320 | Why Pinterest Courses Don’t Work (And What Actually Gets Results)

If you’ve taken a Pinterest course and still aren’t seeing traffic or clients, this episode is going to feel really validating. I’m breaking down why most Pinterest courses don’t actually work for service-based business owners — and it’s not because the courses are bad or because you’re doing something wrong.

I’m sharing a real client story about what happened when we stopped piling on more information and started implementing a strategy built around her actual business and life. Plus, the one deeper question you should be asking new clients that completely changes how you track where leads are really coming from.

🎓 Register for my FREE Pinterest Masterclass: learn.jenvazquez.com/free-pinterest-masterclass

Watch or read here: https://jenvazquez.com/why-pinterest-courses-dont-work/

Transcript

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If you've taken a Pinterest course and still aren't seeing traffic or clients from Pinterest, you are not alone. And the problem probably isn't you. Most Pinterest courses don't actually work the way people expect them to. Not because the strategies inside them are wrong, but because Pinterest success requires something courses just really don't provide. And I've believed this for a really long time. Welcome back to Marketing Strategy Academy Podcast, where we help female entrepreneurs go from marketing overwhelm to an easy streamlined strategy and system that includes Pinterest and repurposing content to grow their businesses when they have very little time. I'm your host, Jen Vasquez. Let's jump right into it. In fact, it's one of the main reasons that I created my Pinterest membership back in 2018. So many people said, make a Pinterest course, make a Pinterest course. And I'm I'm like, no, I'm not going to. After working with service-based business owners four years, since 2018 specifically, I kept seeing the very same pattern. People would take Pinterest courses from really well-known educators out there, and they would learn the strategy. Great, they learn the strategy. They would understand the basics. Great, the basics. But when it came time to actually implement the strategy in their own business, things would stall a little bit. Let's talk about why that happens. This is the real problem with Pinterest courses. There are a lot of really smart educators teaching Pinterest. Many Pinterest courses contain really great information. So I'm not crapping all over other educators. But the issue isn't really the information. And it's not the strategy or anything else that they deliver. The issue is what happens after the course ends, after they've finished getting all of that knowledge and information. Most Pinterest courses follow a very similar structure. Inside the course, people learn things like keyword strategies, pin design, scheduling strategies, content planning. You go through the lessons, you take in the information, you take notes, you feel excited about the possibility because you've heard from these educators how many people grew their businesses, et cetera, et cetera. Then they sit down to apply it to their own business. And that's when the questions start. Am I using the right keywords? Are there keywords that would be better? Am I finding the keywords the right way that I learned in the course? How many pins should I be posting? Which FYI very much varies anywhere from one pin a day to like 20 pins a day, depending on your business and your industry, right? Why isn't my traffic growing yet? You might think, is Pinterest supposed to take this long? Should I change my strategy? Most courses can't really answer those questions. Not because they it's a bad course or they're bad educators, but because every business is different. And courses rarely provide personalized feedback. Sure, they can have a community where they can ask a question, but it is very, very hard to answer a specific Pinterest question and relate it to your business without knowing everything about your business and your ideal client. Here's a real example of why Pinterest courses often don't work. Let me share a little story from one of my clients. Let's call her Lisa. Before working with me, she had purchased a very well-known Pinterest course. And if you spend any time on Pinterest, you might have seen these ads. My client bought said course. She went through the entire program, not once, but twice because she thought she missed something the first time and re-watched the whole thing. She followed the strategy exactly as it was taught. And after doing sort of everything right, right, it still really wasn't working for her. This wasn't because the course was bad. The problem was that she had no way to get feedback specific to her and her business. Most Pinterest courses are designed for bloggers. When we started looking deeper into her strategies, something else became really clear. The course that she had taken seemed heavily built around a blogging business. Although I think they said it was a creative business, but really it was different, right? That works well if you're a blogger, uh, but my client was a service-based business owner. I was just gonna tell you what she was, but I don't want anyone guessing who it is. Her goal was not just traffic. In fact, the traffic, which was nice because it drove people to her website, but that really wasn't exactly what she was looking for. Her goal, as I'm sure many of your guys' goals, since your service providers typically who watch this, was about booking clients, right? Booking a client. So most Pinterest courses advertise themselves as being for everyone or being for creatives, but the examples and the strategies inside the course are often designed for bloggers who are focused on ad revenue or affiliate traffic or other things. Service-based business owners operate very differently. And that mismatch can also make implementation highly confusing. So, what happened when we changed up her approach? Once she joined my program, she shifted the focus from learning more information to actually implementing a strategy that not only worked for her business and her business goals, but also worked for her life, right? She did not want to be pinning all week long. She wanted to have a specific time and she could only give an hour. One of the first things that I asked her to do was to start asking new clients a deeper question. And this is a mistake that everybody I have talked to makes. It's a mistake that I made until 2021 when I did some research with my actual