166: Answering Your Questions about Pinterest with Kate Ahl

In this episode, we figure out a really cool way to listen to the Food Blogger Pro podcast and we share a Q and A from our recent Pinterest Traffic Boot Camp.

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Hey, wonderful people. You are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I'm Alexa, the general Manager of Food Blogger Pro, and I just have to say it. Thank you so much for tuning in. We are so excited and honored to be a part of your day today. But before we hop into the episode, I'd like to take a second to thank our sponsors, WPTasty. WPTasty is our sister company that creates awesome lightweight and heavy lifting plugins for food bloggers. We have a recipe plugin, a Pinterest SEO plugin, and a keyword auto linking plugin. And you can learn more about them@wptasty.com and if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that we like to include an actionable, helpful tip for you alongside of our sponsorship. And it's called a Tasty Tip. And today's tasty tip is from the future, or it feels like that. At least this one's actually about home assistance and specifically the Google Home Mini. I. I recently ordered the Google Home Mini and I'm totally loving it. Talking to it and having it spit back information is just super futuristic and kind of weird, but it's been really, really fun to use. And especially while I'm working either at Food Blogger Pro or on my own blog, I use it to listen to podcasts and I wanted to show you how easy it is. I have my Google Home Mini connected to my Spotify account and just. Just watch how simple this is. Okay, Google Play the latest episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast.

All right, here's the latest episode of the Food blogger Pro Podcast 165 Getting.

Things done with David Allen.

In this episode, I share a list of lists and we talk to the David Allen.

Okay, Google stop. So cool, right? I always need that background noise to stay productive during the day. And it's been so awesome to just easily tune in to the latest episodes of my favorite podcasts. And now our episode. We held our free Pinterest Traffic Bootcamp last week and it was just the best. Our events are some of my favorite days of the entire year. And this event was no different. We invited our Pinterest experts expert, Kate to be a part of the day and it was just so helpful. She runs a Pinterest management business called Simplepin Media, so she's always up to date on the latest Pinterest news and trends. She talked about growing Pinterest traffic through keyword placement strategies and so much more. And then she talked about her three recommended tools for Pinterest success. Our last session of the day was a Q and A where Kate answered a ton of Pinterest related questions from from our attendees. And that is exactly what we're sharing with you today. So grab your favorite drink. I'm sipping on my new favorite Lacroix flavor, Key Lime. Snag a notebook for note taking, and let's hop into this episode.

For those of you that are listening on the podcast, welcome. We are doing a live Q and A with Kate all and Lai. Kate is the founder of SimplePen Media. She's been on the podcast before. She's a food blogger, pro expert. She's an all around great person, and we're lucky enough to have her on this live Q and A to talk about Pinterest. So this is part of the Pinterest bootcamp that we're doing today. And then we're doing a live Q and A here at the end of the day and then also sharing this on the podcast as well. So I think we should just go ahead and jump in. How does that sound, Kate?

Yeah, sounds good to me. I'm ready.

All right, let's do it. So one of the questions that came up, and this comes from the first session that we did when you were talking about keywords and somebody's wondering the difference between hashtags and keywords, Are those the same thing? How are they related? And maybe if you can talk a little bit about what each one of those is and how they relate to each other.

Yeah. So in order to really explain that, you have to think about keywords with. And hashtags have their own feed on Pinterest.

Got it.

And so if somebody puts in a hashtag that helps it funnel into what's called a chronological hashtag feed. And so we want to keep keywords and hashtags separate because they're serving two different purposes on Pinterest. Pinterest. And so keywords help the user match up in the smart feed, whereas, like I said, it's a chronological hashtag feed. So with that, it's really just a bucket, if you will, for users on Pinterest to find your content.

Got it. And then one of the things that you pointed out, I think it's important to reiterate this. You talked about the difference or how it's important not to use a hashtag as a keyword.

Yeah.

You want to put the hashtags at the end. Is that correct?

Yeah, that is correct. You do not want to cover up a hashtag by writing a sentence that says, I love these hashtag chocolate chip, hashtag cookie. Because then you're only optimizing for the hashtag feed when that's not super prevalent and something very new within the last year. Whereas the keywords go with the smart feed and people who might discover your content, that is going to be number one. So we absolutely want to write one to two sentences with hashtags at the end. And Pinterest had said in their guide before, up to 20, they've now taken that out. They just say add a few hashtags. So it's really up to us to figure out which ones work best. But I do recommend that if you're writing a sentence that says, these are the best chocolate chip cookies, maybe one of your hashtags are cookies because it matches up with a keyword. And this is something you just need to test to see. Are people, you know, the ones that are coming to your website? You know, we talked about Google Analytics really looking at, do those pins have hashtags in them? Do they not have hashtags? What are you seeing?

