533: Google Is Out, Pinterest Is In: Here’s The Latest On Pinterest With Toni Herrbach

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You’re listening to the My Web Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into what strategies are working and what strategies are not with their businesses. Now, because of the latest Google updates and the discontent with Facebook and Instagram ads, more people have started looking towards alternative traffic sources like Pinterest. So in this episode, Tony and I are going to give an update on how to leverage Pinterest to drive traffic and sales. But before we begin, I want to let you know that this is the last call for tickets for the 2024 Seller Summit over at sellersummit.com.

00:30
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00:57
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Fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

02:02
Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast. Today we’re going to talk about Pinterest. And the reason why we’re talking about Pinterest is because when Tony and I, were at ECF, a lot of people were complaining about Facebook, Facebook ads, organic. And all of a sudden we found that people were asking a lot of questions about Pinterest and flocking to Pinterest. And it just so happens that she’s very knowledgeable at Pinterest. I know nothing. So I’m not sure what I can contribute to today’s conversation.

02:31
Outside of the fact that I did try an experiment the other day and it crashed and burned. It crashed and burned. What I’ve also noticed is with this latest Google update, which can I just side note and say as a user of Google, it’s driving me nuts that Reddit and Quora are the top five placements for everything I ask Google. 100 % agree. The Reddit threads that it’s giving me,

02:56
are from like four years ago. They’re garbage. The closest one I’ve had is 2021, like as far as like recency and trying to get information. So super frustrating. And people are gaming these Reddit threads now. Of course. So there’s links in there now. I mean, Google’s been screwing up left and right. If they continue to do this, I wouldn’t be surprised if they go under within a year or two, just the search side. Well, which bodes well for Pinterest, right?

03:24
because Pinterest has always said that we are not a social network, we are a visual search engine. So to me, if I was the folks at Pinterest, I would be jumping on this, right, as far as capitalizing on your brand, because I’ve had at least three or four people contact me in the past month after this last Google update, people who relied heavily on SEO to generate traffic to their sites and said, is Pinterest dead? I need help with Pinterest.

03:53
Are you still doing Pinterest? Can I hire you tomorrow? And I was like, Whoa, whoa, whoa. I do email now. Could I just lodge a formal complaint real quick? Yes, you can. So I logged into my Pinterest account after God knows how long it’s been. What? Two years, maybe a year, probably a year actually, because I didn’t remember the password. I had to ask you for it. And it’s changed a lot and I don’t like it at all. Like it took me a whole bunch of clicks. I couldn’t even figure out how to get to my home feed.

04:21
So if you have, yes, if you haven’t logged into Pinterest in the past, I don’t know, six months to a year, and you log into your account, you will be shell shocked at the changes. It’s hard to figure out. I mean, you were funny. You were like, I have some dumb questions about Pinterest. I was like, well, they’re probably not because Pinterest has made so many changes, but you couldn’t find how to create a board. You couldn’t find…

04:43
you know, the pins that you had pinned. And so there’s been a ton of changes to Pinterest in the past, probably 12 months, I would say. So if you haven’t logged on Pinterest or you gave up or you felt like, this wasn’t working for me, I actually would say this might be a good opportunity for you to give it another try. Okay. Why? Because, okay. So the only reason I got back on Pinterest is because I found that short form content is now a thing on there. Yes. And I’m already making short form content every single day.

05:12
for TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, and YouTube Shorts. So was like, what the heck? I may as well auto post to Pinterest. And my first couple just failed. And my Pinterest account, it’s not big. It’s got 10,000 though, it’s decent. That’s a decent sized account. wouldn’t, I would say people that have two or 300 subscribers on Pinterest would struggle, but 10,000 is a definite, that’s a number that’s substantial. But.

05:39
I only got one view on one of my reels. That doesn’t sound very substantial to me. So let’s, I want to know how to do it and what you’ve been experimenting with. Yeah. So unfortunately I will tell you that I don’t know if you should auto post using repurpose.io. I don’t believe it is like an authorized Pinterest. Like it has access to post, but Tailwind I think is still the only like Pinterest partner, which

06:07
which I think does make a difference in regards to your videos and content showing up in the Pinterest feed. Now, this is not an endorsement of Tailwind. I actually think they’ve lost some of their, know, some of the benefits of Tailwind have gone downhill in my opinion. So this is not an endorsement at all of Tailwind. And you can actually schedule pins directly on Pinterest if you have a business account. So you can schedule, I think up to 100 pins a month.

