Struggling To Drive Pinterest Traffic To Your Site?

Did you know that Pinterest is one of the best platforms to drive free traffic?

Site traffic is very important for making money online. While Google is a great traffic source, Pinterest can boost your blog traffic faster, especially if you are a new blogger.

Learn how to get traffic from Pinterest with this simple strategy (that I share here for FREE!!!) that increased my blog traffic by 2,000% without spending a fortune!

I use Pinterest to get 200K+ monthly page views with my blog and earn full time income – Read my latest income report – How I Earned $8,038+ in August 2023!

This Pinterest Traffic guide describes all the steps I took to achieve 200K monthly page views, 20K+ followers, and get over 10 million monthly impressions on Pinterest.

Here is a screenshot of my Pinterest account:

This is a screenshot of my website traffic in the first year I started using Pinterest – Check this out:

In my first year as a blogger, I was a full-time mom, had my second child while raising a toddler. Time was my most precious commodity!​ By implementing this simple Pinterest strategy, I managed to skyrocket my blog traffic while working only 2-4 hours a week on Pinterest!

How I Grew My Blog So Quickly

I was super determined from the very moment I signed up for Pinterest to make this thing work out for me. I did everything I could to master the Pinterest platform, and here I’m publishing my Pinterest traffic guide.

Download my free Pinterest printable planner that can help you kick start your new Pinterest marketing strategy fast and easy – check it here >>>

Use the table of contents below to easily navigate between guide’s pages.

 

STEP 1 – Who Am I & Why Should You Trust Me

Whether you just can’t stand waking up to another boring day at the office, or you need an effective way to promote your business –  you got to the right place.

Nice to meet you! My name is Yanna Berman.

I’m the founder and publisher of “Urban Mamaz”, “Urban Mamaz Shop” and “My Vibes”.

My mission is to empower online entrepreneurs to turn their professional skills and passions into a successful online business!

After I earned my bachelor’s degree in Economics and Management, I worked as a Campaign Manager in a large advertising & marketing company for a few years.

Throughout my career I acquired a thorough understanding of digital marketing that helped me start my online BLOGGING business.

Here’s how it all got started.

Since the day my son was born, I’ve been a stay-at-home mom. As the money in my personal bank account started dwindling away, I felt the urge to make some money, and starting a blog while working from home sounded like the dream business! So I decided to start my first blog about women entrepreneurs and motherhood.

My first year of blogging was very challenging. Although I was strongly motivated to be a work-from-home mom, I realized that making a full-time income blogging actually takes time.

But I didn’t give up.

I knew that the first thing I had to do was to increase my blog traffic. Google was an option but it took too long, so I searched for other free traffic sources. Then I discovered Pinterest – Pinterest has changed my life!

In February 2019, I turned my blog into a profitable business and started working for myself full-time!

While I was growing my online business, I continued to work as a digital marketing freelancer and to teach Facebook marketing lessons. Teaching has always been something that I enjoyed.

There is a great quote that says;

So, later that year , I created this Pinterest Traffic guide which is an online resource for bloggers who wish to learn how to get traffic from Pinterest to their blog! I update this guide from time to time to make sure you’ll have updated tips and tricks!

In this guide, I share all my Pinterest strategies, tips, and hacks that I use to get over 200K monthly page views to my website!

So let’s start! Move to Introduction to Pinterest.

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STEP 2 – Introduction to Pinterest

Pinterest Is a Game Changer

What is Pinterest and how can it help you?

Pinterest is not just a social media platform, it is a giant visual search engine where users can upload, search, sort, and manage images. You can think of Pinterest as the Google of images, which are actually the Pins.

Almost every Pin on Pinterest leads to a website. Unlike Facebook, Instagram or other social media that do their best to prevent users from leaving their platforms, Pinterest encourages users to click on the Pins and immediately view the content in the original web source. This Pinterest feature combined with a good Pinterest pinning strategy make it a GREAT source of traffic for your website!

In addition to the high number of Pinterest’s active users — 482 million monthly active users in the third quarter of 2023 according to Statista —  one of the greatest benefits of Pinterest is the long lifetime of Pins compared to other social media posts. A single Pin can send high traffic to your blog for months and even years after it published!

I can honestly say that since I started using Pinterest as one of my blog’s main traffic sources, I moved one step forward towards the big league of successful bloggers and my monthly revenue has increased significantly.

As a result, I stopped wasting my time trying to promote my blog on other platforms and focused mainly on Pinterest and Google. With my new blog, I managed to reach almost 200,000 page views in less than a year, while giving birth to my second son and raising my oldest son. At the time I joined Mediavine, only 5 months after I started my new blog, I already reached 110,000 monthly page views and became a full-time blogger!

