← Pin Talk - Pinterest Tips and Updates for Creators
Pin Talk - Pinterest Tips and Updates for Creators
S1E4 In a “Bad” Pinterest Niche? This Is for You
01:01:49
Loading summary
Transcript165 lines
- [00:02]
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, on our last episode about good and bad Pinterest niches, we ended it with a bit of a cliffhanger, didn't we?
- [00:19]
B
Yes. We said, if you've listened this far and you've discovered that you are probably pinning in a bad niche, how should you move forward? And we have hashed this out between the two of us a little bit, and it is a really hard question to answer.
- [00:36]
A
Yeah, that's right. It's really a very complex topic, and I would like to say that we're going to give you really clear answers on what you should do. But to be honest, we don't have all the answers here, but we are going to give you some things to think about so that you don't make a rash decision, but more of an informed one. And so it's up to you at the end of the day to determine what you're gonna do. But I encourage you to continue listening and maybe we'll give you some good aha moments and you'll walk away a little bit clearer on what you should do.
- [01:10]
B
Yeah. And I think I would add to that that niche is such an important foundation for success on Pinterest that it's worth devoting the time to consider if your niche is a bad niche or if there's a different problem that you might be facing on your Pinterest account. I think that we too often put blinders on when it comes to all of the questions around niche. And so after the episode that we did last time, and if you haven't listened to that one about niche on Pinterest, we would like to refer you back to that one, because we go over a lot of things that we are not going to talk about specifically today, but we did come up with a few more points that we would like to cover to help people determine if they're in a bad niche before we even get into what do I do if I'm in a bad niche?
- [02:03]
A
Yeah, that's right. There's just a lot of nuance to it. So, I mean, to start, Carly, how would you define a bad niche for Pinterest?
- [02:12]
B
So last time, in the last episode, we talked about a few of the specifics. Like, you know, is this an image friendly niche? Is this a niche that Pinterest smiles on? Like, is there too many words in your content that might be flagged as far as the community guidelines goes. And so we kind of have talked about all these things and we have listed out specific questions that you could ask yourself and say yes or no to them. If you say yes to most of them, then they're probably good pitchers niches. If you say no to most of them, you maybe have more questions to ask yourself before you determine if they're good or bad fitness niches. So what are these questions that we can ask ourselves about our niche?
- [03:01]
A
Yeah, so, well, before we listed the questions, I listed a couple things that I thought we could talk about, and that was what tools can I use? So I guess that's a question like, are there tools that I can use? Yeah, like Pinterest trends came to mind. I mean, start punching in some of your keywords there, and if they're showing up there, you've got a really good chance of doing well. But if not, there's a free tool. We'll link it up in the show notes here. But it's a free interest explorer tool that I built and I've grabbed what I believe are the top 20,000 topics or interests within the Pinterest platform. And so if you start plugging in some of the keywords that you're covering or the topics into this and you start seeing a lot of them pop up, then the signs are getting better that you're doing okay, you're in a good niche, but there's maybe still more explore there. And then beyond that, it kind of depends on your how much time you spend on the platform, how much searching you do for your topics, and following accounts that are creating content similar to yours. I mean, this is something we haven't really talked about as we were discussing this episode before we started Record, but I like to do a search on Pinterest for accounts and to start punching in keywords to see are there other Pinterest accounts that are creating content that's very similar to the types of content I'm creating? And what are the monthly views for those accounts?
- [04:28]
B
Oh yeah, that's a great point. What are the monthly views? Because just because you find the accounts out there creating that content, that doesn't mean that it's a good Pinterest niche.
- [04:38]
A
I would say an account that has more than a hundred thousand monthly views is worth considering. That's my number, based on my experience. Okay, if you had to come up with a number, what would be yours? You look a little surprised.
- [04:52]
B
Yeah, I always look at an account with a hundred thousand views and I think, how old Is this account, if this account is less than six months old, this account could be doing better unless it's in a niche that is not a great Pinterest niche. I think that if you are in a great Pinterest niche, your account should be over a million monthly views.
- [05:13]
A
Okay.
- [05:13]
B
Yeah, but there's a question about, and we touched on this last time, there's a question about how much traffic you need to generate to be a viable business. So just because I think you need to have a million monthly views, that's for an ads based business. That's not for a business that only needs to convert a hundred clients a month.
- [05:33]
A
Right.
- [05:34]
B
And so those are different things.
- [05:35]
A
Yeah. Because we're talking about driving traffic, as much traffic as you can to your site. I think when you do a search on Pinterest for accounts so specifically they will show you just the number of followers. And so I think that's what I'm looking at initially as I'm scrolling through the list. Sure. Paying attention. Who has the most followers that's most relevant to my particular niche.
- [05:58]
B
Sure. That's a good point. Because people will not follow content that they're not interested in. I would also say you kind of made me think about it. We didn't talk about this earlier either. But if you start a new account on Pinterest and you don't do any searches and then you look to see what content Pinterest is filling the feed with, that'll be a really good indication of what niches could do well on Pinterest. Because you haven't even prompted Pinterest to show you anything yet. They're just spitting out content that they think is relevant for somebody in your demographic. And they're not going to come out of the gate with their most obscure micro niche stuff. They are going to come out of the gate with the stuff that is most likely to engage the most people.
- [06:42]
A
I think that makes sense. Yep. That's what I would do if I ran Pinterest. Okay, so one of the other things is that we talked about with this questions. Ask yourself, can I look at any data or analytics to determine if I'm in a bad niche or a good one? What are your thoughts on that?
- [06:59]
B
I guess it depends on the data and analytics. Like you mentioned earlier, you could look inside the Pinks interest tool or look at the Pinterest trends and if you're seeing data there, that's a good indication that there's some activity in the niche. If you want to look inside your own data and analytics and try to make a determination about your niche. I don't really think that's dependable information because there's no context, there's no comparison. You know, you might have a hundred thousand monthly views and you might be getting 25 clicks a month. And unless you have something to compare that to, that's difficult to say, oh, this is good or this is not good. I mean, you might be very disappointed in the 25 clicks with the a hundred thousand monthly views, but that actually might be great for your niche. You don't know if it's a niche that nobody ever clicks through, maybe that's great. If you're getting 10,000 click throughs on a hundred thousand monthly views, that might be really poor for your niche. And you don't know because there's no graphs in there that say like this is great, this is the bar. And you mentioned earlier, people have asked you, people have asked me this over the years, what's a good click through rate? What's a good outbound click rate?
