Pinterest Strategies and More with Ana Ruiz

Welcome to this strategic travel entrepreneur. My name is Rita Perez.

Hello.

I've been a travel Advisor for over 10 years and am navigating this winding road of entrepreneurship with you. I created this podcast because I wanted to share all the things I've learned from leaders both in and out of our industry that I really wish I would have known way back then. But alas, the important thing thing is I'm aware of them now and I want you to be too. Ready for this week's show. Let's jump in. Welcome back, everybody, to this week's show. I'm so glad that you are here. This week we have another amazing speaker and expert with us who I know we're going to geek out on all things like talking about branding and content.

You may have seen her if you have been with me for some time. Prep for Wave week happened last November and we were talking about all sorts of tech tools that you can use in your travel business. She is a travel business coach or she. Yes, she's a travel business coach consultant and she also helps travel businesses out with their own content. So if that's something that you're needing, make sure that you reach out to Anna. So. So welcome Anna back, or back to my world, but to the show for the first time I read us.

Thank you so much for the invitation. It's very exciting for me to be joining forces with you again. I had a blast when we had that interview recently and it's amazing to be back here with you.

Yes, I. I agree. And where. Tell everybody where you're at right now because I think that is also like one of the beauties of us working for ourselves.

I am in Beautiful Ecuador, like 2,800 meters above sea level in the capital Quito. I was actually born in Ecuador, so it's amazing to be back in here.

Nice. When was the last time, other than now, when was the last time you were back home?

Right before the pandemic hit in around February 2020, we came for a couple of days to Guayaquil. That's where I'm originally from. And since then, we hadn't planned to come back. Now that I'm traveling long term, we were like, ecuador. We have to go to Ecuador first.

Nice, nice. So how did you. I remember your story from Prep for Wave, but how did you get started in the travel industry? Being a travel business or being a travel coach for other people who wanted to travel?

Well, as you know, I'm a family travel coach, so that's where everything started. I travel with My kids, since they're very little. So one of the main difficulties that I encounter was realizing how I continue to travel even after becoming a mom. So in my own journey of discovering this, I realized I could help other moms do the same, deal with all the fears, know that they can keep traveling, they can keep doing what they love, even if they're mamas. And that's how I got involved with travel in the travel industry. And I realized in this process of building my own travel coaching business, I learned so much about all the other stuff related that weren't really related to travel. Websites, content, email marketing, online business. And I started receiving questions about the stuff that I put out there in my graphics.

So I realized there were some people in the travel industry who could benefit so much from all the things that I had learned in this time. So that's how the travel VSCO was born. And little by little it has been getting updated depending on what I see people are needing and so on. So that's basically the summary of how everything started.

Awesome. Awesome.

Yeah.

Because I know I had noticed that change recently from VA to more of the coaching and the consulting.

Yeah. And you know, it was a process. I think this started, I would say, towards the end of last year in my initial thought was I'll just help travel business owners with tasks that I know very well because I've done them from my business. Right. So that's the first thought was I'll just become sort of like a va. As months went by and I started realizing, hey, there's just so much needed more in the mindset aspect, in the branding aspect. That's when I started the coaching part. So I was like, I like this better.

You know, I like helping them from the root, not necessarily doing something for them.

Right. Yeah. No, because that when I started the support business, I was very much the same way. I'll do like little tasks here and there, but it's kind of evolved into more strategy also. So that's. That's pretty cool. Now something. The reason, one of the big reasons other than like I know that you have a wealth of knowledge is that you recently posted about Pinterest and when you posted that, I had recently talked to the person who's actually going to be on the podcast episode after you and this airs, the director of integrated marketing with AMA Waterways, which is a river cruise line, and she had mentioned something about Pinterest and being able to utilize Pinterest more because it's a, it's like a search engine.

And so when you saw it, I was like, okay, there's something to this Pinterest thing that travel advisors, travel business owners need to learn more about, because obviously it's on the forefront of a lot of people's minds. So why, why Pinterest and how can people use Pinterest for their business?

