S1E15 How Long Before It’s Time To Give Up Your Pinterest Account

Summary

Pin Talk - Pinterest Tips and Updates for Creators
Episode: S1E15 - How Long Before It’s Time To Give Up Your Pinterest Account
Release Date: April 10, 2025

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Introduction

In the 15th episode of Pin Talk, hosts Tony Hill and Carly Campbell delve into a critical question for Pinterest users: "How long should you invest time into your Pinterest account before considering giving up?" This discussion is particularly timely amidst frequent changes in Pinterest's algorithm, which can significantly impact account performance.

The Formula for Pinterest Success

Carly begins by outlining their "recipe for success" on Pinterest, emphasizing three core components:

1. Niche: Selecting a well-defined niche is foundational. Carly refers listeners to previous episodes for a deep dive into choosing the right niche.

2. Strategy: This includes determining the number of boards, pins per day, and the type of content that resonates with Pinterest users. Tony and Carly have dedicated several episodes to refining strategy elements like keyword research and board management.

3. Time: According to Carly, time is an often underappreciated factor. She mentions, "For as long as I've been doing Pinterest, time has been massive" (01:08).

The Role of Time in Pinterest Growth

Carly advocates for a minimum of eight months to a year as a baseline period to see meaningful results from Pinterest efforts. Drawing from personal experience, she states:

• In 2019, it took eight months for her pins to gain traction.
• In 2020, she tested a new account which also took eight months to start receiving traffic.
• However, with recent changes and enhanced content creation tools, a new site saw significant traffic within two to three months (02:00).

Tony adds, "the number of pins you're putting out there... it's got to factor in the number of pins you're putting out there" (05:24), highlighting that quantity, alongside time, plays a pivotal role.

Volume and Frequency of Pinning

The hosts discuss the importance of maintaining a substantial number of pins to establish a strong presence. Tony emphasizes the goal of 1,000 good pins:

• Carly: "We want a thousand pins that you can identify why the user would click that pin... a thousand intelligently created pins, not a thousand experiments." (10:00)

• Tony: Reflects on his experience, sharing that a lower pinning frequency (one every two weeks) significantly delayed his site's monetization (03:55).

They agree that while AI tools can expedite content creation, the quality and strategic placement of pins remain paramount.

Seasonality and Niche Considerations

Seasonality greatly affects Pinterest performance. Tony shares his experience with seasonal content like St. Patrick's Day:

• A post from St. Patrick's Day performed phenomenally, dragging related posts into the feed (18:19).
• Carly underscores the need to understand how seasonality impacts different niches, stating, "Seasonality can be bigger in some niches than others." (22:02).

Additionally, Carly highlights the distinction between evergreen and trend-oriented niches, noting that evergreen content can continue to drive traffic long-term if given sufficient time to gain traction.

Persistence and Measuring Success

The conversation shifts to measuring progress beyond immediate metrics. Carly advises tracking higher lows—ensuring that even the lowest traffic days are improving over time:

• "If you're seeing higher lows, you know... there's progress." (20:29)

• Tony adds that building a strong foundation of high-performing pins gradually increases overall traffic.

Managing Pins: When to Delete

A contentious topic among Pinterest users is whether to delete underperforming pins. The hosts discuss this cautiously:

• Tony argues against deleting pins within the first year, regardless of performance: "I would give them at least a year." (37:03)

• Carly emphasizes the risk of inadvertently removing pins that may gain traction due to future algorithm changes or seasonal interest: "You just never know how the algorithm will be adjusted." (37:30)

They caution listeners to avoid hasty deletions based on short-term data, which can be misleading due to Pinterest's seasonal nature.

Monetization Strategies

Carly shares insights into maximizing revenue from Pinterest traffic:

• Transitioning from ad-based income to diversified streams like printable products can significantly boost earnings. She recounts a blog post from 2017 that, years later, generated substantial revenue through ad income and product sales (24:43).

• Tony concurs, noting that successful bloggers often have extensive content libraries (e.g., 1,000 blog posts) that support sustained Pinterest traffic and monetization (16:01).

Conclusion and Final Advice

Wrapping up, Tony and Carly reinforce the importance of patience, quality, and strategic consistency on Pinterest:

• Tony advises, "Give it at least a year and pushing through is a good idea," encouraging creators not to be disheartened by initial setbacks (33:13).

• They invite listeners struggling with Pinterest growth to seek feedback within their communities, offering support and tailored advice.