So yes, Pinterest was a game changer for me, and it can be yours, too!

All you need to do is to follow my Pinterest strategy, after adjusting it to your needs, and watch the traffic numbers rising in your analytics account.

Pinterest Audience and Popular Niches

According to Pinterest’s Audience Insights (a new analytics feature from Pinterest, for Business accounts), most users are middle-aged women interested mainly in DIY activities or recipes. There are men using Pinterest as well and fortunately, there are more popular niches besides DIY and recipes.

Here are the most popular niches on Pinterest (according to Pinterest Audience Insights):

• DIY and crafts
• Home décor
• Education
• Art
• Beauty
• Women fashion
• Event planning
• Food and recipes
• Health & nutrition
• Sport
• Travel
• Gardening
• Motherhood, parenting & kids
• Finance

So, how does this list of popular Pinterest niches affect your blog?

Well, if your blog is about any of these niches, it will be easier for you to drive high traffic to your website. If not, it might be challenging. Using Pinterest’s Audience Insights, you need to identify your target market. Please note, if your target audience does not use Pinterest, you shouldn’t waste your time on promoting your content using this platform. This is the first evergreen marketing rule you need to know.

I used to think that I should be passionate about my blog niche in order to succeed, but that is not correct. I wasted my time on writing articles which I thought were outstanding, but I was the only one who thought this! Do you know why? Because they weren’t driving the traffic I needed for my blog to succeed. The truth is that the only one who should be passionate about my blog niche is my audience.

So, guess what? You need to write for your audience, so you better know who Pinterest users are and what they are passionate about!

Understand Pinterest

There are a few rules you need to follow to succeed with Pinterest. But before we get to them, you need to understand what Pinterest wants.

Like other social media and digital businesses, Pinterest wants to succeed at what it’s doing. To succeed, Pinterest needs to have a high number of users.

NO USERS = NO PINTEREST!

To attract users, Pinterest must provide the best content to the relevant audience. Therefore, if you want your Pins to be ranked at the top, you must create this “BEST CONTENT”! It is as simple as that!

How does Pinterest know what the best content is?

By collecting and analyzing data.

Data such as:

• Pins that have the highest repin rate, click rate, close-up rate, save rate, etc.
• Profiles that have a higher number of followers, who use certain keywords/topics, etc.

Based on these analytics and data, Pinterest can scale the profiles that have the most relevant and highest quality content, and direct it to the most relevant audience.

Main guidelines to succeed on Pinterest:

• Create the best content you can
• Put your best content in front
• Optimize your profile so Pinterest will see that your content is the best
• Don’t spam
• Follow your strategy persistently until you succeed

Pinterest Smart Feed

In early 2014, Pinterest introduced the Smart Feed, which technically meant that Pinterest transitioned from a chronological feed to a user-search-based feed.

The new Smart Feed algorithm, which is the way Pinterest sorts and rates pin quality, relies heavily on the visuality of the content, the textual data appearing beneath the image of the pin (the pin description), and other profile ratings.

To promote your pins effectively, you must be able to predict exactly what your customer wants and is looking for.

How can you do this? Well, this is what you are going to learn if you keep reading.

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STEP 3 – Pinterest Profile Setup

How to Create and Edit Your Pinterest Profile

This chapter lists all the steps you need to take to establish your promoting system, which includes setting up a Pinterest account and preparing your website to be promoted by Pinterest.

Although these steps are technical, it is critical to complete all the steps – They are critical to your promotional success. Once you have finished reading the technical part, continue to the next step.

Setting up a Pinterest Business Account and Verifying Your Site

To convert a personal account to business account:

1. Log in to your account
2. Go to com/business/convert/
3. Fill out your business name and website then select a business type
4. Click Create account

Click here to read Pinterest instructions for setting up a business account. To claim your website, you’ll need to add a meta tag or upload an HTML file to your website’s HTML code. To claim your website by adding the HTML tag:

1. Log in to Pinterest from a web browser and click *** to open your menu
2. Select Settings
3. Click Claim
4. In the “Claim website” section, enter your website URL and click Claim
5. Select “Add HTML tag”
6. Copy the tag and click Next
7. Go to the index.html file of your website and add the tag to the <head> section before the <body> section
8. Go back to Pinterest and click Submit
9. Click Done

Click here to read Pinterest instructions for verifying your website by uploading the HTML file.

