← Pin Talk - Pinterest Tips and Updates for Creators
Pin Talk - Pinterest Tips and Updates for Creators
S1E3 “Good” and “Bad” Pinterest Niches (And Determining Which Yours Is)
00:58:57
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- [00:02]
A
Hey, welcome to pentalk, 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 today we're going to talk about good and bad niches or niches for Pinterest. So, Carly, can you, like, quickly clarify what good and bad means for Pinterest creators as it relates to the platform and content?
- [00:27]
B
Yeah. So in a good niche, you will pin and see meaningful business building traffic to your website, and in a bad niche, you will not see the kind of results that you are hoping to see for any number of reasons that we'll talk about. Some niches, I think, are just very difficult to get traffic to on Pinterest.
- [00:55]
A
Okay, so I am listening closely to what Carly is saying today. To be honest, she has way more experience than I do in this particular topic. She's worked with a lot of Pinterest accounts and creators over the last several years and has just had a lot of exposure to different niches and, yeah, has a lot to say and has made a lot of great observations. So listen closely to her. Maybe not as much to me. I will contribute as much as I can here. Now, I want to try to dial this in so that we're speaking to a good representation of who's listening here. And so I've come up with, like, four different camps of content creators that's listening right now. First camp would be those who are already on Pinterest and they're doing great. They've got a great niche, everything's going well for them. The other camp is they're considering Pinterest and they have, like a brand new site, so they're starting from scratch. The third camp is they're considering Pinterest, but they have an existing site, and so they're trying to figure out, will my existing site work with Pinterest. And then the fourth one is they're already on Pinterest and things have been going great and then all of a sudden they've gone bad. So let's talk about. Well, let's just, I don't know, maybe get to the meat of it and talk about how there can be great Pinterest accounts that can go bad like that. That is like the most interesting thing to me, having conversations with you about this and you've just, with your experience, you've seen some really fascinating things about accounts losing a lot of traffic overnight. And it's like, what happened? They were doing great, they were in a great niche, and then something changed.
- [02:36]
B
Yeah. So this is one of the most difficult to diagnose issues on Pinterest. When we see an account that's doing really great and then all of a sudden they lose their traffic. Of course, the most natural question that we're going to ask is, why? What have I done that has caused this traffic drop? And there are times when it is absolutely something you've done. There are absolutely times where we have seen accounts have massive overnight decline, and we can identify that those accounts have been spamming Pinterest or those accounts have done something that maybe isn't spam on Pinterest, but that would have triggered one of Pinterest spam plagues. Sometimes we email Pinterest in those situations and get our accounts back. And then there are these situations where no matter how hard we try, we cannot identify what's gone wrong. I have seen this happen over and over again over the years, and I'll share a few examples with you. Sometimes it is the way that Pinterest treats the niche on the platform that is the direct cause of the drop in your traffic. And a lot of times we can even identify the reason for why the shift. This conversation probably doesn't help us to really prepare for the future in any niche. I mean, maybe a little bit. But like some of the niches that we've seen, the way that Pinterest treats the niche, some of the things that we've seen change weren't predictable or, you know, they just caught us off guard. So the first time that I saw a drastic change in the way that Pinterest treats niche was in postpartum. And the reason that I saw it was because I wrote a lot about postpartum after I had my first baby. And those were some of my best posts on the platform. And one of the earliest signs, I mean, outside of just the traffic drop, one of the earliest signs that helped us identify that it was a change in the way Pinterest was treating the niche was that the colored search bubbles for those terms and their related terms disappeared. So in any other search, you could still search, there'd be still colored search bubbles. But then in our niche, there was no bubbles. There was nothing. Pinterest wasn't going to guide the user any further down that train of thought. And it wasn't very long after that that Pinterest updated their terms of service or their. Their community guidelines. Sorry, those are different than the terms of service. And they really put specific language in there that said you can save content about. They. They listed certain subjects, breastfeeding was one, mastectomies was another. So that's a health niche, just like postpartum is a health niche. They said you can save content about these things. That's not against our community guidelines, but we aren't going to broadly distribute that content. And that makes sense from, like, a user perspective. I mean, that content is limited in scope to the amount of people that it's applicable to. And not only that, there are a lot of people that would find that content triggering. If you think about the way Pinterest works and you think you're a pregnant woman who's engaging with pregnancy content, and then time goes by and maybe something terrible happens and now you're seeing pregnancy content and it's really triggering for you. That's just one example of how this could be a really bad user experience. It makes sense that Pinterest is going to limit the distribution of this content over time. And so that's one example where we saw it was a really great niche, really fantastic for traffic. I mean, talk about Evergreen. If you have a baby on Christmas Day, you're still reading that stuff, and that happens. I have friends who have had babies on Christmas Eve and they're still reading that stuff. So, I mean, you can imagine the traffic was phenomenal. Pinterest changed the way they treated it, and traffic went down. And we saw this again really recently. I think it was November. I have the article open here so I could get the date for us. Oh, March of 2023. So it was over a year ago. Pinterest got a lot of media attention for being, like, inappropriately used by predatory people who were saving collections of content that hadn't been uploaded inappropriately. Like innocent content being saved into inappropriate collections. And we saw Pinterest change the way they treated keywords around children. They changed the way they treated keywords around teenagers. They changed the way they treated keywords around bedroom decor and bathing suits because all of these things were being inappropriately used. And again, like, from a logical, realistic perspective, we can see why Pinterest would adjust the way that they're treating this content. We can't really even fault them for it, to be honest. It's really important for us to understand these historical happenings so that we can try to be aware in the future when these things happen. We need to ask, okay, is my traffic down because of something I've done, or is my traffic down because my niche is changing on Pinterest? Other examples of niches that have struggled in the past are weight loss or dieting as Pinterest. Pinterest has openly said over and over, we want to be a body positive platform. That means that weight loss, dieting don't fit in with their public image that they want for themselves. So we've, we've seen those niches change. If you search for anxiety or mental health related keywords on the platform, they will put up, they put up like a bubble, a blue bubble that says, you know, if you're struggling, here's more resources in our Pinterest help center and they direct users to specific resources that they have curated. I felt that really specifically I had a whole series of blog posts on my mom blog in the 2017, 2018 about anxiety. And they were some of my top performing blog posts. And overnight they went to zero.