Carly concludes with a reminder of the long-term benefits of sustained Pinterest efforts: "Pinterest is a long game." (24:23).

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For more insights and detailed strategies discussed in this episode, visit pintalkpodcast.com and join the Pin Talk community to elevate your Pinterest game and grow your online business.

Transcript

[A]

Hey, welcome to pintalk, the Go to podcast for all things Pinterest for bloggers and content creators. I'm Tony Hill and with me is my co host, Carly Campbell. So, Carly, what are we talking about today?

[B]

We are going to talk about how much time you should expect to invest on the Pinterest platform before you actually see results.

[A]

Yeah, so this topic came up because, I don't know, it seems like there's some people wanting to throw in the towel right now on Pinterest and some of the accounts that they're working on, because Pinterest is making a lot of changes with their algorithm. And, you know, whenever that happens, there are going to be accounts that go up, accounts that go down.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And we also seem to have a lot of new people involved in Pinterest, so there's much for them to learn about the platform and kind of the ebbs and flows of it. And so I guess our goal here is to be encouraging for you to spend more time than maybe you think you need or want to with the platform. And we're going to talk more about that. We've kind of come up with this recipe or formula for success for the platform. Do you want to share what that is?

[B]

Yeah, I think that success on Pinterest is niche plus strategy plus time to get to success. And we've talked in past episodes about niche. And so I think that listening to those past episodes is a really good idea if you're trying to fill in your Pinterest success equation, make sure you're in a good niche. And we've talked in a number of episodes about strategy. You know, how many boards should you have? How many pins per day is enough? What kind of content should you create that the Pinterest user likes? Those things are all part of strategy. And so listening to those past episodes I think will help a person build their. Their strategy out. But there's another really, really important piece of the puzzle that we haven't dedicated much conversation to. I mean, you and I certainly have dedicated conversations to it, and that's time. And for as long as I've been doing Pinterest, time has been massive. In fact, if you entered my, like, email funnels at any point, we use the word funnel very loosely. In my realm, funnel just means, like, you're on my list and you'll receive some emails sporadically, and they might not make sense together. But the majority of them, if you are, you know, looking for Pinterest advice from me, the majority of them talk about eight months as a Baseline for what? I believe that you should have been on Pinterest or working on Pinterest for eight months has been my kind of like my blanket recommendation, my minimum since 2019. I started saying eight months in 2019 because that's how long it was taking at the time for me to see pins that I would put out get traction. And so in 2020, I tested the theory with a brand new account. I started a brand new account and it took eight months before that site started getting traffic to even mention, you know, in an email. Now, more recently, I started a new site and it got good traction in three months or two months. Two or three months. And I think we've seen a lot of examples of people who know what they're doing on Pinterest start accounts and talk about their pretty, like, you know, condensed timeline of success. I would say that that's in part thanks to tools that help us create content faster. I didn't utilize the tools that helped create content faster, but I still put out content at the same rate as those people who are creating content faster, which is not the rate that I was using in 2020, you know, when it took me eight months.

[A]

Wait, what was your rate in 2020?

[B]

Well, it took me about a year to get 25 posts up. So one every two weeks. Yeah. And I pinned, I pinned three or four pins two or three times a week in 2020. And I never got the site to like, Mediavine or Ad Thrive levels on its own. But at the time, actually, I think still today you could get a second site into ad thrive at 30,000 page views if you had a site with thrive over 100,000 pages. And since I qualified that way, I was able to get the site monetized with ad Drive at 30,000 page views with Pinterest traffic. So I think at that point it had maybe 40 posts on it. I was really happy with that. You know, pinning two or three times a week. It was good. So if I had posted more frequently back then, would it have achieved success a little bit faster? Probably. We see that now. But I think when we answer this question, how much time should a person give it? We don't want to assume that the person doing it is doing it really, really well, because that would be a mistake on our part. And so we want to give the person who is working on this the most realistic timeline possible if they are making a lot of mistakes also. And I would say that's eight months to a year. What do you think about that?

[A]

Yeah, and that would also Depend on the strategy component, which would include like the number of pens. So only doing three pens a week, that is like say after 50 weeks, that's 150 pins. Yeah. That's not very many.

[B]

No.

