← Pin Talk - Pinterest Tips and Updates for Creators
Pin Talk - Pinterest Tips and Updates for Creators
S1E9 Why We Have Multiple Pinterest Accounts (And Is It Worth It for You?)
00:50:19
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- [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 what are we talking about today, Carly?
- [00:13]
B
We are going to talk about having multiple Pinterest accounts, whether or not it is worth having multiple Pinterest accounts, and the considerations that are an important part of the conversation around having multiple Pinterest accounts.
- [00:28]
A
Yeah, that's right. We were actually talking about this, naturally, a few hours ago, and I was like, wait a second, let's pause. I think this could be a great podcast episode because I'm seeing a lot of people ask this question, like, hey, can I start another Pinterest account? What does that look like? What are some things I should know? And we've started multiple Pinterest accounts, so we have some experience. There are several different paths one could take. So we've kind of broken down this episode of like, there are three paths you can take with Pinterest, and we're going to talk through all those three paths. So you first just want to highlight real quick what those three paths are.
- [01:09]
B
Okay, sure. So there's like the most, probably the most common one that everybody starts with, and that's having one site and one Pinterest account. And that's kind of the standard baseline how we're going to move forward. The next thing that you could do is have multiple Pinterest accounts for one website, potentially. And finally, you could have multiple websites, each with their own Pinterest account. And those are all very different things.
- [01:38]
A
Yeah, they are. So we're going to jump into each of those. We're going to talk about the pros and the cons of each. But before we do, couple of caveats. One, Well, I don't know, actually, have you done all three of these things? I mean, obviously you've had one site, one account. You've got multiple Pinterest accounts with multiple sites. But have you done the one website with multiple Pinterest accounts?
- [02:01]
B
I have kind of utilized multiple Pinterest accounts to pin for one website, but I've never started a dedicated second account where I'm like, this account is only to pin for this domain and it's not attached to this domain. Like, I have an account on my phone and if something from my main website shows up, I'll pin that, but if something from one of my other websites shows up, I'll pin that too. So it's, it's just like a multi purpose secondary account.
- [02:31]
A
Okay, cool. So I Guess between the two of us, we've got experience with all three of these options, but not maybe as much with having one website with multiple Pinterest accounts that's dedicated to promoting that one website. All right, Another caveat is, and this probably a caveat we could use for every episode, and that is a lot of this depends on the kind of content you're creating, like what we talk about and different strategies and tips and ideas. You have to look at it through the lens of the kind of content you're creating, the kind of images that you're pinning. Right. So the strategy can change if you're pinning like pure images, just purely visual. Niche home decor is one of those, versus maybe a niche that's more text. And visual, like recipes is a good example where people like the pretty pictures, but there's also text that they have to read. And so it's really common to have text on your pens and you're creating collage pens. And so that difference, as small as it is, can make a huge difference in your strategy with all this. And it creates some limitations. There's pros and cons to that. The other one is, you know, earning a full time income, like that's kind of, that's a big goal for a lot of creators here on Pinterest. Right. And so we're assuming that you're in this place where you at least have one site, one Pinterest account. And if you're considering the other two options before you go and do that and make that drastic change, we say give that one account, that one site, a solid year. And if it's flatlined at the end of that year, or if it's going down, okay, maybe it is time to start thinking about adding another account. But don't jump right into it from the very beginning unless you've got a lot of experience creating systems and you've got everything figured out and understood, but really you really don't until you're almost like a year into Pinterest. So that's just another caveat, is you know yourself well and what you can handle, but give it a good year before you start considering some of these other options. Okay, so those are the caveats. Anything you would add to that?
- [04:46]
B
No, I just fully agree. I think that if you're going to be adding more accounts, it's an advanced strategy and you should see it as an advanced strategy, not a beginner strategy.
- [04:55]
A
That's a good way to put it. Okay, so the first one first pass you can take and stay on is just one site, one Pinterest account. Nice and simple. So that's one of the pros. What are some other pros of just having one site, one Pinterest account?
- [05:13]
B
Well, it's obviously, it's like you said, it's simple, it's just, it's easier to manage. And as we grow our businesses, not just our Pinterest traffic but our businesses, we are going to add more and more and more layers to it. And I think if you immediately go, you know, I need to add other Pinterest accounts, I think that what you're going to do is just stay here in the Pinterest layer. You're not going to have any ability to add the next layer of your business. And one of the things that I, I mentioned when, when we started this conversation was that an email that John Dykstro wrote like two years ago really struck me as an important concept for us all to understand and he had gone to. I am not gonna get the name of this right, but it's like mediavine Premiere level conference. Is that it? Okay. Which is a level of mediavine that is specific for people earning over a hundred thousand dollars, I think from their sites. In a year, in a calendar year, there actually might be two levels that might actually be a level below Premier. Yeah. Okay, so that, that might be what it is. So he was actually maybe at the conference for the people at the next level and he wrote in this newsletter that what struck him as interesting was that the vast majority of people he talked to at this conference that were in this toppest tier of mediavine had one site and they had singular focus on one site versus having spread their, their efforts thin in that they've really changed the way that I thought about my business in general. And to this day I still believe that one site with a singular focus for the average person who doesn't have a team has the ability to out earn multiple sites with your focus. Divide it. So yeah, I think that's a pretty big pro to one site and one account.