- [09:11]
A
Jeez.
- [09:11]
B
Or almost zero. I mean, they get a trickle of traffic because you can still search these subjects and you can scroll down past that bubble and you can still engage. But those things are not in the feed anymore. And so this is just a small list of niches that I've been able to personally talk about my experiences in. You know, they went from good niches to bad niches on Pinterest. I think there's lots more that I couldn't even identify.
- [09:42]
A
Yeah. So do you think any niche is safe?
- [09:45]
B
No. I mean, like, there's a really good chance that Pinterest isn't going to change the way that food or fashion or home decor is treated for any of these, like more sensitive reasons that we've talked about. But that doesn't mean that they won't change them. One that we didn't talk about is the way that shopping affects a niche on Pinterest. So we could say two or three years ago, home decor was fantastic for traffic and there was no shopping aspect to it. We've seen in recent days, we've seen Pinterest try to push that niche towards a shopping intent. And so that's a way that Pinterest changes the way the niche behaves on the platform. I don't really think that it's ever going to be 100% shopping. I think people are still going to go to Pinterest for inspiration. But I mean, when we're talking about Pinterest changing the way a niche behaves, you wouldn't think something like home decor could be at the same risk as things like weight loss and anxiety and postpartum, but it is because they could change it.
- [11:04]
A
Yeah. Right. So think about like decorating a kid's bedroom.
- [11:08]
B
Yeah.
- [11:09]
A
And all the various keywords that could be related to something around like little.
- [11:12]
B
Girl or little boy, they're totally wiped out in March. Yeah.
- [11:15]
A
Right. So that's. Yeah, that's wild.
- [11:18]
B
Yeah. Like you would search it and it would say, hmm, we don't have any ideas for that search.
- [11:23]
A
Yeah.
- [11:24]
B
So. And I think just based on the experiences that parenting bloggers had, I also don't think that they were distributed in the feed at the time. So traffic has grown back in a lot of those niches because parents are genuinely out there looking for these ideas and in a non nefarious way. So the traffic is there again. But this week I've talked to a number of people who've lost traffic suddenly. And when we're unable to identify, you know, something that they might have done wrong, I still think that it's important to consider, could this just be Pinterest treating some of the keywords in your niche differently?
- [12:04]
A
Right. Yeah. So another aspect to consider is looking at Pinterest community guidelines and their privacy policy and terms of service. And if you were to read through those, I think you will start to get a sense of what they value as a company and to consider that as you're creating content or picking a niche, because they try to be a very inclusive company and they're willing to make big changes to their platform to do that, disruptive changes. And even if it costs them money, I think that they would still be willing to make some of these changes to be more inclusive and more positive in general. And so they would not hesitate to start demoting negative sentiment pins, for example. And so sometimes there's content strategy where you can target more of like the shocking negative aspect of things.
- [13:03]
B
Absolutely.
- [13:04]
A
Versus the positive aspect of things. And so that's something to consider. And that's where we, we've talked about, well, maybe, maybe there's like not necessarily a good and bad niche, but instead it's more of like a good versus bad content strategy.
- [13:20]
B
Yes, yes, that's an important thing to define. And we, we kind of came out of the gate with. You talked about those four camps of creators. Yeah, we came out of the gate talking about the ones that are already doing great on Pinterest. And then somehow I just got focused on the ones if they're doing great and then they stop doing great. I mean, there's lots that are doing great and they keep doing great. And incorporating a Pinterest focused content strategy into your niche that's already doing great is a really good way to ensure that things keep going smoothly for you on Pinterest.
- [13:53]
A
Yeah. And now the other camp here is those, well, we're kind of going to ignore the ones that are already on Pinterest and they're in a great niche and they're still doing great. They just, you know, take your advice on. Just be careful with choosing your topics, future topics, new topics. You may consider just through a different lens, the lens of the values of Pinterest has as a platform, but when it comes to those who have, there's a lot of people who are listening who have an existing website and they are transitioning to Pinterest as a new source of traffic. And so I get a lot of people emailing me and asking like, hey, is my website or is my niche a good fit for Pinterest? And some might say we have a different opinion. We might have a different answer that we would give to people to that question. I know I've answered a question like that and it basically said like, Pinterest can work for any niche. And you totally disagree with me.