I think most travel advisors may get overwhelmed with all the platforms, and maybe that's the main reason why Pinterest is just in the back. And I personally started using Pinterest because I own a blog. And most of us may think that we need a blog in order to use Pinterest. As you say, Pinterest is a search engine. So putting pins out there that are going to direct people to our website, it's a massive resource for getting new eyes into our content. With that said, I think it's an incredible resource too, to have and to use even if you don't have a blog. One of the main things that I think as travel business owners, we can be doing and directing our attention to is growing and building our email list. And maybe we haven't thought about it, but Pinterest can be also a great tool to do that, to be able to put our freebies out there, our offers out there, and direct people who maybe haven't seen our content before.

It's not only about relying on social media, but also utilizing Pinterest to do this.

So, and I know that you can have a business account because I had attempted dabbling a little bit in Pinterest, I think a year or two ago. When, when you start posting pins, what are kind of like some key things that your pin needs to have?

Definitely keywords. Just like when you are using SEO for blog content, Pinterest is major on keywords, so you want to include text that people are searching for. So let me give you an example. I have a freebie that's a blueprint for travel business owners who want to build their email list. So when I put this on Pinterest, I'm going to be writing things like grow your email list, travel advisor, you know, things that my audience is usually looking for. So these are key things that we want to put in our pins. Also, Pinterest is very graphic.

Yeah.

Hands down, the big reason why someone is going to click on your pin is because they like the image that you're using. So it's very visual. It's important to know how to create these graphics in order to be able to use Pinterest effectively.

So if you have one blog post, does that mean there's one pin. Or do you make multiple different pins to a blog post?

Definitely multiple pins. The more you put them out there, the bigger chance some more people are going to see it. Also, you can create different graphics with different aesthetics and test them out. You're going to realize that if you create, for example, 16 pins. Pins are the graphics that we put up in Pinterest. If you create 16 and you vary the title a little bit, you vary the colors, you vary the images that you use, you'll start to realize which ones get clicked on the most. And you can replicate that. You can see, okay, looks like this type of letters, big letters, simpler image just gets.

It's more attractive and it gets more clicks, so you get to try this. Also, Pinterest functions with boards. For example, I can have a travel advisor board. I can have a travel entrepreneur board, travel business owner board, Digital nomad board, and just put my pins inside different. You can call them folders and reach different people who may be looking for different things. Let's say I'm a digital nomad and I really want to grow my email list, so I'm looking for digital nomad stuff, then my pin has higher chances of appearing in front of this person because I'm putting them, like, everywhere, basically. Okay, does that make sense?

Yes. No. I'm like, oh, we, like, dived in real deep. But I think this is important to note because I think I find this, like, so fascinating. So is 16 what you were saying, like, an average of how much one blog post should be pinned?

That's what I like to do. I've heard some people do this. I've heard some people even repost these pins afterwards. The great thing about Pinterest, that your pin lives there for so much longer than any social media post or reel can last. Like, there's people who can find your pin and even years after you've posted them so you can repost them again. I love this about Pinterest. Like, it takes some effort, you know, building each one of these graphics. And once you put them out there, they're basically doing work for you in the long term.

So I would say 16 is a good number, something that I do all the time. I have templates for this Pinterest pin. So every time I create something new, say a new blog post, I just go to my templates and change the photos, change the text, and I'm ready to go. So it took me a little while to create the 16 in the. In the first place, but now that I have the templates, I just go and switch everything. So it makes it really smooth.

Okay. And when you're. When you're posting or trying to boost a post for a blog post, do you pin all those 16 posts at one time, or do you kind of, like, trickle it out?

No, I schedule them. I use Tailwind, which is a scheduler, and right now I have it set up for specific times. Tailwind actually helps you do it. Once you sync it to your Pinterest account, it kind of tracks when your audience is the most active, and it suggests you, for example, 7:00am, 1:00pm, 3:00pm, 8:00pm so four times in the day where you should schedule your pins. And I just, you know, upload them out there, and I schedule them. Sometimes I have a month ahead of pins. Just schedule. Something to note is that for every board that you put your pin to.

Mm.

It's an extra pin that you're doing. So, for example, let's say I have 16 pins total, but each of them I'm putting into two boards. That means I have 32 pins. Okay.

Oh.

