Hey babe, welcome back to another episode in the Amplify Your Weddings series! This series would not be complete without including the incredible Jen Vazquez. Jen is an amazing wedding and portrait photographer, in addition to being an absolute game-changer and expert in the Pinterest space. I know that she will quickly become your new BFF for tips and tricks regarding all things Pinterest. Let’s dive in to talking about how you can use Pinterest to amplify your business and your weddings starting today!

How Are Photographers And Small Business Owners Using Pinterest Wrong? (3:00)

How To Make Pinterest Worth Your Time And Energy (9:43)

Post-Wedding Blog And Pinterest Workflow (13:22)

Developing Your Pinterest Strategy Using Tailwind And Other Apps (18:08)

How To Set Up Your Pinterest As A Business Owner (25:08)

Get Connected With Jen (37:42)

Jen’s Life-Changing Pinterest Moment (38:47)

Connect with Jen:

Instagram

Website

FREE MARKETING RESOURCES

Review the Transcript:

Quianna Marie
Welcome back to this incredible series called amplify your weddings. And honestly, this series could not be complete. It could not even be thought about without including Jen Vasquez. Jen is one of those incredible souls that the moment you meet you can’t help but the instant friend feel warm feel just understood and loved. I mean, Jan is just a longtime friend in the industry, and it is truly been a joy to watch her business bloom. Jen has been killing it and pivoting and growing and expanding from a wedding photographer and portrait photographer to killing the Pinterest space. When I have any questions about Pinterest Jen is the first one that I go to. She is just a wealth of knowledge. And honestly she is going to be your new BFF when it comes to creating a system and a workflow. That is easy. Honestly, it’s going to be so fun to create and play with without making Pinterest feel like this beast that just just really hard to keep up with. Jen is an incredible photographer based in the Bay Area, California, my hometown of San Jose, and she is a beautiful, beautiful mama, dog mom, grandmother to three beautiful babies. And truly an inspiration. Jen is the friend that as soon as you walk into the room, whether you know somebody or not, she will come say hi and make you feel welcome. And I just I cannot speak more highly of Jen. So let’s get this party started. Let’s dive into Pinterest pins and all things Pinterest with the Pinterest Queen herself.

Quianna Marie
Welcome to Quianna Marie weekly, a podcast for creatives who love to celebrate wins big or small by dancing in the kitchen photographers who are excited to serve their clients and friends who are ready to chase really, really big dreams. You can find all of the resources mentioned in this episode at quiannamarie.com/podcast. Join me as I share weekly motivation, chat about growing pains, finding genuine connections and celebrating your wins through the lens of a photographer at heart. Come join me for a dance party. Ready? Oh, let’s go!

Quianna Marie
All right. All right. Welcome, Jen. I’m so happy you’re here for this dance party we got going on today. How are you?

Jen Vasquez
I am great. I am so honored to be on your podcast. We’ve known each other for years and I this is like the coolest thing ever. So I’m really excited.

Quianna Marie
We’re gonna have so much fun and Pinterest. I just have to say you have literally become the Pinterest queen. You are my go to for fun facts, inspiration and honestly, tactical education that makes Pinterest seem fun and profitable. So I cannot wait to dive into these questions. Are you ready? Let’s go. So how are photographers and small business owners using Pinterest wrong? Oh,