06:35
Might be a week. I’m not sure which one that is, but I’m sure if you’re on Pinterest, you can check it out. If you have that business account on Pinterest, which you should have if you’re a content creator, you can actually schedule right on Pinterest. So which is, you know, probably what I would recommend doing if you’re just starting out or you’ve had a dormant account for a while. So anecdotally, someone posted in the course Facebook group the other day that if you post organically on TikTok, you have an edge. Yes.

07:05
And back in the day, I know Facebook, that was the case. Yeah. So I think if you use Tailwind, you’re fine because they are the Pinterest partner. But I don’t like sometimes how things get scheduled with them. And I would rather just do it right on Pinterest, especially if I’m scheduling my own content. I mean, it’s just silly. Does that mean I need to hire someone just to manually post these things on the platform? OK, so what I would if I was going to hire someone.

07:32
to do something for me for Pinterest, it would be someone to create the graphics for the pins. Because that’s actually to me what I think is, it does not take long to post and to schedule, that’s actually fairly efficient. And also if you schedule from mobile, you actually get more scheduled pins that you can add. So desktop you have a limited amount, but if you do it through mobile, you have more, which is kind of funny. I don’t like doing a lot of stuff like that on mobile.

07:57
So if I was gonna pay someone to help me with Pinterest, I would actually have them doing my graphic creation over scheduling. So even if I publish a reel and we had this conversation before I hit record, you’re saying that I should put a graphic in front of the reel and you said that was the reason why my reel failed because it was just a big picture of me on the front. Yes. So one of the things that

08:20
people have found, and I don’t have the same type of account that you do the post on Pinterest. So you are posting business content on Pinterest, which can do really well. What doesn’t do terribly well is your face with that type of content. unless you’re like, Marcus. saying like a Chinese face is no good? absolutely no Chinese faces. No, faces in general on business type accounts. Now, if I was doing beauty,

08:47
fashion, hair, obviously those types of things, even some of the travel stuff, that with using someone’s face is fine. Now, however, not a screen grab like you’d see on a TikTok short or a YouTube short, you would still wanna create that graphical image for Pinterest. So faces just don’t perform well in the niches that you’re in. And for me, I don’t post a lot of faces anyway because most of what I’m doing is how to, right? How to…

09:16
make your bed faster, how to get stains out of your clothing, things like that. there’s no, like you wouldn’t see my face, even if it grabbed from a video, you would see like a washing machine. However, I still on mine, I’ve actually been testing this for the past week, doing some with pins, actual graphical pin images that lead, that have a short behind it, or stuff that just is the screen grab. The pinned,

09:41
ones with the images do far better. Like the one, I put up one, the same exact thing, it got 23 views. I put up the same exact content with a pin image, it had 115 views, right? So it’s 4X just right there on the one that I’d set up a couple days ago. So for your stuff, there’s an image that makes sense, right? If you do a recipe, it makes sense to put the picture of the end product. In business, there’s really no such image sometimes. So yes, that’s true. However,

10:10
There’s a lot of things you can do. You can use quotes, you can use just the title, you can use something that would be related to, actually let me pull up your account really quick, I was just on it. I moved off of it to mine, because yours is sad. So the one that you put up, the secret to getting quality products from Alibaba every single time. So I would use that exact same text, right, with.

10:38
maybe the Alibaba logo, if you’re allowed to do that, I’m not sure, in the background or a box or packaging or a storage facility, like a fulfillment type place. Anything related to that, you could use as the background with the text. And I would probably go like, I would experiment with having the picture on the top, text on the bottom, having the picture text overlayed on the photo. You could do it a bunch of different ways. I would also try just a blank background.

11:07
right in the text with no image at all. That’s easy to do actually. Correct. So yeah, but you standing there, which is like just a screen grab, that’s not gonna compel people to click on, especially from Pinterest, and especially with the topics that you’re talking about. So what’s interesting is I noticed there’s no feed in Pinterest where you’re just endlessly scrolling, right? There is. There is. You just haven’t found it. I guess I haven’t found it yet, because I was playing, I actually installed a Pinterest app on my phone.

11:37
Is that what most people use? The Pinterest app? Yes, everyone’s on the app. Most people are on mobile on Pinterest. Why does the thumbnail matter if there is this endless scroll feature like TikTok? Because if you think about it, the majority of the content on Pinterest is not video content right now. It’s still static images that link to a blog post or a piece of content somewhere. If people are endlessly scrolling and the video auto plays, then why would that first front photo even matter at all?

