Getting selfish with Pinterest (PLUS why it’s a smart content marketing strategy) with Phil Pallen

IMPORTANT: THIS TRANSCRIPT IS AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED. WE GIVE IT A QUICK CHECK THROUGH BUT WE DON’T CORRECT EVERYTHING AS IT’S INTENDED TO HELP YOU FIND PARTS YOU WANT TO LISTEN TO AGAIN - NOT AS AN EXACT TRANSCRIPT. SO THERE MIGHT BE A FEW QUIRKY WORDS/PHRASES HERE!

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The beauty of Pinterest is that as you start to sprinkle that website with your little bits of gold ingenious and authority and expertise, these pins can work for you are quite literally. Years. It's not something you have to come back to. Would you like to attract more of your ideal customers or clients to your website for years to come without having to create tons of new content?

If so, getting on Pinterest or just investing a bit more time on the platform could be exactly what you need. I would actually encourage you to take it even a step further and get selfish about this. I would love. If Pinterest became potentially a way that you organize your own content or you have it for quick reference whenever you need

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it. In this episode of the Courageous Content Podcast, you'll hear from Personal brand strategist and Pinterest Pro Phil pa. You'll also hear about his unique approach to using Pinterest to grow your website traffic and your business. I'll be honest with you, Janet, I have put very little effort into Pinterest over the last two years, and yet when I look at my analytics, I have this month, 3.6 million impressions on a platform I have barely updated compared to Instagram, for example, which is so much time and effort.

Phil is a keynote speaker at my annual content marketing event, Courageous Content. Which is happening in Newcastle on November the first and second. So this is also a chance to find out more about Phil and what you can learn about him at Courageous Content Live if you'd like to attend the event. By the way, tickets are available until Monday the 24th of October.

That's

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2022. If you're listening in the future. If you can't attend live, you may be able to grab my planner and event recording bundle for a limited time. I linked to it in the show notes of this episode. You're listening to the Courageous Content Podcast. I'm Janet Murray, and I love helping coaches, creatives and entrepreneurs create super engaging content that generates leads and sales for their businesses.

No one starts a business and just knows how to create engaging content. It's a skill that has to be learned from practice, and there's always something new to learn no matter how long you've been in business, and I know running an online business can feel messy. Perfectionism, fear, self doubt, and other mindset staff can stop you showing up online in the way that's best for.

So you'll get help with that too. Ready to get courageous with your content.

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Let's get started.

ld we care about Pinterest in: 2023

More so as we look into the future, we're gonna have maybe, you know, fewer minutes to spend on ourselves to spend on self promotion or to spend on building our authority online. And I like Pinterest. I get excited about Pinterest because it really is the only social media platform that's designed to take you

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somewhere else.

Every other platform wants to keep you on that platform. That's why we have one link in bio on Instagram. Yes, you can put the link tiner in a story, but no one ever clicks it. You know, YouTube, same idea. You want links, go to the description. They've got all kinds of other rules when it comes to actually putting external links.

On a video. So Pinterest really is an exciting platform. That doesn't take a lot of time, It doesn't take a lot of input to get a lot of output. And I'm talking clicks to your website. I'm talking. A curation tool that becomes useful for you depending on what you do and how you show your authority. Uh, virality the ability to create content that people are readily sharing or embedding all throughout the internet.

It's exciting and it's not meant to

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add more stress to your content strategy. Maybe that's why I like it. Cause I feel like the others kind of do that. . Ok. So for those people who aren't familiar with Pinterest, What's it all about? Sure. Pinterest really is, How would you describe it? Maybe when I think about it, I think about creating almost like a mood board or almost.

The analog version of this would be like a corkboard up on the wall where you're clipping things and saving things. It could be, you know, gathering sources of inspiration. It could be finding a recipe that you want to cook for dinner tomorrow night. It could be, or even tonight. I don't plan my meal the next, the day before.

It's definitely the meal tonight. Uh, it could be finding a new workout. Really, it's a place, a social network. Highly visual photos, videos, mostly photos where people can organize little bits, little clips,

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little images, media in some way into groups. And that becomes useful in some way, shape, or form. And so let me give a quick example.

I'm a brand strategist. My job involves lots of things, but one of those things is designing brands for clients, gathering logo inspiration. Work with my team to put pen to paper to design something. Pinterest for me, has become a really valuable resource because I can actually curate and get inspired before I start my project.

Okay. And people often get confused. I think with Pinterest they think it's a social media platform, so they think it's a bit like TikTok or Instagram when actual fact it's more like Google, isn't it like a visual Google? Can you talk, can you talk a little bit about that? Yes. That's another way that I would explain it.