- [07:07]
A
Yeah, for sure. I've had conversations with John about that and I told him, you know, the caveat to that is I think all of those people that he bumped into at that conference with just their one site, one Pinterest account and a lot of them were getting a good chunk of their traffic from Pinterest, but a lot of them are, it's like their personal brand, right? Like maybe it's like a lifestyle blog or maybe like it's a recipe blogger and They've got their name, their face all over the blog. Like, so not only are people following their website because they've got great recipes, but they really like the person and they're following the person as a brand. Okay, so you almost need a little bit of charisma with that. Not everyone has that. Like, sometimes you need a pretty face, like if you're pictures on the sidebar, as shallow as that sounds.
- [07:59]
B
Yeah, I see what you're saying.
- [08:00]
A
You know what I mean? And you're doing video or whatever. Like you have to have some charisma and you're writing some charisma. And I think people get attracted to that and they follow that on top of the value that you provide. And so some people, they just don't have that charisma. And so they try and they struggle. And it's something you have to work on. Like some people are born and it's just a natural thing for them to have that and others you have to work on it. And so I'm not saying it's not possible. It's just something you gotta work on if it's not coming naturally. But really long term, I think it's a really great approach to your business, is to have a personal brand. Like it's kind of a newer concept in the last, I don't know, 10 years or so with the development of the Internet and people having, you know, their own blogs and they're on Instagram and TikTok and the YouTube and developing all these followers. And now they're reaching more people than like your average TV show will reach. Right. And so it's just a big shift that's happened. And so, yeah, if you want to go all in on a personal brand or if you've got like an E. Comm, you've got a shop where you're selling products that go all in on that. But I understand not everyone wants to do that if they're like a total introvert, right. And they just kind of want to hide behind a little couple of sites or something. I totally get that too. So that's my opinion.
- [09:22]
B
Okay, that's a great point. I have talked to a lot of people over the years who have told me I don't want even if they have the charisma and the ability to be a personal brand, I don't want to be a personal brand. And I relate to that because with my Pinterest business, I'd say I'm very much a personal brand. But with my main website that my name and picture could be scrubbed off that thing tomorrow and it would not affect the content or its earning ability. And I actually, there's some massive benefits to that. In some ways I prefer that. And so I can totally relate and understand to the people that would rather just have three small websites earning less money than one massive website.
- [10:10]
A
Yeah, Right. But you have to understand the risk of that is you're very dependent on platforms and that traffic.
- [10:18]
B
When you're talking about the brand, the one website, one account.
- [10:21]
A
That's right, yes. If you're not. Well, if you're, if you decide to not do that, like, you know, with, like, with your site that you were referring to, you can take your picture off there because you're getting your. It's almost like the traffic is anonymous. They could care less that your name and your picture is on there. Right?
- [10:39]
B
Yeah. My main account doesn't email list, so it literally can't reach people outside of the platforms that it uses for traffic.
- [10:47]
A
That's right.
- [10:48]
B
And that is a real risk big time.
- [10:50]
A
Versus, if you went all in on this site as a brand, then if you start losing traffic from one of these platforms like Pinterest, then people will still follow you. They'll still come to your site because they're interested in you. What you have to say, you're not just another random site that they found from Pinterest. And so that's my recommendation is like, if you're going to do one site, one account, go all in on. On a brand.
- [11:19]
B
Okay.
- [11:19]
A
For the long term. Got it.
- [11:21]
B
I, I was just gonna ask you to summarize where we were going with this because I was like, we're talking about the one site, one account, and now we're talking about being a brand and I needed you to make the connection. But that's your recommendation. If you're doing one site, one account, be a brand. And I. That makes sense. I totally get what you're saying.
- [11:35]
A
Yeah, go all in. It's hard though, if you are making the site kind of anonymous. It really is. It's. It's hard to go all in as a brand. And so that's something that I don't do. Like, I don't have sites that have my personal brand on them that's generating traffic from Pinterest. It's funny because I've seen people post on like Reddit about like, when. Where's Tony Hill's Pinterest accounts? Like, and people.
- [12:01]
B
Right. Yes.