Got it. That's great. Uh, somebody had a question here coming in about using board sections.

Yes.

Can you talk about what a board section is? And they asked, does it make sense to break your sections out into multiple boards?

So board sections were added about six to eight months ago, maybe even a year ago. And it was a user request from Pinterest users, because there had been these users that had been on Pinterest since the beginning, which we're approaching almost 10 years now, I believe. And one of the things they said was, I have all these pins in a recipe board. I go to find these pins and I have to scroll, scroll, scroll. How can I organize my recipe board into sections so things are easier to find? So, so when Pinterest rolled it out, it was like, our users have been asking for this. Here it is. Well, we didn't necessarily see that as a benefit to marketers for two reasons. One, we didn't know how the names of these sections played into the keyword mapping on Pinterest. They have now said eventually they will make a difference in this keyword mapping, but they haven't released how that works yet. And number two, if you use a scheduling tool like Tailwind, which we talked about in one of our tools, you can. You can't schedule to sections. So with that, we don't recommend that you use them just yet. We recommend you create a separate board because we know the board name and the board description and pins in that board match with the keyword mapping. So until we know for sure, we don't want to move forward as a marketer using sections just yet.

Got it. That's great. And that makes sense. Kind of pause, don't implement yet, but monitor, which is great. And a little plug for your newsletter. You talked about that before, but that's a great place for people to follow along with that, to be in the loop to know what's going on with some really important Pinterest stuff. Can you, for those listening in the podcast, can you mention how people can sign up for that real quick? As long as.

Super quick. Just go to simplepin media.com email or just go to simplepinmedia.com and you'll see a big box at the top. Cool.

Continuing to move through some of these questions. What, what is the ideal number of boards? So you have your account, you got it all set up. Is there an ideal number of boards that you should try and create on that account?

The ideal number is the amount that serves your audience. So if you feel like you want to communicate your message, your branding, your pins by 35 boards or by a hundred boards, you can definitely do whatever number of boards works for you. Pinterest has said we want you to create relevant boards. So for me, I have found that there, I don't need a ton of boards. I only have 35. Whereas if you have maybe a huge library of different recipes, you know, even as niche as like vegan dessert recipes, vegan side dishes, that vegan Thanksgiving side dishes, I mean, you could go endless. But you want to be thinking, can I create? Am I going to be creating a lot of content for that? Don't just create a board for one post because you can't fill it up. Do it where something, you know, a lot of people are interested in what it is you're talking about. Noodle bowls, whatever it is, make it so that it's a board that's going to serve your audience with a healthy amount of content.

Awesome. That's great. Uh, here's a question about disclosure. So I think this was maybe triggered by us talking about hashtags. And a lot of times on Instagram or maybe on Facebook, if you're posting a piece of content that is sponsored, people will do, you know, hashtag sponsored, hashtag ad or hashtag affiliate. Is that something that you also need to do on Pinterest? Or how do you go about disclosing sponsored content that you have when you are posting something to Pinterest?

Yeah, there's a lot of different ways I would say, number one, go kind of overboard. Right. Because if you overdo it, you're not going to be accused of not doing it. So some people have put hashtag ad, hashtag sponsored, hashtag affiliate. You'd have to really do some digging into the FTC rules, which makes the most sense. But we do suggest adding those few hashtags and then you can expand on your post more obviously that you're an affiliate and you have that at the top. But for now you can do just a simple. This is sponsored. Doesn't have to be a long sentence at all. A simple hashtag is fine.

Got it. That's great. Yep. And basic idea there, like you said, you're disclosing. So the person kind of the filter test is like when somebody looks at the piece of content, wherever it is, are they going to understand that a brand paid you for that? And you got to get to that point where for FTC guidelines they can say, yes, somebody understands that. Now each platform has different rules around disclosure. So that's where you need to make sure that you are both FTC compliant and platform compliant. So Instagram is going to be different than what it would be on your blog, which is different than what it would be on other platforms.

And Pinterest hasn't been super specific on this. They've been specific when it comes to like affiliate marketing and adding affiliate links. And they will strip Bitly links. You know, they've been clear on a lot of that stuff, but they haven't been super clear on the disclosure, especially when it comes to sponsorships or influencer marketing. So with that we just kind of go with the basic ad, sponsored affiliate.