If someone is really not getting it, I think, you

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know, give yourself a chance to actually log onto the website, set up a profile, and just even use. It's a user, as a consumer, you'll get the hang of it. It's, there's not a lot of hidden tricks like other social media platforms. But Janet, to your point, one way to explain it to someone who's not familiar with it is that it is like a visual Google.

Some may say YouTube is like a video version of Google. Well, Pinterest is like an image driven. A visual version of Google where let's say people are looking for a specific search query. You type that in, you're gonna see pins, which are images that people have created with that title saved into the image typically, or some kind of accompanying visual that gives context for what it is you're trying to find or what it is you're after.

But yeah, visual Google, I like that. And I'm quite pleased

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with myself for coming up with that . I'm pretty with you, . So we have used it in the past and we've used it extensively, but we took a break a year or two ago, and certainly something that we want to focus on in 2023 because for, you know, my courageous content planner and kit and the content kits that I sell now, it's absolutely perfect.

we would like to focus on in: 2023

Now, for someone like me who has a lot of content, although it feels overwhelming, . Because I have got a lot of content, and that's something that appeals to me because I think,

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Well, I've got hundreds of blog posts. I've got tons of content I can send people to. I'm guessing for someone who maybe hasn't got as much content, where would you suggest that somebody starts with Pinterest?

Does that kind of make sense? It does make sense. It does make sense. I like where your head is already at and it's in the right place in terms. Really actually just auditing your existing content workflow and figuring out where you plug Pinterest into that it shouldn't be time consuming or laborious.

It really is. I mean, Janet, even since I last saw you in real life, we're having a different conversation now, then we would've had. Online graphic design tools are commonplace. You don't have to be a graphic designer to hop into a

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tool. I use Adobe Express Hop into a tool and actually create something that looks beautiful in a few seconds that you can then post on the website like it used to be that you'd have to hire a graphic designer and to make something that looks good and play around fuss around half an hour.

You've got one pin made for one blog post, now you're able to do it in mass, or you're able to do it quicker. And so the beauty is you've invested a lot of time into creating evergreen content. I think probably you've got listeners that are listening right now that go, Yes, me too. I've got a ton of evergreen content.

Sure. That doesn't mean, you know, you might have to hop in there and update it a year or two or three years down the road just to keep it fresh. But the beauty, the beauty of Pinterest is that as you start to sprinkle that website with your little bits of gold ingenious and

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authority and expertise, these pins can work for you for quite literally years.

It's not something you have to come back to. The minute you take a pin and you attach a link to it, it becomes what we call a rich pin. And the idea is that yes, you click it and it's useful, but it takes you off the website to get more on that topic. So I love how you brainstorming a second ago thinking, Okay, yes, I've got a planner, and yes, I wanna sell a planner, but think of all the other questions that people type into the internet looking for answers that.

Even just loosely connected or related to the idea of using a planner to organize your social media content. You could be answering all of those questions, create a quick visual for that, that could lead us to a video, lead us to a

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blog post, lead us to a podcast episode. Right? That's the exciting thing.

I know. It is overwhelming, and I would say so is a marathon. So focus on mile one, then mile two, mile three. You're not gonna get it all done overnight, but it's better to chip away at this than try to get it all done in one day. . So thinking about it myself, my sort of logical brain thinks the best thing will be to maybe start with say one product like my planet and say, Okay, what have I already got?

I've got tons of blog posts and podcast, which relate to questions that people who buy my planner might have. First step might be making a list of what they are going through. Okay, which ones could I create pins for? So optimizing those posts. I know we're not getting into the specifics I should say, of how to actually use Pinterest, but for

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me, The tech part, people get so worried about how to actually use the platform.

Like for me, it's better to start with the strategy. What is it I want to do? Okay. What I wanna do is I want to group together or start maybe with one group of posts or content that I've already got. See how I could optimize those and have the strategy in place first, and then we can worry about the tech would, Would you agree on that?

So think about, well, what have I got? What can I do with what I've got already? I would agree with you, and I would actually encourage you to take it even a step further and get selfish about this. I would love if Pinterest became potentially a way that you organize your own content or you have it for quick reference whenever you need it.

And I'll talk about this at the event, but I. I'm such a believer in being selfish nowadays when it comes to social media. Yes,

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we care what our audience needs and what they want and what they like consuming, but we don't care enough about what we like creating and how we're using these tools to help ourselves.

So for me, Pinterest is the first place. As I said, I go for inspiration. I've already curated logo. We've designed that are amazing logos that others have designed that are amazing, that could be organized in a certain way, just like you're cleaning your bedroom and organizing things into drawers and such.