Jen Vasquez
you’re gonna jump in with the questions. I love this. First of all, if a photographer is using Pinterest, bravo, let me just say bravo, a couple things that they can sort of tighten up and maybe do better is a lot of times as photographers, we love our beautiful images. And we want to spread them out around and we don’t want any like watermarks and we don’t want anything on it to destroy that beautiful picture. The sad thing is the photographers that are using text overlay on the images, telling people what to do is way more effective because our beautiful images will oftentimes end up on a 16 year old future wedding board right which they give our client and several years but definitely not that now. So one thing is to make sure that put like if it’s for a blog post right let’s say it’s for a wedding at 14 a winery just as an example. We would want to say something like summer wedding at 14 a winery in California or Gilroy wedding. Wit and if it’s like a picture of the mom and dad or the excuse me the bride and this father daughter dance. Then say the most beautiful father daughter dance or check out this gorgeous father daughter dance or whatever but using the key words for your area or at least the area for the wedding. And the area of you know why somebody would want to look at it. That is something that could be really helpful. Even photographers who travel all over the place like you traveled to California as well as Arizona and beyond. Let’s be honest, still focusing on your area or the area you photograph the wedding in is so so important for people there to find you because this is the one thing I always Have to say to people, when people are on Pinterest, they’re typing in a browser bar what they think to find what they want. So they’re typing San Jose wedding photographer, or they’re typing 14, a winery wedding because they want to envision their wedding at the place that they’ve booked. And the quickest way to get a booking, like I’ve done on Pinterest is to show that I’ve photographed at that area. So keywords, and location based keywords, and text on the image are the biggest mistakes I see people make.

Quianna Marie
I love that so much. Because even when Pinterest first started rolling out, right, I feel like Pinterest was a gallery. It was this beautiful space to dream and pin and we use it as inspiration. But I love how you are kind of bridging the gap for business owners and especially photographers and this conversation about actually creating a search engine actually creating ways that people can contact you through those key words. And I love it even when you mentioned the father daughter dance, right? Sometimes we are so consumed with the venue and we’re so consumed with the purity of the day, right? Like I just imagined these editorial status styled shoot images that we want to post and share. However, our dream brides and our dream couples, they’re not just looking for pretty wedding photos, right? They’re looking for first dance song ideas, they’re looking for flower bouquets, they’re looking for exact venues. And that alone by adding that text is is just brilliant. So thank you for adding that.

Jen Vasquez
You’re welcome. I think a lot of people get on Pinterest and consider it Instagram. The pretty right I think Pinterest used to be a gallery Instagram has really sort of become a little bit of a gallery. And Pinterest is the third largest search engine, Google YouTube. And then Pinterest. If you have a YouTube channel, you are like ahead of the game girl. But the fact is, is when you search on Google, in particular, you will always come up with Pinterest results. So you’re actually getting found on Google. And the difference. I always like to talk about this, the difference between Instagram and Pinterest is very specific. Instagram is look at me look at my car, look at my house, look at my beautiful photos. And then Pinterest is this is how you get that car. This is how you decorate that house. This is how you plan a wedding. Right? They people on Pinterest, they want to take action. But the majority of people on Pinterest have over $100,000 in revenue income for the year and are willing to spend money. So a lot of wedding photographers or photographers in general, don’t think that their client is going to hire them from Pinterest. And that’s true to a certain extent. They’re going to find you. They’re going to look at your website, they’re going to always go to Instagram to make sure that you’re a real person. Even though we can put anything we want on Instagram. It’s kind of a joke, right? But so you want to make sure one thing that they also make mistakes with is use the profile image from Instagram on your Pinterest account so that when they look for you on Instagram, which they almost inevitably do, when they want to work with you, you want them to be able to find you, right there’s a ton of people on Instagram and Pinterest. And they want to make sure that they’re hitting the right person. And then when you ask a client like how they found you, because this is the other biggest mistake that people make. I nobody hires me from Pinterest. No one has found me on Pinterest. I’ve never booked a wedding off of Pinterest. But that’s because they asked the question, How did you find me on your intake form? But you’re not asking that additional question. You found me on Instagram. Were you referred to me by somebody? Or maybe did you like what hashtags did you use? Because FYI, we want to know what that hashtag is, and use it all over the place. But when I asked that question over the last year and a half of my business, and like more than 50% of the people that told me Instagram actually found me from a blog post or from Pinterest. I was not asking that question before. So you don’t know how many people have hired you from Pinterest. If you’re not really diving in a little bit deeper on that question in a consultation call.