12:06
Does it autoplay when you’re scrolling? No, no, I couldn’t find it, remember? I don’t know if it autoplay. I don’t ever use Pinterest on my phone. I always use it on desktop and it doesn’t autoplay on desktop. Okay, all right. Well, then that makes sense. Like the old way of using Pinterest, I 100 % agree. If it’s like an array of images, then yeah, old middle-aged Chinese guy’s face is just not going to.

12:29
Not gonna cut it, right? And if you think about how people typically use Pinterest, they’re not mindlessly scrolling. You don’t mindlessly scroll Google. You go to Google and you type in how to not get ripped off on Alibaba, right? And then you get a series of responses all from Quora all wrong. Right, so let’s just say you do it on Pinterest, right? Like how to get products on Alibaba. You know, actually I’m gonna type that in and see what comes up.

12:58
then you’re gonna choose what you’re gonna look at or you’re just gonna pin those to the board because you’re thinking about starting a business next year. So you’re doing your preliminary research, this is how people are using it, you’re doing your preliminary research and then you’re saving that content to board so you can go back and look at it at another time. If that’s the case, why do I have to click three times just to get to my board? It’s really annoying.

13:21
I don’t think people are using boards like they used to be. You know what I mean? You’re using boards to categorize your stuff. It’s funny, you come up a lot when I just search for how to get products from Alibaba. You’re actually the first. Now, of course, this is also, I have a log into your account, so I don’t know how much this is affecting it.

13:43
But the first one is a blog post that you did, how to buy from Alibaba without getting ripped off, and that’s linking to a blog post, and underneath it, it says the complete beginner’s guide. And then there’s another one that says how to find direct manufacturers from Alibaba, that’s not you. But then you’re like three or four on the top row. So. Well, let me ask you this question. Is video becoming more prominent on Pinterest?

14:09
So I think it is and it will be because that’s what everyone’s going to, right? mean, video is just what everyone’s interested in. It’s just like when you search on Google, YouTube still comes up in the search results on the first page. You’re getting YouTube videos on there. Right, and yes, you do get to see a thumbnail and that does influence the click. So it’s the same thing as what you’re saying. Yeah, I would say when you’re thinking about how to create content for Pinterest,

14:38
think of it like Google as far as like the user experience, how people are using it. Now it operates very differently as far as like how you can be more successful and they’ve actually changed a lot of things in the past year. I was actually thinking to myself yesterday, I was like, oh, I gotta update some videos in the course because you know, the old philosophy was, and this is I think, if you take away one thing from this podcast, this is what you should take away. It used to be that you would create,

15:04
a blog post. So let’s look at that one that you just did. How to buy from Alibaba without getting ripped off. It’s a blog post. You have a nice pin image on there. You actually have a child in a factory. That is your image. I just realized I looking at that. I have to look at that. Who created that? Probably me. I don’t know. This looks like something that you would. It’s more your style. But anyway.

15:32
you’ve got that image. So it used to be that you would take that and you would pin it to all the relevant boards that you were a part of, right? So maybe you have five boards that are, know, manufacturing, how to start any commerce, how to be an entrepreneur, right? There’s like, you have all these boards that are related to that content. You would take that same image and you would pin it to all five boards.

15:59
staggered, right? Like that would go out, you know, every couple of days, every seven days. That is not the strategy anymore. The strategy is to pin the same link with a different image to your boards. So it makes more sense. This is one thing I remember listening on that lesson. I was like, this is the most ridiculous thing ever. You’re basically just spamming Pinterest with the same thing. Well, yes, but that but that was what Pinterest rewarded for a very long time.

16:27
And that’s when people were doing something called looping. So basically, you know, they would have their their pin with the URL. They would pin it to their five boards, you know, and then they would loop it back like six months later. They would pin it again. Same image, same URL. Pinterest has made it very, very clear that they don’t want that anymore. They want a different image. Same URL does not matter. You could you could do a hundred different images with the same URL. Pinterest doesn’t care.

16:57
that’s not spammy to them. The nice thing about that is before, to avoid that spamminess, you had to stagger the postings, right? Because if you pinned the same image with the same URL five times on the same day, your whole feed is that, right? The five exact same images. But now, with a different image, you could have the same URL pinned five times in a day and it looks totally different on the feed.

