S1E5 Our Wildly Different Pinterest Board Strategies (And How to Choose Yours)

Summary

Pin Talk - Pinterest Tips and Updates for Creators

Episode: S1E5 "Our Wildly Different Pinterest Board Strategies (And How to Choose Yours)"
Release Date: November 14, 2024
Hosts: Tony Hill and Carly Campbell

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1. Introduction to Board Strategies

In this episode, Tony Hill and Carly Campbell delve deep into the intricacies of Pinterest board strategies, highlighting their distinct approaches and offering insights on how creators can tailor their strategies based on their niche and objectives. The conversation kicks off with Tony emphasizing the foundational role boards play in organizing ideas and enhancing Pinterest's recommendation algorithms.

Tony: “When it comes to Pinterest, the way I see boards is a way of organizing ideas. That's probably why Pinterest created it.” (00:16)

2. Saving Pins: Profile vs. Boards

A significant portion of the discussion centers around the importance of saving pins to specific boards rather than the profile. Carly shares her experiences and the pitfalls of pinning to the profile, underscoring how it can dilute the SEO context that boards provide.

Carly: “If you're pinning only to your profile, Pinterest won't have the context around that pin anymore.” (04:10)

Tony adds that while Pinterest's mobile app offers a "Profile" option for quick saves, it's not advantageous for algorithmic relevance.

Tony: “Pinterest is making it great for users because they can just quickly save something... but it's not so great for their algorithm.” (05:38)

3. Board Sections: To Use or Not

The hosts explore the effectiveness of board sections, recounting their personal experiments. Both agree that board sections often fail to provide the necessary SEO benefits, especially when boards become too generic or overcrowded with diverse content.

Tony: “I once tested an account using board sections, and it was a waste of time.” (07:05)
Carly: “Pinterest has effectively ignored board sections for SEO purposes.” (08:24)

4. Group Boards: Are They Worth It?

Group boards, once a staple for launching Pinterest accounts, have seen a decline in effectiveness. Carly outlines the challenges of joining active group boards today and advises creators to evaluate their engagement before committing.

Carly: “Joining group boards is really difficult these days because a lot of creators consider them not important.” (10:26)
Tony: “If a group board owner decides to shut that board down, your pins are gone. So is your traffic.” (14:44)

They discuss alternative strategies, such as using multiple accounts or selective invitations to maintain control and reduce the risk associated with group boards.

5. Tony's Board Strategy: One Board per Blog Post

Tony reveals his unique strategy of creating a separate board for every blog post. This method simplifies the organizational process for his team and enhances Pinterest’s algorithmic understanding of each pin’s context.

Tony: “For every blog post, we create a board. Put all the pins in there. That's just the easiest thing to do.” (17:05)
Tony: “Pinterest has a really good understanding of what these pins are about based upon their relationship with the board.” (19:41)

He acknowledges the potential limitation of hitting Pinterest’s 2,000 board limit but finds it manageable by focusing on specific niches or deleting underperforming boards.

6. Carly's Board Strategy: Fewer, Thematic Boards

Contrasting Tony’s approach, Carly emphasizes the importance of having fewer, broader boards that encapsulate multiple related blog posts. She advocates for maximizing the number of pins per board to enhance SEO context and user engagement.

Carly: “The less boards, the better... I have focused on what is the broadest board that I can make that has a common thread.” (26:47)
Carly: “I'm using boards for every single blog post. And pin I create... I've just moved forward knowing that I'm not afraid of making extra boards.” (35:08)

Carly shares her recent shift towards creating more boards to target a wider range of keywords, demonstrating flexibility and adaptation based on ongoing results.

7. Impact on Pinterest Algorithm and SEO

Both hosts discuss how Pinterest leverages board information to understand and categorize pins. Tony explains the concept of “confidence scores” that Pinterest assigns based on board names, descriptions, and pin consistency, which in turn affects how pins are recommended and ranked.

Tony: “With algorithms, they're making the best guesses on what it is that they're trying to understand... to increase the confidence level of the algorithm.” (21:58)
Carly: “More boards targeting more keywords is working, and that's a good starting point for me.” (50:29)

8. Managing and Cleaning Up Boards

The conversation shifts to the importance of regularly auditing boards to remove unengaged or redundant boards. Tony shares his experience of deleting over 30 old boards, noting an immediate positive impact on his Pinterest traffic.

Tony: “I deleted over 30 boards... some of them were redundant. It feels totally comfortable deleting all those.” (32:22)
Carly: “Deleting your boards can lead to increased engagement because it removes unengaged or dead weight.” (37:17)

They caution creators to proceed carefully when deleting boards, as it can significantly influence traffic and engagement metrics.

9. Handling Glitch Pins

Glitch pins—pins that display inexplicably high outbound clicks and impressions—are another topic of concern. Tony and Carly discuss their strategies for identifying and managing these anomalies to maintain accurate analytics.

Tony: “There was one pin... it shows like 20,000 outbound clicks in the last 30 days for this pin. That has to be a glitch.” (35:08)
Carly: “I've always believed that glitch pin stats are not reflected accurately in your graphs.” (36:03)

They suggest monitoring these pins closely and considering their deletion if they distort performance data.

10. Niche-specific Strategies: Visual, Informational, Hybrid

The hosts categorize niches into three types—purely visual (e.g., home decor), purely informational (e.g., parenting advice), and hybrid (e.g., recipes)—and discuss tailored board strategies for each.

Tony: “If you are in a niche where it's very visual... adopting my strategy of creating a board for every blog post can go really well.” (40:54)
Carly: “If your content is informational, like parenting advice, roundups and listicles work better than individual pins.” (42:02)

They emphasize the necessity of aligning board strategies with the content type to optimize Pinterest performance effectively.