- [12:01]
A
They hear me talk about Pinterest and so they would think that I would naturally reveal them yes, but they're not. But they're not a personal brand, so I'm not revealing them for that reason and other reasons. So that's gonna have a limitation. I've accepted the risks and the limitations of doing that and taking that approach. But that opens me up to the other paths that we're gonna talk about, the other ways that you can leverage Pinterest with different accounts.
- [12:27]
B
Yeah, And I agree. I accepted the risk of not building a brand around my main account a long time ago. And I've got emails that have gone out years ago that talk about how it's a choice that I've made because I don't want to email those people. Just didn't want to. So with that in mind, I mean, scaling the traffic up as high as we possibly can from any platform that we're using. But in this conversation in particular, we're talking about Pinterest. It makes sense. Why wouldn't we do that? And so then enters the conversation the idea of multiple Pinterest accounts for one website and potentially using multiple Pinterest accounts to boost the traffic to one website. So what are the potential pros of this?
- [13:16]
A
Yeah. So hopefully, as you're listening, you can kind of wrap your brain around this, because I know some people, even myself included, at first, I was, like, trying to understand how this would work. So you got to understand one. With Pinterest, you can only claim one website domain per account. Okay. So just want to make that clear. You can't just go start up another Pinterest account, claim your domain. The advantage of claiming that domain name is that you could see the analytics. That's the biggest one. It's like an official way to tell Pinterest, like, hey, I own this domain. Show me all my stats.
- [13:49]
B
Well, you can have rich pins.
- [13:51]
A
Okay. Rich pins.
- [13:52]
B
And so Pinterest can scrape your pins, like, literally collect the information from the website. I don't believe. Oh, my goodness. If I'm wrong about this, I apologize to everybody listening. But I don't believe you can have rich pins if your website is not claimed somewhere.
- [14:08]
A
Really? Huh.
- [14:10]
B
Yeah. But now I doubt myself.
- [14:12]
A
Yeah. Because it seems like that would be a limitation. That's just an artificial limitation that Pinterest is creating. Because wouldn't they want to get all that open? It's that open graph data that they're reading, which has some benefits to pens, which I wrote down as a future episode topic. So we can talk about rich pens. Because there's some confusion around that and some advantages and disadvantages. And might be worthy of its own episodes. Sounds like Carly's researching this to fact check herself.
- [14:41]
B
I Googled it. Yoast says to get rich pins for your site, Pinterest must authorize your site for rich pins.
- [14:48]
A
That's crazy. I don't know why Pinterest says that.
- [14:51]
B
I believe that that authorization comes via the claiming process. Pretty sure. If I end up being wrong about this, I apologize.
- [15:02]
A
Okay, well, so there's. There's that. All right, so you can only claim one website domain per Pinterest account. But if you. And there's kind of a cap on how many pins you can do for a single account, Pinterest has set a cap of 200 pins a day. But also algorithmically, there are some accounts that can get away with pinning up to 200 pins per day. It seems like Pinterest is cracking down on that a little bit more these days. And I'm not sure about the long term viability of pinning that much every single day. So every account is unique, right? Stone Snowflake, as we talked about in the last episode, and how many daily pins it can handle. There's a lot of factors to that. It's a whole other conversation. But let's just say for simplicity's sake, your account does best at, like, 20 pins per day. Because you tested and you try adding more and nothing happened. Or traffic went down, but you went back to 20, and that's like your equilibrium and sweet spot. So then how are you to grow? Like, that's my thought process of, like, creating multiple accounts. Because my goal is I want to grow, I want to increase my traffic, I want to increase my revenue. So how can I do that if I can't increase the amount of pins that I'm creating? Even if I've continued to dial in to increase the quality of those 20 pins per day, still limited. There are 20amazing pins that can't get any better. I'm still capped. Right. But I don't want to set up a whole new website and, like, create a whole new Pinterest account and do, like, completely different thing. And I just want to focus on that one account because maybe I have created a more of a brand, and I do just want to focus on this one website. So can you create a whole separate Pinterest account with that? Obviously, it can't claim that main domain name, but you can just pin, like, your stuff like that goes back to your main website. And is that okay with Pinterest that you do that?