- [08:18]
A
Yep. Guess what? I figured it out. What have I told you yet? Yeah, I know exactly what is.
- [08:23]
B
Okay, what is it?
- [08:24]
A
We'll never know.
- [08:25]
B
Another.
- [08:26]
A
Just kidding. Yes. I thought you'd be amazing. I think Pinterest knows and that's pretty much it. Unless there's like a wide scale poll that we can create per survey across every major niche possible with like at least a thousand counts per niche, there's just no way for us to know. Unless you know a handful of people who are in the same niche as you and they're willing to give you some of their data from Pinterest analytics, then sure, you can rely on that. But how often is that the case?
- [09:00]
B
Right? Yeah, but you need that bar, you need a comparison. And I would actually caution, I did make this caveat a moment ago. When you look at an account, you know, if you're going to compare to a friend that's giving you their data, you need to also take into consideration things like the age of the account, the amount of content that they have put out there, their Pinterest strategy versus just comparing niche to niche. We can't just say, I'm in this niche, you're in this niche, why is your traffic better than mine? Or you know, oh, you've got these many clicks. I'm happy with this many clicks. We can't say that because I do think, you know, when I look at an account and I see that it has a hundred thousand monthly views, if that account is only six months old, I don't judge it the same way that I would judge an account that is three years old with a hundred thousand monthly views. And I could say the same thing about the amount of content. When I see an account that has 30 pieces of content linked to Pinterest and they have a hundred thousand monthly views, I do not judge that account the same way as I would an account that has 300 or 3,000 pieces of content linked to Pinterest. And it's important that we don't put everybody in the same box.
- [10:14]
A
Yeah, that's fair. That's a good point. So, yeah, when it comes to data and analytics, it's hard to judge based on that. So we've come up with some other questions you can ask to determine if you're in a good niche or a bad one. And side note, I'm curious if at the end of, like this season of this podcast, if I'm going to start saying niche, because I keep slipping that in every once in a while when we're talking, I'm trying really hard while we're recording to not say niche. Carly's from Canada. If you don't know, I'm from the usa, so. Well, I guess people in the USA say niche as well sometimes. So sorry if this is driving some of you crazy that you hear it said both ways.
- [10:54]
B
It's funny because itch doesn't have an E on the end. And I think that's why I have to say it with okay.
- [11:03]
A
All right. Anyways, I just want to throw that out there. Don't be mad at me if you are getting frustrated that I'm saying it differently than Carly or vice versa. All right, so moving on. All right, here's a question. How easily can you create your content using AI?
- [11:20]
B
Yes, this is a great question. Do you think that it's better or worse for your niche if you can create content with AI?
- [11:31]
A
I think a case could be made for both sides of that. Okay, now, if you're going to be using AI because it does a pretty good job creating content, then you have to level up your prompts with ChatGPT with image generators, because the playing field is almost evened out and it's going to be very easy for a lot of people to create content same way that you are. But. But how are you going to differentiate your content versus theirs? How are you going to introduce new ideas into the platform using AI? And that was one of the things I talked about in our AI episode, and it's a common misconception and a Lot of people, I think, get wrong who don't spend a ton of time using AI tools that it can create some really unique, interesting ideas and content. You just have to know how to prompt it well order to do that. So there's that side of things, like, yes, you could be in a good niche that, yes, there's a lot of AI content in there, but you have to work a little bit harder with it. At the same time, it's also going to be very crowded. And so that's just something you gotta go into with eyes wide open or if you realize, like, hey, I've been in this niche for a long time and now I'm seeing it flooded with AI. What do I do? You know, do I pivot? Do I get out of this niche or do I, you know, try to level up my AI skills or do I just keep creating human only content and hope that that will in the end bring enough traffic and revenue and I'll be happy with it?
- [13:08]
B
So we don't have a yes or a no answer that we would like people to be able to give for the question, how easily can you create content with AI? But the question had to be in this list of questions because it's so important. You can't ignore this question now when you're choosing a niche on Pinterest.
- [13:23]
A
Yep. You really can't. So good luck with that one. But you got to face it and, and deal with it at some point.
- [13:31]
B
Yeah, yeah. And so it's put it on your list of considerations or I guess not just if you're choosing a niche, but if you are trying to decide, am I in a bad niche or a good niche, do I move forward in this niche or do I change my strategy or whatever. It's an important consideration regardless. And it was at the top of our list.
- [13:53]
A
Yeah, it was my number one. Well, not quite my number one, but it was up there. Okay. So now with AI, it's really good at creating images. And which leads us to another question, is how visual is your niche? Are people coming to the platform to explore pictures? And you had mentioned that before we started recording and it just prompted me to remember that when people sign up for Pinterest, they think of it as a platform for images. And so it's a little tricky that there are plenty of bloggers out there that are doing well with Pinterest and they are not in a visual niche.
- [14:29]
B
Yeah.
- [14:30]
A
And. But the point here is that people will come into the platform with the visual intention, but they will engage with non Visual content. So just know that you kind of come in with the handicap and that if you're not in a visual niche, then just know that majority of people are not coming to look at your content. Yeah. You know what I mean?
