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Let me start out by saying I am the queen of questions. I love asking questions. I love asking dumb questions because it makes me feel like I can get to the root of what it is I'm trying to figure out. And if I'm brave enough to ask those questions that feel what the world would say, like quote, unquote dumb, then I actually learn more. So we just recently had a webinar where we had over 800 people registered. About 200 people ended up attending live, and a lot of people asked some amazing questions. Now I was going through and teaching a bunch of things, so I wasn't able to get to everything. But we keep track of all those questions here at SimplePen Media for not only our own use internally, but also so that I can bring it here to my podcast. You're listening to the Simple Pin podcast, Simple. So I want to bring some of those questions to the forefront today. And I've broken them down into five or so categories, two questions each as they had themes to questions that were being asked the most. Before we dive in, I want to just put this little plug in your ear about Q4. One of the things that we specialize in is helping people take Pinterest off their plate so they can focus on other areas of their business. There are a lot of content creators and e commerce business owners who are trying to figure out how Pinterest fits into their grand scheme of marketing. But for some people, it feels like a big lift. It feels like it's really difficult for them to figure out, okay, it doesn't feel like Instagram, it doesn't feel like TikTok boards, all of that. Or they're like, I know that I need to spend more time on Pinterest because I can already see that I'm getting traffic from there, but I don't have time. That's where we can help. You can book a discovery call with our team and we have all different types of services based on all different types of budgets. This is not a sales call. This is simply people talking about goals, visions, direction and how you hope Pinterest can really add to your business and if we are the right fit in order to serve you in that way. So scroll down below simplepinmedia.com services or just go to our website, simplepinmedia.com to learn more. We are really passionate about helping people not only learn how to do Pinterest like you are learning from me here, but we also want to take it over for you and manage for you. Okay, let's dive into the questions. All right, number one here, my favorite question. And this does not have a category, but I had to pull it to the front. Does Pinterest pay you to train us? No, they do not pay me to train you. In my trainings, I am part of the Pinterest Educator program. I just did a six month stint with them and that will roll over into another four months to finish out the year. And my job with Pinterest over there as part of that educator team and is to really take big concepts, break them down, and turn them into podcasts. Here I've done one about sections, I've done one about collage, pins, tagging, carousel pins, all these different things over the last six months. So we have videos on YouTube and we have podcasts and we have blog posts that all go very deep into topics that I've done. So, no, Pinterest is not paying me to train you. All right, the first category of questions came around boards and a profile setup. So the question was, are sections within boards still relevant and necessary? The sub question was, how can I best use the sections within boards and how many boards are advisable? So let me tackle sections first. So sections are definitely something that people every day on Pinterest use all the time. They are helpful in adding subcategories to your main boards. Now, I wrote a whole big blog post in collaboration with Pinterest. Probably the one I spent the most time on in all of my podcast history was this one about board sections. And one of the things I took away was that users, if they land on a board, they scroll only three to four times in depth. So if you have boards that have thousands and thousands of pins, people are not scrolling through all of those. So we utilize sections to create subcategories so that when people get done scrolling, they could go to those, scroll three to four times, go to those, scroll three to four times. And what we find is that boards that have sections within them tend to get more engagement because they are newer, they have less pins in them, and generally they're organized well because people are creating something new within the board. And that's really what the spirit of Pinterest has been about lately, is creating things that are new and relevant for the audience. Now, to the question of how many boards are advisable, there is no magic answer here. You could have 10, 20, 50, 100. I would say again, going with a three to four scroll depth idea. If somebody comes to your profile and they scroll three to four times on their phone, how many boards are they going to see this is where sections might be more advisable within your boards. Again, all the links to that I'm going to be talking about in today's podcast slash video, because this also shows on YouTube, will be down below in the description. All right, the second category was pins per day and scheduling. Before we dive into the questions here, I want to say that a number of pins per day question has been on people's