[A]

So it's an important component to this time thing that we're talking about. Also that's got to factor in the number of pins you're putting out there. I think we talked about in a previous episode that before, we are going to really spend much time looking at someone's traffic in their chart that shows that they've dropped. They need to have at least like a thousand pens up, up there to get a good baseline. Would you say that's true as well? These days when you're looking at this, this formula of time, it's gotta include a certain amount of pens. And then like, what is that amount? And then also the other question here is like, okay, then that amount traffic, you know, say it's. Say it's eight months or say it's 12 months down the road and you're trying to decide if you're gonna call it quits or not, then what's that traffic level? And I think it comes down to, like, what that means for you for traffic and how that turns into revenue and what your goal is for revenue and how close you are to that goal.

[B]

I think the traffic question is gonna be very niche dependent, but it's also going to be extremely dependent on what you were doing eight months ago. And so if you are starting to see upward motion on your account, you've been doing it for a year, you're at a hundred page views a day. That's not where you wanted to be in a year, but it's more than you were at a year ago. That's an important question to ask. Always asking yourself, where was I a year ago? Have I seen growth from one year ago? If you don't know because you weren't doing it a year ago, you haven't been doing it long enough. So you know, where was I a year ago? And 100 isn't where I wanted to be at but a year ago, did I understand everything? I understand now? And are those pins I put out a year ago good enough for me to expect more than a hundred clicks a day right now? And the answer in most cases, unless you've been doing this for six or seven or eight or nine years, in most cases, the answer is no. I can go back and look at most counts. You know of people who've been working on Pinterest for A year. And I can see that their pins from one year ago needed a lot of improvement. Pinterest is. It is a long game. I still have probably 25% of my pins in my top 50 are older than two years, which, I mean, I talked to lots of people who say they only got new pins. I mean, right now I have a new account that's doing really well, and all of the top pins on that account are less than a year old. But that's because the account is less than a year old, Right? Yeah. So, I mean, if you aren't getting the results that you are hoping for and you've been at it more than a year, I still think we have to consider the things that we were doing and the things that we knew a year ago. Thinking like, you know, I adjusted my strategy in the last three months and I haven't seen the results that I need. That's not enough time.

[A]

Yeah. So we're talking about a couple different components when we say the word time. So one, you need time to pass for the algorithm to like do its thing with your pens and. Or you need time to pass to hit certain seasonality where your pens can do really well. Right. And then also time for your skills and strategy to develop.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And so that's four different components to this whole concept of time. And as it relates. And so you bring up a good point. Who you are as a pinner from day one versus like day three, 65 can be dramatically different. And so you need to give yourself. It's almost like this, I don't know, 9 month, 9 to 12 month grace period of just understanding. It's just gonna take that much time to really understand your niche that you're in and how that is effective on Pinterest. And also to just get really good at what you're doing and start to develop some really good intuition or instinct on what makes for a good topic, good pen design, a good board, those kind of things.

[B]

Yeah. And as you start to have mild successes, you know, if you're getting a hundred clicks a day a year in. If you look at those pins that are getting a hundred clicks a day and you look at everything that isn't identifying the similarities, you know, what's working with the ones that are working and then doubling down on those things and getting more pins out there that are like, what is doing well, this is also gonna take time. You know, you said we wanna see at least a thousand pins on an account, and I completely agree with that. We also have talked about in the past, the potential dangers to your account of just putting out 200 pins a day, which means that you're not going to get to a thousand pins in five days. You know, you could, but if you are being careful, if you're treating this like a long term business, you know, where you hope to still have traffic a year from now or two years from now, you're not going to want to put out 200 pins a day. It's going to take, even if you do five pins a day, what's. How many days would it take to get to a thousand pins? Five pins a day. Math's not like my thing, so I'm going to calculator it. If you do five pins a day, it's going to take 200 days just to get to a thousand pins and to expect good traffic. Ideally, that is when we say a thousand pins, I mean it's not just a thousand any pins, it's a thousand good pins if you're looking for traffic. And so it's a thousand pins that you can identify why the user would click that pin or you know, that, you know the pin like this has resulted in good traffic and good distribution before. It's a thousand intelligently created pins, not a thousand experiments. Usually there's always the guy that's going to get lucky with a thousand experiments, but for most people it's a thousand pins that you understand why you created them. And so a year in at your thousand pin mark doesn't mean you got a thousand good pens. I want to see a thousand good pens.

[A]

Yeah, that's right. And yeah, a lot of times you have to get through the bad pens to finally get to the good pens. And if all you're doing is letting AI generate your pens for you and you're not paying close attention to those pen designs and why and how it's creating them, then you're not learning. And if you can't learn and it's going to be really hard to adapt.