Add a Save Button to Your Website

1. Go to the Pinterest widget builder – https://help.pinterest.com/en/business/article/save-button
2. In the “Button type” section, select image hover or Any image
3. Customize your button image
4. Copy and paste the code just before the </body> tag on each page where you want the button to appear.

Click here to read Pinterest instructions for adding a Save button to your website.

Apply for Rich Pins

Rich Pins show metadata right on the Pin itself, giving Pinners a richer experience and increasing engagement. To apply for rich Pins:

1. Install Yoast SEO and activate it.
2. Click on the “Social” tab in the Settings area.
3. Click on the Facebook tab and make sure “Add Open Graph Meta Data” is enabled.
4. Validate any post on your site in the Rich Pins Validator.
5. Click on the button to apply for Rich Pins

Click here to read Pinterest instructions for enabling Rich Pins.

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STEP 4 – Pinterest SEO

Introduction to Pinterest SEO

Now that you have set up your Pinterest profile and your website, it’s time to optimize your Pinterest profile, which includes the profile name, description, boards, and pins.

The first thing you need to start with is a keyword research. SEO is the most important thing you need to know to grow your profile and get more traffic. What does a Pinterest keyword research mean?

A Pinterest keyword research means taking the time to find all the popular search terms (keywords) that are relevant for your blog niche. By adding them wisely to your Pinterest profile, you will signal to Pinterest that your profile is the one that should appear in the search results first when users look for one of those keywords.

Using optimized keywords is actually the basics of Pinterest SEO.

By using more popular keywords and implementing the correct board strategy, you will increase the chances of been found on Pinterest and increase your organic blog traffic.

Pinterest Traffic

There are two types of Pinterest traffic. Knowing the differences will help you understand the basis of your Pinterest marketing strategy.

The first traffic type is Viral Pin Traffic

This traffic develops when one of your Pin becomes viral – For example, when you publish a successful Pin that gets repined many times. As a result, your profile is attracting a high level of engagement and your blog traffic skyrockets!

The truth is that a single Pin can drive thousands of visitors to your blog in a single day!

Viral Pins usually last a few days before traffic drops down, but sometimes they can last weeks or even months. However, there is a way to revive Pins that used to be viral.

To create viral Pins, you need to create irresistible Pin designs, write a super interesting post that users want to pin, and optimize your profile engagement scores.

The second traffic type is Organic Pinterest Traffic

Unlike viral Pin traffic, organic traffic increases gradually. It takes time to build up this type of traffic and it may take a few weeks or months for this traffic to appear.

This kind of traffic actually comes organically from users who search for keywords on Pinterest, Google, and other search engines. To increase organic traffic, you will have to work on your Pinterest SEO.

Bottom line: When using Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog, you have to focus on two things:

1. Creating irresistible Pinterest Pin designs and worthy pinnable content.
2. Pinterest SEO and keywords

Each action will generate a different type of Pinterest traffic. Constantly improving both parts in your Pinterest strategy will drive the traffic you want to your blog through Pinterest search results and Smart Feed.

Pinterest Keyword Research

A good keyword research is essential if you want your Pins to appear at the top of Pinterest search results. Actually, that is the most important factor that can drive extremely high traffic to your blog. This kind of traffic is steady, in contrast to the traffic from viral Pins, which typically has ups and downs.

The best way to do keyword research for Pinterest is on Pinterest itself.

Follow these steps:

1. Make a list of the most popular keywords that best define the topics of your blog.
2. Similarly to Google searches, when you type a search term in the Pinterest search query, you get more suggested keywords. Do this for each keyword in your list and add these suggestions to your list. Try to find multi-word phrases rather than single words, since using long tail keywords increase the chance that more relevant customers will find your content.

3. After you run a search, you will get more suggested keywords phrase Add the relevant phrases to your list, too.

You will see the most popular keywords on the right. To get longer long-tail phrases, click again on any of the suggested keywords.

1. Make sure to delete general keywords from your list, because they are too competitive, and focus instead on the long tails, which can increase your chances of reaching your target audience.
2. While you can’t see the exact number of searches for keywords on Pinterest, you can look at your Pinterest Analytics (Audience Insights) and drill down into popular topics on Pinterest.

You can also use the Pinterest keywords tool (which is available when you create ads on Pinterest) to get an indication about the popularity of keywords.

For example:

If my blog is about breastfeeding, I prefer to use keywords like “breastfeeding tips,” “how to breastfeed newborns,” and “breastmilk storage ideas,” – than the keyword “breastfeeding” on its own.