minds for years. And it's not really relevant in the sense that we find 5 is always going to be amazing, 10 is always going to be amazing that people are looking for like this sweet spot that kind of gives them the amplification that they're looking for. The number of pins per day is really dependent on how many pieces of content you create. So this question here is a response to When I said five pins per day feels really appropriate. It's a great number of pins per day and they said five pins per day still feels like a lot to me. To keep up the quality, totally fair. Do you think it's better to do three pins per day twice a week, or one pin per day? I actually like one pin per day. I think not only does it set your intention to keep adding pins to Pinterest, but it connects you again with the content. I would rather do one pin per day rather than three pins twice per week because I like that consistent investment. The second question was when using Tailwind, which is a scheduling tool that a lot of people use, should we be using Smart Loop? Since Pinterest favors fresh pins over repeat pins? No, I don't recommend Smart Loop for this feature. So those of you who don't know what Smart Loop is, it's within Tailwind and you essentially fill up your whole queue, if you will, and then it adds it to Pinterest. And oftentimes Smart Loop is for people who want to do repeat pins, whereas the regular scheduling tool within Tailwind is an easier way to stay up with fresh pins. So my recommendation would just to use Tailwind as the regular scheduler. Okay, our next category is pin style video pins and static pins, also sometimes called standard pin images. The question is, is it smart to have a consistent style of pin, or does Pinterest like it when you have multiple different styles? Say a text overlay with an arrow on one style, text above the image in another style, and say two images in a pin for the last style, is it beneficial for the algorithm? I'm going to peel that back away from the algorithm and say it's more Beneficial depending on the user engagement, and the user engagement fuels the algorithm. So one of the great things that Tailwind did in their benchmark Pinterest study was they surfaced that you don't have to create your pins based on just your branding. So sticking with your brand colors, your brand font all the time, because people are interacting with pins at tons of different times, they're not seeing your pins all at once. Right. So it is much more beneficial to you, especially if you're going along with seasonality, to play on that seasonality, to have something that's geared towards fall, both in text overlay as well as the colors in the image. Because if somebody's searching for fall decor, but your colors are very pastel and spring, it doesn't make sense to talk about fall with those colors. Right. So it's okay for you to have multiple different types of styles, more based on user engagement. We actually have a really great product. It's finding your Pinner Persona. And we talk about this in that is how to really figure out who you're targeting generationally and maybe what types of colors, what types of styles they like. So again, pull it back from appealing to the algorithm and more appealing to the people and how they're engaging. One thing that we've tried for a few clients is we will do pins with a text overlay and pins without a text overlay. It's been interesting to see which one wins out. And more often than that, we find text overlay works. Now, there are a few categories. Home decor, fashion and makeup. You don't always have to have text overlay because people want to see the whole picture, the whole living room when they're looking at the pin. The next question in this is, on my personal Pinterest, all I see is video content or ads, but not many quote, unquote plain pins or standard pins. Do I need to do video to get reach? This is all about what works for your personal account. I was in a room at a conference and one woman said the video was doing crazy well for her. And then the next go, the other person said, video is terrible for me. And they were both pinning actually the same amount of video, but one was getting totally different types of. Of engagement. So all that to say, video is a great format for you to try, especially if you've only been doing standard images. Another thing to tell you as well is on your personal Pinterest, your feed is built with what you have engaged with. So if you've been engaging with video content more, that's what you're going to see. So pay attention. If you've been clicking, if you've been seeing, saving, or if you have been following through on those videos, that could be why. And ads are just a part of the Pinterest ecosystem now. It's very similar to what we see on Instagram or what we see on Facebook. I'm not on TikTok, so I don't know what the ads look like there. But I know for me on Instagram, I will have a sponsored story every three or so. Like stories that I'm going through. That's how platforms monetize. And so you can learn a lot from ads. Actually, a lot of people reject this idea of ads being on Pinterest, but I find they're the best because they look very native to the platform. Sometimes they blend in and look like a regular pin. But take note of what text overlay are they putting on there, what call to action are they adding to their ad. Use them as