- [14:53]
B
But I. Yeah, no, yeah, I mean, I didn't totally disagree with you on the thread.
- [15:01]
A
Yeah, that's right.
- [15:02]
B
Right, Yeah. I don't think that Pinterest can work for any niche, no, I don't think that Pinterest can work for any niche to drive great swaths of traffic. I think that it's important for your niche to identify if you need great swathes of traffic or if there's a lot of value for you in a thousand clicks. Because if there's a lot of value for you in a thousand clicks, I think just about any niche can get a thousand clicks a month from Pinterest. So if you run the kind of business where you have a high conversion rate for your, you know, you engage the people come to your website, you have a high conversion rate on whatever it is you're selling them, and you only need a thousand eyes a month, then like, then maybe there's no bad niche on Pinterest. If you are going to rely on ads to generate your income and your goal is a hundred thousand pages a month, then I think that there are really difficult niches on Pinterest. I think that almost any niche can generate significant traffic over time. I think that the amount of time it takes to generate traffic in some of these, like really shoulder niches might be more than the average person can invest.
- [16:23]
A
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And for some people, they are looking to continue to diversify. Perhaps they have a primary source of traffic being from Google. Maybe they've survived these Google updates, but they're looking to diversify even more because they're afraid maybe one day they might get demoted and, and Google. And so that's where they're looking for other platforms like Pinterest to help supplement their traffic. They don't necessarily need as much traffic as what they're getting from Google, but at least it's better than nothing. It's a harder position when you like lose all of your traffic from Google or some other platform and you're having to make up for it from Pinterest. And that leads me to something that I think is important to distinguish between the types of content that you're creating for Google versus Pinterest. And I think you have some good things to say and a good framework to help creators determine like as they're considering switching to Pinterest either from their existing website or creating a brand new website, how they approach their strategy with their content. And that can affect the niche that they choose. If they're like looking to get into a brand new niche or they're already an existing one. Again, I think we've kind of, we're kind of debunking like there's no good and bad niches or niche. It's more of your content, good and bad content and content strategy that can work for Pinterest. So, yeah, fill us in a little bit. But on your thoughts on the difference between your content approach and Strategy for Google vs Pinterest in this case, where.
- [18:00]
B
You know, we said is it a content strategy approach or is it a niche thing? Let's take a couple bad Pinterest niches. They're what I'm going to call bad Pinterest niches. And then let's see if we can come up with a content strategy approach that would make them good Pinterest niches. So reviews, review websites, I think they're bad Pinterest niches. People don't do research on Pinterest for products. Pinterest has told us that 98%. I wish I had the reference, but I don't. 98% of searches on Pinterest are unbranded, which means they are not going to Pinterest and searching for specific reviews the way people write them for Google Makeup is a really big one on Pinterest. So if you have reviews for 10 different cleansers, facial cleansers, people aren't searching the specific name of the cleanser on Pinterest. And it will be a ridiculously uphill battle to get valuable traffic to a specific review post. Targeting a specific product. But I have seen success with Things like the 25 Best Drugstore Facial cleansers. And so you could take your content, your review content written for Google and you could compile it into Pinterest friendly pieces of content. I wouldn't even do the research to see if you could rank that in Google because, I mean, I think that's going to be a steep, steep ask. I think that there are a lot of big companies that probably have that keyword on Google, but that doesn't mean you couldn't take it on Pinterest. Now the problem with this on Pinterest is content volume. You might have 500 blog posts or a thousand blog posts that are reviews of individual products and you are going to compile them into 50 roundups and that's not the same as 500. And so I would moderate my expectations for a niche like that. But if you are willing to adjust your content strategy, then I would concede that maybe, maybe the niche isn't bad, it's harder.
- [20:31]
A
Right. So I think one that comes to mind is like individual reviews for motocross bikes or dirt bikes.
- [20:40]
B
No, that's a bad niche on Pinterest.
- [20:41]
A
Yeah, you've made me change my mind.
- [20:45]
B
There is bad. These.
- [20:46]
A
Well, I've now I could say if someone is already in that niche and they've got a blog with tons of content on it with all the reviews of individual bikes and maybe some tips and advice, can they repurpose it for Pinterest? And my advice to them is to think about the demographic that they're targeting on Pinterest and would they really want to. So say you convert those into roundups, like the top 25, you know, motocross bikes of 2024 and will you get a lot of traffic to that? Maybe not that much. However, if you change your targeting your content strategy with your demographic, say to there is a female segment of motocross bikers. I don't know. I'm not in that niche side. I don't know if that's the right way to say it, but I know that I'm, I'm really confident that there are women who are in that niche and so gearing your content towards them, towards the thing that they are interested in. I mean, maybe they're more interested in like the, of course there's lots of things to do with like your, your outfits that you wear for riding the bikes to more of the design and aesthetics. Those are just common things that women on the platform are interested in. And so just doing more keyword research to understand the different aspects of your niche that they're interested in. And you might have to completely disregard all content you've created thus far for Google for your male audience and repurpose it for women on the niche or who themselves are perhaps motocross bike riders, but maybe they're not, but they have like a significant other who is or a child who is. And so what kind of content would you create to appeal to them in that context? And again, I think you made a great point that you just can't have the same expectation on the level of traffic that you can get from Pinterest as you can with Google. Especially if you're trying to, like, repurpose your niche to make it work for Pinterest.