Quianna Marie
Wow, that really hits home for me and because I’m such a visual person and almost feels like Pinterest is kind of like the spark. And then the fire is the your website and your Instagram and your platform and all the ways that they can find you. That’s amazing. Oh my gosh. Okay, so you’ve been thrown out a lot of platforms here. Okay. You’ve mentioned YouTube. You’ve mentioned Instagram, Pinterest, Google, all the things we as photographers have a lot on our plates, and we feel like we just don’t have enough hours in the day to get any of this stuff done. So how can you tell if On the photographer’s standpoint that Pinterest is where it’s at, like, how do we know if that’s where we should be putting our time and energy?

Jen Vasquez
A couple of things on this one. One is, you know, I feel like Pinterest should be a part of your marketing process versus another platform we use, right? We can look at Pinterest as a way to drive traffic to our website, and our blogs. And with that traffic, it means that Google sees that we’re popular, and it gives our information to more people. So by utilizing Pinterest, you can actually get better results and a search on Google. So I feel like instead of sort of being another platform, I feel like it should be sort of just a part of your marketing process. And I get it. Last year was insane for for photographers, insane, right? I don’t even know if we were able to really even market as much through our sort of busy season, and this year is going to be turning into something even more insane, right. And so, I always look at Pinterest, and really marketing in general for wedding photographers or any kind of photographer as the starting point. So I feel like we all know well, I don’t know if we all know we might touch on this later. But you know, our blogs are the quickest way to get found by clients who want to hire us. And if you can have a process or a system in place where you are consistently blogging each week, then you can utilize that one blog each week to feed all of the platforms. So if you look at a holistic ways, some wedding photographers like to do YouTube, some wedding photographers like to do podcasts, and some wedding photographers like to do blogs, and then some do all of them right. But it whatever you feel is your major platform utilize that platform to do all the others. So I will put bullet points for as a wedding photographer also, I’ll put wedding like bullet points of what I want to talk about on my YouTube channel or my podcast, that turns into a blog post, it turns into a clubhouse room, it turns into three to seven different Instagram posts and the content that I’m making for Instagram, I repurposing Canva for Pinterest. So people consider social media platforms which Pinterest is sort of, but it’s also a search engine, people think that it takes so much time because we are going to be everywhere. And what I’m always trying to educate people in general, but for sure wedding photographers who have crazy busy seasons is create content once a week if you can, and then turn that content into everything out. So you’re not spinning your wheels and wasting a ton of time, which we don’t have,

Quianna Marie
oh my gosh, you literally took this kind of like headache and made a workflow out of this.

Jen Vasquez
I am I’m all about repurposing and workflow because that’s the only way that my clients are going to be able to get any work done.

Quianna Marie
Loved this so much, Jen. Oh my gosh. Okay, so, so I feel like I’m for anyone that’s listening. You may be kind of swirling. Okay, babe, I see you, I can feel you. You may be thinking, okay, Jen, you may have the answers for me, but I’m still really lost. Okay. So can you walk us through Jen, let’s say, because a lot of us are wedding photographers, especially for this amplifier wedding series. So I really, really want to almost create this kind of hand holding experience as we’re chatting about this. So let’s say you just got home from a wedding, whether you are editing your, your sneak peeks yourself, tossing them in sending them to an editor or whatever. Let’s say you just got your gallery back. Okay. What would be your workflow from taking the images, blog, stamping them, adding them to a blog, like, what does that workflow really look like? I really wanted to help create an action list for these wedding photographers