It's similar in that way, but like how cool Janet would it be if Pinterest became so valuable? To you, right? It's a place you go where you actually have organized all of your content into some kind of semblance, into some kind of, um, folders, really at a basic level around topics. And then you could actually go to your Pinterest account to

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forward someone right to the resources you have.

What's awesome is that people come along for this journey, and that's what I've. With Pinterest, so rather than me, and I'll give an example, rather than me saving right click on a logo that I found on Google images, save as into a folder on my computer that then gets tucked away hidden for forever. I'll forget that it's there.

And no one else is gonna benefit from that little act of curation. Whereas on Pinterest, I can do it for myself. I can organize this content, I can sprinkle the website with content that I've worked hard to create videos, blog posts, podcasts, or my main ones. But not only are you creating an interface or a platform that's useful for you, but it becomes so beneficial cause you let other people in on that process.

That's what excites me about. I absolutely love that. And following enough,

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so I create my blog posts in clusters around products that I, I sell increasingly so. So someone in the team will say, , what podcast episodes have we got on this topic? And we do kind of had them in in indexed on a spreadsheet we can have a flick through.

But to be able to go to a Pinterest board, which has all of our. Podcast episodes that relate to online calls creation, that relate to content strategy and planning that relate to the planner. I mean, that would just be amazing for us and, and actually in terms of how you approach it, it's like, okay, well we'll take one cluster at a time.

We start and go, Okay, we've got this many clusters. We organize this for ourselves as we're doing, so we create pins. By the way, if you dunno what we mean by pin, it's basically an image that you create, that you add to your blog post will fill.

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Correct me if I'm saying this wrong. No, it's right. Yeah, that's right.

That's exactly it. Yeah. So when you think of it like that, it feels a lot less overwhelming and I just love the idea of being selfish about it and using it as a way to organize. Your content. Cause I think when I've spoken to people about Pinterest in the past, or I've done interviews, it often felt very heavy because it was like, Okay, so first of all, you have to clean up all your boards.

Then you have to start creating the right type of boards, then pinning other people's stuff. And it just felt so overwhelming. But I love the idea that you just might start with a way of organizing your own content, almost like a filing cabinet or drawers or you know, folders on your computer. And then as you're doing that, you are building resources for other people.

That feels a lot. Overwhelming. A lot is overwhelming. That is, and I am unlike other Pinterest speakers that will give you a to-do

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list with like all these things you need to go and do that you do not have time for. I don't have time for those things. I'll be honest with you, Janet, I have put very little effort into Pinterest over the last two years, and yet when I look at my analytics, I have this month, 3.6 million.

Impressions on a platform I have barely updated compared to Instagram, for example, which is so much time and effort and input in for very little output at the moment reaches down across the board for a lot of creators. And so this is what excites me. You just totally highlighted what excites me about this platform for busy professionals, busy small business owners.

To use this platform effectively, it does not have to create a lot of additional to do list

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items. I have a pin from two years ago called Creative Ideas for Announcing Your Business, and that sends literally hundreds, sometimes thousands of hits to my website on a blog post that I wrote three years ago.

And I do nothing , you know, to maintain. It just works. Yeah, this is absolutely blowing my mind. I'm already planning things in my head. as I'm talking to you, if my favorite advice is this, my favorite advice is be selfish. It'll come up when I'm at the event. I'm gonna say it multiple times because this stuff cannot be added to the to-do list.

It needs to be useful for you. Everything needs to be useful and rewarding for you. Yeah, I absolutely love that. And you did mention before about workflow as well, so I can see a way with our podcast, we have a process that we go through in terms of, you know, I

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record it, I send it to Bube who does the show notes and the transcript, who I think, you know, Bwe and edits it.

Yeah, . She'll love that. And I love Igor. Yeah. So they're the best. They're the best. So we have a workflow and as part of. Bube also creates social media posts. So this is just one more thing that we can add into our flow. We don't have to do it straight away, but we could start off by just using Pinterest as a way to get things organized.

If Bube will be listening now going, great, I can just get cracking and it does feel a lot overwhelming, which I absolutely love about it. There's a couple of other things I wanted to ask you. Before we wind up, because you are gonna be covering this in a lot more detail at courageous Content Live, but again, I remember doing interviews about this like five years ago, and then there was all this advice about, you know, how to write the best descriptions on your pins and how to create the best looking

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pins, and what advice would you have on that?