- [14:53]
B
Yeah. This point that you've made, one of the questions that I would encourage everybody to ask about, you know, can this niche do well on Pinterest is how much of the Pinterest population will engage with this subject consistently once it gets in front of them. And so if you are thinking, okay, well, this niche isn't really visual, like let's give examples like finances or relationships. People aren't coming to Pinterest to see pictures of those things. But a huge part of the Pinterest population, the human population, is affected by finances and relationships. And therefore you are not talking to 10% of the people on Pinterest, 15% of the people on Pinterest. When you are trying to get your content out there and the fish in the pond are fewer, that is an uphill battle, especially when your content's not visual. If your content is visual, people will come to the platform to look for your content. They might not come there to look for finances or relationships, but if, if you are patient enough. That is one thing that I have found in common with these niches that aren't visual is that it takes them a lot more time to get out there. So patience is a real key factor in success when you're in these niches that aren't visual. But because we've seen these niches, when they speak to a large population of the Pinterest users, we've seen them do well, we can't disqualify them completely just based on the visual question. So that's kind of the follow up question.
- [16:31]
A
Yeah, that's a fair point. So there's three primary human centric topics that you can always create content, products and services around because they're always going to be around and that's health, wealth and love or relationships.
- [16:47]
B
Sure.
- [16:47]
A
Right. So those three things. So if you're creating content around that or products or services, I think you'll, you'll be fine. It's just how are you going to find your unique angle with it?
- [16:57]
B
Right, yes, the unique angle that takes us to our next question is are there always unique ideas, angles and products for the niche?
- [17:07]
A
Right, yeah, because there are some where. Oh gosh, it's. Imagine one of the, one of the ideas I have down here of like a bad example is like dirt bike repair or like, let's just say, like, how to change an oil on a dirt bike. That's not going to change very much. Sure, it might change a little bit from model to model over time, but in general, the principles are kind of the same. And so there's really not a lot of newness being added into it. And so that's going to be a challenging one. But if there's something where there's just a natural like, trend that kind of comes and goes, new trends are coming in for the topic, that is a great sign that you are probably in a good niche. I mean, fashion comes to mind as like one of the easiest, right? Fashion is always changing new ideas.
- [17:57]
B
Extremely visual.
- [17:58]
A
Extremely visual. It's one of the reasons why it's one of the top niches on Pinterest. And so think about it from whatever topics you're covering for your site. Like, are there trends? So one of the things I like to use is the Google app. I only use it primarily for the Google Discover feed because sometimes it will show me new trends that are coming in. And so I like to get ideas from there. And so that's a recommendation I would make is start Googling on the Google app on your phone with some of the topics in your niche and see what pops up in the Google Discover feed. And that will kind of give you some ideas on are there other people reporting different trends and different products, different services, just like constantly evolving information, that kind of stuff within your niche. And I don't know, some are just kind of set in stone on like, okay, another one comes to mind is gardening, like, how to take care of a sunflower. Right? How to grow a sunflower. I mean, sure, you can take different angles on the different climates that you're in, but I don't know that advice. Does it really change that much? Is there a lot of trends with taking care of plants? I'm not saying it's a bad niche, really bad niche, but it's just an example of like, is there really? I got a lot of new ideas about how to take care of that sunflower and how to grow one.
- [19:18]
B
Well, I think you bring up a great point and we talked about this a lot in our last episode, which again, if you haven't listened to it, go back and listen to that one. But sometimes we're in a really great niche, but we've got the wrong content approach. And gardening is one where I would say you've just defined a bad content approach. Because I know lots of gardening bloggers that do really well on Pinterest, but their content that does well is companion plants for sunflowers. And that's never changing because. Or, you know, what looks great with sunflower or backyard sunflower ideas? And if you are, I mean, you know, if you're planting sunflowers and you're demonstrating what looks good with a sunflower, or ways to use sunflowers in your backyard, those things, those visual ideas, when people see that picture, they. They do really well. And you can bring up new ideas and new angles there. Like you said, you can't bring up so many new ideas for how to care for a sunflower. But that's a Google question. It's not a Pinterest question. And so I think that you've just described a bad content strategy in a niche that has potential on the platform because flowers are a visual thing, but care for flowers isn't.
- [20:31]
A
Right? Yes. And you brought up Google. And so that's another thing to consider is are people going to Google first in general when it comes to your topic? Which leads me to how often do you see Pinterest ranking in Google for the topics that you're covering?
- [20:48]
B
Oh, that's okay.
- [20:49]
A
Pinterest is ranking really high for a lot of those topics. That's a good sign, at least that Google thinks that Pinterest is very related and Pinterest has content that's very related to it.
- [21:00]
B
I agree that that's a great indication of if Pinterest might be a good fit.
- [21:05]
A
Yeah. So gardening can be a great niche for Pinterest, but often I see creators struggling in a great niche like this. They're creating good content, but it's not Pinterest friendly. And we're like, yeah, like the niche makes sense. It's like a top 20 niche in Pinterest. But the kind of content you're writing and creating pins for is just not resonating.
- [21:26]
B
Right. Is your approach bad? Not the niche that's bad. And that is a real consideration. I talk to people every day and they see other accounts doing really well and they feel like the Pinterest is treating my niche differently or whatever right now. But that's not necessarily the case. It's, do you have a bad content strategy, a bad pinning strategy, do you have bad pin design or bad Pinterest keyword research or a combination of all of those things? Are you just creating content for Google and have been for 10 years, and you don't know how to make the pivot? And all of those things are really important when it comes to success on Pinterest Yeah.
- [22:06]
A
So there's an example that you have shown me recently that was eye opening and that's one in the travel niche. So. Okay, I want to give an example of how someone can be in the travel niche, which is a great niche for Pinterest, but their approach for the content was just bad.