17:28
Interesting. You know, what’s funny is I noticed my YouTube videos are on here. I didn’t do this. I might have done that. OK, that could have been me. So you have so like, I don’t know if you can see this. It’s hard because we’re not doing this visually, but you have everything you need to know. You have the same Alibaba post, right? Correct. And you have the same image of the girl in the factory, but you have different text overlay.

17:54
So you have one where it’s like blue at the top and then the image is at the bottom. So I would actually just change out the image, right? To make it a truly unique image. And you know, like, so one would have one image, one would have another image. And you could actually even use the same text over.

18:16
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18:43
and you can sign up over at profitableaudience.com slash free. Once again, that’s profitableaudience.com slash free. Now back to the show.

18:55
This is why I could never get into Pinterest. To me, this sounds like spam because you’re taking the exact same information that’s underneath it and you’re just throwing like a new facade on it and pinning it. So you’re basically, it’s almost like keyword stuffing in Google land. Except for Pinterest has said, please do this. Yeah, I know. Yeah. And here’s why I think it is.

19:19
different things resonate with different people. And since Pinterest’s whole foundation is visual, right? It’s a visual search engine. know, some people really love the like plain background text, very simplistic, especially when it, like, obviously if you’re like how to make your bed every day, like that’s not a plain text, you know, type of thing. But if, especially in the business space.

19:43
Like I think about Kevin, who’s in our course, and he’s like, should I? He’s making all this video content. He’s like, should I be on Pinterest? Well, yeah, you probably should, because you’re already making great thumbnails. All you need to do is put them on Pinterest. But like for his stuff, I think it would actually do really well. Now, he’s not going to get the thing is like he’s talking about a very specific topic, cybersecurity. That’s not going to be like 10 million views a month from Pinterest, right? Because the the topic isn’t popular. He’s actually branched out to much more broader topics that apply to everyone.

20:12
So the market potential is larger. Yeah, it’s huge. But like just that topic in general is probably not going to be a 10 million visits a month. our friend Naomi in the course, who’s talking about travel, where Pinterest is a travel hub, right? Where you’re going to if you’re planning a trip, you’re probably on Pinterest looking for destinations, clothing, suitcases, packing tips, all these things. You know, her her net is much wider. So Kevin can do well, but it’s probably not going to be.

20:39
You know, I think for him, Google still is where YouTube’s where it’s at, right? Because people are on YouTube searching for how do I set up my router, you know, kind of thing. People aren’t really on Pinterest going, how do I set up my router? Let me ask you this. And this might sound like a dumb question, but let’s say I’m using Pinterest to do a search and then I see the top 10 pins and I’m like, oh, great. There’s 10 articles, but I click on all 10. They’re different images, but they all go to the same article. I’d be pissed. That’s waste of my time.

21:08
Yes, but if you look at like when I looked at how to get products from Alibaba, you know, it’s they don’t they’re not serving up the same. mean, Pinterest knows what the URL is. Right, right. So they’re not serving up the same URL in the top 10 posts. I mean, yours appears twice. To the same URL, right? To the same URL. On a page with 20 pins. Now, I could understand if Pinterest is just split testing images.

21:36
Like maybe it switches and finds the best one. But see Pinterest also knows like say, know, Sally wants to start an e-commerce store. So she’s searching for stuff, but Sally really resonates with like text overlay versus blue. Right. So now Sally is going to be fed more text overlay at some point. So I think that there’s a lot of like you create those different graphics because they’re going to serve different people. Different graphics resonate with different people. Yeah, I agree. That makes total sense. If

22:06
they only post one URL per search, right? I mean, they post the same URL, like I’m looking at this page and there’s probably 20 to 30 that I can see in this page and the same URL for you is on twice. On twice, right. Yeah, which is to me not, that doesn’t feel spammy. Yeah, that’s not egregious. If it was any more than that though, it would be. Okay, well, let’s move on to what’s working then. So how has your strategy shifted? Well, I just started doing this with the short form video.

22:35
What I’ve learned very quickly is there needs to be a graphic, right? So I can’t just upload the same, the screen grab of whatever, it appears that way. So that’s number one. What I’ve also realized is that you actually can link out to, I mean, I knew this before, you can link out to YouTube. So I’m actually now putting my YouTube, like the long form, I’m creating the pin content for Pinterest because,

23:03
You know, I have a lot of Pinterest followers. I’ve got like 70,000. So why not use Pinterest to help beef up my YouTube? And Pinterest doesn’t care if people click off the platform, unlike every other social platform, right? They care. Pinterest actually wants you to click off and buy, right? They want you to take that action, because they view themselves as a search engine. So the more clicks a pen gets, the more that signals to Pinterest, like this is relevant content because people are clicking off.