11. Practical Takeaways and Recommendations

To wrap up, Tony and Carly offer actionable advice for creators looking to refine their Pinterest board strategies:

• Understand Your Niche: Tailor your board strategy based on whether your niche is visual, informational, or hybrid.
• Organize Thoughtfully: Use specific, keyword-rich board names to enhance algorithmic understanding and improve pin recommendations.
• Regular Maintenance: Periodically audit and clean up boards to remove unengaged or redundant ones, thereby boosting overall account engagement.
• Experiment and Adapt: Don’t be afraid to try different strategies, such as Tony’s per-blog-post boards or Carly’s broader thematic boards, and adjust based on performance data.
• Monitor Anomalies: Keep an eye out for glitch pins and manage them promptly to maintain accurate analytics.

Carly: “Understand your board strategy and how you'll approach it. If you've been doing it wrong, double-check with someone before making changes.” (54:05)
Tony: “Be careful with your boards. They can really change the context of your pins and affect your traffic.” (54:29)

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Notable Quotes:

• Tony at [00:16]: “When it comes to Pinterest, the way I see boards is a way of organizing ideas.”
• Carly at [04:10]: “Pinterest has created these Boards to be collections of same ideas... it's really important that we don't just save our pins.”
• Tony at [17:05]: “For every blog post, we create a board. That's just the easiest thing to do.”
• Carly at [26:47]: “The less boards, the better... I have focused on what is the broadest board that I can make.”
• Tony at [21:58]: “With algorithms, they're making the best guesses on what it is that they're trying to understand.”

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Conclusion

This episode of Pin Talk offers a comprehensive exploration of Pinterest board strategies through the lens of two experts with contrasting approaches. By dissecting the nuances of saving pins, utilizing board sections, managing group boards, and aligning strategies with specific niches, Tony and Carly provide invaluable guidance for bloggers and content creators aiming to optimize their Pinterest presence. Whether you resonate more with Tony’s granular board-per-post method or Carly’s streamlined thematic boards, the insights shared pave the way for informed decision-making and enhanced Pinterest performance.

Transcript

[A]

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

[B]

Boards and everything. Pinterest boards.

[A]

Yeah, that's right. So this is one of the areas that I get a lot of questions about, especially because my strategy is a little bit different than the typical strategy, and we'll get into that a little bit later. But it's actually my thing, my board strategy that kind of put me on the map among the Pinterest creator community. Yeah, a year or so ago. Yeah, yeah. So we'll talk about that in a little bit. But I guess zooming out, bigger picture, let's just make sure we're covering our bases here. What are boards? Right when it comes to Pinterest, like, the way I see boards is a way of organizing ideas. That's probably why Pinterest created it. Versus, like, you save all these pins or ideas and it's hard to go back and reference what you had pinned and saved. So creating a board is just a natural way to just keep things organized. And also Pinterest has figured out a way to leverage boards to help improve their recommendations of pins for users who are on the platform. Which we'll get more into the weeds on that a little bit. Uh, yeah, so that's the way I see it. So just a simple, you save a pin on the platform and Pinterest is gonna ask you what board you want to save it to. Like, you don't have a choice. You have to pin to a board. That's how important and integrated.

[B]

No.

[A]

What?

[B]

No. And this is something that I've meant to talk to you about and it's come up. It's come up. Once in the Fat Stacks forum, it came up and somebody said they were just pinning to their profile and I thought, like, what even is that? On my new account, in my sleep deprived, allergy ridden state, I have accidentally saved two pins to my profile. I can't even find them to get rid of them. But when I go to my analytics and I scroll down to my top boards, because I don't have that many boards yet. If I go all the way down to the end, oh, it fell off today because I finally created more boards. Oh, no pins by you. There's five of them. I've accidentally saved five pins to no board. But it is important to remember that because of the thing that you were saying. You know, Pinterest has created these Boards to be collections of same ideas. And because they use it for SEO, it's really important that we don't just save our pins. Unless you have the most niche account and you're only ever pinning in one tiny granular subject, which is a whole nother conversation. And I would refer you to our episodes on niche. If you're pinning that nichely, then it's not a good idea to just save pins to your profile, because over time, as you save more pins and you throw all of these ideas and keywords into one bucket, Pinterest will not have the context around that pin anymore. We used to see really common. If you were on group boards, we're going to get to group boards. I'm kind of jumping ahead a little bit with the group boards, but if you were on group boards five years ago, there were all these group boards called, like bloggers Blogging and pinning things to Pinterest. That was their title. And they'd start out really great, really strong. Your pins would do fantastic on them. And over time, we saw them lose traction, I believe as 1000 bloggers pinning pins to Pinterest pinned all kinds of niches to the board and completely lost any semblance of useful SEO context. I keep saying the word context, but it's really relevant. And so you have a really better understanding than I do of the specific algorithm workflows. Or is that what they're called, processes?

[A]

Sure.

[B]

That utilize boards. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

[A]

Yeah, I can. So hold on. I can't get over. I'm sorry. You can pin and it's not going to a board. So I just did it and it then came up with, I'm on the mobile app. And so I pinned something. I didn't save it to a board. I clicked the profile. But then it encouraged me to organize it. So I had a button said organize, then it's bringing up a list of.

[B]

Oh, it doesn't do that on the desktop.

[A]

Interesting. Yeah. I highly encourage Pinterest creators to use the Pinterest app on their phone at least a few times a week. I am doing that more and more. And it's just good because the majority of users are going to be on their phone Pinterest. And so there's a very different experience on the phone than the desktop. And so it's important to understand the user experience. So it shows the top choices for these board recommendations. The number one is a profile pick. Is that a generic one or is that one to my account? I don't know. So anyways, it generates the top two choices based upon your current boards to save it in. I just find it a fascinating thing that Pinterest is doing because it's making it great for users because they can just quickly save something. They don't think about the board and they can move on, but it's not so great for their algorithm.

[B]

Okay, back this thought up. You just said that you did this on your phone. Did you create a PIN or save a pin on your phone?

[A]

I'm sorry, I saved a pin.

[B]

You saved a pin? Okay, yes. I'm gonna try to save someone else's pin. I'm saving this.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And then you chose Profile at the top, Is that what you mean?

[A]

Yep, that's right. I chose Profile. Yep. Okay.