Got it. And so the affiliate thing is interesting. Do they strip all affiliate links? So you can't.

No, they don't. There are that. You can do reward style. You can do a bunch of other ones. Amazon is still on the line because the US platform hasn't super clarified. If you're in the UK they have on Amazon over there said you can definitely use Pinterest links on or Amazon links on Pinterest, but that's not here in the US they just are really specific about link cloaking. That will probably get your link stripped and you won't get the affiliate credit.

And so you use Bitly as an example. So that's kind of hiding where the link goes to. You're kind of cloaking it. And so if you use a bitly link, they'll just remove the link so you still have the image but it won't link to anything, Is that right?

No, it'll still link to something. Yeah, the final destination. But it will not. If you've put anything attached in that bit link, it will not read that.

Got it. Okay, interesting. All right, moving along here. This actually came up in the chat a few different times and I'm guessing that this is not an uncommon email or request that you get from people. My traffic has gone down recently from Pinterest. And why is that? And this one specifically is talking about, you know, I have kind of these giraffe pins and can. Is that the reason maybe why traffic has gone down? So what is your, what is your response to when somebody reaches out like that and what troubleshooting steps should they go through to help understand?

Yes. So number one, we go through a checklist. Number one is we want to look at if you've been marked as spam. And on Pinterest when you're marked as spam, you would just simply find that out by clicking on one of your pins that leads to your website and there would be a pop up that says suspicious link. You've probably been marked as spam. If that's the case, they've given a special designated email address for creators. That's just creators. Supportinterest.com Email them. You may need to email a couple of times. If they come back to you and say we've closed your profile because suspicious activity, that is a canned response. Respond back again and say you need to give me a reason why you've marked me as spam. So that's number one. Number two, we would go into this place of figuring out was there anything that happened on your site that could have disconnected Google Analytics or a plugin that could have affected that? Because we've definitely seen that when it comes to tracking sessions that are coming from Pinterest, we had one client who we could not figure out why it had dropped, but we realized it actually wasn't tracking fully. So that's number two.

So the traffic was still coming in, it just wasn't being tracked.

Exactly. So we want to diagnose like was there a hosting change? Was there, you know, some people who haven't fully converted to like HTTPs or something like that. There's a lot things that can change that tracking. Then the third one is we want to look at time of year. So we're going into the high Time, you know, like pumpkin spice latte has dropped today. Like, here we go. And so that's kind of our cue from now to February 15th. This is when we get this burst of traffic. So especially for food bloggers. So if you're looking at low traffic in June and July, that's just going to be a low traffic time. It's just people are on vacation, whatever. So if you can cross compare year over year and see that it's a normal traffic trend, don't worry about it. If you do see that it's not a normal traffic trend, then what you want to do is I would say it's going to be one of those first couple ones there, especially if it's dropped so drastically that you want to investigate further into whether or not everything's working. The other thing to note too is that if the giraffe pins there, you know, those are the super long ones, they might not get distributed and distributed in the feed. I would move real fast to adjust those images down to the right size, which is 600 by 900 or as long as 1260. Get those flowing into your scheduling, get them into tailwind and get them out there. Then after a month, see what happens. If that brings it back up, then you kind of have your answer. You needed to get these new pins into the system so that they're getting distributed. So there it's. With Pinterest, there's a lot of troubleshooting. One answer might not be the same for another account. The other thing would be to change up your keywords, change up things a little bit different. Sometimes that can be frustrating because it can take a while. But if you've gone through all those things and still something's wrong, I don't know at that point, you know, maybe we need to do some digging in, in a consult or something like that.

Yeah. And I think those, those first few examples you gave are really helpful. And I think even somebody in the chat here, Kathleen, said that her Pinterest was marked as spam in July and said apparently many bloggers were marked that way most accidentally. And she said, boy, did that panic me. All was fixed in 12 hours, but kind of this panicked moment. But it's good to have as a reference sometimes. It might not be anything that you're doing wrong necessarily. There just might be a disconnect in your Google Analytics. There might be something on the Pinterest side that you need to reach out. You give that email, which is a great resource for people to reach out and talk to them and Then if not after doing kind of some of that initial high level troubleshooting, maybe there's something a little bit deeper that needs to be done. So great feedback and good action steps for people if they are noticing that the as it relates to the giraffe pins, which I just love that we get to call them giraffe pins.

I know, and that's what Pinterest said. It's hilarious. They're like these giraffe pins.

And I'm like, great, okay, we'll roll with it. Should you delete the old ones from Pinterest or just replace, replace the image on your site and create new content around that?