What's changed or what do people need to know about, you know, how your pins look, what kind of descriptions they need, and any, any quick tips on. Yes, great question. I will never waste air time on again. Giving you a giant to do list of how things need to be. Exactly. Because I think with that, people just won't show up at all.

And I feel like when I show up at Craig just content live, if I have been successful, then a handful of people from the event. Show up on Pinterest and it not add a lot of time. That's how I'm measuring my success. So at the event, I'm going to go through the workflow that you highlighted in detail, my own workflow, taking long form content and piecing it down into

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bite size bits that show up all over the internet.

And Pinterest is a part of that, and I'll walk through that. I will also be giving attendees free templates. So rather than me saying, Hey, go and make sure your pins look exactly like this. That's not my approach. That's not the Phil Pallen approach. The Phil Pallen approach is here. I've designed some templates for you to make your life easier.

Experiment with these. So take one. Let's say a blog post. Try it text only. Try it, Text on the bottom, and maybe a stock photo or a photo that you've got that's relevant on the top. I'll give you multiple versions. I will show you how one, say, blog post or podcast episode can show up in about three or four different ways.

And I think the goal here is to not get it perfect the first time around that you post it, but the, the

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goal is to actually experiment and see what in and, and Pinterest analytics are amazing. They'll track for you. This is how many clicks this is getting, you know, this is how it's ranking. You can see all of that, and it's gonna teach you by incorporating this into your workflow, which type of pins are gonna work for the different types of content you have.

first and second, and that's: 2022

So even if you can't make it live, you'll be able to get your hands on this juicy stuff from Phil. And we provide everything

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audio as well as video as well. If you're like me and you like to listen to stuff while you are doing something. So finally, I just wanna talk about conversion. So obviously you're talking about traffic.

Coming to your website, you can see which pins are generating the most traffics. How do you measure conversions or how do you measure success? Because I'm guessing that success might look different. Depending on your objectives, yes, success is gonna look different for each person, depending on how this fits into your strategy and how you measure your wins, right?

So, Janet, for you, for example, conversion would be obviously purchases of, uh, your planner, for example. For me, it's a little less tangible. I've got digital courses and so I can measure success based on the number of people that would purchase my course that have been sent. Through to my website.

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So first traffic, then conversion.

Yeah. Pinterest has definitely improved. The analytics they have and also the commerce functionality. That's actually like the, The ability to shop on the platform itself has definitely gotten better. I would say we used to have to kind of hack around , how to actually sell something on Pinterest. You'd have to send them somewhere else.

Now you can actually do it directly from the platform. I have less experience doing that cause I don't have a physical product. Most of mine are digital and they'll go through to my website, but I am going to talk about that at the event and consider that some of those attendees have physical products, some of them have digital products, and I'll kind of walk through that process of traffic and then conversion and how to track that.

I'll actually pull up Pinterest analytics and break it down so that you know exactly how to do. And the kind of things that

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we would use is we'd use specific UTMs in the back of our website, so we'd create specific links so that we could see basically track sales, which just require a little bit of knowledge of things like Google Analytics.

But yes, again, the thing I always say to people is, don't panic about that stuff. Just think, what is it I want to measure? You can figure out how you're gonna measure it later. You can figure out how to do it, but it's just what? What am I gonna measure for some people? It might be, say for example, if you are an influencer or something, it might actually just be about getting more people to visit your website.

Yes. The key thing I think is knowing what is your objective? Like do you want people to download your lead back or do you want people to buy your thing or whatever. The measurement for me is, is always tied to what exactly is, is your reason to. It might be well be that you need to have a certain amount of traffic to your website to satisfy your response or yeah, something like that.

That's actually one of

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mine is I use Pinterest to get people to sign up for my freebies or my eBooks, and then I'm able to, you know, partner with a brand to send their product out to my email list. So that's actually one of mine. Yeah, so actually the, your objective may not be strictly about sales. There might be, there might be more money involved in just getting more traffic to your website.

And these are the kind of things that we need to consider. And I did touch on this earlier. What if I don't have loads of content, So I've got tons of blog posts and podcasts. I'm already feeling excited about my clusters and whatever. What if I don't have that many pieces of content on my website? Where would you suggest someone starts?

Like would you suggest that someone starts or would you wait until you've got more content? I would suggest that someone starts using Pinterest as a consumer more so than a creator Pinterest.

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Still my very favorite place to go to actually get content ideas. So I'll give this quick example. Let's say you don't have a lot of content, let's.

You're starting a new business. So let's say you've started it in the last year and you've been focused on the actual business part, less on the content creation around it, which really is typically a longer play. Not always, but usually it's like right when you set aside time to actually write blog posts or create videos.