- [22:24]
B
Okay. Yeah. So I actually could think of a few accounts off top my head. People go to Google to search for travel things. They do that, you know, you get a question in your mind, you search it on Google. That doesn't mean they won't search it on Pinterest, but it's generally at a different point in the user journey. The planning of a trip, for example. Or like, is the trip still in its ideation stage or. Well, that's a good Pinterest approach if it's an ideation stage or actually Pinterest is also okay once they're very specific, but they're still gonna look for a specific kind of content. Hotel reviews, restaurant reviews, super local destinations that the person who's traveling doesn't even necessarily know about. I have an example, actually. This happened to me personally years ago. We were going to Paris, I think we were on a layover and we landed in this airport and then the. I don't know what happened. The flight got canceled or we were there for a long time and we were like, we don't know where we are or what we're going to do here. And we went out into the town that we were in and we had a fantastic time. In fact, it was like one of the highlights of the trip. It was a fantastic town to visit, but I had never heard of it before I got there. And I could have easily written a blog post afterwards if I had been a blogger at the time about the top 15 things to do in this town. But when I was planning the trip, even though this was on my way or, you know, like could have been my final destination, but I was planning the trip, I had never heard of it. I had no idea that I should even search for things to do there. And so I wouldn't have started my trip planning process by searching for this specific name of this specific place, even though it was amazing. And that is a thing that really holds back travel sites, specifically writing real local content about these cool places that nobody's ever or, you know, the broad Pinterest audience hasn't heard of. People, once they're in the situation where they're going there, they might search for that content and engage with the content, but your Views, your traffic will never be as high as if you take the most broad approach you can to it, which is 15 cool destinations you've never heard of in the country that that city's in. Does that make sense?
- [24:50]
A
Okay, so what I've seen is, and in those cases, they will continue to take content that they basically written for Google. It's like long tail content. It's very specific. People are searching for it on Google and then they will just continue to create pins for it over and over again in Pinterest. Each one may look a little bit different, but they're just kind of putting lipstick on a pig at the end of the day with that because that content is never really going to go anywhere because it's just so specific and you just keep pinning it and it's diluting your account. Just continue to create all those kind of pins that are really not going to get a lot of traction.
- [25:27]
B
Okay, I feel like this statement diluting your account kind of moves us forward in the conversation to if you've been pinning in a niche that is not a good Pinterest niche, what does that mean, diluting your account?
- [25:44]
A
Yeah, I don't know if I've ever actually said it that way.
- [25:46]
B
Oh, it's a good way to say it.
- [25:49]
A
Yeah. So I have a theory that there is an account level score that Pinterest will assigned to you and it's gonna be based on the overall performance of all of your pens and boards. And so if you've got a lot of pens that are not getting saves and clicks and then you've got boards that are following that same pattern, then it's lowering your overall score. And so you're better off having fewer pens that are highly targeted good Pinterest topics. Then they're gonna outperform versus having a bunch of pins that a lot of em are not relevant and they're not getting much engagement and clicks. And so it's essentially diluting it. It's low in your score and it's going to be hurting your best performing pins because of that lower overall account score.
- [26:40]
B
Okay, we haven't discussed this before, but I've heard you touch on it a couple times when we talk about account score and we talk about dilution and highly targeted topics. This maybe kind of, this is a sidebar, but like it used to be a really big conversation. How niche does your account have to be if you're pinning in fashion and recipes and home decor, are you diluting? You know, maybe this is the approach you've taken do you have to be more niche? This is not specific, but we used to think that having lots of boards that are really not relevant to your niche could hold you back a lot. After this conversation and after watching the way Pinterest has behaved for the last year, I would almost say it's not that simple. We can't distill it down to, you know, if you've got this board that's not in this niche, if these are both great Pinterest niches, it's actually probably fine. If this is a bad Pinterest niche and this is a good Pinterest niche. Now you're diluting the account with the weight of this board that isn't getting engagement because it's a bad Pinterest niche, not because it's not related to this niche. That's kind of where my brain has gone now after this conversation.
- [27:55]
A
Yeah, that's the way I see it.
- [27:56]
B
That's the way you see it too. Okay.
- [27:58]
A
Yep.
- [27:58]
B
Interesting. I have kind of shifted my language in the past year, I would say it's been about a year to saying it's fine to pin in lots of popular Pinterest niches, but it's important to remember that while you're pinning in kind of four different niches, if they're not related, you're kind of creating four different Pinterest accounts, which is fine. It can do well over time, but the person who's only pinning in this niche is going to create four times the content you are in this time. And so there's still that consideration when it comes to niche and the broadness or the narrowness of your niche.
- [28:35]
A
Yeah, that's true. And if all you're doing is just covering the most popular topics and you're not finding that unique angle and bringing a fresh idea right, then you're really going to be struggling. I see a lot of new Pinterest accounts that are popping up and they're more of a general lifestyle Pinterest account. They're covering all the big topics, but they're just rehashing the same ideas.
- [28:59]
B
Yes. I see a lot of people that get a few wins that way. Maybe it makes them think that that's a good approach. But over and over and over again, my biggest wins have been the unique angles, the wins that stick, the ones that, the pins that stay viral for a year, they are not usually the same thing. Cut and dried again. And so for long term success, I would agree that it's really important to be able to come up with those new Angles and ideas.
- [29:33]
A
So I want to cover a couple more examples that we've talked through on bad niches. I mentioned dirt bike repair as one of them. And part of that is because it's geared towards a male audience, which we know is not the primary audience for Pinterest. So you're already at a limitation if you're targeting the male audience. But I've seen some successful accounts targeting the male audience, but oftentimes it has something to do with the male audience that crosses over with some of the most popular topics like fashion, that kind of stuff. And there's a way that you could change the angle in which you cover that topic. Like, I know some people who are in the fishing niche and they're getting decent traffic from Pinterest. Actually, I just was having a conversation with my dad recently and we were talking about Pinterest. It came up and he was like, yeah, I use Pinterest all the time. And I was shocked. I had no idea.
- [30:24]
B
That's funny.
- [30:24]
A
And he, like, uses it for, you know, he's really into fly fishing. And so, yeah, he's like, looking up stuff. Fly fishing. And he's really into bears.
- [30:32]
B
That's funny.
- [30:33]
A
So there are men on there.
- [30:34]
B
There's bear pictures on Pinterest?
- [30:35]
A
Yeah, like, you know, they have like the world's fattest bear contest.
- [30:39]
B
No, I didn't.
- [30:40]
A
Every year. Oh, it's a whole thing. He introduces me. Yeah, it's a whole thing. They just announced the winner, like a couple weeks ago.
- [30:46]
B
The people grow a bear.