Yeah, replace the image on your site and just create new contact, new content. Already Pinterest isn't showing it potentially to people, so you can just leave it there. It's not anything they've indicated in any of their best practices doesn't tell us that they penalize us. You know, I think we have talked about, like, don't look at as penalties, but just start fresh and move forward. And images are really your most powerful tool. You know, like we talked about, they're kind of your first gate. So start with that and see what happens.

Got it.

Don't delete old ones.

Cool. And for those that maybe are feeling a little bit overwhelmed, like, oh, I need to go back and, you know, chalk out 40 hours in a week to redo everything with Pinterest, maybe a good starting point would be, hey, think of these important things that we're learning here as things to implement moving forward. And then if you have little spots of time where you can go back and kind of tighten things up and adjust old content, then maybe you can do that. But not necessarily things where you need to overhaul everything and delete all your old draft pins and start with little snippets of time.

Set a timer, whether it's an hour. Do the top 10 in Google Analytics like we talked about in the previous session, but don't tackle it all. You'll just shut down and start watching.

Netflix, which sometimes needs to happen, but.

I know it's true.

Here's a question. Rich pins, yay or nay? So for those that aren't familiar, can you talk about what rich pins are and then maybe give a little bit of a background as to why some people would say I'm not doing rich pins or I'm getting rid of them?

Yes. So rich pins are. They give the pin context with adding a little snippet of code and to your site and it allows pinterest to pull in this bolded title. That's really the easiest way to describe it. It's right underneath the pin and it describes the particular post in. It's usually the title that it pulls. So how to clean up Pinterest boards. That's it. And then you go into the pin description. So the snippet of code can be a product pin, it can be an article pin, and there's two others that I'm forgetting right now. But basically, if we're talking about it from like a food blogger perspective, it just pulls in the title, but it can also pull in the recip ingredients. It doesn't tell you how to do it, it just shows the recipe. And the reason it does this is because there's a great little handy search tool on Pinterest where if I'm looking for a recipe that's 15 minutes or less includes these ingredients, and it's in this category vegan or vegetarian. Pinterest can easily categorize that pin based on what they see there with the ingredients. And so it's a great, helpful, useful tool for users. In fact, we've heard from a lot of users, you know, that we've kind of polled our audiences who use it for personal. This ingredient list tells them, am I going to click on it or not? Because I might not have fresh cilantro or whatever it is. So the debate came in probably about a year ago where people said, I don't want them seeing this list of ingredients because then they might not click. And so I want to remove the rich pin completely to encourage the click. And this is primarily people who monetize their with ads because when they got them over, obviously then people would see the ads. Well, the problem really came in is that some people had tested it and they had seen that it had definitely increased their traffic. And that kind of took sweeping. It swept everything. And so people said, well, I'm going to turn it off because I want more traffic. So what we tell people now is we believe rich pins give great context to pins and they serve the user, and that's why we're putting our content on there. However, don't just turn them on or off based on someone else's experience. Really do the research for your own site to see if it makes a difference. But one of the things you want to be aware of is that when you turn them off, you could increase your bounce rate. And some of our clients have increased their bounce rate by about 10%.

And for those that aren't familiar, can you Talk about what that is and why that's important.

Yeah, so it's the people who hop over to your site and how quick, quickly, they bounce away. So you want to have that be pretty low or as low as you can get it. Because that also tells Google, hey, they stuck around. They found this content interesting and useful. The same for Pinterest. They are starting to factor in time on site. Oh, this person originated from this pin. They found it helpful. This must be good content. Whereas if we get a lot of people bouncing away super duper fast, then that tells the Google and tells Pinterest, well, this must not be useful. We will no longer show it to people. So you have to balance all of that into your decision. But my recommendation has been and will always be keep them on. Because it first and foremost serves the user. You don't want somebody clicking over for the recipe and finding out, well, I don't need it or I can't make this because I don't have it. Click away really quickly. They can look at the ingredients and go, yeah, I want to make this click over. And they're going to spend more time.

Yeah, we have them on for Pinch of Yum and plan to continue to keep them on. And I think you probably see this and we see this as well, but sometimes there can be this like communication snowball that happens where a little pebble is thrown out like somebody, a little message is sent and it's a pebble on the hill and then it like picks up speed and then it picks and then it becomes this giant snowball from this tiny little piece of information. And as creators, as business owners, as bloggers, whatever it is that we want to call it, I think it's really important that we take that information. Not that we totally ignore it by any means, but we take that information, we say, okay, let's process this through instead of just taking it and then saying like, oh, I need to do this, whatever it is, and kind of going to our sources, researching that, looking into it, being slow and methodical, while quick to gather new information. Being slow and methodical with saying, now I'm going to change this just because somebody said this somewhere else. And I think that Rich Pins is a good example of that, where maybe you hear this experience that somebody has, but be slow with that and methodical and say like, okay, what are some of the factors that I need to consider in making the best decision for my readers, my followers, my blog, my business?