If I use three boards, it's just it, you know, it just keeps growing exponentially. So you can have literally months of pins schedule. You can even include more times in the day. You can have 10 pins schedule in the same day. But Tailwind helps you do all of that in advance.

Okay. Now, how important are hashtags? Like when, when, when I. So I specialize in retreat planning. So if somebody puts in retreat planning, is that enough, or do they need to put a hashtag? Retreat planning?

No, it's not necessary to use a hashtag. Pinterest will read even the text that it's in your images. That's why it's important for it to be very legible.

Okay.

Pinterest would promote it more if your image is easy to read.

Okay.

So every single text that you use has to be very rich in keywords. You don't need to use the hashtag. Each of your boards, for example, the ones that I was describing, if I have a board named Travel Advisor, you can also write the description of this board when you create it, and that is also searchable. So I can put Travel Advisor, resources for travel advisors, Travel Business owner. Like, all of these little keywords I can put in the description of the board. So, you know, it's like a pool of keywords that you can use. Pinterest.

Yeah. And so does this also. Does Google pick any of this up, or is it really just Pinterest?

It picks it up. I don't know in the percentage or the rate, but I think you can notice there's a very high chance that when you've searched for something in Google, you found a Pinterest link in there between the top. So I have no, no proof other than that. I think whatever you put up in Pinterest will show up in Google as well.

That is so cool. Okay. I think we've gotten a lot of like the Pinterest almost basics and how it works out, because I want to go to the next part where it is you. So it's helpful. Like, we know why now. Pinterest is very helpful and can and can help move our travel businesses forward. But there's certain foundational elements that you need before you even start pinning, which is some sort of landing page that people can get on your email list, some sort of blog. And your branding needs to be okay.

Like, you need to have all the elements of your branding. So talk to us a little bit more about branding because I know I can geek out on that a lot because I just, I went through another rebrand recently and I love the branding process.

Yes. I think it's very fun because it basically takes all your uniqueness and all the personality of your business and it puts it out there in graphics, in text, in the photos that you decide to use. So I think it's a fascinating process. What I would say though, and something that I've noticed a lot is that a lot of travel business owners stop with a logo or stop with the colors. They think that branding is just having your name presented nicely somewhere, when in reality it's. It has so much to do with the personality and the uniqueness of your travel business is the way you write, is who you help is having all of these things super clear and choosing. Choosing what you're going to do, who you're going to help and why.

Right?

Yes. Like, I just get light on fire because I wish more travel business owners knew this.

Right? Yeah. Because I remember for so long my business was very purple because I love the color purple. And when you're working with somebody who knows the strategy behind things, your. My ideal client is not like, that's not what they need to see, the color purple. My ideal client needs to feel like they are being nurtured and taken care of, but they also want to stand out. So what fonts communicate that? What brand images communicate that to them? It's, it's. There's. So it's more of a feat.

How does your brand make other people feel and do they connect with them because I feel it's so much like. Ready to play bingo in your travel business? Did you even think you could play bingo in your travel business business? The monthly bingo board is more than just having fun while working your business. It is a tool to help you stay focused and hold you accountable while taking the necessary actions to move your business forward. You can even enter to win special rewards when you achieve a bingo for the month. Join our travel bingo community by visiting the link in the show notes. We can't wait to cheer you on in success. We. I can say Walmart and we automatically know what.

What the Walmart is the blue and the yellow. And we already know, like, the. Because it's also the experience that Walmart provides is like, we're able to identify, okay, Walmart, like, I know what I'm gonna get when I go into a Walmart store. It's kind of how people should be feeling when they see whatever your travel business brand is out there.

Yep, that's correct. And I'll give you a little example. I worked recently with a travel advisor, and her feet initially look like what we see in most travel business owners, because I think it's what. Maybe it's perceived that it's the right thing to do. Like, you see blue oceans, you see sunsets, blue, white, everywhere.

Mm.

But when I asked her, okay, what type of trips do you plan? Who do you want to help? She told me, I just like the adventurous trips. My. My type of trip is super colorful places like Colombia and Morocco. So I was like, okay, then your content and your branding needs to show this. Otherwise you're not gonna attract this type of people, the fun people, the people who want to dance in the trips. So, yes, your branding is everywhere, and it has to be 100% aligned with the person you're trying to help. If you don't know this, there's some work there that we have to do. We cannot skip this part on what type of things I do, who I do it for, and expect a successful branding.