Jen Vasquez
Perfect. Well, the first thing I do, and I always have to start at this point, even before the gallery, because I feel like this is sort of that missing piece. When we go to write a blog post. We’re like, Oh, what do we write about? Well, a make sure you have a questionnaire. I use it to talk about how I’m going to create a timeline for them. But all of the questions I have in there on how you met this that and the other helped me to write the blog post easy, but the way that I make it even easier is on my way home from the wedding. We typically have to drive somewhere. Sometimes we are going to be flying somewhere flying home, right? I just do a voice text right after the wedding. And I usually literally send a text to myself with a voice, right because I’m driving or whatever it is. And I talk about three things from the wedding that I thought were Unique grandmas dancing and jamming on the dance floor, the father of the bride crying harder than the bride did like whatever was unique about this wedding, I put it on a voice text. Because then when I get my gallery back well, and let me tell you, my process is I give two to three sneak peeks. The next day, I feel like I want my couples to have a professional image to share, right. And then when I get, I get my gallery back, but basically I’m taking and doing the sneak peek on my blog post because for me, I don’t want to give the gallery yet to the clients. I want to do 25 to 30 images. Sometimes it’s more on a blog post with my notes and my questionnaire to help me write it because I hate writing. And I will take that information with the blog post. And then I will send that blog post to my client, I will post some images on social media, I will share it in a story with a link to my blog post. And all of this drives an incredible amount of traffic, the traffic i get after that blog post is 100 times more than the traffic I will ever get after a gallery. But after I write that blog post, I take my five favorite images. And I know it’s hard sometimes I have a hard time picking my best child, but good. But pick five images. And at this time, I spend about an hour and I make the content for every platform. So I make stories I make like story images, which is the long ways I make idea pins, I’ll make a reel, I’ll take those pictures and plan five of them out around. I can also do more in like a little carousel style if I want. But I want to get some use out of those photos. And at the time that I’m creating that content for LinkedIn for wherever. I’m also making the idea pin which aka can also be your real, but also the pins with again those keywords from whatever made that reading unique from my voice notes. And then I for me, I just upload it to tailwind but you can also use Pinterest. You can schedule out two weeks and up to about 30 pins. But I want to set it and forget it. My clients only spend about an hour a week on Pinterest done. That’s it. That’s all the time that you will need from using my workflow.

Quianna Marie
And then just to clarify when you say your clients, are you talking about your brides are spending about an hour on Pinterest? Yeah, no, you’re good. I wanted to perfect.

Jen Vasquez
No, I met my Pinterest clients. So sorry. The key is Pinterest is one of the most effective platforms for driving traffic. And doing social media with the least amount of your time buck. It is kind of a no brainer. For me. I wouldn’t only use Pinterest, right? I’m not going to be someone who preaches that. But if I had to pick two, I would probably pick Instagram and Pinterest. Just because Instagram is where our clients, our couples confirm that we’re a real person.

Quianna Marie
Oh, my goodness, you are just a wealth of knowledge. This is amazing, Jen. Thank you. Okay, so I heard you kind of slip tailwind in there. Can we dive into tailwind? And I would love for you to share a handful of your must have programs or workflows or systems that kind of help you stay on track because it sounds like you have this incredible game plan where you’re just taking action. I love that you can compact all of this really tangible things into one quick little workflow and I love how you said set it and forget it baby like just create it and then let it drink out kind of like like I mentioned earlier, I’m such a visual person like start that spark get that smoke going and the flames will just take off. So yes, so let’s chat about tailwind and then maybe any other programs or apps that you totally utilize for building this huge Pinterest game.