- [22:58]
B
Yes. Yeah, I hear all the time from people, oh, I have an SEO background and I just have to let that go. Which isn't entirely true because there is an aspect of SEO for Pinterest, but it is different than SEO for Google. So people coming to Pinterest with a completely SEO focused mind, they seem to struggle. I would say if you just need a easy test, the easy sniff test, just pass your content through the lens of visual importance. So if we go back to the facial cleansers example, like the top 25 drugstore facial cleansers, that's not a visual post. So we already know that that's not going to perform as well as something that is visual. I use this one all the time. But like costume ideas, when people search for costume ideas, they don't want to read four paragraphs of text describing costume ideas, they want to see them. And so if you pass your content through the lens of do people want to see something for this keyword versus do they want to read something for this keyword? If the answer is yes, they want to see it, almost guaranteed there's a place for it on Pinterest. If they don't want to see it, you are going to have to do that content strategy creativity approach that we talked about.
- [24:25]
A
Right, like relationship advice or parenting advice.
- [24:29]
B
Yeah, that's an interesting one because I know people who have done really well with relationship advice on the platform. I also know people that have really struggled with relationship advice on the platform and I think that it is difficult. I would say that's a challenging Pinterest niche. However, once they have broken into the feed, once they have gained traction, it becomes a really good Pinterest niche. And I think the reason is because the vast majority of Pinterest users Will, at some point or another have relationships. I mean, it's just like one of those human conditioned things that we do. And so the pool that you're fishing in is so big, if you are doing motocross roundups, the pool that you're fishing in is just much smaller on Pinterest. So I think that's a second sniff test for your. Your niche. Like, do the demographics that use Pinterest. Is this thing applicable to them? And when. When the thing is applicable to 90% of the people who use Pinterest. This is why food does so well on Pinterest. It's because everybody eats, not everybody cooks. People will still save that idea or they'll still at some point look for this idea or that idea for food, because everybody eats. And so that's a big pond. More competition. Yes, but more potential. I have a very, very, very niche site that I started a few years ago, and I got it to about 30,000 pages a month from Pinterest with like 30 blog posts. But it is really, really an uphill battle because it is too niche. It's too niche and it's too seasonal. And so if I was to niche out on that site and start posting the shoulder niches to it that the same person would be interested in, then there would be like a lot more potential. I'm not gonna do that. I'm just gonna take all the content, put it on my main site, call it a day, redirect it all. But, like, you want to have a larger portion of the Pinterest audience, I think, to look for meaningful traffic.
- [26:46]
A
Yeah. I've seen a lot of new accounts being created in Pinterest this year, and I've seen a good mix of very niche types of websites and blogs. And then I've seen a lot of new ones pop up that are more like a lifestyle blog. And it's not around a particular person. Sometimes it is, and when it is, it's like an AI generated person. And so they're covering like all the big Pinterest topics. Yeah. What are your thoughts on those kind of sites?
- [27:19]
B
Uh, well, I mean, I have one of those sites, I'm not AI generated, but a lifestyle site that has ranking pins in the top 10 from like every different niche that you can imagine, except motocross. So. So, I mean, I think those kind of sites have always done well on Pinterest. I have often wondered in the past three or four years if we hold ourselves back a little bit with those sites. I mean, if the people you're Talking about are using AI, of course this doesn't apply to them. But if I'm creating content in 10 different Pinterest verticals and pinning for 10 different Pinterest verticals, creating content at a human rate, I'm maybe only making 10 articles about nails this year and 10 articles about hair this year and 10 articles about makeup this year. Those are actually different. They are not like in the Pinterest algorithm, when you get related keywords to nails, you want to spread through those like related keywords to nails. If you're only pinning 10, your volume is falling behind, your reach won't be as far. And so I've often wondered if, you know, it takes much longer to grow these broad sites like this to a stable. You know, it's interesting, we talk about, recently we've been talking about the dramatic ups and downs of new accounts on Pinterest, but how much of this could be related to the instability of lack of cornerstone content that has done well on the platform, that has got its reach far and wide, related to all kinds of keywords? And I mean, we see more established accounts. It's like once your account gets to a hundred thousand page views and it stays there for a number of years, it is harder to knock that account down in the updates than these accounts that, like, they go up, they've got three or four or five pins that are doing really well, and they go down when those pins shuffle. Now, I mean, this is kind of off topic because that when that happens, that doesn't mean your niche is bad. It means maybe you need more time on the platform, more established content, more keywords that you're targeting inside your niche. And so I wouldn't say that, you know, if those things happen to you that you're in a bad niche, it's just maybe also that you're in a niche that is going to take more time to really get your fingers into the platform.
- [29:52]
A
Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. And so for people who are looking into starting a whole new website and account for Pinterest, I mean, that could be a route to go. They can go the lifestyle route and they can create lots of content in different verticals. It may take longer to get traction.
- [30:11]
B
And it might fluctuate more. It may take longer to get traction and it might fluctuate more for the early time. I think that's really equally important.