[B]

There is another option, or was another option that I'm not seeing on my phone right now. You just brought this up for me when you said save a pin quickly. It was called Quick Saves. And if you go to accounts that existed at that time, it wasn't that long ago, they will have a whole board called Quick Saves. It looks to me like Pinterest has done away with Quick Saves, probably because too many people were using it and not organizing their ideas well enough for Pinterest to find value in that. Because when you clicked on the pin like you, you know, you push down on it to be able to save it. Quicksave used to be one of the zoomy off to options.

[A]

Oh, I see. Okay.

[B]

But I see that it's gone. And I didn't notice that it was gone because I never used it, because I never would have used it, because it is use for creators. It's like by giving it the option to pin to your profile, they've still allowed it there, but they certainly haven't guided people towards it the way they used to with the Quicksaves.

[A]

Fascinating.

[B]

It is. It is fascinating.

[A]

Okay, well, so they're important, but maybe in some ways Pinterest has chosen to sacrifice that relevance that they get from boards with user experience. And so that's an advantage to us as content creators when it comes to creating boards.

[B]

Sure, yeah.

[A]

You know, have better names to them, give more context and relevance to the pins themselves. So that's kind of great to see, in my opinion.

[B]

Sure. Because we can use that to our advantage.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. So did we cover board sections? I don't think we mentioned that we were going to mention it real quick.

[B]

No, we didn't. Okay, let's. Because that's an important conversation too.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. I once Tested an account, a brand new one, and I used board sections, and it was a waste of time. That account really didn't get a whole lot of traction the way that I expected it to. It was in a huge Pinterest niche. And, yeah, so instead of creating multiple boards the way that I normally do, which I'll talk about in a minute, I just created sections instead, and they didn't work very well. Again, this was just one account, one experiment, but I've heard other people kind of had the same experience. And so at this point in time, I don't recommend board sections. What about you?

[B]

Yeah, when we first started talking, I just had so much nervousness that you and I were going to disagree on every single idea that we had, because your board strategy, which we're going to get to, was so different than my board strategy, and you were pinning a lot more pins than I was pinning. It was really scary for me. And board sections is one of the first things that we talked about that I thought, like, surely this will be like, one of the things. And I said, I firmly believe Pinterest doesn't use word sections. And Pinterest has actually said in the past that they don't use board sections, like, for SEO purposes. We all know that. Just because I said it the past, that doesn't mean that has to be true in the present. But it does play out like the way we see it in the present. And I've had conversations with people say that have said there's absolutely no way that Pinterest would have developed that aspect of their platform and then ignored it. And yet everything that we have seen in practice suggests that they do ignore it. The group boards that I mentioned earlier, that the big ones, the broad ones that, you know, lost context when they brought out board sections. Those boards and those creators especially, we're very excited about it because we thought, oh, look, a way to add context now to our group boards. All of a sudden, you're on this group board. Any creator could add a section. Let's add a section on this board that already has a ton of reach. Let's give it the context. That did not work. The boards only got worse. So, yeah, I 100% agree with you about sections, and I'm so glad that you've done your own experiment on it, because I have not tested sections on my account in years and years, because there's never been a reason to.

[A]

Cool. Yeah, I wish it did work because the way my brain works, it just helps keep things organized. And I thought it was a way to get around the 2000 board limit, perhaps.

[B]

Right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So board limit, which we are going to talk about also.

[A]

Yeah. All right. Now, group boards, I have zero experience with group boards, but it's a question I get at least a few times a month. Like, Tony, what do you do about group boards? Are they worth joining still? And I just say I don't do group boards. And that's about all I can say about it. So you have way more experience with group boards. Do you still get this question a lot? And what are you doing with group boards?

[B]

Yeah, I get the question less than I used to because group boards used to be a critical part of launching a new Pinterest count. I am still on a ton of group boards. A lot of Pinterest creators who've been on Pinterest for a really long time are still on a lot of old group boards. And I think we'll get to this part of the conversation too, but it's important to ask, okay, but do unengaged boards on our accounts weigh our accounts down? Because I, I think they do. And so with group boards, unfortunately, just like personal boards, there is no way to know just by glancing at them if this is a good, strong, engaged board or not. Maybe using a tool like pin clicks, because in pin clicks, you can take a number of URLs and put them right into the pin stats. So you could take the top 100 URLs off of a group board that you're considering joining, put them into the pin stats tracker, and you could see how many saves are on those most recent hundred pins. And I think that would be a fun way to see, fun, useful way to see if that group board is getting any reach, because it might not be. I wouldn't do all the pins. I wouldn't go back two years. Historical stats have a place. But it's not in this conversation. Let's look at the recent stats in this conversation. The only way to find out if a group board is worth your time is to join it and pin to it and see how that goes. Don't go crazy pinning a ton to it, because remember, if you're putting out pins that are getting absolutely no distribution and engagement, this is weight on your account. So I wouldn't join a group board and pin a hundred pins to it over the next week. I would look to see if there's any reach on that board. And you can't use the logic like, oh, this account has 400,000 followers, so its group board is going to be really powerful. That absolutely doesn't play out in reality. I've seen it not work. Or I think if the account has a really high number of impressions, there's a better likelihood that the group board will be stronger versus than if they have a lot of followers. So there's still no guarantee that the group board's going to be strong, but you can check. Joining group boards is really difficult these days because a lot of creators consider them not important. A lot of creators are more careful about who they'll let into their group boards, so it's really hard to get on group boards. I personally have incorporated grouparts into my strategy lately by inviting my smaller account to pin on boards on my larger accounts.

[A]

Yeah, that's clever. I like that. So for people who have, say, multiple Pinterest accounts and they don't have overlapping topics, would you still recommend they create a group board and pin to them? Especially if one account that creates a group board is a strong account?

[B]

I don't know. What would you say?

[A]

I don't know. It's. Honestly, it's never crossed my mind until this moment.

[B]

Well, if the same user would be interested in the content, I think that there's less risk. But if you're talking about having a dirt bike site pinned to a strong baby shower site. Yeah, no, I wouldn't do that.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

But if you are like a fashion site and you want to invite your makeup site to it, I would, I would absolutely do that.