23:30
Same with the more saves a pin gets, right? The more times that pin is saved to a board, that’s sending the message to Pinterest. When someone searches for how do I buy safely on Alibaba, you’re giving the best information. So I was like, well, why not just leverage this for YouTube as well? So my strategy going forward is one, create new images for old content, right? Like same strategy as it’s kind of always been. However, the emphasis on that is much greater.

23:59
The last two days I’ve sent my graphic designer 20 pin images to make. for her, once you set up some templates, and I would say if you’re going to try this, you need to create like six templates in Canva and just throw in new images. And with honestly, with Canva’s AI, with all the free tools out there, go out with your phone and take photos in your yard, whatever that you need to do to get those images.

24:23
It’s not something that’s like hard to do anymore where it used to be much more difficult to get stock photos, right? Like, you know, everyone had the same four stock photos from, you know, Well, now there’s AI. Does Pinterest frown upon AI generated images at all? Or do they care? I don’t think they care at all. OK. So the one thing that you do have to look out for with doing this with video is that if you’re actually uploading the video directly to Pinterest, whatever size that video is, your

24:52
graphic for your pin image has to be the same size. So like the standard Pinterest image is still what, like 1000 by 1500, the vertical orientation. However, if you’re making stuff for TikTok, it’s nine by 16, which is slightly different sized. So if you are making a TikTok and you’re like gonna put it on shorts and TikTok and then you’re uploading it to Pinterest, Pinterest will accept that size.

25:20
but your pin graphic needs to be nine by 16 as well. It can’t be the thousand by 1500. You know what I mean? Like you have to adjust that. Whereas like if you’re just creating pin images for static content or YouTube videos that live on YouTube, they might be in a different template. So you just need to sort of watch that. Because that happened to me initially where I created some graphics for my shorts that were being uploaded directly onto Pinterest.

25:47
and then they were the wrong size. So I had to go in and resize them. Not a huge deal, but just like another time waster. So let me ask you this question. Why link out to YouTube video versus like a blog post where I could potentially get their email or some opt-in? So I would say you should probably link to a blog post. However, if you’re trying to like, if you have a blog that has good traffic and now you’re trying to build YouTube, right? Then I would link out to YouTube. That’s really like for you, I would probably

26:17
links still link to the blog post, but there’s no reason why you can’t also link to the YouTube video to give yourself more content on Pinterest. So two separate pins, two separate images, but just linking somewhere else. Yeah, one’s linking to the blog post, one’s linking to the YouTube video. How is Pinterest doing as a company? I’m just curious. Do you know? I’m not sure. I mean, it felt like the past year people really got down in the dumps about them with, you know,

26:46
Pinterest used to be the funny money days, right? Where the traffic just poured in, right? And I think then they went public, they had a lot of changes, they’ve changed everything. They went really heavy on ads, right? Like wanting people to spend ad money on the platform. And I think the original core users got a little disillusioned with the platform. However,

27:12
There’s still things you can do to drive traffic. There’s still people getting to, I still get a lot of traffic from Pinterest. That hasn’t changed. The goal, the key is, every channel, you have to be consistent. You can’t pin two things and come back a month later and pin five and then come back three weeks later and pin one. It’s gotta be the same strategy that you use for writing content. You wanna write a blog post a week. You wanna create one YouTube video week. Even if you’re doing five pins a week,

27:42
That’s good, but just keep it consistent as opposed to I think what most people do with everything is like they get excited about something, they make three things and then, you know, they kind of fall off the map, which will, you know, it’s not going to hurt. They’re not going to penalize you on Pinterest, but you’re not going to see success that way either. Yes, I just pull up their financials. Yeah. So the last so they were growing gangbusters in 2020. the last two years has not been that great. I mean, they’re still growing.

28:11
which is a good thing, know, single digits. I think with the Google changes, if they’re smart, they will capitalize on that because I think there is a big opportunity for them. Yeah. So how are you splitting then? Because this is a lot of pins we’re talking about. So you have video, you have blog posts. Are you still using the same strategy for your blog posts? The blog post prep strategy really hasn’t changed, although now that I’ve realized how important it is to create those different images,

28:41
Because it used to be I would create two to three per blog post and then spread them out and do the old strategy where you pin the same image to the different boards. So now I would love to get to like 10 images per blog post. I don’t think that’s realistic right now, but I do think five is really realistic to getting that. So five images, different images to the same URL pinned.