- [30:48]
A
No, like real, real bears.
- [30:50]
B
So they take a picture of the.
- [30:51]
A
Bear, but yeah, they take a picture. They follow these bears around because, you know, they're like, they're getting ready to hibernate this time of year.
- [30:57]
B
Yeah. In Canada we say things like, don't follow the bears around. It's not safe.
- [31:02]
A
That's probably wise. Yeah, well, someone's following them around to take their picture. They'll take it like before the beginning of their pre hibernation season, whatever that's called. And then they'll take a picture like around right now. And it's crazy to see the difference in how big those bears are.
- [31:17]
B
And it's on Pinterest.
- [31:18]
A
Yeah, it's on Pinterest.
- [31:19]
B
That's cool.
- [31:20]
A
Okay, so there's that and then there's like stock trading, which. You had some interesting things to say about that.
- [31:27]
B
Yeah, I think that's a really good example of a niche where the content is consumed by people who are looking for news right now. And it has to be news that is relevant to right now. And in stocks, the pertinent information to the thing that you are trying to do changes really quickly. And so the user's not interested in an article written six months ago or three months ago, or sometimes even three or four weeks ago. And because it takes a little bit of time sometimes to gain traction on Pinterest, I think that this is a bad niche. And not only that, I mean, the average person, if we go back to some of the questions we asked the average person in the Pinterest population who is going to be closer to the beginning of their journey or the ideation stage, they aren't actually interested in the images that you would use for stocks because these would be charts and whatnot. The people who know how to read charts, they're not going to Pinterest to look at them. They are going to Google to search for the charts from the timely news places. Stock trading is a great example of a niche that doesn't satisfactorily answer any of our questions. Any of them? Not one. I don't think so. Except for maybe the always the new ideas. There's always new news, but that doesn't mean that people are going to start coming to Pinterest for it. So that's a really good example of a bad niche. And I don't even think that in this niche it'll ever come down to the creator or the strategy. The strategy that the creator's using. This is. That's a rough niche. You might get traction on a few articles about making money or, you know, quick, kind of like earn, earn quick money. Yeah, there might be a few. And in this niche, you might only need 100 conversions a month to make good money. So maybe it's still worth it. I don't know. Just big circle.
- [33:28]
A
I was thinking about like gift ideas. Say someone has a husband who's a stock trader. Right. So like, what are some gift ideas there? Yeah, yeah, that's one thing coming to mind right now. So there's some unique angles you could take with it for people who are really into stocks in your life and how that intersects with, say, gifts or decor or fashion or recipes or food. Sometimes there's some crossover there. But just understand that you're still going to be limited on how much traffic you're going to bring in.
- [33:58]
B
Yes.
- [33:59]
A
And then there's some things like really technical stuff that provide like really specific instructions or, you know, diagrams that people have to follow. You know, tutorials like really in depth, very technical. And it's again, not related to a popular topic. Like there's a DIY is a great niche for Pinterest to an extent. Right. You gotta keep things very practical and doable by the general population. And that's something that you've mentioned a few times. And that's been really impactful for me. Hopefully has been for, you know, whoever's listening to this, that just remember, like, how much of the population does my primary topics intersect? You know, you can ask 10 people on the street, like, hey, how often do you engage with? And then, you know, whatever your primary site topic is about. And if, like, you know more than five out of those ten say, like, oh, yeah, like I engage with that, like once a month or a couple times a year. Like, that's, that's a good indicator that, all right, you might be in a good Pinterest niche.
- [35:01]
B
Yeah.
- [35:02]
A
And so, like, something that, like, people like to engage with often. And that's something. I mentioned, one of those things you mentioned news. But it could be a good niche in some cases. I liked your example that you gave on how news could work.
- [35:15]
B
Okay. I did mention earlier that when we were discussing, you know, what news doesn't work, what news does work. So really current news where, like, you know, is this thing affecting people right now, that's not a great picture of niche, but human interest news, like celebrity news, for example, those things can still be relevant and interesting years later. Now, the celebrity niche actually, like, I think brings up all kinds of other issues, like, do you have the right to use the picture of that person? It is interesting to note, just, you know, on the heels of our AI conversation, it is specifically against Pinterest community guidelines to pin images of people. They've got the language in there right now around the election, but they've gone as far as to say you can't pin images of people that are created to influence the election. I think it is five minutes until they've got. You can't pin images of people who are real people that have been created by AI, because that's. What's the word? Like, we've already seen celebrities suing companies for using AI images. It's liability. Is that the right word?
- [36:29]
A
I don't know. I know what you're talking about.
- [36:31]
B
Okay. Hopefully other people know what I'm talking about. Yeah, they've already got it in there in one instance. It's not long, in my opinion, until it's in there in other instances where we're using someone's face on a fake body. So I think, you know, be careful when you go into the celebrity news niche. Regardless of if I just said it might be okay for Pinterest or not. That's not me encouraging people to go into it.
- [36:51]
A
Yeah, good point. So what about. What about movies and TV shows? Especially TV shows, which can be constant, like new ideas, new points of discussion or interest. In a TV show.
- [37:04]
B
I have a blog post about the best Christmas movies to watch with your toddlers, and it routinely does well. And so I would hazard a guess that if you took the right content strategy approach, being broad and general, not a specific review on a specific TV show, because people go to Google for that, not Pinterest, then I would hazard a guess that there would be some traffic to be had, but I would definitely take the angle. Like Listicles, like, you know, 15 great weekend movies. I read an article when I was pregnant that was like the 10 best movies to watch when you're waiting for your baby or something like that. I'm not the kind of person that reads those kind of articles, but I read that one and the one on my site gets traffic. And so I would think that there's traffic to be had if. If an account with no other reach in the niche can generate traffic, an account dedicated to the niche with the right strategy approach can generate traffic.
- [38:15]
A
Yeah.
- [38:15]
B
I'm curious if you thought that I was going to say that that was a terrible niche.