- [17:00]
B
Okay, well, the Pinterest community guidelines And I'm going to read it word for word so that we are being completely clear. Says don't operate multiple accounts or coordinate with other people for the purpose of manipulating the Pinterest platform. So we have to consider that Pinterest is literally, its purpose is literally to save and share content that you find on Pinterest. And so I don't think that having another account that is broadly making collections of content in your niche and your content happens to be part of the content that you're sharing is against those terms of service. I do think that setting up six accounts and having bots is really common. In the old Pinterest days, there were these bots that would like create accounts and then repin only your pins, like endlessly, hundreds of accounts, repinning only your pins. Pinterest shut that down really fast. I think that's what they're talking about. So I think that having one account that you are intentionally curating fantastic collections of content, yours and third party is within Pinterest terms of service because Pinterest is like created to curate collections of content and unlikely to set off a spam flag either way because. Because you're not doing a spammy action, you're doing what Pinterest was created to do. So we had this conversation earlier and you said, well, you wondered about pinning your competitors things. And I said, yes, if I was doing this, I would pin my competitors things. Maybe not exactly the same idea as what I've created. So in this example, I used Grinch recipes. It's kind of Christmas time right now while we're recording this. So Grinch is showing up in my feed everywhere. And if I'm pinning and I have a Grinch truffles recipe and a Grinch cookies recipe, and I know that that's what I'm pinning out. And then I'm on another account on my phone, I've got my regular user account on my phone and I'm pinning to a Grinch recipes board. If I pass Grinch pudding cups from one of my competitors in my feed, I will absolutely save that along with my own that will come up afterwards because I'm putting it into a relevant content bucket. And Grinch Pudding cups is honestly not even competing with anything that I'm creating. So that's how I view the use of multiple Pinterest accounts for one website. Kind of like it's just increasing your opportunity for engagement and more relevant signals to the platform. Now, do you view it the same way or do you take a whole different approach when you think about this.
- [20:02]
A
Concept, yeah, I wouldn't pin any of my competitors pins. I would try to look like a normal user account maybe, and maybe follow a different set of different topics and pin regularly for those topics. But for my own niche, I would only save mine.
- [20:19]
B
Interesting. Okay.
- [20:20]
A
Yeah. I don't know if Pinterest would find that pattern. It's like, oh, only recipes I save are from this one website. I don't think so. Actually, I can prove it, because if you were to go to my wife's Pinterest account, which I found out she's using again, interesting. So she was using a new recipe and I was like, oh, you know, because it was all on the Pinterest board and I recognized the site and I was like, all the pins on that board was from that one website. I'm like, what's going on there? She's like, yeah, I know. For when it comes to desserts and treats and stuff, I've tried all of her stuff and they've been great every single time. So I just follow her and only pin her stuff for desserts and treats, which I thought was interesting.
- [21:03]
B
So, I mean, for one thing, I'm glad to hear your wife is using Pinterest again, because, I mean, surely that girl should know that you're buying her gifts directly from there. And so it would be wise for her to lean into this.
- [21:14]
A
Right. Like, she listens to this podcast sometimes.
- [21:16]
B
Yeah, she knows. I don't think my husband's ever listened to the podcast, but just saying, make a board of pretty sparkly things there. So hopefully she'll do that. But there's actually a massive spam account happening on Pinterest right now, and I'm not going to go into directly what the account is, but one of the things that this account has done is it's created hundreds and hundreds. Like the bots of old. It's created hundreds and hundreds of accounts. It. It has created loads of boards on each of these accounts, and on every single one of those boards, all the links only go to the spam account. And they're not getting shut down the way that we would hope that they would. They are literally, like, doing the thing, manipulating, you know, having multiple accounts for the sole purpose of being manipulative. To me, what they're doing is clearly against Pinterest terms of service. I mean, they're also stealing images from other websites that still have other URLs on them and linking them out to their own accounts. But their boards are not a problem. They're still ranking in Pinterest. It's clearly not a immediate flag, right?
- [22:34]
A
Because I guess it can be. I guess my wife has proven kind of a normal behavior for a certain topic. You're only saving pins from one website because you like all their. All their ideas. Yeah. So practically, what does this look like and how much time should you dedicate to this? Do you have to create brand new pins for this separate account, this non connected kind of side account that you're creating, or are you just saving pins that you've already created that are on the website or that are on your actual Pinterest account?
- [23:08]
B
I think both things are options. When I talk about my personal account on my phone, I am not doing newly created like individual images for that. I am saving the things that are in my feed that are relevant. There's been a few times where if it's a post that I have a lot of images for, I'll click through the one that ended up in my feedback and then I'll save my favorite one from the site so that I'm reintroducing the ones that I have the most hope for. But I'm not actually creating new images for it. That's just beyond the scope of my personal abilities. I think if you have a team, you could certainly create individual images and upload them from another account. Really depends on what your capacity is and considering the Pinterest community guidelines. Knowing that Pinterest is created for us to save content in in buckets, I do feel like saving from the feed is a really safe way to do it. I also feel like third party pins others pins. So when you look at your analytics, you'll see either the traffic is coming from your pins or from others pins. But Pinterest still knows if those others pins were pinned by you first and if the person got to them by going through that pin on the app. I always see those others pins as really strong votes for your content, which I guess they still are if someone else creates an image. But it just seems like it seems like a lot of work at the level I'm implementing this. I want this to be an easy thing where I'm spending 10 minutes on my phone Pinterest account at night on the couch. This is not taking me hours and hours.