[A]

That makes sense. There's one word on why I do not do group boards, and that word is control. You told me something about group boards that just solidified why I just cannot tolerate doing a group board. And that's because if you participate in someone else's group board and some of your top performing pins are from that group board, and that group board owner decides to shut that board down, your pins are gone. So is your tractor.

[B]

I've been through it. It has happened to me.

[A]

That is terrifying.

[B]

It is terrifying. And even though for years I taught that group boards were a core, like, part of my Pinterest strategy, I didn't create group boards broadly to invite people to because I did not want other people pinning at all on my account. And now I actually do have a very small handful of group boards that are on my account that have, like, one of my best friends that is in a similar niche to me, she's on one and someone that I've known for a long time and I've watched her pin for a long time. And I Trust her pinning. She's on one of my boards. And I've. I've opened them up to a few people over time, but it was really common back in the 2017s to if you sold a Pinterest course or any kind of blogging course, you would have, like a Pinterest group board as a bonus for your students. And anybody who bought your course could pin on your board. And that was something I never did.

[A]

Oh, okay. I was going to ask you if you did that because essentially you are selling your group board, you're selling access to it. I wonder if people still do that to this day. If they've got a strong group board and they will only sell it to you if you have relevant pins to put in there. That might be an interesting way to make some side money.

[B]

Just gonna say, why don't we just make some strong accounts and sell some seats on a group board? It is against Pinterest terms of service. Yeah, but you could sell access to a Facebook group that comes with a bonus.

[A]

Right. So it's kind of injured.

[B]

Yeah. So one of the reasons that kind of moving this group board conversation segues into this. One of the reasons that I have been hesitant about group boards and letting other people pin on them is because of, I believe, like, in dead weight on the account. Lots of boards over time that are unengaged could be dead weight. And I think this is the reason that your Pinterest board strategy kind of made waves in the creator space, because your strategy is so many more boards than. Than I have or than anybody else I know has. So will you tell us about your board strategy?

[A]

Yeah. So in general, my strategy is for every blog post, we create a board. And the only reason why we did that is because I kept having my VA come back to me and they'd be like, okay, where should we put these pins? And I just didn't have really a good framework to give them. So I was just like, just create a new board for every blog post. Put all the pins in there. That's just the easiest thing to do. And it worked out well that way because the reason why is every pin in that board is a unique idea. Now, I've seen there are other types of niches that you can cover where it would be kind of weird to create a board for one blog post, because, like, the one blog post is like one main idea. And so if you're creating a whole board for it, then all the pins you're going to create are basically just a new design of a pen for the same idea. Idea, yeah. So it works really well if you're creating content with lots of ideas for that blog post. And the ideas are constant and never ending. I mean, that's why, like, home decor and like nails are really popular. Even makeup, like fashion, because those ideas are constant, they're ever changing and evolving. So you can continue to create brand new ideas and put them all into a board, but it just creates an. An easy way to make a decision on where I put this. But when you've got thousands. Well, I would say a thousand plus boards. Cause you can't have more than 2,000 boards, apparently. I have not ran into that limit yet, but I've gotten close and I've backed off. But the main idea here is to make it easy for my team. But also, once I started to read the Pinterest engineering blog to understand how they use boards for their algorithm and the recommendation systems, I was like, okay, it makes sense why I created all of these boards and how my account's going to be doing so well. Because Pinterest has a really good understanding of what these pins are about based upon their relationship with the board. So again, one of the reasons why these boards are just so important is because it helps their algorithms understand what your pins are about. So one of the interesting things you can do with any pin is you can look at boards that it's been pinned to from other accounts. I don't think Pinterest will show you all of the boards that a pin was pinned to.

[B]

No, if the user's under 18, they absolutely won't.

[A]

That makes sense.

[B]

Show to you. And there are also other instances, which is way beyond the scope of this conversation, where. Where for whatever reason, the board is not publicly visible. Not that the creator has hit it, but the Pinterest has hit it. It's a whole nother conversation. Right. But no, it won't show you every board that it's pinned to. I totally agree.

[A]

Yeah. But I'm curious to understand why is it showing me these boards? But anyways, what I found is that the average pinner, they are terrible with their board names. They can be very irrelevant to the topic, but it's very relevant to them. There's a good example that you like to use. You want to share the example?

[B]

Like one of my first boards from when I started. So I. Is that the example we're talking about? When I started my Pinterest boards, I didn't know anything about SEO or Pinterest, and certainly not SEO and pinterest together. And I called one of my earliest pregnancy and postpartum boards baby having, which is not a keyword that anybody ever searches for, ever. It's just something that I call maybe having.

[A]

That's right. So that makes it really hard for Pinterest to, at least from the board name perspective, to understand what the board is about. Now they can dig into all those pins and they can conclude, okay, all these pins are related in many ways and beyond just the name of the board. But my goal with any algorithm is to make their decision making as easy as possible, but most importantly, to increase the confidence level of the algorithm. So with algorithms, they're making their best guesses basically on what it is that they're trying to understand and analyze, and they have to give it a number. And so let's just for simplicity's sake, say they're trying to understand what a board is about, and they'll have a confidence score of like 0 to 100%. They're going to give it that score based upon their analysis of the board name, the description, the pins, all that. And so I just want to make the chances very high that it understands and give it a hundred percent score that it knows what it's about, especially if it can match that to an official interest.

[B]

Okay. I think that you just explained more clearly to me why the single board strategy for a blog post when it's not so granular that someone would actually search for it. Which we should talk about, makes it easier for Pinterest because we had a conversation last week and it wasn't in a podcast episode, so nobody else heard it. I'll fill the bin. It came up, how many pins do each of us think is for a strong board? Oh, no, you. You just. You were looking at one of my boards and you were like, oh, my goodness, there's 600 pins on this board. And I was like, why wouldn't there be? And you thought that was a crazy high number. Your boards have like 50 or 60 pins on them very often. And in the past, I have said to people and taught, don't really expect traction from a board until you get to 100, 200, 300 pins. But I'm understanding now after we talk that because. What did you say? Confidence. The confidence, yes. If you've got one URL about one subject, that confidence is going to be a lot higher than if you are waiting for Pinterest to collect context from 100 or 200 or 300 pins.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

So this makes sense to me now when you use the word confidence, which is probably like a SEO term that all of you SEO people fully understand. These ideas are still solidifying themselves in my mind because I don't have all the SEO foundation, but that makes perfect sense to me.