Jen Vasquez
Yes. So there’s a lot as you can imagine, let me pick a few that I think will be really helpful. One that I really love is otter.ai It’s free. And it literally writes down the information that you say so I talked about how I make bullet points for like a YouTube video or whatever it for my blog essentially and I’ll take those and or the notes that I’m talking about as I’m driving home from the wedding. I can use otter.ai for that as well. The one thing that I have just started using and it is rocking my world is Jasper that AI it is in sane. I can write a blog post in about 15 to 20 minutes, and I’m not writing it. So Asperger jasper.ai is an artificial intelligence app or program I should say. And it has learned memorized the entire internet through 2019 before COVID And it will help you to write paragraph by paragraph, whatever you’re talking about to make it sound friendly, or to make it sound funny or to make it sound interesting, whatever descriptive words you want, you can put in there, the keywords you want to rank for. FYI, make sure you’re using location based specific keywords and that kind of thing. And it literally writes it for you not only will it write it for you, it’ll give you a couple options if you want to, for you to pick your favorite one. But what it does is, it will integrate those keywords because that’s the thing I feel like people have the hardest time with is writing a blog post that has keywords. And so it helps to do that incredibly quickly and easily. And it makes sure that you’re not plagiarizing anyone else. So it’s like the best thing that since sliced bread in my mind. The other thing that I love to use, of course, is tailwind. And I don’t know that it is necessary for people to pay for tailwind or another third party platform. But it is 100 times easier. And it does make things much faster. And so all of the clients that I work with on the Pinterest side do use tailwind because it does make it’s like 10 times faster. It would depend on if you want to invest that. And I know we all have to make those business decisions. My advice for anybody like starting out on Pinterest or deciding to like because most people have a Pinterest presence. But people are going to actually utilize it to drive potential clients to them could start out using the Pinterest platform and then go from there to decide if you want to make that investment. Because it used to be that you wanted to do like 30 pins a day. That’s not the case anymore. Actually, the the specific thing that you want to do is to take a wedding, for instance, and you have five pins, and you have five different text overlay sort of subjects that you’re focusing on. Let me be specific, different keywords in your niche for different ones, and then put those on a board or two. Instead of putting them on five to 10 boards and doing 30 pins a day, we’re finding that you want to take it down a notch. And for people who haven’t been on Pinterest or learned about Pinterest, and a very long time, we don’t use keywords ever on Pinterest, it can actually hurt your analytics. And you don’t need or at all to pin other people’s content, you want to be focused 100% on your content. And that’s a big switch from even a year or two ago.

Quianna Marie
Okay, so I have a question. So this little thing that you just mentioned about don’t use keywords on your Pinterest because it’s going to hurt you. Can you clarify that? What does that mean? It used

Jen Vasquez
to be that we would use keywords to get found and the Pinterest algorithm. So we would say keyword wedding photographer a key word, you know the venue name or whatever, the algorithm is smart enough, it recognizes the image to understand what it’s about. It recognizes the text on the pin to know what it’s about. And then if you take that pin and the key words on the pin, and the board and your profile, and if at all matches, you know, a wedding photographer in the Bay Area, then it’s going to serve your stuff up to clients in the Bay Area that are searching for those keywords. The algorithm ignored keywords for a while and now if you use keywords it can it can actually lower your analytics it they just don’t want it because it doesn’t look pretty right Pinterest is pretty Pinterest once the description and the title on there an image with text overlay that explains it but to have keywords or like hashtag keywords or keyword stuffing like San Jose wedding photographers, bury wedding photographer, California wedding photographer, instead of a paragraph that humans can read, those things will all hurt your analytics.

Quianna Marie
Got it. Now I have a visual here and especially for someone listening, I can see how this can be so confusing. So instead of just having a beautiful picture, and having a whole bunch of hashtags, and just words, very descriptive words that are keywords that you’re searching for. Now you’re almost just kind of like writing maybe the first paragraph of your blog post, right? Like that’s exactly what you’re doing. Okay. Got it. Thank you for clarifying, because I’m over here that I’m gonna try to pick a you know me I’m super visual. I’m trying to picture this over here. So now that makes perfect sense.

Jen Vasquez
Perfect. Yeah, it is. It is amazing. So we’ve got tailwind, we have otter.ai We got jasper.ai. And then of course Canva. For me. The addition of Canva pro versus the regular Canva lets you resize. So as an example, if you make a carousel with a bunch of images for Instagram, you can resize that. Put some text overlay to give some color content. And then you can share those as pins on Pinterest by just resizing it and then adjusting the text and stuff.