- [38:21]
A
Yeah, well, I keep going back to. Okay, how much does this affect the larger population? Sure. So thinking about like a TV show, a popular one that's still ongoing is like the Bachelor. And so I could see that that could do fairly well. That's going to reach a lot of the female audience and it's current. There's some new things being added to it.
- [38:43]
B
But is it old news? Still interesting?
- [38:45]
A
All right, so it depends on your approach.
- [38:46]
B
Right.
- [38:47]
A
Are you going to do like some top 10, you know, listicles based on the. On the show versus reporting like the latest gossip from the latest episode. I don't think that would necessarily work.
- [38:59]
B
Okay, I see what you're saying. Yes. So it's about content strategy approach.
- [39:03]
A
Yeah, about the strategy. Right. Like I've seen the show like one time that first season outta curiosity, but other than that I haven't. So I don't know what I'm talking about. But you know, just thinking about the, you know, top 10 most watched Bachelor episodes, something like that, um, and just, I don't know, I, I would ask AI for some ideas and it would probably give me some really Interesting listicle ideas. So I think those could do fairly well with that audience. But I don't know if I would create a whole account just on it.
- [39:31]
B
But if that's your passion and I think that if your person was to go into that niche without doing any looking at it, I would say 99% sure that's one of those one year accounts. Like it's not going to do well quickly because if you get that person that's engaging with an article, like the top 10 ones or whatever, Pinterest is going to serve up more of your articles to that person and it's going to take a little bit more time to build up an audience of those people who will engage with that content. Yeah, there's less other relevant content, I guess put it that way. There's less third party content that they are going to develop relationship with. To pull those things out into the feed is going to be built on the foundation of your own content and I think it'll happen very slowly.
- [40:16]
A
Yeah, okay, that makes sense. And then so in that case I would probably cover several TV shows, not just one. And you know, this brings to mind there's something that I haven't mentioned jumping all the way back up to the beginning of this episode when we talked about tools and I mentioned the free interest tool, searching the top 20,000 interests. So with pin clicks there is the Interest Explorer tool. And one of the things that I will do there to gauge if this is a good niche or not is I will plug in like the broadest keyword or topic. So let's just say you are a travel site. You cover like Mexico, Mexico travel. So you type in Mexico into the Interest Explorer tool, which is going to be searching a database of like 11 million official interests or topics within the Pinterest platform. And if you're getting like over a thousand results for it, that's a really good sign that it's a great niche to be in. But if you're getting, oh gosh, a couple hundred or less results, I would be, I'd be cautious on continuing on with that niche. And that's where I would probably start finding other topics that I could also cover or creating a new account.
- [41:30]
B
Okay, so creating a new account, that's a big jump. Let's talk about that.
- [41:36]
A
Yeah, so now we're catching back up here. So what are all the possible options of, you know, what I can do if I, if I realize I'm listening to this episode and I'm like, oh gosh, I might be in a Bad niche. What do I do? So we've listed a couple of things. One, like, do you give up? Two, maybe you pivot, which could mean you create a new account or you still use your current account and just pivot it. Or three, like you just create a whole new account. So let's talk about giving up. When do you give up and what does that look like?
- [42:15]
B
I'm not a big giver upper until I am very confident that this is something worth giving up on. And then, then I give up with my whole heart. I 100% give it up. So it's difficult for me to say at what point I would give up. When I started my website, I started it in February and I told myself that if I hadn't made 10 cents by Christmas, I'd give up.
- [42:42]
A
That's a really low bar.
- [42:43]
B
Yeah. I wasn't going to give up easily.
- [42:47]
A
Okay.
- [42:47]
B
Yeah. Fortunately, I had made many thousands of dollars by Christmas, so I didn't give up. And after the experiences that I've had with other bloggers and just. Actually there was a poll in my ad network's Facebook group a few years ago and it said, how long did you do this before you earned any money? And the average was like two and a half years.
- [43:13]
A
Whoa.
- [43:14]
B
Yeah. So after this conversation, if you've listened to this and you have said like, no, I am confident it's a good niche and I am confident I have a good strategy approach. I, I wouldn't give up for two and a half years. What about you?
- [43:29]
A
Oh, wow. You know, I'm in the middle trying to figure out what do I do with one of the accounts that I've created this year if I give up on it or not. And not because it's in a bad niche. It's totally different reason. And you encourage me, like, get to the nine month mark. You just never know. Unless like you've checked all the boxes and answered like these questions that we've gone through.
- [43:52]
B
Yeah, that's right. That's. Then it's time to pivot.
- [43:55]
A
Yeah. Then pivot. So that was the other option.
- [43:57]
B
Right.
- [43:58]
A
So what does pivoting look like?
- [44:00]
B
Well, I mean, I guess if it's real bad, pivoting could mean pivoting to a new site. I, I don't want to encourage people to give up on their sites or their businesses. I guess that's what I was saying. I wasn't saying, you know, keep pinning diligently on the same account between that nine month and that two and a half year mark.
- [44:17]
A
Yeah.
- [44:17]
B
But I believe online business is open to a lot of people. And so I think giving up at seven months because your Pinterest account isn't taking off is the wrong choice. Pivoting might just look like developing your content strategy in a Pinterest friendly manner, or it might look like niching out. I think I've seen a lot of accounts where we're just too niche for the platform. We aren't considering how much of the population will engage with the subject consistently. It might be a lot of people that will engage with the niche, but the content that you're creating is too advanced for them. Because when we talked about the user journey being in the ideation stage, you know, sometimes there's a lot more people at the beginning of the journey that are utilizing Pinterest than there is at the end of the journey. So it might mean niching out from your extremely niche to the more shouldery stuff.
- [45:16]
A
Okay, that makes sense. Now, what about their old bores and pens that they realize, oh, these are not great topics for Pinterest. I'm not getting much impressions or clicks from them. What do they do?