[B]

Yeah, you, you need to be able to identify what's working. I guess if you're a year in and you are at a thousand pins, good or bad, and your account has never ever seen any upward increase, like, you know, you didn't even get to 10 clicks a day, I would stop there and I would seek out the help of somebody who could point out to you like, oh, maybe this is the problem. Either of us could help people do that inside of our communities. We both have communities people can be in. Actually, can people share their accounts in your community and get feedback. Yeah, they can.

[A]

Some do.

[B]

Okay. It's always optional whether or not anybody shares their account, obviously. But in my community we do that all the time. I say if you want to know what I think, post it on the wall. I don't do it privately because it's a really low cost community, but I'm always happy for people to post it on the wall and then I'll give. I reply, but if your line is moving upwards at all, this is where I was going with that. You should be able to learn something from whatever the pins are that has made that difference. There might only be 10 of them, but you should be able to learn from those 10.

[A]

Okay, so another factor to this is. Well, one we talked about number of pins. Right. But that also can equate to the number of URLs. Right. How many different posts are you creating? Is that going to be enough? Of course it's very niche dependent what you can do, ratio wise, number of pins to the URLs and everything. But to your point, I think you'd mentioned he had like 20, 40 different posts for that one account that you did after a whole year, I would say that is probably not enough to really.

[B]

No.

[A]

Understand. Understand how that content can do well with Pinterest and also figuring out this cadence of okay, how many new URLs is really needed for your account, for your niche. And then once you figure that out, then you know. But that's just gonna take time and trial and error to figure that out.

[B]

Yes. And the majority of bloggers that I see when they're working on Pinterest, they're not working on Pinterest as the sole focus. That's not why they open accounts. And then they grow them. While they're growing Pinterest, they're also posting on Facebook or they're also creating content for Google. And a lot of people have a difficult time creating their content for Pinterest and Google. I know you do that really successfully, but I'll see a lot of people who create content for Google and content for Pinterest and they pin all the content to Pinterest as though that's a good idea. And then they say, I have a thousand pins. No, you got 500 pins because half of them were good Pinterest posts. 500 of them are just Google posts that you tried to force down Pinterest. They don't count towards your bottom line. And so, you know, if you feel like you've created a thousand good Pinterest posts, but you've really only created 500. You have only done half the Pinterest work that, you know, if you just have this arbitrary goal of a thousand pins or a thousand URLs, it's just an arbitrary goal. Or I'll talk to people who I say I give it eight months and then come back, and they'll come back to me in eight months. But in that eight months, they've published 20 blog posts. And for that 20 blog posts, they put out five pins each. And just letting the time pass is also not enough. It's an entire equation. The niche plus the strategy plus the time. And so there's nothing wrong with going slower with only publishing 40 posts in a year. You just have to moderate your expectations to be that after a year, we might be looking at just enough to sneak into ad thrive with the second site. You know, it's not going to be a first site.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. I would say site owners and bloggers who are making some serious revenue from Pinterest, they're going to have at least thousand blog posts I've seen. So that also seems to be a pretty important number. Like with a thousand pens. Of course, with a thousand blog posts, you should have a lot more than just a thousand pins. Yeah, but that's a, that's a significant milestone, in my opinion, in a lot of different niches. So getting to that thousand posts is. It's a lot of work. It's less work with AI if you're leveraging AI, but if you're doing this all yourself and you can only crank out like one a day at the most, and you only want to do it like five days a week, I mean, and you don't have the resources to hire anyone else. You just have to, to your point, change your expectation on the time component of this equation, and you're just gonna have to give it more time before you call it quits.

[B]

Yes. So I don't own a site that has a thousand posts anywhere, and my sites do. Okay. But I had a really interesting experience with my newest site this year, and we were talking about this before we started, and that is, you know, I, I do know what I'm doing on Pinterest, and I get to bounce my ideas off you, and you know what you're doing on Pinterest. So, like, my site had a real edge, I would say, over a lot of the sites that we're talking about. And I spent three months working on the site and working on Pinterest. And it got to a really good place. But those three months of effort were put into a specific season. And then that season ended, and I began the new season that I didn't have any content for, even though we had already put three months into the site. That season's a year away again. Now, those three months of effort that we put into the site likely almost didn't count at all in the new season that we were in. And so now, you know, we started again. Not. Not again, because it's the same site, but we started over working on after that season content, evergreen content, and the site. We're seeing great growth again. Google Analytics hasn't fully updated for the day yesterday, but it looks like we had 5,000 pages.

[A]

Nice.