- [30:19]
A
Interesting. Yes. Okay, that makes sense. And then there's the other aspect of, well, you niche down and create, like for every vertical, just create a separate Pinterest account. A separate website for it. That's where I lean towards. That's my recommendation. But it depends. I mean, for some they want to create like a really branded lifestyle blog and that's great. Like you can be very successful doing that. Especially if you're trying to reach people who like more human content than AI content and you're willing to put your real face out there and your real thoughts and everything out there and expertise, then that's a great way to go.
- [31:01]
B
Yeah. So we did an episode on AI and Pinterest and if you haven't listened to that, you know, everybody should go back and listen to that one. But yeah, I mean, when you're creating your site, what is your ultimate goal for the site? Is it to be a long term brand and business or is it just a traffic factory? Which I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I have a site that, that's how it operates. But those are definitely different considerations. They have to be treated differently on the platform. I think they don't have to be, they can be treated differently on the platform.
- [31:41]
A
So then does it make it a good or bad niche if you are choosing one that if you were to go look at Pinterest and see the top ranking pens for keywords for that niche and like a lot of them are AI generated, is that a good sign? A bad sign? You know, I would kind of defer to the Pinterest and AI episode that we did on that. And it's just what your willingness would be to compete with AI. Either compete with like I'm going to join them with my AI content and just try to keep one upping the AI content or I'm going to differentiate myself by creating human only content in an AI saturated niche and carving out a little path for yourself on like originality human content and creating a personal brand behind it.
- [32:32]
B
Yeah, yeah. I think that when you go to Pinterest and search, search for anything actually, not just niches where AI is prevalent, but when you look at it, I think you need to ask yourself, is there a click through intent here? And I think that you get a lot of AI generated content ranking really well on Pinterest where there is no click through intent, they are just saving it because it's a pretty picture and they like the picture. You know, there's an idea in the picture that they want to save. And so you need to be really honest with yourself, like is it even worthwhile to create content in this niche if there's no click through intent when you Talk about AI generated content. Specifically, I think of phone wallpapers. So phone wallpapers is a huge niche on Pinterest. There are accounts for phone wallpapers that have millions of impressions. But if you were to inspect their traffic, I'm guessing it's fractional of their impressions. Because you could generate wallpapers with AI all day and still not translate that into traffic. And even without AI in the conversation, we can apply this to different niches. Quotes. Quotes is a really poor niche on Pinterest if you are just making the quote and posting it to Pinterest because people save the quote without ever clicking through. But I've seen people adjust their content strategy to be like 50 things to write in a graduation card. Then they make roundups of the quotes that they've got, you know, and so you just adjust your content strategy and make it into a decent Pinterest niche. But it's really important that you look at the content that's ranking and ask what is the click through intent? And then make sure that that's a core tenant of your strategy.
- [34:27]
A
Right. So a lot of Roundup content or listicle content will have a high intent for click throughs that people want to go because when they see your pin and it's a roundup or listicle and there's a number going back to, you know, like the 15 best makeup removers. And so people will want to know what they are. And so the pin invites them into your blog posts and they get that information there. However, in some niches I've seen a shift happen with at least search Pinterest search, where Pinterest went from ranking a lot of Roundup content for a keyword to then ranking pins that were targeting the individual ideas instead of the roundups. And people who didn't create content around the individual ideas saw a big drop in traffic because they were relying so much on their Roundup blog posts and pins.
- [35:23]
B
Yeah, that is so interesting. I haven't talked about it on the podcast because we're still quite new, but I'm starting a new site and this is something that I've been wrestling with. I have assumed that the majority of the traffic would come to the roundup. So I'm, you know, content strategy. We're making the pieces of content individually, then we're creating them into roundups. I have assumed that the traffic come to roundups and yet we are putting the majority of the investment into individual pieces of content. And I am very interested to see what happens over the next year as far as whether or not the individual pieces of content will gain traction or if it'll just be the roundup posts and what that looks like on Pinterest and all the things that are going on on Pinterest right now that could affect it. I mean, AI could really easily create the roundups. I don't think it'll as easily create the individual pieces of content, at least not in a valuable way. It'll be very interesting to see what happens.
- [36:27]
A
Yeah. And so like, say for the niche, like recipes, if you go to Pinterest search and you type in chicken recipes or chicken dinner recipes, I bet you'll see a mix of individual recipes. A good chunk of them will be individual recipes and then you'll see some in there that are roundups of like the 15 easiest chicken dinner recipes or something. And it will shift. Like I see, Pinterest will rank more pins higher that are the individual recipes for a certain period of time. And then other times it will just be the roundups. And of course that will change. If you're logged in and you're the type of person who likes roundups and you like seeing, you know, the text on top of the pens and you like the list goal format, Pinterest will often show you more of that type of content in your feed and in the search. So I just say, like, do both. If you can do the individual, individual posts to rank, but also create the roundup pins and roundup posts.
- [37:27]
B
So I haven't thought about it in exactly these terms before, but if someone was to ask me what's a good Pinterest niche or a bad Pinterest niche, I would say if you can't do roundups in your niche or listicle type content, if you can't come up with a way to, to incorporate that into your content strategy, it's probably not a good Pinterest niche.