I'll make a note about that. And kind of the one conversation I've had with somebody about this where I said, you know, that's great. You could. I support you. Turning them off was. They said they did a test, it was one time on Monday. They turned it off at the same time, left them on all week. Then they turned them off on, on the next Monday, left them all week and compared those two weeks outside of any holidays. They were very structured. And. And she had said, you know, I lost X amount of page views and for me right now I can't afford to lose that ad revenue. So what that told me was that I needed to create a product or needed to diversify my income and to be able to not have to be subject to these changes. I supported her. And what she did was because she tested it for herself instead of looking at a graph in a Facebook group. And that's how it starts with that little snowball.

And.

And then people just do it just because. Do your own research and figure out why you're doing it before you just take somebody else's word for it because that's not a good way to run your business anyway. So with that, just test out, especially this time of year, it actually happened this time of year, going into this high traffic time, people are searching like crazy for things. So just know, just figure out how you want to do that and how you want to serve them. That's great.

Awesome. And some important general takeaways of that too. Just in terms of how you approach making changes with the things that you're doing. One of the things that we talked about that you had mentioned was this idea of branding some of your images and you had talked about how to go about doing that and why that's important. So maybe a quick review on that. And then some people had some questions about where you actually do that. So when you have a pinned image that you are branding, putting your logo on it, do you have your logo? Do you have your name? Do you have both? And then where does that go?

Okay, so I can't remember if you and I talked about this and I said to put it in the bottom right. I think I did because Pinterest had just told us that the rep that we're working with, but we actually realized that if you're going to put your logo, you want to put it in the bottom middle or on the left because there's the visual search tool that on mobile hovers in the bottom right.

Got it.

And so that covers it up. So the reason you want to do this branding and having your logo is it Builds brand awareness so that over time, if people see this very similar style image and they connect the branding, they start to build brand awareness. Oh, this recipe comes from xyz. So if you're going to do any type of branding, keep your font similar, keep your color similar, keep a can a similar style of image, and then put your logo or even your website, but it's super small and. But you can still see it in the. At the bottom middle.

Got it. And that makes a lot of sense. And you think of companies, how intentional they are with doing branding related things. Like I think back to, I think Airbnb did a commercial during the super bowl and it was this really cool story that I don't even remember what it was. But at the end they just showed the Airbnb logo and that was a valuable thing for them. And you think about as a small business, how do you bring that over into what you're doing? One of the ways you can have that subtle, consistent brand exposure is through adding that to the images that you're creating and posting to Pinterest, which is great.

And one really great way for you to kind of like flesh out your branding if you don't know what it is yet is go onto Pinterest and save the ones that catch your eye. Look at Promoted pins too. Promoted Pins have really changed within the last month with their migration into one Tap. And so these advertisers are getting super duper smart about what they're putting on their pin image, how they're branding, how they're getting people to click. Take a lesson from some of those Promoted pins and even from some of the branding of these big companies, and then fold it into what, how it fits you and start to go with that and create that. Especially if you've never created branding before.

That's great. Can you explain what one touches?

Yeah. So Promoted Pins for, since their inception, had always operated like a pin. If you click on it, you get a close up and then if you click on it again, it takes you to your website. Well, they realized that when we looked at Facebook or Instagram, you just tap on an ad and it takes you to your website. So Pinterest migrated at the beginning of August over to what they call one tap, which means it no longer functions like a traditional pin. You click on the image, you go straight to the website. So this is a little bit different for users because they're not used to that. And so we're trying to figure out if they're doing promoted paid advertising on pinterest how to get them over to the site and have it make sense and not be like, wait, you took me here too soon. Because they want to hold back, do the close up and then make a decision. So this is just a way for Pinterest to stay competitive with other social platforms and how they do their advertising.

Got it. And that's called One Tap, otherwise known as what I call it One Touch.

Yes, exactly.