- [25:02]
A
Yeah. Which having this conversation sparked an idea that I want to test. And that is so I've got a team of people that help me with my Pinterest accounts. And what if like I asked them, okay, everyone, you know, take off 20 minutes early, go Sit on the couch, hang out, get on your phone and with a personal Pinterest account, go through and start saving our pins.
- [25:29]
B
I think it's a great.
- [25:30]
A
As well as saving other pins and everything.
- [25:32]
B
Yeah, content buckets.
- [25:34]
A
Yeah, that's right, content buckets. But then most of my team, they're in the Philippines, so I would want them to get on a vpn, connect to here in the States. I think there's going to be more weight. Unfortunately, that's just the way I see the algorithm working. There's just a lot of weight with USA based users and accounts. So hooking up a VPN for that and they, I believe they're using it for the work count as well. So they just need to make sure they're connected to the states. But I do wonder. So say they're using a vpn, say they connect to Chicago for their laptop or computer for their work, but then maybe on their phone they connect to like Los Angeles or something just to get a different IP address, just to play it safe. But again, it shouldn't be a big deal. If they are doing the thing that the platform is designed for and they're pinning more than just our own pins and the other different topics and other boards they're creating. I don't see the harm in it. But that guarantees that, okay, say I have 10 people on my team, every PIN is gonna have at least 10 saves within 24 hours.
- [26:39]
B
Yeah, that'll be. That would be a pretty insane. I mean, so this is not an experiment that I would do with my full time income earning account. To be completely honest. I would, because I would want it to look very natural. I would have like one pin with 10 saves, but one with three and one with seven. And that's hard to coordinate. But I would feel more comfortable with sporadic numbers rather than consistent numbers because we know that the bots were doing consistent numbers and they got in trouble. They got in big bad bot trouble. So, um, I do do the VPN thing because my computer has a VPN on it. So then my phone is obviously a different vpn. It was not that long ago, it was in the summer that you, you started like a few just like random user accounts back to back and you didn't even pin anything on them or anything. And you got one of them shut down. Right. And that is certainly a V. IP address issue. You started like a whole bunch right away.
- [27:43]
A
Yep.
- [27:44]
B
Yeah. So we know that they're watching our IP addresses for like crazy things like starting 10 accounts at once. That that'll cause issues for you?
- [27:52]
A
Oh, yeah, yeah. They're collecting all sorts of user data. They're matching your IP address with what operating system you're using with your browser. And so, yeah, they're looking for patterns. So.
- [28:04]
B
And so that's just, just very important that we help people understand that if they are listening to this.
- [28:10]
A
Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, I guess, you know, if you're hanging out on your couch watching TV or whatever and you just kind of for 20 minutes, scroll through your Pinterest feed, save some of your pins. Wouldn't hurt if you've got some friends or your spouse, if they can get on a different IP address, why not? Do you think it's worth it? Like, would you really commit to doing this if this was your full time or you want it to be your full time thing?
- [28:38]
B
Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I have committed to doing this this way. My phone, my phone account. And I will also say that my phone account once in a while, if I'm seeing in my analytics that a PIN is starting to do really well and that pin pops into the feed, the phone account might comment on that pin. It'll give it an extra boost of engagement. So, and then, and then my main account will go back and it will answer. And yes, I'm having a conversation with myself on my, on my pins. But engagement breeds engagement. It's really can't be overlooked. So. Yep. So yeah, I mean, just the basic. Having a regular user account that pins in the same niche as your main account, that's something that I would absolutely do. The thing that I am not as confident that I would recommend for everybody is multiple websites with multiple Pinterest accounts, because that's a whole undertaking. So let's. Should we like dive into multiple websites with multiple Pinterest accounts?
- [29:39]
A
Yep. So that's the third one here on our list and the last one having multiple sites with their own Pinterest account. That's claimed. So basically, instead of running one site, one Pinterest account, you're just going to run several as a way to diversify. I'm going to assume if you choose this particular path, you're hitting a limitation with your first account that you've created and you don't want to really put all of your time and energy into that one account to make it a big brand. Then you're going to choose a path of. All right, what If I have four or five sites making $1,000 a month each, which is totally doable.
- [30:21]
B
Yes. I would go as far as to say with hoping not to upset anybody deeply, I would go as far as to say, it's easy.
- [30:31]
A
Just gotta follow Carly's process.
- [30:33]
B
Right. Or Tony's. I mean, they're very similar processes at this point.
- [30:37]
A
I guess so. All right. Now, I'd imagine for some people, that would feel a little overwhelming. Maybe two sites, three, four. It starts getting a little complicated. What are some tips and advice you would give to somebody who.