You can take your keyword research to the next level by looking for keyword search volumes, which are the exact number of searches that each keyword generated.

As mentioned before, you can’t see the exact number of searches for keywords on Pinterest, but we definitely can look for keyword search volumes on Google, which is a great indicator of keyword popularity.

Here are the most popular keyword tools to help you improve your SEO keyword research:

• Google Trends
• Ahrefs
• Google AdWords Keyword Planner
• Semrush Keyword Research Tool – try the free trial
• Webceo Keywords Tool– try the free trial

Read more about the fundamentals of SEO here.

Accessing accurate statistics on keyword search volumes will help you to determine which keywords are more popular and worth using in your Pinterest profile. Remember to use long-tail keywords to increase the chances of attracting high quality traffic.

At the end of this stage, you should have a list of popular keywords that perfectly describe your blog topics. These are the keywords that you are going to add to your Pinterest profile, boards, and pin descriptions.

Pinterest SEO Principles

The purpose of implementing Pinterest SEO is to make your profile more searchable on Pinterest and to rank your account high in Pinterest search results.

When Pinterest users search for keywords, Pinterest sorts and displays the best matches based on keywords and profile popularity levels.

Boards and Pins that are ranked high in Pinterest results of keyword searches, especially when these are popular keywords with high monthly search volumes, manage to generate high traffic to their linked blogs.

When your Pinterest SEO is done well, you can still get Pinterest traffic even if you stop repining pins for a while.

Now that you have a list of popular keywords and long tails that best describe your blog, it is time to optimize your Pinterest profile by adding them to your profile.

Here is where you should add the keywords on Pinterest:

• Pinterest profile name
• Pinterest profile description
• Pinterest boards names
• Pinterest boards descriptions
• Pinterest Pin image (the Pinterest algorithm can read the text on the image itself)
• Pinterest Pin descriptions

Pinterest announced that we no longer need to use hashtags in pin descriptions.

***Avoid keyword stuffing (loading a webpage with keywords) – This will not help you get ranked and might hurt your profile.

After using your keywords to optimize your Pinterest profile, the next step is to add these same keywords to your blog posts and image tags. Use the keywords in your headlines, as tags for your photos, image alt-text, and in your text.

Here is where you should add the keywords on your website:

• Post titles (headings H1, H2)
• Post page URL
• Post description tag (which will appear as Rich Pin information) – Use the Yoast SEO plugin (free version)
• Image filename
• Image “alt-text” tag
• The article’s text (repeat one keyword every 150-200 words)

How to Use ChatGPT to Write Your Pin Descriptions

Use ChatGPT to easily generate descriptions for your pins. Here is an example of a prompt I use: “Write a Pinterest pin description about {article topic} that includes the following keywords: {Keyword 1}, {Keyword 2}. Max 3-4 sentences”.

Ask for a new version if for every pin you publish for the same article.

Pinterest Competitor Analysis

To get a better understanding of how to optimize your Pinterest profile, you need to search for popular keywords on Pinterest and check out what appears first in the top-ranked results. Explore the top results you get for the keywords in your own niche to see what your Pinterest Pins and profile should look like to be ranked at top of Pinterest search results.

Case study

Suppose that your blog is about recipes, let’s try to search for “kid’s recipes”. What search results did you get? Pick up the first three Pins in your search results and explore them.

Notice that all three have similar characteristics, including the appearance of the keyword “kid’s recipes” and its synonyms in the Pins images and descriptions.

If you drill down, you will also find that the same keywords or part of them are used in the profile names, profile descriptions, board names, board descriptions, and in the linked web pages.

These profiles are about recipes – This is their primary or secondary niche.

Now, check out how popular these profiles are, how many followers they have, what kind of boards they have, what keywords they use, and what can you learn from them.

By analyzing your competitors, you will get an idea of how competitive your blog niche is and what all the top Pinterest profiles have in common.

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STEP 5 – How to Organize Your Pinterest Boards

How to Organize Your Boards on Pinterest

As we saw in the previous chapter, Pinterest boards are an extremely important element in your Pinterest marketing strategy. Boards allow you to organize your Pins, create exposure to a new audience, and optimize your Pinterest account by signaling to Pinterest what your blog is all about!

By implementing Pinterest SEO, you will help the Pinterest algorithm match the relevant audience with your profile.

In addition to Pinterest board SEO, there is a strategy for using boards.

Before we approach this strategy, let’s start with the basics of board organization, which is organizing your regular boards. These steps are a must for all profiles at any stage.