Which is related to my favorite band, One Direction. Yeah, Story of my life. So the next question coming in here, this is actually kind of a technical question but it's related to Retina images and feel free to if you don't have any thoughts on this because Retina gets a little bit technical. So Retina images and how does that work with the optimal size for Pinterest? And so you know, if you, for people that are doing Retina images on their blog, they're taking these really big images and then they kind of shrink them down into the blog post. So when you look at a Retina screen, like if you have a Retina screen on your computer or sometimes, you know, phones would be Retina that it's going to be a really clear image with lots of pixels in it. So if you have a 600 by 900 Pinterest image that you're using, does Pinterest translate that into a Retina image? Do we know how that works or what their sizes are as it relates to mobile and desktop? Kind of the general Retina question.

That is a good one. It's the first time I've ever heard that term.

Yeah, it comes from a web developer and a designer. So is our friend John that asked that question. That would maybe be a question we could reach out to the creators Pinterest support group with.

Yes, definitely do that. Because I would have no clue. I mean I can talk about visual search. Yes, that plays in, but not the other.

For sure. We'll, we'll, we'll do some digging for those that are Food Blogger Pro members. We'll do some digging and then follow up on the forum if we find anything out about that and how that works with Retina Images, which is just, and I'm trying to wrap my head around it even just for the blog and how it works because it's not an easy thing. So we will follow up on that. John, good question. Here's a question coming in about group boards. What are the benefits of group boards and are these something that people should be looking at getting involved with the.

Benefit of a group board is if you join with people that you can. You share the same type of content. So it's a way to get greater distribution for your content and a way for them to get greater distribution by contributing to this particular board. Pinterest has said that they're not a huge fan of the way that people group boards were used, and that was by tons of contributors and tons of content. So if you're going to utilize a group board, I definitely recommend you have no more than five people on this group board. You all agree to also share each other's content from. The group board has a great name, a keyword, appropriate name. It's very specific, it's not broad. And then it has a description. And then you all pin pins that fit that description and that board name. That is really the only way I would tell people to do that. Other than outside of that, I can't really see any other good use of group boards. So I would say focus more on your personal boards before you even dive into group boards. There has been a lot of teaching over the last two, three, even four years that talk about how group boards can get greater exposure. But what we've looked at in our network and the clients that we work with, group boards can be a powerful tool for distribution. But now the focus is really personal boards and being more strategic with how you're naming and pinning to those.

Got it. That's great. So one of the things that we talked about in one of the first sessions was it was actually the second session using Google Analytics, when you talk through how to kind of drill down so you can see the referral traffic from Pinterest and then in there you can see the specific pins that are sending you the most traffic. And somebody said that they went in there and in referrals, their number one referral, their top pin, it doesn't have a bunch of numbers after it. It's just a backslash. And when they click to look at what it is, it's their homepage. So what does that mean? And is there anything that we should learn from that when we look at our Pinterest referral traffic? And it's just a backslash.

Yeah. So we did a bunch of research on this and there hasn't been a final conclusion as to what it is, because we haven't really got that from Pinterest. But what we've concluded is that it's actually the combination of a lot of little pins driving traffic in combination with your profile traffic, maybe clicks from your profile. And so that's really the Best we've come away with, we've talked to Danny at Tailwind, we've done a bunch of digging. That's really what everybody kind of comes away with is that it's a collection of a lot of tiny pins bringing traffic. And then that's why next you see those top pins, and they're the ones that they can extract right below.

Got it. And the basic idea with that, if you're seeing that when you look at the referral traffic for Pinterest, there's not much information you can get from it. So you can kind of ignore that and then look to the first pin or the first area where you actually have more information around that. So if you see that, it was something that we saw too, with Pinch of Yam when we were looking, it's a normal thing, but it's not going to give you much data or helpful action. Action items. So here's something that came up around deleting and somebody was asking what's kind of the reasoning behind recommending that you don't delete pins, even if it's a duplicate pin on a board? There's something that I think people really like about having a clean board with no duplicates and deleting older pieces of content. So why should we not delete pins?

So the main reason you want to not delete pins is we never know when Pinterest is going to surface some of these pins. We've heard numerous case studies over and over again of pins that have just been lying there, if you will, on Pinterest for eight to nine months, and suddenly they get picked up by maybe a user that has a lot more reach, or they get picked up in search, and all of a sudden this pin that was never really bringing traffic now has gone viral or bringing a ton of traffic. So it's kind of like we don't delete because we don't want to miss the opportunity. And from what we know from Pinterest, there is no negative effect to leaving pins on your profile. There was somebody who had written a post four years ago that deleting pins could trick the algorithm into seeing that you have more engagement. We haven't known that to be true. We haven't seen that to be true. And we have actually noticed that just leaving them there provides a potential opportunity in the future.