[B]

For yesterday. It is nice. I'm super excited about it. There is a St. Patrick's Day post that is doing absolutely phenomenally well, and it's dragged other St. Patrick's Day posts out into the feed. And so once again, we are working off of, you know, this whole, like, what was this like a year ago? I don't know what it was like a year ago because I didn't have a site a year ago. And none of this was. Was here. This might just be our foot in the door in this season, and I can't tell that. And next season, next St Patrick's Day, could it be double this? I would hope so, because we will create new St. Patrick's Day content, you know, going into that season, and we'll also have this St. Patrick's Day content that already did well to rely on. And there was a long period now. And I did just look at some of the pins while we were chatting. There are some Easter pins that are already starting to pick up, but it's little. They haven't jumped up. They're just. Just starting to pick up. They're going in the right direction. But three months ago, there was nothing. Oh, well, not nothing. It had. I think our worst day was, like, 200 page views, which is just so much less than 5,000. You know, like, it's down. Giving it the full year is a really good thing to do. And also not freaking out. Now, this is just my best advice. I'm not saying that I manage it well. There are days where I freak out. You know, when it's at 200 pages, I'm like, oh, I haven't failed. But giving it a full year and pushing through is a good idea, because if I hadn't hit the St. Patrick's Day win, that wouldn't mean that I failed. It would mean that I'm still inside the first year, you know, and still learning what works.

[A]

Yeah, right, right. And that means that you can have some wins early on. I've seen this happen. And then traffic drops from that.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And sometimes we see this happen and it goes in two different directions where you can have a couple of pins go viral and then at that point forward, like you have a new baseline of what your average traffic is like.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And then sometimes it could go viral and then they quickly die and then like your traffic is going back down and it's kind of flat lined. And that can be a frustrating scenario, too.

[B]

Yes. I actually, when you said that, it actually made me think that, like, that is all that we are doing here. We are just always looking for the next win. And hopefully that win just builds your baseline the tiniest bit higher. And so what you should actually be measuring is your higher lows. If you're seeing higher lows, you know, however far back, if I go, okay, my lowest day after Christmas was 200. I know that tomorrow when St. Patrick's Day falls off a cliff, it's going to hurt. But if I stop at 300, that's a win. Even though what looks like progress was eroded, that's a win. And I'll keep going. I'm looking for a decent Easter and I'm looking for a decent 4th of July based on the content we've been creating. If I have a good Easter and we fall off of Easter and end up at 400, that's a win. And then if we stay at 400 until the 4th of July, that will feel depressing. But when I look back at what's happened over the course of the year, I will see progress. And that is how it has always been. This is not a new thing that's just happened on Pinterest, I wouldn't think.

[A]

Yeah. And it's important to understand the niche that you're in and how seasonality plays into it. So seasonality can be bigger in some niches than others. And then also how, let's just say trend oriented, which we've talked about in the past. The niche may be. Or not. So there are some niches where you can create content that's very evergreen and you can have these pens that can do well for a really long time. And it just takes some time for those pens to catch on. And then once they do, they can continue to bring you traffic for a long time. Right. You just have to give them time. Yeah.

[B]

I was Telling you before we started this about some posts on my main site, which is an evergreen site. And I think I've talked about it before on the podcast because it was just. It. I was just so pleased with it. In 2017, I published a blog post that did really well. Then it was a different time on Pinterest. I measured well, differently at the time, but it was probably one of my first, like true virals. And then it. It did well for a year or two and its death was really sad for me because I had, you know, really relied heavily on that post. And In July of 2023, that post got over a hundred thousand page views. It earned over $4,000 in ad income, and I put a printable product for sale in it, and that product made over a thousand dollars. So that blog post that I had written in 2017 made over $5,000 in July. And you know, the viral wasn't just like contained to July. It also did well in May and June and August and September. It died off towards Christmas. But I actually think once I look to see what it made all year. I think over the course of the year, that blog post made $36,000. But it was written in 2017 when my blog was getting, you know, baby traffic. And every win like that over time adds up. And Pinterest traffic, you can get traffic from pins years and years later. I know we see the majority of pins that bring traffic on Pinterest seem to be new pins, but you only need five old winners in your top 50 to really change that baseline. So if you spend those years, you should get them.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. You were explaining it to me in such a way that like every year, if you can just build that new foundation of like five or so pins that do really well for you, they're kind of a good workhorse pen that's just sending you a lot of consistent traffic. And every year that you commit to it, you're just stacking on more and more of these types of pins. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