Quianna Marie
Okay, so now that this super experienced budding photographer wants to dabble into Pinterest, I really want you to kind of give us some, some education or some tips on how we can, let’s say our Pinterest has been a little dusty. Let’s say we use it ourselves. When we were building our business, we have fashion boards, and we have dream vacation boards. And we have home boards that look like chip and Joe Joe’s, you know, like the Magnolia, fixer upper boards, we have tons of stuff. So from a business perspective, what should our boards look like? And like? Do you have special categories for weddings? Do you have special boards that you create specifically for your dream client? Like if you can imagine Pinterest being like a shop? Okay, what should we be doing to put our best foot forward as we are kind of cleaning up and revamping our Pinterest? Perfect?

Jen Vasquez
First step, first step for sure, is to make sure you have a business Pinterest profile, a lot of people started off with a personal Pinterest, and then used it for business, but they didn’t designate it as business. So the first thing that you want to do is make it a business account in the settings, you’ll know if it’s a business account, because when you go to look at analytics, if you don’t have the option to look at analytics, you don’t have a business account. So you want to go in and for sure, make it a business account, you want to with regards to the account, you want to make sure that you have so the username is up on the URL, but there’s a name underneath the profile image. And you want to make sure you’re using a keyword in there, I have California wedding photographer on mine, you can do whatever you want to do. And they’re very particular and wanting to you to use your name now. So I would say put it like one keyword on there, and then your name if you can fit it. And if they allow you to do it, every account is a little different. And sometimes you can’t do stuff, find a way around or don’t worry about it right. And then your description. A lot of people say things like light and airy photographer who’s picked up a camera in high school and all these sort of descriptive things about them. People on Pinterest don’t care about you. I’m just gonna, I’m gonna break, I’m gonna break it and make everyone cry. But they don’t care about you right Instagrams the place where they learn about you. Pinterest is the place where they can fix a problem, or find a solution or to purchase something. And so in the description, you want to talk about what you’re doing for them. So I have things in there. Like I love working with couples who don’t exactly love being in front of the camera, or you know, wherever your specialty is, I absolutely adore Beach Weddings, and I love coastal photos. If you’re if you like that, then I won’t be the photographer for you like whatever it is in there. But you’re solving their problem, or telling them what they need to know versus anything about you really. And then in terms of the boards, you want to secret, well, you have two options. You can archive or you can secret. If you archive aboard, then you save all the analytics, you get to keep all the analytics, but you cannot pin to it. So that usually doesn’t work for people. So you want to secret like I have, you know sourdough recipes and things like that. I have those secret ID because if their secret. Pinterest doesn’t look at your account as a whole and know what you do. Because if there’s recipes and home decor on there, they’re like, I’m just not getting it right. You have to be very specific. So you want all the boards on there that are in or around your business. So I have boards like wedding themes, wedding colors, wedding planning tips, wedding advice, notice I have two boards, but they have the exact same information. It just depends on what my ideal client is typing so that they can find my content. Right. I have California wedding venues. I have wedding venues in the Bay Area. I have wedding vendors in the Bay Area I have like all the things that people would want to look at. And then I have the normal things like wedding dress, inspiration and bridesmaids inspiration. And by the way, if you want to use affiliate links for Amazon, you can absolutely do that on Pinterest. So you are going to be putting you know, bridesmaids gifts, wedding party gifts. What are all the things that you talk about in your blog post and I always say if you look at your blog post and you look at the categories, make sure you have those first. Like that’s important, but the other two words that you should have that so many wedding photographers don’t have is your business name board. So I have Jen Vasquez photography Bored. Because if someone’s looking for Jen Vasquez photography and Google, they’re going to find my board, they’re going to find my Pinterest account, they’re going to find all my pins, they’re going to see me right. And then you have a board that says free wedding planning advice, or free wedding planning resources, or free wedding resources, whatever you want to title it, whatever you think your ideal client is looking for. And then any of the blog posts that you write about, that you give help to your clients, right, we all have written those blog posts you get, if you get a question more than three times, write a blog post about it so that you have it in your information that you deliver to your couples, and so have a board that it goes on. And what goes on your free resources board is all your blog posts, all of your lead magnets, get people on your email, list all of that stuff, those two boards will help to get people that are looking to buy,

Quianna Marie
wow, Jen, oh my gosh, this makes me want to go into my Pinterest board right now and just clean house.