- [45:28]
B
Well, you used the word earlier diluting your account. And I think that is a really good word. And it prompts a really important question that we can't answer, unfortunately, like you kind of mentioned at the beginning, and that is, is the weight of all of those pins that don't get engagement, does that bring your account down? You talked about a theoretical account score, which I've always believed in, also. I call it a profile score. Is the risk that you run by moving forward with this bad account score too high? And if you're going to keep pinning on this same account, are you holding back your progress with the weight, the dead weight of all these pins that don't do well, of these boards that never went anywhere. And would starting a new account move you forward faster?
- [46:25]
A
Yeah, because what we've seen this year, Pinterest is really favoring newer accounts. So is it better to create a new, a brand new account than just to pivot your existing one?
- [46:36]
B
So in the past, I have always encouraged people to move forward with their old account unless we knew that their old account had some real, real issues. Like. Like if you've pinned a lot of pins in those subjects that Pinterest doesn't like, those things that are against their community guidelines or things that Pinterest thinks might be against their community guidelines, that's the same in Pinterest eyes. Or if you have been in one niche that has no overlap on the audience. Like, if you have been in dirt bikes and now you want to become recipes, then those things are so different. In the past, I've always said, like, okay, unless you're in those situations, maybe you should keep pinning on this account. But after watching the way that Pinterest has treated new accounts and some of the discussions that we've had, I've really started to lean towards, you should start a new account.
- [47:32]
A
Yeah. You know, and this has given me an interesting thought about our previous episode. I think it was the AI one where if it were me, I would put more emphasis on the number of followers that an account has to help factor in the profile or account score. Because every follow is like a vote of confidence and trust that the person thought that you were creating great enough pins that it was worth following you. So now I'm bridging that with what we're talking about today. And now I'm thinking, be an account worth following. If in the future Pinterest decides to up the dial on that signal of how many followers does this account have, then you're going to be in a good position. So if you have got a very fragmented account that's covering a variety of topics that most people, when they see all the topics you're covering, like, they're not going to follow you because they don't want to see your totally unrelated pins for a subject matter that they have just no interest in. And that's why, you know, we can see a lot of the lifestyle accounts do really well because they're covering so many popular topics that an average Pinterest user would want to see most of their content on average, they can resonate with it. But if you're covering dirt bikes and recipes and bears and home decor, like you're kind of all over the place, people are probably not going to follow your account.
- [49:00]
B
Yeah.
- [49:00]
A
And that might be a factor.
- [49:02]
B
It's funny that you just said that in my course I could quote this line and I think I would get it exact. I say, don't be the muscle car cake decorating, bird watching blog. What I'm talking about niche on Pinterest. And it's exactly the thing that you're talking about.
- [49:14]
A
About.
- [49:15]
B
I have a question for you though. On your thought about the followers, you're saying those accounts that have a lot of followers, they might be worth more in the future. We don't know about the dead weight and the risks of the dead weight to our account. We do know that right now, if you have a lot of Followers and those people don't engage with your stuff. That is dead weight. But we don't know what it'll be like in the future. I was thinking while you were talking, okay, but when we start a new account, we don't have to delete the old one. We don't have to give that up just because we start a new account. It is completely reasonable. And actually, I think that it might even be wise if you start a new account to continue pinning now and then on the old one and keep it active and retain that account with all those followers for in the future. If Pinterest decides way more followers are worth more, there's nothing from stopping you taking your domain back over there right now.
- [50:13]
A
Yeah, I guess that's true. You could basically disconnect your domain from your current account, set up a new one, a new account, and then associate your domain with that new account. But you can always go back.
- [50:26]
B
You could, if Pinterest decided that followers were a super important aspect and will know if that happens. Because we won't hear any more about accounts with five followers doing really well like we do hear about now. So that's not something that, like it might be happening in the background and we don't know. We'll know. We'll tell. We'll tell you what we see.
- [50:49]
A
Yeah.
- [50:50]
B
So I would think to keep that old account active if a new account is what you decide to do. Yeah, I would keep that old account active just knowing that there may be a lot of value in the followers in the future. I don't think there's a lot of values in the followers at the present.
- [51:08]
A
Okay, what about at the board level?
- [51:10]
B
That's a great question. I don't know. I would have to think about that.
- [51:14]
A
So I've built an internal tool that you can plug in any Pinterest account and it will extract all their boards and it will show you the number of followers for every board.
- [51:25]
B
Yeah.
- [51:25]
A
Eventually this will be a tool in pin clicks.
- [51:28]
B
Cool.
- [51:28]
A
So as you're doing your research on other accounts that are in your niche and you're trying to figure out, okay, they seem to be doing well because maybe the monthly views is much higher than yours.
- [51:39]
B
Okay.
- [51:40]
A
And so then eventually it'd be great if you could plug in their account and it will show you all their boards and it'll show you the boards that have the most followers. That would be an interesting one because if someone wants to follow a board, so maybe they won't follow the entire account. I don't know if you follow a board if you inherently follow the account.
- [51:57]
B
Nope. I know the answer to this.
- [51:59]
A
Okay.
- [52:00]
B
If you follow an account and that account creates new boards, you will be following those boards. But if you follow a board instead of the account, when that account creates new boards, you won't be assigned as a follower. I think this would be relatively easy for us to determine the accurate answer right now. That's what I believe that I've seen happen. And the group boards, which I know don't factor into your strategy in a big way. There's something very specific about the followers of group boards. When people follow the account that has the group board, they are not following you or your boards, even though you're pinning there. So when an account is very strong, you can get in front of their followers by pinning to their boards. That's a whole nother conversation. But. But, yeah, when a person just follows a board, they don't end up following all your other boards.
- [52:53]
A
Okay, so we paused, and I looked it up. And when you follow a board doesn't mean you're following the account. It's just a board. So my point here is, as you're doing your research of other accounts that are covering similar topics as you look at their boards, unfortunately, there's not a tool yet to, like, pull in all their boards and how many followers are for each board. But you can also get an idea on number of pins they have, how active those boards are, how most recently those pins have been added to those boards. Because if you scroll down on an account, like, further you scroll down, the less active the boards are, which means those are topics that they're probably not getting a lot of traction with, or.
- [53:37]
B
They don't see value in pinning to those boards anymore.