[A]

I think that came from the conversation where I called you up on a Saturday because I was having a Pinterest crisis that you helped me through.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

So, yeah. And so I think it creates a great opportunity for us as creators again, when people are creating board names that are just very relevant. Like another example you give is someone will say they'll call a board like Sarah's room or just Sarah.

[B]

Sure. Yeah. They'll name their boards after their kids.

[A]

Yeah. And then they just pin all these random things. And Pinterest is just having a hard time understanding. So that just gives an advantage to us creators that we can have more relevant boards with better names and stuff. So that's my general strategy, and I don't recommend it for everyone. And that's come from many conversations with you because we cover different niches and. And we're just learning that some different niches require different strategy. And I would like to just continue to have these conversations with you and other people. It'd be great to, like, have a really easy framework. I don't know, maybe you already have an easy framework to help people understand, okay, I'm in this niche. What's my strategy, especially for boards? And so I would say in general, if you are in a niche where it's very visual and you can have all sorts of, again, fresh new ideas that you can create, then adopting my strategy of creating about a board for every blog post can go really well. It doesn't go well. If you are like covering a lifestyle blog and you've got all sorts of visual ideas that you are creating, you're gonna run into that 2000 board limit very quickly.

[B]

Really quickly.

[A]

So even though you can follow that strategy, it's just, yeah, it's gonna be a big bummer when you hit that limit. And that's one of the reasons why I like to create niche accounts. So I'm just gonna focus on one particular topic. That way I can maximize the number of boards I have. And to your point, you know, my boards, I don't think I have one that's has over a hundred pins in it. Maybe eventually, because I'll go back in and add fresh pins to those boards. I think maybe the longest a board, a current, like something we've covered in the last couple years, a Blog post topic the last couple years, which has its own board, but I think the longest it will go is maybe one year without creating a pin for it. And usually those are the smaller topics that don't get a lot of traction anyways. So it just doesn't work for every single niche. And you've opened my eyes to more niches where the board strategy that I adopt doesn't really work that well. And it makes a lot of sense. I get a lot of questions about this, especially from pin clicks, users trying to figure out, like, where they're going to put their content, and then my course students, because they go through my course and they see how I'm doing my board strategy. And yeah, it's just a really popular question. And so again, it just depends on the niche. But you've got a lot of experience with different niches that some would benefit from creating more boards, some would not. It would be a complete disaster if they approach their board strategy using mine. So do you want to go into, like, what's been your board strategy and then are you doing anything differently since learning about mine?

[B]

Yeah, I absolutely am. So my board strategy for the past, I think it's probably like four or five years, has been fewer boards. The less boards, the better. Going back to that thing I said about, you know, 100, 200, 300 pins, for context, obviously, if you're aiming to put that many pins on a board, you want to have less boards. And so I have focused on what is the broadest board that I can make that has a common thread that runs through my content. That would be the target keyword for this content, and that could apply to multiple blog posts. And that's been my strategy. I would go as far as to say that I even became really fearful of having a lot of unengaged boards. And I think that my course talks about the danger of unengaged boards, which I still believe is a danger. Now, you've explained you're pinning to most of your boards. Like you said, like a year doesn't go by that you don't pin to them. So you're pinning to them because I don't just mean unengaged by the users. I also mean by the creator. I guess I should call them abandoned boards. I don't want to have a lot of abandoned boards on my account that I don't pin to anymore. Pinterest has ratings that they give to our account on the individual level, like unengaged, recently reengaged and engaged. And I think that we would Be absolutely crazy to believe that they don't apply these to a board level also. And yet we know that seasonal boards like Christmas, it can be dormant for a year, pick right back up again a year later, and therefore think that that filter can't apply in the timeline of less than a year. So I have always said, when your account is feeling stagnant, maybe then it's time to introduce a new board. Since having so many conversations with you about boards, I have been far more liberal with my board creation and it is going really well. I've been very pleasantly surprised I have not adopted the strategy of a blog post for every board because like you said, it just doesn't work for every niche. When your singular idea, you kind of said this earlier. When your singular idea is so granular that the Pinterest user wouldn't search it and there isn't going to be multiple images that can represent that idea in a different way to Pinterest, it doesn't make sense to have a board just for that blog post, but it certainly does make sense to have a board that 15 of your blog posts could go on and then another board that 15 of your blog posts could go on and another one. It doesn't have to be just one board for a hundred of your blog posts. That's been really eye opening to me. A measuring stick that I'm using currently is could these 15 blog posts go into a roundup? And if it could, that's probably a good board idea for whatever that roundup would be called, because that thread is obviously going to be pretty strong between those posts. As I've moved forward in my thinking about boards, in the conversations that we've had, I've recently started a new site. I've mentioned that before, and one of the things that is kind of fun about this new site is that it's a. You called it a hybrid niche between a niche that could have a lot of boards or a niche that could not have a lot of boards. It could go either way. And so I have been kind of struggling with what boards should I create and how many boards should I create and which posts should I create this board for? And I'm sure I've badgered you quite a lot about this because I feel like, you know, it's your fault that I want to create more boards. And so I've expected you to give me a lot of feedback. And so as I've moved on forward with this and as we've discussed it, one of the things that I've really settled on is when in doubt, I'm creating a board now, not for the very, very, very granular individual subjects that people are unlikely to search on their own, but when there's a broader thought that can go with that subject, I am creating a board for it. But because this site is a Pinterest site created for Pinterest, the content strategy that I've used has dictated that there's no post that is an individual thought. It has 25 buddies that can be lumped into the same thought. So if I make a board for that thought, it and 25 of its buddies and its roundup pin can all go on that same board. I guess a follow up thought to that is now that I'm feeling like when in doubt, create a board. A recent shift in my train of thinking is also that as we go on and as we find out we might have too many boards. I mean, Pinterest will tell us when we have too many boards. You mentioned that earlier the board limit of 2,000. If we're getting to the point where we have too many boards, or if I have a board that is very unengaged, then I will delete the board. And that has not been something that has ever crossed my mind before. If you had said to me a year ago, oh, why don't you delete that board? I would have been like, no, but, but I'm very open to the idea right now. And so you just deleted a bunch of boards.

