Today I’m going to share what happened, exactly, when I did a Pinterest board cleanse. Cleaning up your Pinterest boards takes a little bit of time, but it’s important to weed out pins that are no longer relevant or technologically applicable to the current day.
History of My Pinterest Activities
So if you’ve been following me here on the blog where I write semi-specific stuff on writing and design, then you know how much of a Pinterest fanatic I am. I’ve been a pinner for over a year now, and this is not my first confession, my friends, about how much Pinterest has either influenced my site designs or has dramatically improved my website traffic both as an author and a blogger.
Researching Pinterest
I’ve researched and studied Pinterest so much I was able to build a course around it, and have consulted for businesses looking to use Pinterest to market themselves.
This gorgeous, masterpiece of a search engine that we lovingly open to find inspiration, new products, recipes, books, and how-tos is simply amazing. And the beauty of it is it works for everyone – every genre, product, and website. As long as you are in a niche that is not prohibited by Pinterest, you can market your website there. Think of it as a visual version of Google search, surrounded by beautiful ‘pins’ or images of what the pin is all about.
Niche on Pinterest
Well, one of the biggest things about succeeding with Pinterest is ensuring that your website has a certain niche. Well, I certainly figured that out, and my monthly viewers just from Pinterest have been steadily growing so much that running this blog is becoming so much more than just an income stream.
It’s becoming a personal challenge to set the bar even higher for myself from a design sense. But with all that under my belt, I was ready for a unique challenge. Cleaning up your Pinterest boards can be one of those big challenges as you grow as a blogger. And if you feel like cleaning your virtual house, this is something you’ll want to take on, and there are a ton of benefits, as well.
Pinning on Pinterest
You know what happens when you just keep pinning, and pinning and pinning? Yeah. Take a look at your boards and have yourselves a lot at your own Pinterest account. Do you see an element of crazy there? Most likely, yes.
Sometimes this just happens from what I call drunken pinning. Like having a little too much wine on the weekend and deciding to pin ALL the THINGS. Like drunk buying on Amazon. It seldom ends well.
The other thing that happens is when you belong to a Tailwind community, you might feel obligated or ‘forced’ into sharing pins to keep a 1:1 sharing ratio that may not perform well on your boards. They simply don’t resonate with your audience. But you pin them anyway.
After months or years of doing that, and you look at your boards and see no activity no those pins, you realize that Tailwind communities may not be all they’re cracked up to be. Sharing pins just to maintain a 1:1 ratio is a sign of 1) a bad community match or 2) lack of good design and keyword use by the pin’s creator.
This is exactly why you need to be super selective about what you share on your Pinterest boards. This way, you’re only pinning quality pins rather than pins you feel obligated or ‘forced’ to share because you’re part of a pinning squad, a pinning Facebook group or even a Tailwind community.
Yes, it’s important to share pins of others. But it’s even more important to only share pins you know will perform well. Otherwise, you’re in for quite a cleanup.
A Pinterest Board Cleanse
This past week I worked on a major project that pinners on Pinterest seldom do. A Pinterest board cleanse. Why don’t they like to do it? It’s a lot of work. Lots of deleting, reorganizing, reassessing, reviewing of analytics, etc. That’s right. I shifted everything and anything that didn’t fit anymore or wasn’t performing into a secret board.
When I was looking at my boards with an objective designer’s eye, my face made this grimace thing and I think I pulled a muscle. My boards looked yucky with things that were of duplicate content. This is why cleaning up your Pinterest boards can be so rewarding…it actually makes you feel good.
It was a challenge because my look and feel differs so much from everyone else that I figured it’d be hard to find good, quality content along with high-quality pins that matched.
Pinterest Board Cleanse Results
But here’s what happened, and I think you’ll find this interesting.
- The boards looked so much more beautiful than they did before. I’ve received tons of compliments on this account now that I’ve made this update. It’s hard, sometimes, to make decisions on elements to use and look and feel. Doing a Pinterest board cleanse got positive feedback.
- It looks put together. Like it was intentional and purposeful. It looks like this is not my first rodeo. It matches. It’s coordinated. I’m in love, which leads me to my next point.
- I actually felt better. Seriously. Design obstacles are crippling enough. Then add in an overload of mis-matched content and you’ll be rocking back and forth like a crazy person. I stopped second guessing myself once I saw the end result. Gorgeous. My heart was happy, and I was excited to look for more ways to add more to it. It was a refreshing feeling, and I felt energized once again. Proof that cleansing your boards can actually make you happier!
- I got rid of the excess. There were multiples of the same pin, square images that had somehow landed on there (to me, a bit yucky), redundant articles (where everyone seems to write about how to start a blog), and moved over 4000 pins altogether.
- I got rid of information no longer relevant to my audience. Leveled up my basic to intermediate content. Writing for sales funnels. Writing copy. Ethereal design. New, fresh stuff that I think my audience wants to learn more about.
- Found my people! I found some other bloggers like me – they design like me, use subtle, more muted colors, and now I feel like we have something in common and I’ll be reaching out to them, thus, just enhancing my sense of blogging community.
Has it been challenging? Of course it has. Did I delete a lot of pins? Yes. Have other gurus cautioned against doing that? Of course they have. Did it hurt my account? Not in the least. In fact, bottom line, it helped tremendously.
Parting Thoughts on a Pinterest Board Cleanse
So would I recommend taking your Pinterest account to this extreme? YES. If I could do it over again, I totally would, despite the amount of effort that went into it (like, hours, and hours of effort).
Here’s your Pinterest challenge for the following week: do a Pinterest board cleanse. Clean up those boards. Create a theme, a certain look, and move pins around that do not match. Use a secondary account to still support the bloggers you love and admire and continue to re-pin them on a separate account. Or better yet, give them a blog shout-out, which is probably what I’ll be doing as well, come to think of it.
And yes, I’ll be updating my Pinterest course, available for purchase on my online store, to add this cleansing activity in more detail!
Happy pinning, everyone! Try cleaning up your Pinterest boards – you’ll love the results!