29:09
Is Pinterest your top traffic source at this point? No, Google is. Google still is. I didn’t get hurt as much as everybody else, fairly. I’m just Reddit 2.0. don’t know. Pinterest and Google sit basically neck and neck most of the time. The reason why I ask is it seems like, at Google you write the post and you’re done. It seems like in Pinterest land, you’re constantly pinning all this stuff regularly. Is that accurate?

29:39
Yeah, to an extent. like I would still. So I did a lesson a long time ago on how to do all your Pinterest in 45 minutes a week. Yeah, I still think that strategy works. It just you’re changing what you’re doing, but I think you can still get it done in about an hour a week. So to me, if I’m getting 10,000 visits a month from Pinterest, let’s just say to make the numbers round, that’s worth 45 minutes a week to my site. Right. Like if I can drive 10,000 people.

30:07
because the chances are too that a lot of those people haven’t heard of me. And where I see a lot of success, similar to how you’ve seen it on YouTube, is that my lead magnets actually are some of my best traffic drivers on Pinterest. for example, I have a Christmas printable that allows you to take a Hershey bar and it’s like a snowman or a reindeer and you wrap the bar and it makes a really cute little thing that you can put in a teacher gift bag or your kids can take to school and pass it out. Well, every year, I I haven’t actually,

30:37
made me think this year, was like, I need to update those images because every year that leads to between a thousand and 2000 email subscribers. This year I got like 4,000 from it, which that’s what made me notice it. was like, oh crud. I need Just one holiday season, right? One holiday season. So now granted, people are coming to get that printable download. So it’s not totally sticky, right? But I think I end up

31:03
I usually watch those people for about six months and then I see how they perform. But I’m usually keeping 50 to 60 % of those people and it’s totally free. I’m not paying for those email subscribers. I have a couple other ones that do really well on Pinterest with the lead magnets. They’re very seasonal, but I think Pinterest can be very seasonal too, which is another strategy for anybody not in the business space is spend time on Pinterest trends. Pinterest literally is 10

31:32
telling you what people do all throughout the year. They’re telling you the exact terminology to use, the exact keywords. Now it’s manual, right? You’re not getting like a nice little report, but it does let you know that like, hey, this summer, these things are gonna be really popular. So maybe I should create content about that or rework some content I’ve already created and be able to capitalize on that. But where I see like Pinterest,

31:59
doing something for people, especially people which we meet all the time who only have Instagram or only have TikTok, right? They’re just pure influencers. To me, upload, create a landing page. I mean, honestly, use ClickFunnels, right? Actually, I didn’t know this. don’t know, are you familiar with Flodesk? Yes. Yeah, so you can create a landing page in Flodesk, right? I think they’re fairly inexpensive. But you should put…

32:26
all of that content that you’re creating for TikTok or Instagram or YouTube shorts on Pinterest and just drive people to a landing page to sign up for some create something for people to sign up. But like to me, if you already have the content created, you’ve done the hardest part. Why not spend 35 to 40 minutes a week, you know, putting your content on another platform that we know for sure will drive traffic. So to me, that’s where the opportunity is for a lot of people. And because we’re doing this 30 day challenge right now.

32:54
where I’ve made more shorts. Yeah. I’m like, I’m so sick of myself. But, you know, I’m making all these shorts. All these shorts are so aligned with my content, right? Like how to get your muffins to do this, how to organize your kitchen drawer, how to figure out which pants you want to wear, like all this stuff that is like so aligned with my audience. It’s like, why am I just going to let this stuff sit on YouTube? Why not put it on Pinterest where my audience is too? I agree with you. I was just thinking, though.

33:23
Like I can post the same TikTok on YouTube shorts and Instagram reels and Facebook, but now to do Pinterest, I gotta create a separate image for it, whereas I don’t have to do it there. So I guess for a new user, am I gonna start seeing results right away like a TikTok or is this something that I just need to do for a long time before I see any results? So it’ll be interesting if you have zero followers, I would say, you know,

33:49
probably putting that video content up that plays right on Pinterest is probably more beneficial to you than static images linking to a blog post. I think you probably see. I would also think about breaking your video. Now this is where, now we’re like in the weeds, right? But like the idea pins, which are basically slideshows, right? You can actually break up a video into an idea pin. So if your video is 60 seconds long,

34:15
clip it into 10 second clips and upload six 10 second clips right into the idea pin. I think that will actually perform really well. So if I was starting out and had zero followers, I would probably do some of that. But it’s like any platform, if you’re starting from zero, you’re gonna have to do a lot more work than someone like me or you who’s been on the platform for a long time has a following. But to me, why waste that content that’s already being created? Yes, you have to make…

34:41
Like for you, let’s just use you, because I know you don’t like to do any extra, you don’t want to take on any extra work. Well, unless I know that there’s going to be a definite outcome. Yeah. I mean, I would say like there are a lot of business people killing it on Pinterest. So it’s definitely a possibility. I would create five templates in Canva. Right. And I would literally just like make one image for each video. Right. Like don’t even.