Jen Vasquez
And by the way, you should really clean house at least once a year. I always say to do it around November when we are sometimes at the lowest it depends on where you live, obviously. But do it on whatever your down months or whatever months, you only have one wedding or no weddings, that’s the month that you should go in and really update that. And the second thing that you should really do when you’re updating your Pinterest profile, or if you’re just starting out either way, is spend time researching keywords. And it’s going to help you with your blog posts on Google. But if you do it on Pinterest, it will also help you to know what things are being searched for. When you type something in the search bar of Pinterest, there’s a drop down menu just like Google, all of those words you should add to this list. So you have like wedding planning right? Underneath it might be wedding planning tips, wedding planning advice, and I’m not a wedding planner. But guess what I do help couples with some of that process right in my blog post to attract people to me make sure that you have so you have a in my resources, which of course I’ll share with you. I do have a free keyword builder that you can use. It’s a Google Sheet, like it’s easy peasy stuff. But you can list wedding planning. And then underneath it all the ways that people type it out. And if you know because not all wedding photographers know, but if you know what your ideal client would type in that search bar, add that to obviously, once you have this keyword list, every time you go to make pins, you can use different keywords on every single pin in it really makes it I’m all about working smarter, not harder. And for me, that’s that first step in jumping onto Pinterest is having those keywords. That’s really important.

Quianna Marie
Amazing. And I love how you are creating this experience. Because you know me, I’m all about client experience, making people feel loved and appreciated and heard and understood that that is like my thing. Like if I can wrap that up into anything.

Jen Vasquez
Yes. And one thing about client experience, which is more important now than it’s ever been is people are more oftentimes going to your profile, because the advent of IDEA pins, they while they don’t have links, they’re kind of like reels on Instagram, and they lift your whole Pinterest account and all of your pins get seen more. So as you’re making those they are forced when they click because we’re all trained to click on things to go directly to your profile. So one piece of advice that I always give for people is to create boards that are in your brand. But if you do, and when you’re doing those keyword searches on Pinterest, and you type in a keyword and you look at the feed that that Pinterest delivers to you, oftentimes in a wedding industry and might be all pastels. So throw in a black pen, throw in a blue pen, you don’t have to stick to and you shouldn’t stick to your brand, you should be making pins that stand out from the feed and catches people’s eye. Right. But when they go to your profile, if you have board covers, then your whole Pinterest profile will be your brand and you will be branded as you as a photographer. That’s a step that so many are taking right now and it will it will really help them.

Quianna Marie
Oh my goodness. Okay, so just to find clarity in that you’re saying for like the cover photos for your pins, or like the text overlays, like be bold and kind of be if you

Jen Vasquez
if you have time, sometimes it’s hard. That’s why I say to do it when you’re doing this keyword building. If you go on there and it’s all pastels, and oftentimes photographer pins are gonna probably be that way, stand out if you can, so I’ll make two or three pins in my brand colors and I’ll make two pins that totally stand out. And then I see what pins are right rising to the top what pins in my analytics are doing the best. And I’m gonna make some more of those.

Quianna Marie
That is genius. And especially because we all we are trained and now to be so branded and to stick to our colors. When we think of Pinterest, I think of like, Lala Land photo land, right? Like it’s just kind of like this Disneyland for sure. Yes, yes. And so if you throw in some bold things, kind of shake things up, you’re really just catching their eye and slowing their scroll. And then you’re just you’re standing

Jen Vasquez
out from the feed and, and standing out from the feed is one of those things that can actually make a huge difference.

Quianna Marie
Oh, my gosh, okay, so you are literally just blowing my world over here. And I know. And it’s so crazy, because I’ve been following you for so long. We’ve been close, close friends for years. And every time I talk to you, I feel like you have these mic drop moments.