- [30:54]
B
I mean, I would not attempt to manage and pin for three or four sites without handing some of the first parts of the work off to somebody else. I don't believe that creating content and pinning and keeping up with foresights is something that the average person can do by themselves. I mean, maybe if you're very heavily using AI, but I don't really like AI, so none of my content is created with AI. And it would be. It would be impossible. I have multiple counts, and my experience is that as I shift my focus to one, for whatever reason, the balls start to drop across the others. I have experienced that over and over and over again. Some of my accounts are strong enough that it doesn't matter when their balls get dropped for a couple months. But you don't ping consistently on a Pinterest account for six months, and that account is going to start to show you that it knows that. And so I would not do this without handing some of the work off to somebody else. Taking a few hundred dollars out of the money that hopefully your first one's already making, because you really should be making some money before you attempt another one. Take some of that revenue and put it into management. Consider it an investment in your business. I would absolutely start them in the same niche so that you can utilize the reach of your first account. I would really consider inviting second and third accounts to pin on a handful of what we would create as group boards on the first account. That's obviously gonna be easier if they're in the same niche, or at the very least, a niche where the user is going to be heavily invested in the shoulder content. Like, if it's. If it makes sense for the same user to pin content from both sites, then I think it's pretty safe to have a board on your first Pinterest account to invite the second Pinterest account to. But if you are thinking, like completely different niches, I think you're. It's a really missed opportunity.
- [33:09]
A
What if you are a travel blogger and you primarily have been doing a travel blog on Canada, now you want to start one on Mexico? So would you create A shared group board there between the two.
- [33:26]
B
I believe there's so much potential in travel. It is one of the niches where the considerations are so much more complex.
- [33:34]
A
That's why I brought this one up.
- [33:36]
B
That's why you brought this one up. Thank you. Putting you in the hot seat this week. I've been thinking about travel specifically, and I think that when it comes to travel, the main considerations are budget, timeframe, location and party. Like, you know, the group of people that you're traveling with and somebody planning a trip to Cancun is not planning a trip to Toronto. And so I don't know if your account's that niche. If the first account is very strong and it's really established and it's doing just fine, maybe go ahead and start the board. I wouldn't necessarily have the same expectations for it as I would if your next account was also in travel to Canada because of the fact that the user that is engaging with that content will want to be engaging with the content in the same session, or at least that's what I would want them to be doing.
- [34:30]
A
Yeah, that makes sense.
- [34:31]
B
Would you start the board? I'm curious, in that specific example in travel Mexico, Canada board, would you do it?
- [34:38]
A
Yeah. That's a tricky one. It is. At the very least, maybe you could take some of your. If you have a strong Canadian travel site, then say you started one for Mexico travel than anything that's like Canadian oriented. Like the best beaches in Mexico for Canadian snowbirds. Like you have a whole blog post on that. Sure you can. Okay. It's the same user because you're targeting Canadians, right?
- [35:06]
B
The same user. Yeah.
- [35:07]
A
Yeah. Where they might want to travel. So you could do that all over the world. Because Canadians travel all over the world, right?
- [35:13]
B
Yep. And Pinterest tells us that location is a consideration for distribution. So surely they track the location of the user also. It would be crazy for them not to.
- [35:23]
A
Yeah, that makes sense.
- [35:25]
B
Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, every niche is a little bit different. Every niche has specific considerations. I would always go back to does this make sense for my user, for me to pin this on this account? And that is the question that I would answer if I'm deciding if I'm going to let my accounts share a space.
- [35:43]
A
And you're not worried about that being, like, figured out by Pinterest to see what's going on. So say you start like four different accounts and they're all kind of in the same niche, and would you have all four of those accounts in that shared board?
- [35:56]
B
I absolutely would because I'm promoting four different domain names, all with their own hopefully, valuable content. That's in my. I mean, I mean the wording here, I guess, is maybe a little bit ambiguous, but I'm not manipulating the Pinterest platform. That's the same as if I have four websites that I'm trying to drive traffic to. And the point of group boards is collaborative pinning. And if all the content makes sense together and is valuable for the user. I don't think there's a downside, do.
- [36:31]
A
You, other than just Pinterest figuring it out and realizing that it's all coming from the same four accounts. And I don't know, it would probably be one of maybe many other signals that you might be giving that could be concerning. Especially like, for example, you are using the same IP address to log into all of them.
- [36:55]
B
Okay.
- [36:56]
A
Or maybe you set them up so that you've got like the agency level account and you can invite partners, partner accounts into there how you want, however you want to set that up. Because who's to say, maybe you're not a, like Pinterest marketing agency for travel bloggers. And so you just happen to have, you know, four or five travel blogs under this agency account that you're managing.