Got it. How about. This is kind of a. It's not a loaded question, but it's a question that I would assume is hard to answer. How much time should you spend on Pinterest to See results.

Oh, okay. Yeah, that is loaded. Okay. First we're going to go back to how often you're creating content on your site. If you're somebody that is not creating new content, new fresh content, which Pinterest likes, and you are just pinning a bunch of old stuff all of a sudden or old stuff over time, the growth on Pinterest is going to be pretty stagnated. But if you're creating new content and you're contributing and you really putting in the time, let's say you're a new content creator. I would say six to eight months is when you're really going to start to see the Steam build. Slow moving train takes a long time for you to get into the algorithm for Pinterest to recognize you know, what you're about, what you're pinning. So we have noticed about six to eight months is a good rule of thumb for a new account.

That's great. Yep. And one of the things that I think is so true about any of the efforts that you do in this broader, like building a business, slash building a business online is the things you do today aren't going to have a payoff tomorrow. Usually it's going to be six months, it's going to be a year, it's going to be three years. I was having a conversation with a friend in the Connection, Eric, who started a blog eight years ago and he said he finally made the transition into blogging full time after learning about. He specifically mentioned Mediavine so an ad network and transitioned over after not knowing about Manage Ads. And it was just such a great story and a great interaction. Found out about them on the Food Blogger Pro forums, but it's like eight years. He's been working eight years doing that and working really hard. And I think sometimes we expect to see that stuff overnight, but it just takes, it takes a long time and a lot of energy.

Which is why I think that's why you can't apply the Instagram mindset to Pinterest Instagram. You can post something, you immediately get this kickback of likes or comments that's just not going to happen on Pinterest. So you just need to gear up for the long winter and then know that you're investing in a platform where users take a long time to make a decision and discover ideas.

Yeah, that's great. Two more questions here that we'll use to wrap things up. Somebody is asking a question about the business name profile area and saying that it seems like it's limited to 30 characters, but it Seems like some accounts have more characters. So can you talk about the business name profile area and how that works?

Yeah. So what you can do is Pinterest has changed their profile quite a bit over the last two years. And at each stage, that profile name can get either more or less. And in this last iteration that they gave us, where we have the big banner across the top, it's very colorful. It's a great change for them. We saw the decrease in what you could add there. Before you could add up to three lines of text. Now it's just two. So if you are going to add your business name, you can. I want that there first. Then you can add a keyword or two behind it describing what you are. You'd have to see where Pinterest limits you, because I have the older. I mean, I've been around for a long time. I might have more just because Pinterest has left it there, whereas new ones, they might limit it. So I don't know the exact number of characters. I'd have to go look to see what a new account is getting. But you have to play around with it and see where it cuts off. And then don't just look on desktop, look on mobile, too, to see what you can see.

Yeah. And I would assume in a lot of ways mobile is probably more important.

Oh, yeah.

I think we think of desktop as creators, but as consumers, it's almost certain, you know, there's what, 75, 25% chance that they're using that on mobile.

Yes.

So the final question that I wanted to ask actually had to do around video. And I know video has kind of been something that has been a really important new type of media across multiple platforms and social media accounts. And I know Pinterest is a little bit later than most of the platforms implementing this, but it's something where they're kind of playing around with that and starting to experiment with video. So any advice for people to be on the kind of the cutting edge of video for Pinterest and things that they should be experimenting with?

Yeah. So one of the cool things, and I have a full tutorial on my site, like how to upload video to Pinterest. But one of the things that you need to know is that Pinterest users for a long time saw video as a speed bump. And if they would come across it in the feed, which you really wouldn't like, there would be no way to really come across like a YouTube video. And YouTube videos didn't seem to get engagement anyway. Well, then Pinterest introduced their native ad player only to Promoted Pin customers. And that would mean it would be a square. It could autoplay. It was reflecting kind of those tasty style pins that we saw on Facebook. Um, well, then actually when I was at Everything Food, Lindsay from Connor Crunch came up to me and she's like, I can upload a video to Pinterest. And I was like, what? Like you have to be paid? Well, what we learned was that you did have to have a business account and you did have to have an active credit card on file under Promoted Pins. So when Lindsay showed me that there, we realized there's a certain dimensions that you need to have, but you. If you have the credit card on file, you can upload your video to Pinterest. And we actually started seeing some really good engagement on this. And with the native player, they do show up in your feed and they don't feel like a speed bump, which is pretty cool. And then you can link them to wherever. So some people have gotten creative and linked them directly to YouTube. If people are going to click for more info, we find that they watch the video and usually don't. Unless you get a short, short, short, like 22nd and they want the recipe or they even link to like their Facebook group. Some people have gotten creative with that. But we can link to that on the site and it has all the specs and what you need. But I think that video in the next year on Pinterest is going to definitely take off more now that we have a native player and we're not just posting YouTube links.