- [37:48]
A
Yes.
- [37:49]
B
Yeah.
- [37:50]
A
Or topic like can chickens eat tomatoes? That's the example you've given about the difference in intent, like search intent. Because Pinterest is a search engine. So you wanna talk a little bit more about that too.
- [38:03]
B
Well, it's a search engine, but people come to the search engine with a different intent than they go to the Google search engine. They go to Google with the intent to answer questions, they go to Pinterest with the intent to gain ideas or inspiration. And at first glance those might seem like the same thing, but they are not. And so, I mean, if you want to use chickens, the question, you know, can chickens eat tomatoes? That is a question that Is research. People are doing that is a Google question. Research is Google. Unless the research is in the idea stage, which means that people with chickens might look on Pinterest for chicken raising. Ideas like, you have to go back to the broader basic chickens is a difficult one because it's so niche. And so there again, you have to think like, what percentage of the Pinterest audience is this reaching? Is it reaching enough people to make it worth my time? Maybe an easier niche to give this example in is the vacation planning niche. So if people have a question about a very specific location, if they've already decided where they're going and they want to know about a specific hotel, they are going to look for that on Google. If they want to know about the ten best places to visit with kids in Florida, they might look for that on Pinterest. Whether their train of thought is in the ideation stage or the research stage is really critical. And so if your niche is super narrow and Google focused, if it's been Google focused, you might find yourself fleshing out the research questions and struggling on Pinterest.
- [39:50]
A
Yeah. Okay, That's a good way to look at it. I like that framework. Now, what about. So say it's like less visual. So I'm just curious, the kind of person who is going to go to Pinterest search on Pinterest for, you know, the best. Was it the best hotels in Florida with kids and I don't think they'll search for that.
- [40:09]
B
I think they'll search for the best places to visit. I think once you go to hotels, I think you're too specific.
- [40:14]
A
Yes. Okay, so best places to visit. So would those people be more inclined to see? Very. Yeah. How would you target them? Like, are they looking to see things that are more visual versus informational? I'm just trying to figure out the kind of. The difference between the kind of person who's going to search for that on Pinterest versus Google, because they're going to search in both places.
- [40:36]
B
So every niche is a little bit different. And it's important to do your research to see what's ranking there or, you know, to search it yourself on Pinterest and then go back to Pinterest the next day, the day after you searched it, don't search it again. Just scroll your feed. What do they give you that is related to the thing you searched? What kind of pin is it? Because the things that they're going to populate your feed with are going to be the things that are popular generally in that niche. Now I'm not saying that just because it gets in your feed, that's what's getting traffic, because you might have searched, you know, what do chickens eat? Not going to get a lot of traffic. But we have never been to the Florida Keys and we are going to the Florida Keys in the near future. And so I have searched a few things on Pinterest about the keys and it is really interesting to me to see what comes up and what I engage with. And I don't think I'm going to like define what comes up or what I engage with because I think it's so important for everybody who wants to be on Pinterest to do this exercise.
- [41:40]
A
Yeah, that's a great idea. And just to see what it decides to associate with. Because they're going to want to show you more ideas of things that are related to what you've searched for. They're trying to make a guess on what you will be engaging with next, what you're most likely to engage with based upon past behavior of not only you as a individual, but also they're looking at in general other users who have searched for the Florida Keys. What do they engage with next? So it's important to understand the user journey and the continuity between the different topics. And so that's something to consider as you're considering a niche or your content strategy is the whole user journey and the different stages that they can enter into of looking for ideas and maybe doing a better job covering those. So like a quick little thing when people come to me and they're like, hey, I've got a pin that's like popped up and it's my new number one, what should I do next? Should I create another one just like it? And the first thing I say is no, go look at the annotated interests on that. Just copy that URL, put it into pin clicks or look at it logged out of Pinterest and look at those interests and make sure you're creating content that's targeting those as well because often they are very related and a part of that user journey.
- [43:03]
B
Yes. Now you bring up an interesting point and that is that just because there are related interests doesn't make it what I would call a good Pinterest niche. Because Pinterest doesn't give us any idea of click throughs or like what the actual traffic is. Just because the interests exist doesn't mean that there's traffic to them. And, and so it's difficult for new sites, people trying to start at the very, very Very front. It's difficult for these people. But for anybody who has any context on Pinterest, if you are in niche A and you want to know is niche B or topic B going to be good on Pinterest, I would go to Pinterest Trends, plug in niche A, something that you already get any amount of traffic for because there's context for you. Then plug in niche B next to it because. Or topic B, because Pinterest is. When we look at the trends, they're showing us popularity out of a hundred, right? So, like, it's always out of a hundred. If you know that you get a hundred page views a day to topic A and you have for an established amount of time, and then you see that topic B is getting three on that scale where you're getting a hundred. To me, that says I should not expect this niche to be as good as this niche or this topic to be as good as this topic. I don't actually know if that is like, if that plays out in reality the way that I think it does. But I like to use the context of trends from what I already know because it is difficult. If you just go to Pinterest and just start looking at what exists there.
- [44:53]
A
Right.
- [44:54]
B
You can very easily put yourself in that corner where lots of people have created content about whether or not chickens eat tomatoes, and you can really quickly fool yourself into thinking that there's a lot of traffic there.