- [37:19]
B
I mean, so that's probably an important topic to touch on here is the whole agency thing. A lot of people that are listening to this won't have a clue. You're talking about how you can invite, like you can be an agency and you can kind of control multiple accounts, pinning for multiple accounts from one login. I don't think that people will necessarily even realize that that's an option. Do you wanna. Because if you're gonna have multiple accounts and you're gonna pin for all of them and they've all got their own domain, this is a good way to do that. Do you wanna explain that?
- [37:53]
A
Yeah. So the way I'm currently using it, it's through the business manager. And I think it's one of the benefits of claiming your domain name with a Pinterest account is you get access to the business manager tool where you can invite employees to your account, but you can also invite partners. So I have it set up that everyone who works for me has their own Pinterest account and they are added as an employee to that main Pinterest account for that one website. I don't think anyone is set up as a partner in any way. I think it's primarily designed for agencies. Okay. So if you wanted to like really make it look legit. Like if this is your full time income, this is what I would do in this particular situation. Either you just keep them all separated and if you have a team, some VAs helping you out, you invite them as employees and you have all separate accounts or you literally go register like my penningmarketingagency.com and you set up a Pinterest account for that agency, you claim it to that agency domain name and you just put up a little homepage front of like your Pinterest marketing agency. And then you invite as an agency, you can send a request to each individual Pinterest account to be a, basically a partner under that one agency account and then that kind of legitimize everything all under one main umbrella account. There's pros and cons to that. I mean there's a, there's maybe a risk in that if the agency account, if Pinterest doesn't like it, I don't know what kind of downline consequences there could be. I don't think there would be one because there are so many Pinterest agencies out there that do this that it would just wreck havoc if something happened at the agency level that would then impact all the accounts under it. Or you would have say like one of the individual accounts under the agency was flagged as spam, then Pinterest would not go and then mark all the other ones as spam and shut them down or shadow ban them because of all the terrible side effects of that happening to like legitimate agencies.
- [40:05]
B
Yeah, I agree. Pinterest is not out there like trying to come up with all the ways they can make our lives miserable. They want our content and stuff. So I, I agree that they must have safeties in place for that so that, yeah. That those things aren't happening. And I mean honestly, pinning agencies are probably managing some of the biggest accounts in the world. It's not like Target has somebody just sitting back there just like pinning for Target that has no idea what they're doing. They're not learning on Target account. They probably utilize some well known pinning agency that knows exactly what they're doing. And so yeah, there's no way that those big partners, when I say partners, I mean like in, in ad spend, those big ad spenders. There's no way that they're putting their accounts at risk by hiring agencies. Can we think about it that way?
- [40:57]
A
Yeah, it's a good point. Okay, so let's talk about the content strategy. Okay. Let's say you decide to stick to kind of the Same niche. I would imagine most people would choose that because they're already in whatever current niche that they're in. They're in it because they're interested in it, they've got some experience with it or whatever. Something drew them to that. It would just be easier to start multiple accounts in the same niche. How would you approach your content strategy with it? Would you basically go create pretty much the same content? Like if. Would you go target like all the most popular topics and make sure to create blog posts on every single one of them on those same topics?
- [41:38]
B
That's a really good question. And I was going to say no, of course not. That's ridiculous.
- [41:42]
A
But that's what I'm doing. What would you do?
- [41:45]
B
Yeah, I. For my newest website, I specifically and intentionally targeted a keyword that already performed well on my first website and now it's performing well on both. And just like I never believed in the idea of cannibalization on Google because if they were clicking on my stuff, they were clicking on my stuff and I didn't care how many URLs it took me to get there. I feel the same way about this. If I want to decrease risk by spreading my traffic across domains than going after the same keywords as, you know, cannibalization of sorts, I guess. But it's still my content they'll end up at. I would also intentionally target very complimentary keywords because then when people are saving into content buckets, you know, the regular users out there, maybe they'll save a pin from this website, but maybe they'll also save a pin from this website. And now we've just increased our Pinterest snowball effect, you know, two times. So you said you are also targeting the same keywords with your multiple websites?
- [42:56]
A
Oh yeah. I've got a list of like the top 100 keywords for the niche and definitely targeting all those 100. I guess I could be more strategic with say those like mid tail and long tail keywords, where maybe. All right, we give this group of mid tail keywords to this site and this group of Mattel keywords to this site and kind of disperse them a little bit. The same thing with long tail, that just requires more forethought and setting up a process to make that happen.
- [43:30]
B
Right. And there's always the roi. Consideration is the amount of time that this thing will take you actually increasing your bottom line that much more or not. I mean, on one hand, targeting the same keywords that were already doing well for one site, particularly because I was pinning to the same group boards that they were already doing well on from the first site. It meant that I was already getting distribution on Pinterest somewhere for that. And it was that much easier to get that content out there for the new site. But also they're kind of vetted in that I already know that it wasn't that hard to rank for those or whatever. So I'm not necessarily going after the most difficult keywords over and over and over again by accident. I'm going over the ones I know I could maybe rank for.