And it's. It is difficult when you are investing your time and not seeing a return. But I think that it's just important for us to remember that there is no such thing as free money. And you need to either invest in your sites with your time, knowing that, you know, could take a year or two or more before you get paid, or you have to invest in your size with your money. I do have another new site. I haven't talked about it. I have another site. I'm not. I'm not going to Talk about it. I'm just going to say this one thing. I'm also not, you know, doing a lot of the work on it myself. My team is working on it and I like, open Pinterest every couple days and I look at it just to like, make sure that it hasn't flatlined to zero. But as a rule, I'm not looking at it because we are not publishing 300 pins a day. I want it to get to 2 or 300 pins before I even start asking myself, are we going in the right direction? I cannot know if we're going in the right direction until there's some direction there to look at.

[A]

Right, Right. Yep. That makes sense. Is there a way to speed up this time element, in your opinion?

[B]

I don't know, like, for who, who is this person that wants it fed.

[A]

Up for the impatient person with the attention of a goldfish?

[B]

No.

[A]

Which is all of us these days.

[B]

I think those people should go look at a different platform. What do you think?

[A]

Uh, okay. I do think that there are some shortcuts that you can take. Okay. Yeah. One of the things I have on here is a part of the equation, and that's strategy.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

So either you could figure out your own strategy, kind of a diy. I'm just gonna figure this out through trial and error.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It's just gonna take more time to create all those bad pins and bad posts and those bad keywords to eventually get to the good ones. Or you can learn from someone else's strategy and take some shortcuts.

[B]

Yes. Okay, your point seems valid.

[A]

But. So there's a caveat to that. I mean, there's still trial and error if you learn Pinterest from someone. Unless. Unless you are learning from them, like they've got experience with certain niches and you are going to be in the exact same niches. There's still a level of translation that needs to happen for you to figure out this kind of step by step blueprint of like a lot of people are expecting from, from courses, which I don't know if that. That totally exists for, like, okay, here's the exact, you know, keywords to choose and here's the exact post to create with headlines like that. That's up to you. And that should be unique and should be a little different than what everyone else is doing. So there's an element of even taking a course of like, you just have to spend a little bit of trial and error applying the strategies that you're learning to your particular site, to your niche. To what you are good at and are an expert on and what you want to blog about. And then also sometimes if you're just in a bad niche and so you can have the best strategy in the world, but if you're in a bad niche, it's not gonna go well.

[B]

Right?

[A]

So hopefully, if you're listening now, you've, you've listened to the previous episodes on Good and Bad Niches to understand that, because that's just going to drag things on. And yeah, you're eventually, you should call it quits if you're in the wrong niche. So I think strategy can speed things up if you decide to follow one that, that can work well and then you apply it. And that could include, as I mentioned, you know, a keyword research process and a selection process, because choosing keywords is just so, so important, as we've talked about. And so either you can spend a bunch of time doing keyword research, trying to figure out which ones are the best ones to go after, where to put them all, what to do with them all, or you can learn a keyword strategy of a process and do it. And even then, it's still, it's just expected to be trial and error with all these things because again, I just don't think you're going to find the exact step I set blueprint for, for how to create a very successful Pinterest account for you in particular, it's kind of like house plans. Okay? Like the house plan that I have for my house, I built my own house. We bought a house plan online. So there are people who have this exact same house plan just, you know, copy paste, right? And it works. Pinterest isn't like that. You know, we had the whole episode of like, how your account is a snowflake, right?

[B]

Yes, that's right. Unique.

[A]

Yeah. But in our case, like, we made changes to our, to the blueprints. Give us an architect. There were some things that we wanted to tweak and everything. And so it is different. And I saw pictures of people who use this exact floor plan and they posted online the finished result of the house, which was cool to see. And it was cool to see some of the changes that they made from the original one. And so that would be my suggestion. But the point is, this isn't kind of like these websites where you can buy house blueprints and you can expect the same exact results just from following this exact blueprint. You're just not going to find it. And so I think people just need to wrap their minds around that. And there's just this element of you can't have someone hold your hand a hundred percent of the time to success. There's this part of this process of, like, you having to figure out how to have good judgment and to actually, like, figure some things out on your own.