[A]

Yeah, I did. I deleted over 30 boards from. Yeah, it's a big number. This came from a conversation with you. And there's someone in my community who posted that they consistently delete their boards. They will go in and do it and when they do, they see a bump in traffic. And so you have. Obviously you have to tread very carefully when deleting boards. Yes. So I was in, in this particular case, on this account, the boards I deleted, I don't think anything had been pinned for at minimum six years. So there was pretty old boards abandoned.

[B]

I like that word very much so.

[A]

Because those are boards that were created when they were like the baby making boards. Like we had no idea what we were doing.

[B]

Baby having. Just so everyone knows I didn't have a baby making board.

[A]

Yeah, I guess baby making comes first, then baby having.

[B]

Yeah, but you don't pin about the first one.

[A]

Yeah, don't, don't, don't pin about those. Okay, all right. So yeah, there was that. And, and also actually when I was going back through those boards, I couldn't believe some of the pins that we had because, well, we mentioned, I think in a couple episodes back, there were a lot of, like, celebrity images in there. And I would be very nervous to use celebrity images these days. I think some people, they get away with it. That's just my preference. I would be nervous about copyright issues and those pens being taken down, even though I got them from a reputable source of photos. I don't know, it just. It's tricky. And so I would steer clear. But, yeah, we had a bunch of those in there. So I got rid of. And then stuff that, again, these were outdated ideas. And that was another filter I went through because I personally went and did it. It's like, would this idea be relevant today? If not, then I got rid of the whole board. So I don't know how many pins I got rid of, because some of those boards. This was when I had someone managing the Pinterest account that had no idea what they're doing. So actually, those boards had hundreds of pins in them. A lot of them were not our own. They were other people's pens and stuff. So I got rid of all those because I don't. I pin a little bit of other people's stuff. I think there's a good time to do that and a good time to not do that. But, yeah, so those 30 boards, 30 plus boards are gone. And we'll see. Like, that's just. It's been like, not even a week since I've done that. So we'll see what happens. Yeah, some of them were redundant. Like, I think one of my assistants forgot we already had a board on this topic. They just. It was at the bottom, you know, of the list. Cause when you have as many boards as we do, it takes a lot of scrolling to get through all of your boards.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And so they just missed it. And so I found several, like, duplicate boards, basically. But I deleted the old ones and because again, they just haven't been pinned to. They were abandoned. So I felt totally comfortable deleting all those. Although there was. There was one pin in there, I deleted it because I deleted the board. It's one of those rare pins that you see that show up in your Pinterest analytics, where has an crazy amount of clicks and impressions. And there's no way that this pen. It's one of those glitch pins.

[B]

I think you called it glitch pin. I called it a glitch pin. Yeah.

[A]

It was a. There. I deleted one of the boards that had the glitch pin.

[B]

It's on it.

[A]

Yeah. And we're talking like, Pinterest will show like 20,000 outbound clicks in the last 30 days for this pin.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I look at this pin, I'm like, there is absolutely no way. This PIN is so old. It's so outdated. This has to be a glitch. And then when you go to the individual stats for it, it's like all zero. Yeah, yeah. It's nothing.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. All my accounts have a glitch pin and most of the other people that I've talked to have a glitch pin. So, I mean, be aware of your glitch pin. I've never thought about deleting the glitch pin. That's interesting. I do think that the glitch pin stats, I think, and I don't know that they're reflected in your line in your graphs. So you might see if you delete those 30 boards and you delete a glitch pin, you might see an instant drop in your stats, but. But you can't count it. And I don't know about that, but I'd be interested to learn. And then I'll also be interested to learn about when you deleted it. Like, note that date. And then I'd be interested to see if your engagement rate graph is also immediately up. Right. Because that's less dead weight. We talked about dead weight earlier and now what we're talking about is deleting dead weight. And I'm about to delete. I'm not brave enough to start with 30, but I'm about to delete a board or two on my account also. And those are things I'm going to be watching for. My boards have 400, 500, 600 pins, so I might see a more immediate effect on my stats. Although you deleted 30, which is going to be like, also to terrible math. 3000 pins, 1500 pins.

[A]

It was a lot.

[B]

Yeah. So you might have immediate effect, too. I'm going to start by deleting one at a time here and there. You know, you said you heard from this group member that deleted her boards and. Or he or she had instant bump right away. I'd be curious to know, was that instant bump just statistical impressions engagement, or did it include outbound clicks? Because it would make sense if we saw immediate lift in engagements. Yeah, it would make sense if we saw the impressions shouldn't change. Except if you delete your glitch pin, but your engagement should go up. It'd be interesting to know if outbound clicks Followed years ago when the whole group board. We've touched on group boards a few times and we talked about how they went bad because people were pinning all kinds of content to them. I didn't leave any of my group boards. I wasn't brave enough to do that. I archived all of mine, but lots of creators left them. They deleted them from their accounts. And a lot of those people reported increased everything. It improved their accounts to leave those boards, not just to quit pinning to them, but to leave them. I'm pretty motivated to start leaving some five years later now after this conversation.

[A]

Really?

[B]

Yeah, I think so. Feel super brave.

[A]

Okay. Yeah. You have to report back how that goes. So, like with the glitch pin, I need to keep better track on when the glitch pin shows up on my analytics because it might show up for a couple days and I think it.

[B]

Goes away, but you get a different one.

[A]

Well, that's the thing is I need to take more screenshots.

[B]

So I'll get a different one.

[A]

That one will be there for a.