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. There was a specific pin for Pinch of Yum with a video. We did the same thing where we had a business account put in a credit card number and that, like unlocked, it was like a secret code that you unlocked to get access to the video. And we had a video that it was like one of the top performing pins. I don't remember specifically what it was. Maybe Abby does if she's a part of the chat right now and can post that. But it's interesting to see. It feels like really early stages where it's not generally accessible. You kind of have to go through this weird back door. At least we did when we set it up. And what ended up happening though was like, it got a lot of traction. And it was. And it was a really popular piece of content. It was the crunch wrap Abby was saying that we did for Pinch of Yum. So something to think about. Kind of a fun note to end on was talking about kind of some of the things to be aware of and into research. And you had mentioned that post, which we'll link to in the show notes for the podcast and also mention it here in the Bootcamp. So we're coming to the end. Kate, what a fun day that we've had. We've learned so much from you. There's been a couple times where you've mentioned and we've just kind of talked about some of the things that you do. I want to make sure that the people that are listening on the podcast as well as that are listening live on the bootcamp have an understanding of what exactly SimplePen Media is. You have some free resources, your newsletter and podcast, if you could talk about those. If people are interested in working with you to be somebody that you are working with. You know, you talked about clients that you have that are a part of simplepin Media and they help manage their accounts. How can they do that? So those three things, podcast, newsletter, and then how can people work with you?

Yeah. So the podcast is the simplepin Podcast. It's on every player. You can, you know, subscribe and listen to a few of them. In fact, our last one from last week was about hashtags. Awesome. So if you want to know more about that, that one's right available. We have a blog post, if you're a reader, to go along with every single one of those podcasts on the blog. And you can go find that@simplepinmedia.com and then we do have our newsletter that comes out every Wednesday at 5am and that's filled with kind of the most up to date tips. We run education each week, so we'll extract things from Pinterest webinars from creative guides and pull them down into simple, actionable tips so that you don't have to read through it, basically. And then what we do as well is we do management. So on the site too, you'll see services and you click on management. We just want you to fill out a complete form so we can learn more about you and how we can do best serve you. Because we definitely want to be matched up with people that fit our services and match the goals that we have for them. And there's a lot of people who just are kind of tired of Pinterest or maybe they're confused by it and they just don't want to dive into it because we save people time. That's really what we do, is we give them more time back in their business not to have to focus on Pinterest, especially if it's a big traffic driver for them.

Awesome. Great. And Kathleen posted a comment here, said I love your newsletter and advice and she's going to start listening to your podcast, simple and Actionable. So a little props out for you there. Coming in live from the chat. So Kate, thanks so much for being a part of these. Thanks for being a part of the Food Blogger Pro community for your continued advice and expertise. I know people get a lot out of it and we really encourage everybody that's listening or watching this to reach out to Kate. Follow along with podcast, sign up for the newsletter. And if your business is at the point where it makes sense, which I would say probably sooner rather than later, you want to think about bringing experts into the fold with your business, letting them do what they're good at and then you can do what you're good at, Kate. And Simplepoon Media is a great example of that. So be sure to reach out. Kate, thanks so much for coming on.

Yeah, bye. Bye.

Bye.

And that was the Q and A from our Pinterest Traffic Bootcamp. The Bootcamp taught me so much about Pinterest, but I think one of the most important lessons that I learned from the Bootcamp was just the fact that it's such a complex social media platform and there are so many decisions and strategies that go into really performing well on Pinterest. So we hope that you learned some actionable and helpful tips. Tips from this Q and A. I'm also here to bring you one of our favorite things of the week, our Reviewer of the Week. And these reviews come straight from itunes. And this week's reviewer of the Week is lois from Polish Housewife.com and it says after writing my food blog for many years, I've seen noticeable growth. After finding the Food Blogger Pro Podcast and implementing what I've learned, I'll listen to some episodes multiple times to be sure I haven't missed a valuable tidbit. Great information for all kinds of bloggers, not just for the food blogging niche. Thanks so much, Lois. It's awesome that you're seeing some growth after listening to some podcast episodes. We really appreciate you tuning in and implementing what you've learned and thank you all for listening this week. We're so excited and grateful to be a part of your week and until next time, make it a great week.

Sam.