[B]

Absolutely. I always tell people when we're talking about my Pinterest course what it will do for them. I don't like to say that my course will teach you when to pin and how many times to pin. I like to tell them that my course helps them understand Pinterest so that they can develop a strategy based on how Pinterest works. And I hope that's what people will look for. Now, when I compare the last two accounts I started, I think that you do have a point, because the account that I started in 2020, that I pinned, you know, three pins three or four times a week, and it took a full eight months before the needle moved. I did it with good strategy. The keyword research process and the content creation process was solid. What might have been able to be tweaked about the strategy was frequency and volume. And so when I did my new account, the one that I was talking about, you know, did really well over Christmas, and it's fallen off. It's doing really well again over St. Patrick's Day. And I'm expecting a good, you know, spring, that one. I actually did a really similar process. I adjusted the board strategy a little bit, which I think you. You can get some insights on that if you listen to the board episode we have on Pintalk here. Adjusted the board strategy a little bit. But what I really changed there was volume and frequency, and part of my, you know, desire to change that came from conversations with you and increase the volume and frequency a little bit. And I think that I was able to increase it to a place where it did grow faster than eight months. Right. We saw results in three months versus eight. I do think that you're right. There are things that we can change. I would also suggest that if you are one of those people that is going at a very low volume, very low frequency, you should expect the longest likely timeframe for success, which would be like a year. If you can increase your volume and frequency, you should probably be able to see success in a shorter period of time. But if you're one of those people that's already at high volume, high frequency, just increasing it more isn't going to help more. That's when the whole overall strategy, you know, maybe taking a course on Pinterest to identify where you might be missing something is really going to matter. And even then, I do think I still believe in a little bit of a sandbox. I believe that there is something that happens at the eight month mark where Pinterest goes like, all right, I trust this account more. And maybe some of your older pins start getting out there. Now, you didn't have old pins to get out there before, right?

[A]

Right.

[B]

Yeah. Now they exist.

[A]

Yeah. So even if you have a really great strategy.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And you have a way to scale out to, you know, say 48 pens a day, it's still going to take a lot of time. Like 9 months, 12 months. Get a full year under your belt at least. And that's when the, like, the deck is stacked in your favor.

[B]

Right.

[A]

You know what I mean? If it's not. If you're trying to DIY this and you can only commit so much. Yeah. What, at least a year and a half, two years? I mean, it kind of depends.

[B]

Mm, that sounds like so long. But the time passes anyway.

[A]

Right.

[B]

I was just thinking about my new monetized site today and trying to determine what to do to make it earn more. The RPMs on it are not fantastic. What? We've talked about this. I've never, I don't think I've said that on the podcast, but we've talked about this. And so I was brainstorming over the week ways to start earning more per visitor because it is getting a fair amount of visitors. If those visitors individually were earning more, that would make a significant difference to my bottom line. And the frustrating thing about this is that I've had this conversation. I had this conversation four months ago with my girlfriend who, who worked on the theme and she was like all ready to put a product for sale into the posts. And we just didn't get around to it because it was earning so well in ads. It just kind of got pushed in the back of my mind. And now what's happened? The time has passed anyway and hundreds of thousands of visitors have come and gone from the site and I didn't take the opportunity to attempt to monetize them better. And the time has passed and it would have taken an hour or two of actual focused effort to start. Just, just start. I wouldn't have gotten. I wouldn't have gotten, you know, a hundred thousand dollar strategy built out in an hour or two, but I would have gotten just the first steps set out to collect the data that I would need to be able to tweak that strategy now so that I could actually make it into significant income. And it's the same with Pinterest. If you can dedicate two or three hours a day, and that seems like a lot to some people, but, I mean, you're growing a business, you shouldn't expect to be able to do that in 15 minutes a day. So that's not realistic. If you could dedicate two hours a day, and I used to do it in the middle of the night, just, you know, between midnight and two, if those are the hours that are available to you, those are the hours you should use. If you could do that for a year, I believe that if you do it with good strategy, a year is long enough to start to see growth.

[A]

Yeah, I would agree. And to that note, you're probably gonna have some bad pens that you created early on. And one of the conversations that's been picking up again in the communities is deleting some of these bad pens that have gone nowhere. I think we talked about this on the podcast before on. Is there a point in time where it's worth deleting some of these pins that could be dead weight on your account? And I think, sure. Some of these ones from early on where, you know, you can look back and you can see they've gotten zero traction, no traffic, hardly any impressions, the designs are not great. It's before you figured out and got better over time and the keyword selection wasn't great, all that kind of stuff. Then it's worth considering deleting those pens because, yeah, they could be holding your account back as time goes on. And sometimes it takes people a couple months to figure that out and start making really good pens. And sometimes it takes a whole year. Right. So you might have like a whole year of bad pens, which I've, I've been doing. I've had like a couple of, of years worth of. Well, I wouldn't say full years. Maybe like six months, 12 months worth of pins that I'm, I'm deleting. That's a lot of pins.