There's no way to guarantee that that's gonna have instant success, right? So I would say hop on Pinterest as a creator. Don't feel the pressure yet to have to post a ton, but start with a single keyword. I could go to Pinterest right now and type in the phrase personal branding. That keyword is probably the most important.

Keyword in my business and right away before I even scroll. So above the fold, we call that I'm gonna see what other

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creators are creating on, on my topic. That should serve as inspiration to you for what you can start to create and what you can start to create quickly. Don't just sit in front of a blank Word document.

tips for personal branding in: 2023

Instead, I want you to take out auto.ai free and talk it out, right? Or you can take a couple quick notes. Maybe you give us five strategies for personal branding in 2023. Give us your version of it and create it

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quickly. And once that piece of content is created, You can use a template that I'm gonna give you or that you can find online and get that on Pinterest in the way that you get content on YouTube by posting a video, you'd get content on Instagram by posting a carousel or a post or a blog post on your website to get it into Google.

Same idea. Cool. Okay. And one last thing. You mentioned that this is a long game, like a lot of content stuff, and you, we talked about evergreen content, You talked about blog posts that you created ages ago that were attracting traffic. So I guess the question a lot of people will have is, how quickly can I see results

Like how long could you expect to see results? If I was, for example, to get back in there with my planner, would I have to wait months and months to start to see the impact of that? Or could I see results quick? I think you can see results

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quicker. Again, I, It's funny that I'm talking on Pinterest, but I actually put not a ton of effort into it, although I think that's the point.

updates. November or October,: 2022

Right? I know that that will have instant traffic and I think you know from the arenas that you've played online where you can get results quickly, and that's the benefit of having been around or having experimented years past. I believe that translates to Pinterest. Since Pinterest is really a mirror of Google, it's really a mirror of YouTube.

It's really a mirror of like exactly what

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people are looking for. I think if you were to prioritize posting on Pinterest, since you want results faster, prioritize what you know and have proof that people are looking for, focus on those to start. Quick example, I could go to my YouTube channel where I do show up more consistently and I'll filter by total number of views, and I'll start pinning my most popular videos, maybe as a little video clip, maybe as just text only.

Use some templates to sprinkle it out there and prioritize what's performed well. That strategy will help you. There's no way to guarantee it like anywhere else on the internet, but certainly that strategy will. Fab. Okay. I'm already thinking about my monthly podcast episodes that I do. So I do content ideas for November, content ideas for December.

And so what you're saying is Yes, that is cracking. Yeah, I hear you. Brilliant.

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Well, Phil, this has been amazing and I can't wait to get even more from you at Courageous Content Live. I was gonna ask you, what are you gonna be talking about at Courageous Content Live? But I think we've kind of covered that interest growth, I think we've got interest strategy.

What's gonna be big inter 23. We just haven't got into the nitty gritty, which is what people will get at the event and with the recordings. In the meantime, where can we find you online? Oh gosh. I'm pretty easy to find online. I would say Instagram's the quickest way to get in touch with me at Phil PA dropping DM to me.

If you took the time to listen this, say hello. Otherwise I'll see you in person in the uk. I can't wait. It's been ages. It's been years. I can't wait to get back over there. I also have phil pa.co/freebies. I have over 10. Freebies that I've created myself there that are really good. A hundred evergreen content ideas,

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archetypes for your brand, brand positioning worksheet, all kinds of stuff over there that's really useful for people as you're working through the process of positioning, building, and promoting your brand.

But otherwise, we'll see you in the UK and I can't wait. See you then.

So I hope you found that useful and you are as excited as I am to hear from Phil at Courageous Content Live More than ever. I hope that you'll join me at the event. It is my annual content marketing event, which means it only happens once a year. I'm definitely, definitely not going to be repeating it.

Anytime soon. If you've ever organized a large event, you'll know exactly what I mean. But if you do want to hear more from Phil and the other amazing speakers at Courageous Content Live, they'll be speaking on every topic you can possibly imagine that relates to promoting a business or brand online. So TikTok,

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Instagram, LinkedIn, seo, blogging, email marketing.

If it relates to content and growing your business, then we cover it at Courageous Content Live. If you've missed out on a live ticket or a virtual one, then still head to the Courageous Content Live link in the show. As you may be able to grab my event recordings and content planner bundle, and if you use the code podcast, you'll get a surprise discount app checkout.

Thanks for listening to the Courageous Content Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave review on Apple Podcast or share the episode on social media. That way more people can benefit from the free tips and strategies I share. And be sure. Just tag me in when you do. I'm at Jan Murray on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.