clients. The deeper question after asking how you found me, and they said Instagram, is to ask a deeper question of, okay, great. So did you start following me from an algorithm like I just popped up, or was it a hashtag, or did somebody refer you? Because of course we want to thank those people. But really, truly, you need to know like how the client found you. Now, the quick answer is not the real answer, 83% of the time. At first, most people told her that they found her through um TikTok and her situation, but a lot of my clients say Instagram, right? But when she asked follow-up questions, the real story started to come out. Many of these people found her through Pinterest, discovered her through a Google search. Nowadays they might find her via AI, or they might have read one of her blog posts. But when people think about where they found you, they are often answering, right? Giving credit to the platform they are when they decided to reach out to you, which actually makes sense, right? So you have to ask a little bit deeper questions to find out exactly where your clients are coming from. Because Instagram and TikTok were getting all the credit. Well, for her, in her case, TikTok was getting all the credit. In my case, in 2001, when I started doing this research on my clients, calling past clients and asking them this question, Instagram was taking the credit for me. But Pinterest and Search were actually doing the discovery work. They were doing the heavy lifting. And the journey for a client is they find your PI. Everything feels good and feels aligned. And then they're gonna go stalk you on Instagram or stalk you on TikTok, wherever you are prevalent and probably wherever they like the most. But Pinterest and search, they were doing that actual discovery work. During the seven months that she worked with me, we focused on refining her Pinterest strategy, not creating something out of nothing, but really focusing on her business and her business goals and how she wanted to work. Not starting over, not guessing, not assuming, refining. Because she had support and she was able to work on Pinterest three times a month only for an hour each time. So three hours a month for the entire month, with guidance, of course, on what to adjust and how to improve. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, she had a very clear system. We also created a simple marketing workflow that dramatically reduced how much time she spent on marketing. Before working together, she was spending about five hours every week trying to keep up with her marketing. And honestly, she told me that the majority of the time was spent on social media and very little of the time was spent on Pinterest because she had so many questions, she wasn't exactly sure what she was supposed to be doing for her business. After we streamlined her workflow, she only needed three hours a month instead of five. And with that extra time that she had, she now spends volunteering at her child's school. That's the kind of results most business owners actually want. Not just traffic like bloggers do, but a marketing system that works without taking over their life. That's the real goal. And Pinterest success requires more than information. This experience reinforced something that I have believed for years. Pinterest success usually isn't an information problem. It's an implementation problem. Most business owners already have access to more information than they could ever use, and sometimes it's conflicting even. You can go to YouTube University, you can read blogs, you can take courses, you can listen to podcasts like mine, you can even ask AI tools. Information is everywhere, but execution is where most people struggle. And they're just maybe even a couple questions away of doing well once they have somebody that actually finds out about them and their business and business goals to make sure that it's meeting them where they want to be. Pinterest success requires three things: knowledge, implementation, and the hardest one, consistency. Courses usually provide the first one, right? But the other two are where most people need help the most. That's exactly why when I created my Pinterest membership back in 2018, I structured it differently from a typical course. Instead of just giving people information and sending them on their way, I wanted to create a space where business owners could actually implement what they learned. Inside the membership, we do things like live trainings, live QA sessions, and live masterclasses. Because when someone gets stuck, they can ask questions and I can even share my screen and show them what I'm talking about. We're not just texting it in a community and hoping and praying that we get the right information. When something isn't working, we just address the strategy. And honestly, you should adjust the strategy as your business changes, or your business goals change, or your time changes. When motivation starts to drop, there's built-in accountability to keep going. And that's the most important thing, in my opinion. The goal isn't just to learn Pinterest. The goal is to actually use Pinterest to bring in clients. Now, if Pinterest has felt confusing or slow, or if Pinterest hasn't worked the way you expected, it's usually because the platform operates very differently than social media. Pinterest isn't about trends, although they have trends, but it's not about the trends like it is on social media. And you don't have to constantly post. It's about creating searchable content that compounds over time. Think about it. Whenever you search for something on Google, Pinterest results come up every single time. If you want to understand how Pinterest actually works as a traffic engine, I just created a free Pinterest masterclass that walks through the strategy step by step. Inside the education, I'm going to cover how Pinterest drives long-term traffic, the biggest mistakes business owners make on the platform, and how to build a strategy that works for you and your business and actually brings in leads. You can register for my free masterclass at learn.genvasquez.com slash free Pinterest Masterclass. I'll put the link below. It's probably on the screen somewhere. Thank you, editor. So Pinterest courses aren't necessarily bad. They just aren't. But courses alone typically are not going to be enough to create results because Pinterest isn't just about learning a strategy. It's about implementing that strategy consistently until it compounds. That's the part most business owners need support with. I'll see you next week.