research to create great pin styles. There's a lot you can learn. Also, we did a full podcast and video about a new format, collages. That is another one I created in partnership with Pinterest. We'll leave that below in the show notes. The next category was Pinterest ads. We got a lot of questions from people about how to run ads, if they were right for them. So here are the two that we took away. What is the difference between Pinterest ads and Promoted Pins? For a long time when Pinterest released this new ad format, they were called Promoted Pins. And then they slowly migrated into Pinterest ads. And we do have Promoted pins still, where you can boost a pin, like on a pin. We now refer to those as Promoted pins. But if you go and you build your ad inside the dashboard, that is a Pinterest ad. So that's the only difference they build. Both are ads. They're just set up a different way. The next question is, if we're just starting out with Pinterest ads, how many do you suggest we promote at once? How long should we let them run before we make adjustments? Okay, I have a great workshop that we have done. It's a replay of an ads workshop that we did. It is in our shop. I'm going to put that down below as well. But I would say you want to start with one campaign and then you can create multiple ad groups within that campaign. It's going to depend on what you are promoting, what the cost of that particular product is that you're promoting. You should always set them up and let them run for at least two weeks. Do not make many adjustments and then after that you can adjust from there again if you are ready really interested in going deep into Pinterest ads. I highly recommend you grab the replay of this workshop that we did. It is really, really helpful for you to set up your first Pinterest ad. Also to note we never ever ever recommend running Pinterest ads simply for traffic. The math doesn't math. You have to have something very specific that you are promoting to. So that could be an email signup, that could be sign up for an event, that could also be the sale of a physical product and the sale of a digital product because then you actually have a metric to say this thing is worth XYZ to me if I get an email lead, if I get a sign up for an event, if I sell a product. So you always want to make sure you have a strong conversion. We are loving Pinterest ads. Right now we have one client that has gotten 15x return on ad spend. Most are between 2 and 5 but nonetheless once they scale, they scale. We use them here at Simple Pin Media primarily to grow our email list and it has been so great. I think just last month I got over 600 email signups just off of one Pinterest ad. So it's definitely worth it. The next category is the type of businesses that work to market their business on Pinterest. So somebody said I'm a SaaS digital marketing agency. B2B is my niche. Even on Pinterest I don't have a physical product to sell. I am a B2B and I'm a marketing agency and I think there is definitely room for me to market my Pinterest marketing services there. But I would always tell people when you're asking the question is my niche even on Pinterest? Go to Pinterest, pick up your phone, look at the app, type in what your niche is, type in any keywords you think people would search to find you and that will give you the answer right away. The next was is Pinterest a good platform for sustainable and circular products? So I, I forgive me, we talked about dumb questions in the beginning. I don't know what circular products are, but I do know what sustainable products are. And yes, absolutely eco friendly ways to build a sustainable life, how to fuel sustainable products into your everyday is definitely something that Pinterest users are looking for. They're definitely very environmentally conscious and they want to do their part to really care for the Earth. Absolutely. The next category is keyword tagging and URLs. One was should I tag a product in the post or just add a link? Now they use the word post here. So I'm, I'm meaning they mean pin. You can't add a link in your description. Like it what? And that's actually the second follow up question that I don't know if the same person asked, but they said, should I link to my blog post or my landing page in the description of the pin? Do not add links in the description of the pin. There's a specific box where you put the URL which allows your pin to go directly to your website. Now you can tag products which we find actually that when we add a pin that has a URL and we tag the person's products on that pin, it actually does really well because Pinterest users are looking for products quickly and so we highly recommend you take products. I have a video on that. I will actually make a note of that. I'm looking at my notes here, so I want to make sure I get that for you. And it is really important to give opportunities to the pinner to purchase and to follow through on what they're looking for. So if you can add tags to the products in the pin, you can make sure you have a robust landing page. In fact, this is probably a pet peeve for me. I, I'll say this, there are a lot of people declaring how to do affiliate marketing on Pinterest and it's a lot of like AI whip up stuff. But I would say, and some of it is taking products on pins. The number one way to work on getting affiliate marketing dollars on