35:07
Don’t even try like five images per short, right? Do one and just get it up there and just rotate between the five templates, new text, throw in an image. If you have a template created and you have your color scheme uploaded to Canva, this would probably take you under 60 seconds to do. So in that way, it’s like, okay, well, let’s just say it’s taking you five minutes a week and you’re gonna get.

35:32
500 visitors, right? And it’s absolutely targeted to what, or it’s gonna boost your shorts, which boost your channel, which boost your subscribers, which boost your email, right? Like, I think it can have a cascading effect. And if the content’s already created, I feel like the work isn’t that much. Is it more work for sure? But I mean, why not put your content in as many places as possible if you are already creating it? The reason why I ask that question is we’ve had

36:00
Excellent results for our challenge. So so for the past for the month of April We’ve had students in our profitable audience course create one short a day And I was just looking on the Facebook group this morning and a lot of students have gotten tens of thousands of views And it’s only it’s only April 10th. Yeah, right So instant gratification Yes, you know, it’s funny though because I’m participating in the challenge as well

36:30
And as I think I said on one of the other podcasts, I’m not leveraging any, now I am putting stuff on Pinterest, but I’m basically doing, I wanna do a case study on this at the end. So it’s not like going gangbusters right now and I’m not doing the five images and stuff like that on the shorts content. Although I probably will when the projects, especially the shorts that were really popular. But like when I have a video that does well,

36:56
Like my whole day is good. And then when I have a video that doesn’t do well, my whole day sucks. Like I was like, no, I’ve sucked back into the beginning days of blogging where you’re like on a whatever the get whatever the get clicky, whatever the like analytics app we all used to use. And you’re like, oh, I’m going viral or someone stumbled my post. And you’re like all excited. And the next day you’re like 22 visits.

37:23
You know what’s funny about all that is I feel that on YouTube. So here’s my YouTube strategy now. If I post a video that’s a dud, usually I post one a week, but you’re right, that bad feeling lingers the entire week. Every time you pull up the app, you’re like, this was 10 out of 10. So now what I do is I’ll post twice a week if one of them was a dud to reduce that downtime for me. Yeah. I will say like just total side note, but going, talking about this challenge.

37:51
my shorts are performing far better than my like long form videos, which like that’s not surprising, especially just starting out. And I don’t have a lot of subscribers, but like I hate all the work the long form takes to then get no like no views. Well, here’s the beauty of long form. At some point, YouTube will generate traffic for like I have videos I recorded four years ago that literally just recently popped. Yeah, I think because of a recent video that I published that is doing well.

38:20
that links to that one. Yeah, which I’m still doing it and I’m actually like, I’m kind of taking that full circle, right? So I’m creating content based on my popular blog posts. I’m creating the long form content. I’m embedding that in the blog post, right? So the video is embedded into the blog post. I’m generating a new image for Pinterest, right? So.

38:45
the bog post is getting repinned, then I’m generating an image just straight to the video, just hoping that people click over and watch the video so doesn’t have four views, right? And so, you know, I’m trying to like get as much as possible, but then when you put a short up and it’s literally so dumb and you’re like, here’s my 5,500 view short, you know, from a 400 subscriber channel versus my long form video that took me two hours.

39:12
And it’s like, and it has 100 views. Yay. One of my shorts did really well because I said I mispronounced something. And then all the comments were like, hey, learn how to speak. I mean, yeah, I got my first troll comments in forever this week. And I’m like at the age where I’m like, delete. I’m not even going to like allow you on my page. I don’t care. But one person. So I’m.

39:38
I’ve realized what shorts do well. So I’ve, you know, I’ve done 13 days of shorts basically, or no, 10 days of shorts. And what I’ve realized does well on shorts is these kitchen tips, like little hacks in the kitchen for cooking, which is funny because they don’t do really well on long form. What does well in long form is organizing. So I’m like, great. You know, it’s still home ec overall. But the kitchen tips do well. They’ve done pretty well on Pinterest. They’ve done well on TikTok, like all, you know.

