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:

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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.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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 forthe Holidays mini-sode series.
So, if you are new to thisseries, this is something we are
doing this year to help makers,artists, creative service

(00:24):
providers and content creators,like bloggers and YouTubers, get
ready for the busy holidayselling season.
So the premise behind eachepisode is that it covers off
one task that you should beworking on to get yourself ready
for the holiday selling season,and the idea being that when

(00:45):
that task airs is around thetime that you should be working
on that particular task in yourbusiness.
So, if you are watching onYouTube, I will put a link to
our playlist that has the entireprep for the holiday series in
it, and if you are listening onyour favorite podcast app, you
can go back and listen to all ofthe episodes.

(01:07):
However you enjoy listening toyour podcast, they should all be
identified as Prep for theHolidays episodes, so it should
be easy for you to find them.
And, yeah, let's jump in tothis week's task, which is okay.
So at this point, we are wellinto August and there's a lot of

(01:29):
things going on that youprobably want to be working on
simultaneously, so choosing atask for this week's episode was
a little bit difficult, becauseI felt like there was four or
five different things that wecould talk about, but the one
that I chose is to work on blogposts and Pinterest pins, and
the reason I chose this isbecause these really do need to

(01:51):
be things that you work on earlyon, because it can take a
little while for things to startget rolling with them.
They need a little bit of timeto start snowballing for lack of
a better word and so I thoughtit would be better to cover this
now, so that it's somethingthat you can work on as soon as

(02:12):
possible, but continue to workon as we get closer to the
winter months and the holidayseason.
So if you are a content creator,like a blogger or a YouTuber,
then you are probably alreadyfully aware of the fact that you
need to be working on yourcontent for the holiday season.
Already, you're probably wellon your way.

(02:33):
If you're not, then you need toget on that.
It's something you do need tobe working on If you're a
YouTuber and you're planning onparticipating in Vlogmas, which
I know is something that sort ofhappens on YouTube every
December, then now is definitelythe time where you want to
start planning for that contentif not filming some of it in

(02:56):
advance, because it's quite aslog and if you're not familiar
with Vlogmas, this is whereYouTube creators try to release
one new video a day throughoutthe month of December, or up
until December 25th.
So that's a lot of content, andif you've ever created video

(03:16):
content, you know that theediting process and all the
behind the scenes can take sometime.
So if you can start planningthose out or even shooting bits
of those now, if you're takingpart, this is a great time to do
that.
Now, for the rest of us, who maynot necessarily consider
ourselves content creators,there is a very valid argument

(03:39):
for creating content to supportyour creative business.
There's a lot of different waysyou can do this.
You can do this with socialmedia content, which is things
like reels and stories andTikToks or short form video on
YouTube.
But there's another verypowerful way that you can work
on this too, actually and that'swhat we're going to be talking

(03:59):
about today One is Pinterest andone is blogging.
So Pinterest is a platform thata lot of people use to plan, so
they tend to be looking onPinterest in advance for things,
and the type of planning thatthey tend to do on Pinterest can
be anything from the fashionlook that they want to have for

(04:22):
a particular season, or ifthey're figuring out what they
want to purchase fashion-wisefor a season.
It's used for planning for homedecor renovations or just
freshening up your indoor oroutdoor space.
It's used for party andentertaining and hosting ideas.
So this can obviously meanChristmas, but it can also mean

(04:49):
Halloween, canadian and AmericanThanksgiving.
Canadian Thanksgiving is veryearly it's prior to Halloween
and American Thanksgiving isquite late.
It could also be things likeDiwali, hanukkah, kwanzaa all of
the festivities that happen inthis last part of the year.
So people are not only planningtheir entertaining and their

(05:12):
decor and food and all of that.
They're also planning theirgift giving, and so this is a
great time to start getting pinsup on Pinterest that direct
back to your products.
Now, this is one of the reasonswhy last week, we talked about
creating mock-ups.

(05:33):
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 tohave actual Etsy listings yet,
although the sooner you can getthose up the better, because
people do start purchasing wellin advance.
I had my first Christmas saleback in June, so people start

(05:54):
early.
So as soon as you're in aposition to get your product
listings up, you should get themup, even if it seems early,
because people are shopping andthey're also pinning those
products.
So if they can pin your contentfrom Etsy or from your own shop
, they will do that.
You can also pin your owncontent from Etsy or your shop

(06:16):
and get it out there, becausePinterest takes a little.
While Pinterest pins veryrarely take off within the first
few days or even the first fewweeks of you pinning them.
They can take many weeks,months in some cases, and in
some cases it can be almost ayear.
So you really want to get ajump on that, if you can, so
create pins.