- [45:05]
A
Yeah, right. It's interesting. I was looking at an account recently and I went to Pinterest Trends and I typed in like the big, the biggest keyword that they are covering on their site. They've got lots of posts about it. I put it into Pinterest Trends and there were three results. That's it. Yet this site is getting, oh, gosh, tens of thousands of clicks a month from Pinterest. And so it's an interesting niche in that they are creating content that does not align well with Pinterest Search, which is what Pinterest Trends is showing you. There's a whole other aspect of things with the home feed. Right. And so that's one of the reasons why I say go look at those annotations, because the annotations are great for targeting the home feed. Pinterest Trends is great for targeting search.
- [45:53]
B
So when you looked at this content, could you see good Pinterest user intent in it, even though it wasn't there in Trends?
- [46:02]
A
Oh, yeah. I'm absolutely sure that there are people searching it on Pinterest. It's just not enough. Volume for it. Yeah, yeah. To even show up on Pinterest trends.
- [46:11]
B
Do you think that there always has to be volume for Pinterest Trends? This is like a kind of related to niche. Do you think there always has to be volume there for terms to show up in Pinterest trends, or do you think that Pinterest sometimes puts trends in there that it thinks will benefit the platform?
- [46:27]
A
Oh, yeah. Between me and you and the person that's listening. Yes. I think they see it with their own ideas.
- [46:34]
B
I do too. I do too. And I think that you have to be really careful not to automatically assume that just because it's there, it means it's a good niche on Pinterest.
- [46:43]
A
Yeah. And for some people, they stay away from it because it can be very saturated and competitive targeting them.
- [46:52]
B
Yeah, true. That's true. And I mean, the first time we talked about Pinterest trends, you said something about it and I said I think Pinterest Trends is trash. You thought that was ridiculous. But I, other than checking context for new ideas that I have against ideas that I already know do well. I actually don't use Pinterest Trends a ton because I don't trust it. They say like, this has gone up 900% and I think like, well, that means nine people searched it instead of zero for some ideas.
- [47:28]
A
Yeah.
- [47:29]
B
And then they've just added it in there because they want us to be focused on those ideas. So I don't think that just because it's in Pinterest trends, it's a good Pinterest niche.
- [47:39]
A
Yes. So you need to be careful about that. Now the case that I'm thinking of this example that doesn't show up a lot in Pinterest trends, I think they just stumbled into Pinterest, like they created this blog as like a personal blog about something in particular and it started to do well on Google and then it started to do really well on Pinterest and it was just a happy accident for them.
- [47:59]
B
That's awesome.
- [48:00]
A
Because it is hard to do research and figure out a good niche for Pinterest without, in my opinion, using Pinterest Trends or even their ads tool where you can plug in keywords and it'll give you keyword ideas and it'll give you search volume that I believe is absolutely false based on my own testing and validating cross referencing those numbers versus what you see in Pinterest Trends. So just be aware that this is probably not totally accurate. And so sometimes you just don't know until you get into it. Like you can make your best guess if you're starting with a brand new account and trying to find a new niche. This is my opinion. There's a high correlation between the number of interests around a topic and how popular it is on the platform. So if you go use a tool like Pinklix that has like all 10/4 million official Pinterest interests that they use to associate with pins as well as users to like match up relevant pins to the right users, if you put in like a really broad keyword, then if you see like you know, 10,000, 20,000 plus results, that's probably a good size niche, you can probably get some decent traffic in. Now I put in some keywords in there and there was like 20 results and that's it. And I would probably stay away from that unless Pinterest Trends tells a different story. But I haven't seen that to be the case.
- [49:22]
B
If there was a keyword that I searched and There was only 20 related interests and everything led to a dead end and Pinterest Trends said it was off the charts, I would still ignore it. Yeah. Because I think Pinterest Trends make stuff up. So. Yeah, but I don't think that their interests make things up.
- [49:39]
A
Yeah. So what was really helpful, like in this particular account that I'm talking about, there was like three results in Pinterest Trends, but I put it into the interest Explorer tool in pin clicks and there were thousands of results. Thousands. So interesting. Yeah, that's why they were doing so well.
- [49:56]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So if you can see user intent though, and that means, you know, is this an inspirational or instructional? We actually didn't touch on instructional, but that also goes along with inspirational because hands on. People do seem to do some research on Pinterest, like in niches where you're going to do something like cook something or sew something or craft something, renovate something, people will do that kind of query. They'll search that kind of query on Pinterest. And so, you know, as long as you can see the Pinterest user intent there, then I'd say that's step one. And then I'd say step two is that, you know, when people are looking at this subject, are they looking to see something versus read something? I'd say that's, you know, step two. If you check the trends, if you check the interest annotations, I don't put as much stock in those because of the things that we talked about, but some, there's some clues that you can get there. That's step three. And then if we've done this research, we've thought about these things. Actually, you know what we didn't talk about either. Is this a shopping niche? Could this niche be abducted by shopping? So this is going back to like where Pinterest has changed the way some niches have acted. In the feeds we've seen niches that were good, they went to bad because of the way Pinterest has treated them. So as you are checking to see if your niche is a good niche or not, I think now we should be asking ourselves, is this a niche that Pinterest can abduct and make into a shopping niche? So can you explain what a shopping niche is?