- [53:40]
A
Yeah, Right.
- [53:41]
B
Cause they can see their analytics.
- [53:43]
A
Yeah. But eventually there'll be a tool that you can use that you can plug in any account, and you can see the number of followers and all sorts of good stuff. All right, so with that, you know, you kind of changed my opinion on just deleting an account and starting over. Like, I. I would have just been like, yeah, just delete the account. Start over. But you're like, nope, never delete the account. You just never know. You could always go back to it. You just never know. But there might be a case where, okay, what if you've got. We're talking about dead weight. You say you have, like, over fifty or a hundred thousand followers for an account, and, like, you just walk away from that. But also, can those followers be dead weight? Because they're not interested. Maybe you're pivoting because maybe you were doing well in the past, but the stuff you're covering now isn't great. And so those followers are not engaging with your stuff. And those followers will they always hold your account back because you've got so many of them that just aren't engaging with your content.
- [54:44]
B
Yeah, I believe, I firmly believe, that if you have enough followers currently in the present algorithm, that if you have enough followers that aren't engaging with your things, you'll never move forward. You've made a great point about the future. We don't know what the future holds for the numbers of followers that you have, but at present I don't think that having a hundred thousand followers is a reason to keep pinning on a specific account. In fact, I showed you an account earlier. I know that this person started a new account for their blog years and years ago, and I didn't actually look at the followers on the account, but I'm pulling it up right now because it was a really strong account years ago. I think it had well over a hundred thousand followers when they started a new account. Yeah. So the new account has over 400,000 followers. And the old account, the old. Oh, the old account has 507,000 followers. So the old account has more, but the new account has more than 10 times the monthly views.
- [55:42]
A
Yeah, so.
- [55:44]
B
So she actually didn't achieve this more followers on the new account, which I thought she did. The followers clearly don't make a difference for the impressions currently though, because more than 10 times the monthly views on the account with less followers. I personally lean towards starting a new account. Even if you have a lot of followers currently, if you have a lot of other things that you would consider dead weight, like thousands of pins in a niche that you understand now or a topic that you understand now is a bad Pinterest topic, or hundreds of old boards that are not engaged at all. I lean towards starting a new account. I'm curious where you lean after this conversation.
- [56:30]
A
I don't know. I keep going back and forth. It really will depend on the site, on the account. I would lean maybe a little bit towards, can you do some cleaning up? Maybe getting rid of some irrelevant pens and boards that just aren't performing well, Giving it some time. And this is where you make a good point. I'm like, give it some time. Give it, you know, three to nine months or something after you get rid of those bad boards and bad pens and you focus on creating more relevant, better pinterest friendly boards and pens and see where you're at. But then you're like, well, why don't you just. At that point in time, you could have started a whole new account. I don't know. I sometimes can get stuck in that sunk cost fallacy where, like, you put in so much time and money and energy into creating all this content for this account and then to, like, walk away from it feels really hard. So I would say, like, if you were about to hit the big red button on, like, I'm just gonna walk away from this account, I might even delete it. But you're totally not confident. I mean, just send, send us email, pentalk podcastmail.com I. You know, if we got, if we have a chance, like, maybe we can take a quick look. I'd be curious to see before you smash that.
- [57:48]
B
Yeah.
- [57:49]
A
Button that will implode the account. And yeah, it's a big decision. So I get it. Not that we will have all the answers or anything, but it doesn't hurt to get a second opinion, especially if you've got a lot of history with the account, that it did bring in a decent amount of traffic. It's not performing well.
- [58:07]
B
It's.
- [58:08]
A
No, it seems to be no longer relevant. Yeah, it's a tough decision, but hopefully some of the things we've talked about today are making it a little bit easier.
- [58:16]
B
Yeah. And the fact that we can't with confidence say it's better to start a new account or it's better to work on an old account, I think demonstrates that for a lot of the cases, it's probably going to be the same thing whether you move forward on your old account and you put three to nine months of work into that, or you start a new account and you put three to nine months of work into that. The truth is that it was. It was probably going to be similar at the end. I just say that because I've talked to people over the years who have started new accounts and I've talked to people over the years who have revived old accounts. And so we know that both are possible. And it's difficult, even after years of talking to people about it, to say with certainty, no, this one's better than the other. And so I don't think that you can make a wrong choice, except maybe if you are talking about content where Pinterest has said no, this is against our community guidelines in that situation, I would say that there's no point in continuing on that account. But Pinterest will probably give you clear signs about that, that you'll get violation notices and stuff.
- [59:30]
A
Yeah, for sure. Or sometimes there are topics you cover where just Pinterest is not going to give them much distribution for it and you're like wondering why. One of the ideas I had was you go to their community guidelines page and you copy all the text from it, paste in the chat GPT and then upload all of your blog post topics and ask it to find like any overlapping, potential overlapping topics that could be going against these community guidelines. Because Pinterest can be very sensitive about those things and they don't have much of a tolerance for it. And you just never know. Like one day they could just wipe out a whole pen or board. They can hide the board and you're wondering what is going on and that could bring down your account over time.
- [60:16]
B
Yeah, we've talked about a lot of examples where you wouldn't necessarily have immediately identified that this content had a relationship with the content that Pinterest considers sensitive. So I think that the idea of uploading it to ChatGPT and asking it to look at it with a new pair of eyes is a great idea. And if it comes back with a lot of things that Pinterest might not like in that situation, I would not think twice about starting a new account. And I would be careful not to introduce the content again to Pinterest. That might not do well. And then if you're going to go to the effort to start a new account, I would also say I would be careful not to introduce the content that is very lightly engaged. I would go for the engagement for sure.
- [61:04]
A
That's a good way to put it. So I think what we're going to do here is include these questions in the show notes. I think that'll be helpful. And some other resources and links that we've mentioned and go through those. Spend some time honestly answering those questions. And if you need any help you're feeling really stuck, send us an email. Maybe there's something we can take a look at and help you along the way. 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 from us, please rate and review our show. Thanks.