- [44:23]
A
That's right. And that's why. So the second site I started in the same niche, like, took off very quickly. And it's because I knew exactly what to do. I already had the. I knew my greatest hits from the first site, and I just repeated the greatest hits. And then you could start that then with the third site and then the fourth site.
- [44:44]
B
Would there come a point when you. For whatever reason, when you decide that it would be more beneficial to have all the traffic going to one site and you just redirect it broadly? Now, Pinterest does tell us in their community guidelines. I'm going to read it. Exactly. Redirecting existing pins to new destinations is, like, outlined as one of the things that they consider unscrupulous tactics to attempt to improperly influence distribution. But I have redirected everything on one site at one time, and that didn't hurt me. I think that going into a pin and editing it at the pin level is dangerous. And the more you do it, the more dangerous that is. And I know that. I know that it can be dangerous to redirect your entire website at the website level, but if you're doing it all in one fell swoop, would you ever consider redirecting the traffic from your second smaller account to your bigger account? Like, maybe you're with a much better ad network for that first account and the second one's just not getting there or whatever.
- [45:46]
A
What I would do, and I didn't even think about it until having this conversation is I think what I'm gonna. What I would do is I would create a one newsletter that I would promote across all those sites and send all that traffic back to the main site that has, like, the highest RPMs.
- [46:03]
B
That's a great idea. Yeah.
- [46:05]
A
Yeah, I would like to do that for. For this year. Yeah.
- [46:08]
B
I would like to hear about how it goes for you.
- [46:11]
A
I know I need to get my newsletter fire back up again. It burned down. There's a lot of drama there. So that's one of my goals this year.
- [46:18]
B
Oh, dear.
- [46:18]
A
Yeah, it's the second time I've done this, so. So I'm, I'm striking out with newsletters, but I will get it figured out. I've got some good friends who figured it out, so I'm getting some coaching.
- [46:28]
B
Awesome.
- [46:29]
A
But that's my strategy. If you have like one flagship branded account but you've still decided to like spin off and do some smaller related accounts. Yeah, I would still, I would figure out if you can find that overlap in that content with your audience, definitely cross promote. Even if it's simply as like internal links that you are adding from one site to the other to promote it. If you've got products, services you can cross promote and everything just to make the most of that. But that's difficult to do if you're spending all of your time and your resources on multiple accounts. You know, I mean, it's. I think it's one of the reasons why again, going back to people who just have one site, one account, they can devote all that energy into coming up with some really cool, unique ideas and ways that they can better monetize that one site. Whereas kind of you're diluting yourself a bit setting up multiple sites with multiple accounts. And unless you can scale it out slowly, like what I've done. I mean, when I first started online, like it was just me and my business partner for a while and then eventually we started to make some hires one at a time. And so that would be my suggestion is just start with like that one va, get the next site off the ground. But you're really going to have to become organized, in my opinion, to really pull it off. To pull off two or more additional sites, you're going to have to have standard operating procedures. You're going to start tracking a lot of things and just creating systems and processes for things so that with the end goal in mind. So if you know that, all right, I'm going to have four sites. The research process, the content creation process for me is I'm dialing it in so it looks pretty much exactly the same across all the sites. Because it's way too complicated for each site to kind of have its own little unique process of how you are getting keywords or how you're creating this particular kind of content. Very challenging. Just streamline that and it's just gonna, it's gonna slow you down and then you're not gonna be able to hit your pin goal of like, say you need 20 pins a day. It's gonna be very difficult to get to that point if you're running four sites and it's just you or a couple other people and you don't really have anything systematized with it.
- [48:46]
B
Yeah, I totally agree. I think the biggest. Absolutely the biggest con risk to having multiple websites with multiple Pinterest accounts is the risk of spreading yourself too thin. So totally, totally agree. And it's definitely something that, again, I'll reiterate, like make one site profitable first.
- [49:10]
A
Yeah, that's right. And then move on to the next one. Make that profitable. And if you are feeling it for doing a third one, go for it, get that to a profitable standpoint and then move on to the next one. Go from there. Anything else you would say before we wrap up here?
- [49:27]
B
No, I feel like we covered it.
- [49:29]
A
Yeah. Awesome. Okay, cool. Well, if you have questions about what you should do here with these three options of either you keep your one site, your one Pinterest account, or maybe you dabble in creating a personal Pinterest account or two and start pinning for your main account with that, or you want to, like, go big and have multiple accounts. Yeah. Let us know what you're going to do. Send us an email pentalk podcastmail.com and we look forward to hearing from you. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of Pen Talk. Head over to pentalkpodcast.com to get the show notes and the resources mentioned. And hey, if you like this episode and want to hear more from us, please rate and review our show. Thanks.