- [51:46]
A
Yeah. Okay, so the example from earlier, the roundup for makeup removal products.
- [51:53]
B
Yeah.
- [51:53]
A
I would not touch that with a ten foot pole. Great.
- [51:56]
B
Tell me more about that. Because I was already thinking it was a terrible niche and then that was just my example of how to save it.
- [52:01]
A
So it used to do well.
- [52:03]
B
Okay.
- [52:03]
A
And it can. There might be someone listening here that's doing really well in that niche. But what I'm observing with Pinterest search at least is that they're putting more products as results for the pins than they are roundups. And so unless you are able to sell the product yourself, just be careful because Pinterest is wanting to become a shopping platform. If you go and listen to any of their recent quarterly earnings calls and you count the number of times they mentioned the word shop shopping, it's crazy. Don't make it a drinking game. You won't last very long. It's what they're all about right now. And so if you are talking about products, just be careful, tread lightly if you're picking a new niche. I would stay away from products. I would. I'm not saying you should. I would stay away from a lot of products unless I sell those products myself. Because that's what I'm seeing Pinterest rank more and that's because they partnered with Amazon and so they're gonna be rolling out the ability to do in app shopping directly through Amazon. So. And even Amazon, it's interesting, Amazon has their own roundup pages that will show up in Google. So it'll be interesting to see if they will show those somewhere in Pinterest or will it be the individual products. But basically some people are gonna be looking at the Pinterest search results for product oriented search and they're going to be judging and determining if they're going to buy that product straight from the Pinterest results. And they're not going to go to your blog post. That's a little scary.
- [53:33]
B
Yeah, it is. And it brings up. Okay, we, so we've kind of done this whole niche discussion. Even though we had our four camps of creators that we laid out in the beginning. I probably just because my brain doesn't separate anything into buckets, we've just been like talking about all the niches as they apply to everybody. You just said, you know, if you're considering a niche, I'd stay away from this one. But along with that, if you are on Pinterest and you've seen a decline or you're, you're in a strong niche and you're doing well and you're thinking about what you're going to continue to do that could do well, or you're asking, well, why has this declined? You need to consider if the things that you have targeted in the past could have been shifted on the platform in into shopping. Because we know that the things Pinterest does now affect the things that we've created historically. And so this is something that we need to be aware of for both new niches, new Pinterest creators and old niches, people who've been on the platform for a long time. If you have a really strong account, now is the time to take advantage of that strong account to create content that doesn't lend itself to shopping and get it out there while you have lots of traction through those related interests of the things that might be shopping later.
- [54:52]
A
Yeah. So at the end of the day, I think what this is coming down to is there's not, there's a little asterisk next to is there like a good niche, a bad niche? For Pinterest, it really comes down to your content strategy for it. But if you get the chance to start over, hopefully there's some things that you took away from this conversation. I think approaches that you can take basically doing your research, I think no matter what, doing your research, doing your keyword research, searching Pinterest trends if you want to and Pinterest ads keyword tool, tool like pin clicks to see the. All the interests. And then another recommendation I make is keep your eye on the Explorer page, on Pinterest and the Today page and look at those. I think over time I know people want to make a quick decision on what they're going to be covering in Pinterest, but saturating yourself and what Pinterest is showing to other users will start to make new connections in your brain on what can do well with Pinterest and what won't do well. And then just keeping up with the search results and how those are changing, I would definitely keep track of your biggest keywords and look at those search results like once a week or once a month at least. And that's going to help continue to keep you informed on how things are changing with the platform and what topics are doing well. And sometimes you just need a little bit of luck and a little bit of patience.
- [56:20]
B
You know, I really want to add that sometimes I think people respond really negatively to when we say, like things are changing. You need to be watchful of these things and let time pass. People respond negatively to that because it's scary and frustrating, but it is how Pinterest has always been. So I cannot remember a time on Pinterest where the statement that you just made isn't applicable. It was true in 2016 when they stopped their real time feed. It was, you know, true in 2018 when they crushed all the weight loss and anxiety and postpartum keywords. And it was true earlier this year when they started pushing towards shopping. And just because it's true that Pinterest is always changing and that we always need to be adapting, we always need to be watching to learn about the platform, doesn't mean that we can't see success in the interim. So it's very worthwhile to get going or to keep going. That said, if somebody's been listening to this conversation and they've heard everything we said and they're like, oh, I think I'm in a bad niche, or I think that I have taken a bad content strategy approach to my niche. What should they do moving forward? I get this question all the time. Should they abandon that account that they have maybe pinned 2000 pins on, or should they delete those pins or should they just start new boards and start pinning? What do you think?
- [58:04]
A
I think this is a great setup for another episode.
- [58:08]
B
Okay. Works for me.
- [58:11]
A
Lots to unpack with that one. And so I think we'll cover that very soon.
- [58:16]
B
That sounds good. This is a good. This is a good place to wrap up.
- [58:20]
A
That's right. But if you are curious after listening to this episode and you are feeling really stuck, I don't know, send us an email pentalkpodcastmail.com and maybe we can help or post in one of our communities if you're in our community. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of Pentalk. Head over to Pentalk Podcast.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.