[B]

Few days, then a different one, and it's always the same three or four or five. And then after Pinterest updates, there'll be a new one too in the rotation.

[A]

Oh, my gosh.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That's so crazy. So I need to look and see because there are times when there's no glitch pin.

[B]

No, I never have that.

[A]

Oh, really? Yeah, I'm pretty darn sure.

[B]

Interesting.

[A]

I know that there are times where I have no glitch pin and so I would think that then I would see a lot more ups and downs with my charts because again, some of these glitch pins, they're reporting like 20 to 30,000 outbound clicks in a month. That's a significant amount of clicks.

[B]

And it's not in your charts.

[A]

No, not that I've seen.

[B]

Interesting, because my brand new account that's only five weeks old already has a glitch pin with outrageous stats on it. I've always believed that that is showing lifetime stats. That's clearly not because I already have a glitch pin with. I'm just gonna look, I think more impressions and outbound clicks than what my account has got. And so this is. I was explaining earlier to you, like, it's so interesting to do this account because I'm noticing things that are impossible to notice on a very established account because there's so much going on on a very established account. Whereas this account, everything is very clear. Yeah. This pin has not had, it says 497 outbound clicks. It has not had that. These are not historical stats. If I click on it, if I open the pin, it shows three clicks. And this account is only five weeks old. I would know if there was another pin getting 500 clicks in in these weeks.

[A]

Yeah. So it's not even lifetime stats.

[B]

No. I don't know where they're coming from. This is crazy. Fascinating.

[A]

Yeah. So one of the things that I think would be good to kind of end with is some examples of what we're talking about with our board strategy.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

So there are like three primary niches I see with Pinterest. Like purely visual. Like a purely visual niche. Think of, like, home decor as comes to mind. Then there's purely informational think, like parenting advice. Right. You're just going in there to read the information. You're not going to get ideas. You're not going to be looking visually to get ideas. And then there's a niche that's like a hybrid. In between that and recipes is a great niche for that. People are, you know, drawn in visually by the beautiful pictures of the final creation of the dish, but they need the text, they need to read it in order to be able to understand if they're going to implement this idea. And then when they go to implement it, they need to read it as well. So I think it's one of the reasons why, you know, a lot of recipe bloggers can do really well with this niche, but they're the hybrid ones. And so their approach to their board tragedy is going to look a little different than, say, home decor. Whereas home decor. I would be creating pretty much a board for every blog post. But because, again, you can have, like, unlimited ideas of kitchen design ideas.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, it's endless, right?

[B]

Yeah. That's a great way to explain it, if anything that's image based is going to be able to be described endlessly. And the board names are descriptions of what you're seeing.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So that's a great way to define.

[A]

It versus, say, like, parenting advice.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So you have, like, you mentioned roundups. I do listicles. So, like, all my content is listicle base. And now with your content, that's more like text information or a hybrid of the two. Those are more roundups that you end up doing where, like, you group together a list of individual ideas that you've created blog posts for. That's what I refer to as a roundup. And then I define a listicle as like a standalone. This is just a list, you know, top 10 you know, white kitchen ideas, and it's not linking to, like, an individual kitchen idea. Now some home decor bloggers may, like, break down an individual kitchen. Like, maybe they really do like home decor and they have a client they did a white kitchen for and they break that down into a blog post. Some people may want to see that blog post of, like, this whole makeover of this white kitchen, but they're not going to be searching for that and wanting to, like, see an individual makeover. The nuances to that when they're looking for a white kitchen idea. So that's why you don't see that a lot of home decor sites, but with parenting, so going back to that niche, say you've got a bunch of advice for, like, potty training. Let's say that. And so, like, maybe you've got like 10 different tips and you can create whole new blog posts for every single tip. Those individual tips, they might do well on their own. On Pinterest, it's hard to say. They may end up doing better as roundups. Like, you know, 10 tips for potty training. And that's where you create a whole roundup post. Feature all 10 of those and then link to the individual tips from those. And the same thing can apply to, like, recipes. So individual recipe you create on your site, but then you can create roundups to include those recipes in. Sometimes those individual recipes or ideas, like from the parenting advice will show up in the broader searches, sometimes not. That's something we were talking about before we hit record. Here is like, I'm still trying to figure this out. When Pinterest chooses to be the curator of ideas on the search results, where they will pick, like, kind of random ideas. So if you type in, like, chicken recipes, you're going to see like a bunch of random different chicken recipes versus, like, other searches that are broad. Pinterest will not curate individual unique ideas, but instead they'll show you pins that have done the curation for you. And that's where, like the roundups and listicles, you'll see more of those pins ranking there.

[B]

Oh, I have a question for you about this.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Okay. So when, when you're doing this research and you see this because this is directly applicable to, to a blog post that I'm going to work on this afternoon for my news site. So I'm going to target one of the areas where I'm only seeing individual ideas with a roundup and see how that performs. But are you saying that maybe Pinterest doesn't want roundups for Those areas.

[A]

I don't know what I'm saying. That's just what I'm seeing.

[B]

Right. What you're seeing. Okay. Right.

[A]

That's what I'm seeing. Yeah. And so that's all the more reason to like, do your research to know. To see how Pinterest treats it.

[B]

Yeah. Oh, well, I did research it and I've seen that exactly what you're talking about. I saw it for this blog post and I just thought, like, but that could be a roundup too.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So I made a board for it. I'm going to pin all my individual ideas because I still want to give Pinterest the opportunity to rank the individual ideas. So I've got 10 individual ideas for this particular subject. I'm going to pin the individual individual ideas and I'm going to pin the roundup too.

[A]

Cool. Okay, that makes sense.

[B]

We'll see if they will take my.

[A]

Roundup, but it would be hard. So, like, going back to the, like, parenting advice idea, the individual pieces of advice as an individual blog post, I would not create a board for each of those because you can't really expand on that advice necessarily, like with fresh new ideas. Cause it's like one idea. It's kind of like how a individual recipe is one idea. Sure, you might be able to go back and tweak the recipe a little bit, but. And so you're end up creating just rehash pins, ensure you can find a unique angle to take with it. Like you can throw an adjective in there, like easy or simple or whatever, you know, to make those unique. But it's going to be hard to create something fresh and different and unique enough to warrant having its own board.

