Marketing on Pinterest tips and finds

Hello again! I hope you had a wonderful weekend, whether that meant relaxing, time to work on your dreams, or a little of both!

Yesterday I made my last school pickup, ever. My baby graduates high school tomorrow. Yipes.

In this issue:

• Niche Ideas: Math Workbooks and Health Trackers

• Getting Pinterest traffic

• KDP Advice

• Paper cutout text effect in Affinity

Video Tutorials

I haven’t had a chance to publish any of the new videos I have been working on, so let me share a KDP video that I watched in its entirety recently. In a sea of people blowing hot air about KDP on Youtube these days, I kind of like this guy. Actionable. Realistic. Light on the crazy hooks that leave you endlessly waiting for the good stuff (despite his thumbnails)…

Watch: If I Were Starting Amazon KDP in 2024 This is What I Would Do

From Tracey Capone: Learn to make this cool paper cutout text effect in Affinity Designer.

Two niche ideas this week: either could be used for KDP or printables

You make also like

2024 Pinterest Strategy Guide from Amy LeBlanc. (The guide is free, but this is my affiliate link so if you make a purchase I may earn a commission. See below for more thoughts on Amy). I am not sure this is really the best title, the content is more: here’s all the issues & changes with Pinterest in the last couple of years and how to approach them in 2024. To repin or not? How many pins per day? What to do about Idea pins, and more…

If you want to make Math Workbooks (see niche idea above) then this Kindergarten curriculum (affiliate link) would be a great starting point. Take a flip through the sample. Even though some of these pages are fairly simple, it would take a long time to create all of them from scratch. Plus, I love that there are multiple subject areas included so you could turn them into general Kindergarten activity books or create one for each subject area. For Powerpoint.

Random Musings:

Lately I have been rotating my focus through renovating an existing niche blog, Printables Academy, and a newer travel site. As you may know, the days of free Google traffic are either over, or the end is near.

I know, very gloomy words, and I really don’t like to be doom and gloom but I suspect that even if the big G course corrects in a future update, the AI Overviews in some form or another will diminish organic traffic.

People will figure out a way to pivot, but right now a lot of people are feeling a little lost.

Google doesn’t want to be a search engine anymore. It wants to be Wikipedia, using our sites as sources.

In one sense, it’s a little freeing. We can blog on our own timelines and our sites are unlikely to get any traffic until we do something to start promoting it. No more worrying about post velocity or any of the other signals that Google supposedly wants to see. My site. My choices.

I also think people don’t want as much AI as developers would like to think. Yes, it can be a useful tool in many respects but that doesn’t mean everything will benefit from an infusion of AI.

Which means there is an opportunity for human curated content. We are already seeing this. In fact, I have one single Substack subscription that I pay for, and the topic is all about curation.

And where have humans been publicly curating content for the past decade? Pinterest.

Fortunately for us, Pinterest seems to be “working” again for bloggers and business owners.

What’s nice about Pinterest is it is part search engine, part recommendation engine.

So you may have heard of an expensive Pinterest course that launched last week from Tony Hill and Jon Dykstra. Tony has been on my radar for a while but there was no way I was going to pay $500 for a Pinterest course.

And then in my inbox Amy LeBlanc mentioned her thoughts about Tony’s course. She’s been in my inbox for a while and it made me wonder “how did she get in there?” (and should I let her out? just kidding).

So I looked, and lo and behold I had access to a little Pinterest SEO course of hers called Pinterest Rank Boost 2.0. It must have been from a bundle at some point.

So I went through it this past weekend. Twice.

Let me say that the guide I linked above is pretty good, but this course was great. I would say it is for intermediate beginners.

The focus of Rank Boost is on keyword research and then using that research to optimize your profile, boards, and pins. So if you’re already good with that, you don’t need this.

If you have Pin Inspector, her short bonus video opened my eyes to how to use it. In the past I have opened the software and wondered okay, how does this help me?

What I really liked about Amy is that she clearly explains not just what to do, but why. Her lessons are clear, organized, concise, and appear to be frequently updated. Now I am contemplating picking up her full course.

In the meantime, I have started optimizing my niche site profile and boards, and on my newer travel site, since I had only recently started on Pinterest I will be able to use her methods to get this new account started the right way.

I don’t promote a lot in this newsletter but she is a good teacher, and based her content on both the Pinterest Engineering blog and her experience as a Pinterest manager.

So, if you are interested in marketing on Pinterest, or like me, haven’t given it enough attention lately, or haven’t been seeing results, then see if she is a good fit for you.

Note that the guide above includes a discount code for Rank Boost, and also for her full course. Don’t click on the full course link unless you’re ready because it activates a 5 day timer for the discount. Ask me how I know :)

Until next time,

Catherine