(06:38):
I'm not going to get into indepth into how to pin to
Pinterest from a e-commerceperspective, because that's a
whole episode in itself, but Iwill direct you to Simple Pin
Media and their podcast, theSimple Pin Podcast.
They have lots of episodes onhow to use Pinterest to your
advantage as a small productbusiness or as an e-commerce

(07:00):
business.
So I highly recommend checkingthat out.
I'll put a link to them in theshow notes, but that's
definitely something that youwant to be very cognizant of,
because people do use.
They use Pinterest as almost akind of wishlist or a dream list
or that kind of thing.
So if you can get in front ofthem on a platform like that,

(07:22):
that is so much better, and thisis where you can use your
mock-ups.
If you don't have listingsalready, you can, but you need
to direct them back to something.
So you might want to considercreating blog content.
If you're on Etsy, it can bereally hard to create blog
content because there's no blogcomponent to Etsy, but there are

(07:43):
lots of free blogging platformsout there.
There is wordpresscom, whichallows you to set up a free
WordPress blog that is hosted byWordPress.
There's nothing you need to do.
There is also Blogger, which isanother free platform that you
can set up and create blogs blogposts that talk about your

(08:03):
products or that talk aboutthings relating to your products
, and you can create Pinterestpins that lead back to those
blog posts.
Blogging is an incrediblypowerful tool for driving
traffic and for getting foundthrough SEO.
I know a lot of people get veryfrustrated with Etsy and

(08:24):
threaten to leave and starttheir own website.
When you start your own website, that comes with a whole host
of challenges as well, and oneof the biggest challenges is
getting people to find yourwebsite, and this is where
blogging comes into play.
Blogging is a great way tobuild SEO and to drive traffic,
but it takes a bit of work andsome planning, so it's something

(08:48):
you definitely want to considerIf you already have your own
e-commerce website.
So, whether you're on Shopify,squarespace, wix, um,
wordpressorg, which is the paidfor uh hosted where you have to
host the website, and if you'reusing WooCommerce, you would be
using WordPress, um, those areplatforms that come with

(09:11):
blogging tools.
So if you haven't used them,now is the time to start and you
want to give yourself a littlebit of an education on um blog
structure.
All of those things are veryimportant for SEO and we have
done a whole episode about aseason ago on blogging for SEO

(09:33):
and to build traffic.
It is episode 135.
I will put a link to it in theshow 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 thosethings that takes off overnight,
but once it starts to take off,it builds and you tend to have

(09:56):
a much longer.
For one thing, it gives you amuch longer lasting piece of
content than anything you do onsocial media besides Pinterest
or YouTube.
I don't really consider YouTubesocial media.
I consider it a visual bloggingplatform.
It's a video platform, so theseare really great platforms.

(10:16):
A YouTube channel is anotherway to drive traffic to your
products as well.
It's a great way to build acommunity around what you do.
There are so many successfulcreators and artists using
YouTube for this purpose, and soif that is something that is of
interest to you, you might wantto check that out Again.

(10:37):
These are all things that you'regoing to need to do a little
bit of extra research on yourown.
I am simply pointing out thatif they are tools that you want
to use and they can be verypowerful tools then now is the
time to get a jump on those,because, as I said, you're not
going to see the resultsovernight.
You're not even going to seethe results next week, but you

(10:58):
might start to see the resultsnext month and the month after
that, and it's going to continueto build.
And if you can keep bloggingthroughout the year, you can
also use blogging as a tool tohelp you with big holidays like
Valentine's Day, mother's Dayand just day-to-day sales
outside of the big seasonalholidays.
So definitely something tothink about if you haven't.

(11:22):
And again, using Pinterest isanother great way to build
traffic.
These are all tools to have inyour toolbox so you're not
relying on one stream of gettingfound, like Etsy, or only your
YouTube channel, or only TikTokor only Instagram.
It's always nice to have otherways to build your community and

(11:45):
to get found and to drivetraffic to your product.
So that is it for this week.
I hope you found this episodehelpful and we'll be back next
week with another tip to helpyou get prepped for the holidays
.
So that is it for now and we'lltalk to you all soon.