[B]

So would you delete pins? Like you just said, it takes a couple months to figure out Pinterest. If you had started Pinterest within the last year, would you Delete pins from 6 months ago if you thought that they were bad?

[A]

No, I, I wouldn't. I would, I would give them at least a year. Yeah, even if you are in something that's very trend oriented or, or very seasonal, I would still give it a full calendar.

[B]

Yeah, I, I like that. I agree I a hundred percent agree. Because you don't know what that pin would have done a year ago if it had been a year old a year ago. And if there is any kind of Pinterest sandbox that I believe we see indication of.

[A]

Yeah. And you just. You just never know how the algorithm will be adjusted. That could all of a sudden favorite an older pen. Maybe it did okay in the first few months, and then it kind of died down. Nothing special. But then it could be an algorithm update that really starts to favor that pin, gives it more distribution. You miss out on that, so you just never know. And that's where I can go back and I can look at my own pins and say, okay, this is a dud. I know this is not going to work out and ever send me any traffic because I had that experience, which is that required a lot of time. Right. So I can be more confident in that decision.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

There's someone that I was talking to recently who they tried out Pinterest for a while. Um, they gave up for a while because they were doing really well with Facebook. So they decided to, like, double down on Facebook, which I think is good. You're getting traction from platform. Yeah, go. Go all in on it and see what you can do with it. And that's what he did. And it's humming along very nicely. But now he's coming back considering Pinterest again for the same account. But I think it's been six, nine months since he's pinned anything. And he's been hearing talk about, you know, deleting pins that aren't doing well. And he was telling me that he used this tool to delete some pins. He got it set up right before he was going to bed. He got it all set up, and then the next morning, he checked his account, and he was expecting, like, I don't know, 100, 150 pins to be deleted. And it was like, 6,500 pens gone overnight. And I was like, dude, what was the criteria you set for deleting these pens? He was like, less than 10 impressions and older than 90 days. I'm like, oh, okay, yeah, that could be a problem. And he was in a niche that could be considered evergreen.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

So I feel bad for him. He knows better now, but just be careful of. Oh, gosh, yeah, it really depends on the niche you're in. And again, if it's your. But, yeah, 12 months, that's a pretty safe place to be. But you have to be on the platform for at least 12 months to even get there.

[B]

And in the case of your friend, when anything is looking at impressions on Pinterest, correct me if I'm wrong, Tony, but there is no way to see lifetime impressions on Pinterest. We can see lifetime saves, but when we look at impressions, we are always looking at the time set in the analytics and the furthest back that you can actually set it on an individual pin and get a number is six months. So say you are proceeding with that own criteria in your mind and you're saying, okay, I'm going to delete everything on my account that has less than a thousand impressions and I've pinned it in the last 90 days. You are automatically going to slaughter all of your seasonal content by accident because your impressions are going to be reflective of what's happening right now, not what might be happening in November. And this is the same thing with search volume. If you were to do a really involved experiment where you said, okay, I'm going to use pin clicks, I'm going to look at the search volume and I'm going to go and start deleting pins that are in low volume searches, you need to remember that you're looking at the search volume for the last 30 days and that Pinterest is a wildly seasonal platform and that that search volume is going to change as the year goes on. And all of a sudden in May, that search volume might shoot through the roof. You don't want to be making choices based on less than a full year of data from all the angles. Your account, their account, Pinterest, you know, it's really a process to see how your traffic plays out on Pinterest.

[A]

Yeah, honestly, I, I don't know if I can say it any better than that. I think, I think we've covered it all. Hopefully by now you're listening here and you just realize you just need to give it more time. And if you're under a year, I understand it's really tough, especially when you see traffic go up, you see it come back down and it's been going down, or if it's been flatlined. In that case, my advice is maybe spend a bit more time paying attention to what other accounts are doing, analyzing your good pins that are, that are going well or that went well in the past and testing some new ideas, try new things. Because if you just keep doing the same thing over and over again, I don't know if you're going to. It's hard to expect, you know, to get different results than what you're getting, especially if you're past that one year mark. But if you're not totally sure, then feel free to reach out to us in one of our communities. We'd be happy to take a look and get some feedback. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of Pentalk. Head over to pentalkpodcast.com to get the show notes and the resources mentioned. And hey, if you like this episode and want to hear more from us, please rate and review our show. Thanks.