Right, Right. And it even goes down to the travel brands that we want to sell, because I. It's funny that you mentioned you had a session, because I had a recent session where they're like, I don't. I don't want the nickel and dimers, like, coming to me. And then I'm like, but you just posted about this budget cruise line, so why would you post about that if that's not what you want to sell?

100%. It's like, these are the Type of people you're attracting, right?

No. And then on my Facebook, so because I started my travel business 11 years ago, on my Facebook, there was a post that said something like, if you're in the market and you need a good travel deal, make sure to email me here. And I looked at that, it popped up in my memories and I'm like, oh my, I can't. But it was so cringy. And I was like, I can't believe I used to post things like that. But I still see so many people posting that because they think. And I think it's also knowing what your value is. If, if you are the travel advisor who is only good for the deals, well then, then that's you.

Then you should be posting that. But if you don't want to be known for the deals and you want to be known for your service and the experience that you provide, then that's what you need to put forward.

Yes, yes, I completely agree. We see it every time. I see it all the time. I actually find inspiration for my content. When I go and like, look at this thing, I'm like, okay, no, I need to help. I'm not like gift tips for this.

Yes, yes, totally. So let's see what else. Email. You have been putting out a lot of amazing freebies for people to learn from. Obviously gets on your email list. How can travel advisors kind of utilize some of the things that you're doing so that they can grow their own email lists?

I think once they know exactly who they're going to help. Let's say you're a luxury planning travel advisor, then you know, probably your clients want to know the whole process of how, step by step, how does planning phase happen? What happens when I reach the hotel? If you're planning trips in luxury, there's a very high chance that the clients that you're attracting are very high detail oriented. So maybe having sort of a guide of like this is what you can expect from working with me from beginning to end. Just that simple guide can be something that you give out in exchange of an email address. So we may think that this is a false belief that you need to be giving out a freebie, something that someone is going to use for something to make more money, to get more clients in order to get emails in exchange. But in reality, you can give out anything. You can give out information of your business for someone who's interested in.

Right.

You can do a travel guide for someone and get an email, an email address in return. I recently worked with a Team, team sequence sequence software. And we created a very, very fun lead magnet for their membership. They have a membership, if I'm not mistaken, only for 100 people every year. And they wanted to have a big, massive resource to give out for people who were interested in the membership. It was meant to convert these people into members, but also it had tons of resources for travel advisors. So it's definitely one of the most fun and valuable lead magnets that I've helped create it. But it's just to give you an example that honestly, it can be anything you want as long as it's value focused.

What type of value and information are you going to be giving to the people you want on your email list?

And how, how can people think of ideas or how can they sort through? Like maybe they put out a couple and nothing's, nothing's like generating anything. How can they kind of filter what is going to be working?

I think they need to know their audience a lot. Like if once they know who they're helping, it's easier to know what are they struggling with. If I plan on group trips, maybe I can have a resource that talks about the best places to go for group trips this year. You know, it is a lot about trial. You know, I have created so many lead magnets for my business since I started and some of them I felt like these are going to be awesome. Like this is going to answer all of my audience's questions and I put it out there and it doesn't do that. Great. And you know what? It's okay.

You get to try something that I know has worked great for me. It's doing a mini course. I'm actually launching one very soon for travel business owners, but I have one for my family travel coaching Business business. And the great thing about doing a mini email course is that you are already training your audience to open your emails. So when you do another type of lead magnet, which is a freebie, for example, you send it out, it may land in their spam folder. So there's a risk of you probably not even reaching there their inbox. Okay. When you do an email course, they're already expecting that you're gonna give them all the content through email.

So they're paying more attention to that first email where it lands. They're probably making sure every single email after that is gonna come into their inbox. So they're getting trained. Okay. Anna emails me. I get value through Anna. And then when you start sending regular emails to them, most likely they're gonna be Opening those emails.

Yeah. Oh, that is so awesome. I'm glad that you pointed that out too because it's not only that they open the emails, it's that they read and engage with what's in the email content that you send out to.