Jen Vasquez
I love that that doesn’t make my day. One other thing I want to say. And I think it’s really important. Also, all of these things are great, that I’m telling you. But if you’re not consistent, you might not find success. So it doesn’t matter these days, if you pin one time a day, or maybe three times a day, like just start and do do it every day. That’s why I say to use the Pinterest, you know, in Pinterest to go ahead and pin one of the benefits of tailwind is they just like on Instagram and everywhere else. They know what the best time to pin something is because they’ve they figured the algorithm out unlike us, and they will actually pick the times for you. But if you’re using just the Pinterest platform, just make sure you do it every day. And I would say take you know, an hour each week, put several pins on there at least one pin a day, and then you’ll you’ll be golden. And the other thing I want to say before we end is that Pinterest like blogging takes time. So a lot of people jump on with gusto on Pinterest, and really hit it for like a month or so. And then busy season hits and then they forget about it and they see some results right they see their Pinterest takes a little bit of love and your analytics will will go through the roof. The problem is is that if you stick to it over time, it’ll be insane.

Quianna Marie
Oh my gosh. And and it’s true because I feel like we’re in this. I don’t know this day and age where people just want fast results right? Like they don’t they just want to click a microwave. They don’t want to wait on the oven to really bake it and really just like cook with love, right? Oh my gosh. So please tell me John, how can like now that I feel like everyone’s listening like we just need to work with you. We need to like have you literally hold our hand for this process. So how can listeners find you and just learn and just soak up all your Pinterest knowledge?

Jen Vasquez
Absolutely. That obviously the best way like most people is on Instagram. And my Instagram is Jen Vasquez coach. And that’s with two z’s in my last name, a lot of different spelling. Jen Vasquez coach on Origin boss, because coach.com On my website is another good way to find me. But definitely just reach out, send me send me a DM and let me know that you heard me on key on his show so that I can share that on my stories and get key on his podcast out to everyone because it is truly magnificent. And I I legit listen to it every week. So yeah, definitely you can find me and a ton of free information on there, including my resources.

Quianna Marie
Thank you. Thank you so much, Jen, I appreciate your time. I’d like to ask you one more question before we totally close out. And what was that tipping point for you? What was that one moment? Once you started using Pinterest where you thought, Whoa, this is it. This is life changing for my business. And maybe a little tip that you know, would just encourage someone where they’re kind of on the fence? And it’s like, no, let’s go full throttle with Pinterest. What was that moment for you?

Jen Vasquez
Yeah, it was looking at Google Analytics. When I’m spending maybe an hour a week on Pinterest, and I’m spending every day all day on Instagram and like trying to come up with the best posts and the best stuff. And consistently between 68 and 82% of my social media traffic is coming from Pinterest. That just does it to my website consistently each month. That did it for me. And also people when I’m asking that additional question of Oh, you found me on Instagram and asking more clarifying question and finding out that they one of my people in Ohio, saw my blog post on a beach engagement session and hired me at the Ritz Carlton to do her beach wedding. So I I mean from a engagement blog post and she’s in Ohio, and that was pinned on Pinterest. And that’s how she found me. And a story that that that does it that I will never let go of Pinterest at least if it continues to send me traffic.

Quianna Marie
Amazing. Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing your heart all of your knowledge. And honestly, inspiration. I feel like this is something that we all need to listen to again and take notes.

Jen Vasquez
Are you talking to yourself?

Quianna Marie
I am I am. I want to go back and listen and I need to pull up my keywords, get things rolling. Thank you so much. And I appreciate you so much. Yay.

Jen Vasquez
Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure to be on here and I can’t wait to have you on my

Quianna Marie
Yes, thank you. That’s a wrap on another episode of Quianna Marie weekly. Thank you so much for your listenership and support. You can find the resources and show notes for this episode and more at quiannamarie.com/podcast. I’d be honored if you’d show your support by leaving a review and rating on your favorite podcast app. Until next time, keep on dancing.