40:07
all the different avenues are doing well. But these kitchen tips are like things to me that are stuff I’ve always done so they don’t seem real revolutionary because it’s just part of my everyday life. Like I did one yesterday on how to like make muffins without the paper cups, like just using a regular muffin tin and how you can like spray the tin correctly. Like it sounds so dumb when I say it. Blew up, right? Like.

40:32
And I’m like, come on. then someone commented, Oh, everyone thinks they’re a content creator these days. And I’m like, these days I’ve been doing this for 20 years. Like, come on, you jerk. But I realized that those little hacks are what people are just those shorts, both shorts that I’ve done or three shorts like that have all gone done really well outperforming the other shorts by like 5X. Yeah. Back in the kitchen today to spray some more muffin tins.

40:59
I think I made fun of you too. One of your shorts was how to make sure your muffins are all the same size. Yes. I was thinking to myself, don’t you just put the same amount of batter in each cup? I’ve got a how do you tell if you have a rotten egg, but I don’t have any rotten eggs right now, so I’m waiting for an egg to rot so I can make the video. It’s funny because you get that high from it performing well, and then once it performs well on YouTube,

41:27
It’s like guaranteed to go on Pinterest, guaranteed to go on TikTok because my audience on Pinterest is the people that are like watching that stuff on YouTube. Right. Like it’s the it’s the right people. I can’t wait to talk about Bumblebee’s social media strategy, which is going to get unleashed, I think, in a week. Unleashed. I’m excited. we’re starting it. Remember, I dreaded it for, yes, I don’t know, 15 years. I’ve known you. Yeah. The entire life.

41:56
but this is maintainable and we’ll see how it performs and hopefully it’ll boost up some sales for Bumblebee. Bumblebee has a good Pinterest presence. Actually, you know what? I think these videos and graphics for Instagram can be used on Pinterest as well. Pinterest, once upon a time, actually was number five on the sales list. Totally dropped off a cliff one of the years and I gave up on it.

42:24
So I’m gonna give you a little tidbit that you’re gonna make you very excited. You can actually pin those square Instagram images to Pinterest. Nice, so I’m just gonna pin them as is. Yes, I would pin them as is. To me, it’s like if you just wanna get started and see how the channel performs, you can actually pin the squares. don’t perform, like Pinterest has always favored that long form vertical content as far as the image goes. However, the short square stubby little images

42:54
it’s not a detriment to your account. So I would pin those just to get your stuff out there. Okay. Do I have to manually do it or can I use repurpose? You can. I mean, here’s the thing. I would probably test it, right? Cause you can, I know that if you do repurposed to IO, it all does the same thing. Um, you know, I’m not sure how I I’m not familiar enough with repurposed to IO to know if that’s going to nerf your, your reach on Pinterest. I guess we’ll have to find out.

43:22
However, your assistant could easily do this in probably 20 minutes a week. She’s already maxed out with all the videos. That’s what she said. Well, no, I’m just kidding. Your customer service person could do this. That’s true. She can do it because I’ll have her do it because you don’t get it’s not like Amazon where if someone logs into your Pinterest account, it’s like, oh, you might get suspended. Like, that’s not going to happen. Anyone can log into your account. I mean, I don’t recommend giving your account to anybody, but like

43:49
you could have your account, your assistant log into that account and schedule those square images, you know, in probably 15 minutes a week and just get the content out, scheduled and out there. I agree. Actually, she’s yeah, she’s got she’s got a lot of room to do stuff. Yeah. I just need to figure out how to do it first so I can make a video that shows her how to do it. Well, I’m probably going to do an office hours on this in a couple of weeks, so you can just give her that video and you’ll be fine. Yeah, but I’m really excited about

44:19
Because we have zero social media presence. I know. And just to have one can only… Well, here, ever since I started running meta ads, top of funnel meta ads again, my accounts have seen a lot more traffic, which is natural, right? Because they’re finding it on there. So it makes sense to have a social media strategy now too in conjunction with it.

44:44
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Now with so many traffic sources in a state of flux right now due to AI, you should look towards diversifying and Pinterest is still a traffic source that not many content creators are leveraging. more information about this episode, go to mywebcoderjob.com slash episode 533. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2024 are on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person, in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event.

45:13
go to SellersSummit.com. And if you’re interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to MyWifeQuarterJob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.