[B]

Right. Because if you are the end user, this is the test I would pass it through. If you are the end user and you go to that board and you see simple potty training idea and easy potty training idea and best potty training idea. Are they different ideas when you combine those words with the image or not and not, the answer is not in this case. Whereas in the white bathroom vanities example that you used before, white bathroom vanity A, white bathroom vanity B, white bathroom vanity C, white bag. A board should be like looking at a roundup or listicle without clicking through. And so that to me, is a good measure for whether or not your content. And this is the strategy that I've come to understand after talking with you. This is a strategy that I've applied to my new site. Just slightly tweaked. But when you open the Boards. And you look at the boards, you do see, you know, the 25 different ideas that can make up the Listicle or the Roundup plus the Roundup. And so they are all different ideas on that board. I am ending up with more pins. And I was just thinking about this while we're talking. I am going to end up with a hundred pins on a lot of my boards.

[A]

Wow. Yeah.

[B]

I don't know what to think about that now. Got to find out how it goes.

[A]

Because, well, what gets tricky is, like, going back to the parenting tips. Some of those tips can be repurposed in other context or other ways. Same thing, like with recipes or even home decor. With this new account, I know we've had lots of conversations about it and especially the board strategy about it, but it can get overwhelming when you're creating so many boards that you're repurposing your content. Individual ideas that can be repurposed under unique, broader ideas, which is a great niche to be in if you can repurpose that. So it's more boards, more pins. But, you know, you're expanding your reach. And, I mean, I think it's one of the reasons why your account, this new account, is doing really well for you right now.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, I agree. And what I've settled on, it is really overwhelming. And I have been overwhelmed trying to determine what I'm doing. But, you know, it's great for me to do this and to do this with you, because after we've done this, we'll be able to articulate for other people inside our trainings and inside our memberships, just how we think they should move forward. And right now, what I've settled on is I'm using pinks for every single blog post. And pin I create. A pinclicks is the keyword research tool that Tony developed for anybody listening who doesn't know what pink clicks is. And I think there's probably links to it in the show notes. And because I've been able to find so many good Pinterest keywords that I want to target, I've just moved forward knowing that, like, I'm not afraid of making extra boards. So, you know, in the past, where I would have gone, okay, I can't pick between this keyword and this keyword. I can't decide. In the past, I would have been worried to create too many boards. Now I'm just creating both boards, gonna try them both, because I'm not afraid to delete one if it doesn't go well. That's A new approach for me. So I'm just creating more boards and I'm more liberally targeting more keywords because I find more keywords. And so right now, it feels like a broad experiment, but I'm seeing the experiment work. And so as time goes on, we'll be able to refine exactly what works. Right now, I can broadly say more boards targeting more keywords is working, and that's a good starting point for me.

[A]

Cool. Yeah. One of the things that I'm thinking about is someone asking when can they know that they can reuse a pen idea for another board for another blog post? So going back to my example of home decor and say it's an individual picture of a white kitchen cabinet, I've had people ask, like, can I just reuse that same image, put it into another listicle and create a board for that listicle and pin that image to that board, even though you've already pinned that image to another listicle, because maybe you've got, like, modern kitchen ideas and you've got, like, clean kitchen ideas where you can easily take the same exact image, white kitchen, and put it in both of those boards. My recommendation, I mean, this is where AI is really great for these kind of accounts where, like, you don't have to worry about that because it's just so easy, go create another white kitchen image, you know? But if you're in a niche that you can't easily go create another version of that that's unique, then that's where you can at least test out. Putting, like, text on the image, like unique text with it that can help put as part of a collage with other images, create a unique collage out of it. But, yeah, that gets hard to scale that out when you've got this one picture of this one idea and you're trying to roll that into several different listicles or roundups, because then you end up pinning that same image over and over again in different boards, kind of under different contexts.

[B]

So the idea that you are talking about has definitely contributed to the overwhelm that I've experienced with this account. But I have not pinned the same image at any point. I've used the same image and I've done what you're talking about, added text overlay to it, or change the color on the text overlay or cropped it differently. So I haven't pinned an identical image, even though my goal when I introduce an image is to have no less. Currently, I don't think I've shared this with you either yet. To have no less than four boards that it can go on. And so I'm starting with multiple pins for each blog post. I don't introduce them all the same day over time, but to have at least four boards that that blog post can go on and a different pin image created for each of those boards. And for some boards as they become more broadly distributed and I'm seeing good results with it. Sometimes I'm even putting the keyword language on the pin, even though I would have considered it potentially too granular or whatever to start with. It's going on the pin because that pin's only for that board.

[A]

Right, Interesting. So time will tell how it's going, and we're kind of in a popular season right now as we record this, but I'm anxious to see how these pins and these boards do for you going forward for the next next year or so, if you commit to it. Yeah, I know it's a lot of. It's a lot of work.

[B]

A year sounds like a lot of time, but we'll be committed to it for the next few months and continue to see what happens. And I'll keep you updated.

[A]

Cool. Well, if you've got questions about Pinterest boards, if you're in one of our communities, join our community if you're not, and post a question there. But also you can reach [e-mail] if there was just something we said that was totally confusing, we can kind of clarify for you. If you have a quick question, you can reach us out there. But hopefully this gave you some things to think about. Understand your board strategy and how you'll approach it. If you have realized you've been doing the strategy all wrong for your niche, before you start deleting boards and renaming boards, I don't know, double check with somebody. Whether it's us or someone else, just be careful with your boards. It can really change the context of your pins and whatnot. So I hate for that to negatively affect your traffic there. So be careful because they're that important.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, I agree.

[A]

Awesome. Well, thanks for listening. Today, check the show notes for some resources that we mentioned and we will catch you on the next episode. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of Pentalk. Head over to pentalkpodcast.com to get the show notes and the resources mentioned. And hey, if you like this episode and want to hear more from us, please rate and review our show.