Pinterest is to build a long term loyal audience and to be reputable for knowing exactly what you're talking about. I know right away if I see five great jeans for women in the fall and I go to that post and it sounds like a robot wrote it or there's no personal recommendations, like, yeah, I really like this pair of jeans, but it kind of like hits a little tight in the waist. I wore it for five or six hours and it just felt like I needed to take them off that you sold me right there. But if it says this is the best gene of the season, people are all over this. They are loving it. You should grab this gene. Nope, hard pass. Like not gonna work for me. So really be thinking long term about your tagging and your affiliate strategy to connect with people on a real per human to human level. And that's Where I think as we lean into this next one of AI, that's where I think it's going to win. That's where we're going to have to get a little bit creative putting things on the Pinterest images that say human reviewed, not AI reviewed, human created, not AI created. And there's a time and a place for AI creation. But I think especially on Pinterest, where people are aching for a human connection, there's a lot of ways that we can bring that into it. The second AI question that, or actually the first AI question that somebody asked was some of my pins are being tagged as AI modified. Why does it happen if I'm using my own photos? I have a blog post about this for where you can appeal, some people will get caught up into the filter. In fact, I'm going to make that note here. You can appeal easily to get that removed. We have somebody in our community who's having the same thing happen to them and it's almost like they appeal them and they come back. So something's being caught up in the filter. Make sure that you continue to connect with a human on that help ticket so that you can get answers. Or also, one other thing to note is that Pinterest does have a business community. It is amazing. If you are a developer, if you are a creator, if you are a merchant, if you are somebody doing ads, there are so many different places that you can go to ask questions and not only get help from Pinterest, but also the Pinterest pioneers. Highly, highly recommend. All right, the last question that we had, it was kind of random. It didn't have a theme which was how do you balance user intent versus reach on Pinterest? This is an interesting question that I, I loved. They said, for example, an Indian Thanksgiving recipe versus a Thanksgiving recipe. If you target the first, the reach might be limited for the use of Indian. But if you target the second, your engagement might be awful because it's so bad broad. But there's a chance you might get shown to more people. Okay. When it comes to using words that maybe the Pinterest algorithm doesn't like, I think there's going to have to be a way around it. It could be Native American, it could be First Nation. When it comes to Canadian, think about some ways that people are actually maybe changing up that particular word and targeting that. Right? Then when it comes to broad, there's people still searching for Thanksgiving recipes. Right. So I think it gets back to who is the person that you want to engage with. This particular pin and lead them to your blog post. And sometimes the I think it's important to note that, like, the user intent might be a smaller subgroup, but that smaller subgroup might actually engage more, stay in your website more, buy more. And so it's not always about the masses and how much. Sometimes it's about the most qualified, the ones that are most engaged. And I've heard from people over and over who have smaller, more engaged audiences who are making more money than those with larger, maybe disengaged audiences who are making less. So I think it's just really important for you to balance who it is that you're targeting, how you're working that out. I just think that you have to take into consideration the end goal. And if your end goal is I really want these specific people, I think that's great. All right, that's it. We had hundreds and hundreds of more questions. We are going to be doing another webinar in January. We traditionally do these webinars right before we open up our small group mastermind coaching program called the Inner Circle. That was what we had this last webinar for and it will open again in January. Will we? Where we will do that again. There are a lot of links below. There were a lot of things that I shared. But if there's one thing that you should do because you want to continue to hear my teaching, you want to hear my updates, is sign up for our newsletter. It is totally free. It comes out every Wednesday. It is the way for you to stay up to date with my podcast. The Any news? We pull all the latest links when it comes to Pinterest into a section of that email. We pull in things that are working. I give you my own insights about things that are working and not working. So go ahead and sign up for that simplepinmedia.com newsletter or scroll down below. Spend a couple seconds in the description because there's quite a few Alrighty. Thank you so much for listening. And don't forget, if you're an Apple, to hit follow so that you can see more of these podcasts or if you're in Spotify or wherever you get your podcast to hit subscribe. Alrighty. Thanks so much for listening.