Yeah, absolutely. And so it's very important to keep that relationship. Frequently once they are on your email, you want to make sure you're nurturing them. Google can actually tell when your emails are not getting open and, and it takes them to span. If it takes a little like a long time for people to not read your emails, Google is like, okay, this is probably spammy. So the more you email, the more your emails get open. It's going to be great for your email marketing.

Okay, well tell us more about this mini course that you have coming up for travel business owners.

Sure, thank you for asking. It's taken a little bit because I have dealing with no wi fi, but I am so excited to be presenting a mini course is going to talk all about branding, just what we were talking a little bit ago and it's called travel biz Sole branding mini course and I call it AKA building a travel biz. That stands out because as we mentioned, it's very easy for travel businesses to look exactly like each other. Like they all look the same, they all use the same type of photos, they, they use the same type of offers. And in this course I'm going to help you connect with what you do, why you do it and who you're helping. So throughout the three days it's going to touch on why you need to choose these specific things and from there on how you can spark it all over your travel based personality.

Oh, wow. So how can somebody grab that if they want that? Is it available yet or still work in progress?

I'm projecting it to be. It's ready. The course is ready. I'm just creating the landing page so anyone interested can sign up. So probably by the time this airs it will be live and you'll be able to find it on my profile. I'm estimating that within the next week. Okay, I'm gonna be officially launching it on, on Instagram. It's very exciting.

It really, really touches my heart, as cliche as that may sound, because I think for my travel coaching business, I was able to do this. You know, when you go into Mano Village, which my travel coaching account, I think immediately you can feel the personality of my business. You can know who I help, you can see the colors and I want to help other travel business Owners do the same. Make their travel businesses stand out and make them magnets for the people they're trying to attract.

I love, love that. So where can people follow you if we, if I don't get the link beforehand, where can people follow you at least to get access to that when it's ready?

Sure. They can find me on Instagram as Travel Biz, the travelbiz.co and from there you can see all of the travel biz content, resources, branding, email marketing tips that I share. And if you like to know a little bit of my personal travel business and you can see what I've done for my business, the type of reels that I create which I usually get a lot of compliments on because they're, they're super fun. You can check them out at Monos Villageros, which literally means traveler monkeys. So you can check out both their sister accounts, I would say.

Okay, perfect. And how do you work one on one with travel business owners if they want to work with you in the future?

Right now I have intensive content planning, one on one training and I've done that with a couple of travel business owners so far and I've realized that we also do a lot of branding work in there. So if you're interested in that, in knowing on identifying your, your unique personality and how to attract your ideal audience and building content like a lot of content from that, we can do this intensive for a week, this four week intensive. I also do email marketing and this is more like a done for you package. So if you're short on time, if you know you're needing travel, if you're needing email marketing for your travel business and you really need someone to guide you, create your landing pages, your lead magnets, I also have a package for that and the last thing that I have is a Canva graphics. This is more for travel business owners who already have identified who they help, what type of services they provide, but they need some help translating it into graphic format. So this Canva graphics bundle is one of them. So these are the current packages that I have and I can foresee in the future building some one on one coaching for travel branding like finding your travel based soul and guiding you in the process. Because it's really what lights me up and it's really what I see, it's the root for some of the problems.

Right.

Travel advisors, travel agents may be encountering in their brands.

Right? Yeah, because you can't, you can't really do anything unless you know who you're serving and how you do that?

Yeah. So it gets me excited. Hopefully in the next coming weeks, I'll start putting something together around that, too.

Awesome. Well, thank you, Anna, so much for being on here today. Really love anytime that we're able to connect and talk marketing things and helping out travel business owners. So thank you.

My pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me and hopefully we can meet soon.

Yes. Yeah. In Ecuador maybe.

In Ecuador. That would be fantastic.

All right, travel entrepreneurs, thank you so much for listening in to this episode. All the resources will be in this week's show notes and you guys have a great week and I'll see you next week. Bye. Thanks for joining me on this trip. Strategic travel entrepreneur. Please subscribe and leave a show a rating on your favorite podcast platform. Oh, and don't forget to take a look at the show notes for important information and links.

See you next week.