too. I think SEO and Pinterest are two of the best ways to get found online in a way that doesn't take up so much of your time. So I am at services.ayelined.com, and aye is a sort of Scottish aye because that was from my beauty blog, AyeLined, a very clever play on words.

Joanna: I'll put the link in the show notes!

Trona: And I offer one-to-one training, I have a Pinterest SEO course, I have management, and I have completely customizable packages as well, as well as SEO services. So there's a whole host of things here to help you get started and grow on Pinterest.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Trona. That was great.

Trona: You're very welcome. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you for having me.

The post Pinterest For Book Marketing With Trona Freeman first appeared on The Creative Penn.

60 - Knowing Your Roots (Dr. Manor Haas)