Organize and Optimize Your Boards

Boards let Pinterest users organize their Pins around different topics and interests. Any regular board you create will be visible to your audience. You can turn any of your regular boards to a secret board or a group board.

Secret boards are visible only to you or anyone that you invite.

Group boards are just like regular boards, except that the owner can invite collaborators to pin on the board.

When organizing your boards, your goal is to create as many regular boards as you can that are related to your blog niche and are based on Pinterest SEO principles.

By creating these boards, your Pinterest profile will be more searchable on Pinterest’s search engine. This increases your profile visibility and your Pins’ ranking in search results on Pinterest and Smart Feed. That means that more Pinterest users will reach your Pins, because your Pins will appear more often when users search for keywords on Pinterest.

Follow the next steps to organize your boards:

• In case your Pinterest account already has boards, delete all the boards that aren’t related to your blog topic (which you are no longer using) – or make them secret boards.
• Start with creating at least 10 regular boards – Use the list of the keywords that you created in Pinterest keyword research step. When choosing the boards’ names, try to cover as many popular topics related to your blog niche as you can.
• Write a description for the board using the related keywords – Write 2-3 sentences that describe the board’s topic, and include a few related keywords and popular synonyms. Be careful not to stuff too many keywords into the description, as it may look “spammy”.

A good board description should look like this:

• Add the board’s category (available when you click on edit).
• Add covers to your boards to brand your account.
• Make board organization a monthly task – Optimize your board and Pins for keywords on a monthly basis, and add new boards as necessary.
• Hashtags are no longer required.

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STEP 6 – How to Rank First on Pinterest

Pinterest for Bloggers

You can rank high on Pinterest in three ways: through Pin ranking, board ranking, and profile ranking.

Let’s walk through all three options to achieve a high ranking:

Pins

A Pin is ranked at the top when it is viral and matches the searched keywords.

Profiles

In addition to keyword matching, a Pinterest profile is ranked at top when you manage to build a trusted, popular, and well-established account.

Boards

To ensure that your board is ranked at the top, you need to optimize these three factors:

1. Keyword matching
2. Number of followers
3. Number of Pins in the board

While it takes time to grow your Pinterest followers, there are a few things you can do to rank your board at the top even when your subscriber numbers are low. This includes removing all the Pins that are not on topic, adding more topic-related Pins, using a better board name, and optimizing the board by adding the related keywords.

When your board has a high number of followers, it can take less time to rank the board at the top.

Common reasons for boards not being ranked at top may be: board name that is not optimized for SEO, use of too competitive (general) keywords, board description keywords are not optimized, board contains unrelated Pins, board has a very low number of Pins, too few followers.

While optimizing my board on Pinterest I have noticed the following:

• Even when you have fewer than 3,000 followers, your board can be ranked at the top, if you use popular but not competitive keywords and optimize your board.
• Selected Keywords matters because Pinterest shows that best matches first.
• Avoid marking your board with signs – especially at the beginning of the board name. I used to mark all my boards with an “!” sign in the beginning of the board so I could find them faster. When I delete that sign, my organic traffic doubled.
• When ranking your boards on very popular keywords, the number of followers matters.

How to Ensure That Your Boards Are Ranked at The Top of Pinterest Search Results?

Follow these principles to optimize your board ranking

1. Use popular but less competitive board names – Try to find the most popular keywords that are related to your blog niche that have less competition – such as long tail keywords (which means that fewer bloggers use them). You need to find that gap where you can be ranked at the top with a popular keyword that is used by fewer bloggers.
2. Don’t stuff keywords – This strategy doesn’t work and it might hurt your ranking.
3. Optimize board titles – When naming boards – use the exact keywords since Pinterest shows that best matches first.
4. Optimize board descriptions – Place the keyword at the beginning of the description. Write short descriptions of 1-3 sentences. The board description can contain keyword synonyms.
5. Make sure all the pins are relevant to the board topic – The more relevant Pins in a board, the higher the board will be ranked. If your boards are filled with pins that are not relevant, delete them. For example if you have a board about “Best bathroom decor ideas” – don’t pin Pins that are about best kitchen decor ideas. Stay focus on the topic.
6. Grow your followers – In popular keyword ranking, the number of your Pinterest followers matters. You can see this when you search for popular keywords on Pinterest, such as dresses, baby, recipes, etc. You will notice that most of the top-ranked profiles are the profiles with the largest followings.

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STEP 7 – What to Pin on Pinterest

Content Is King

Well, this is one of the obvious quotes that everybody repeats. But do you really understand what it means?

Have you ever tried to stop for a moment and consider what the best content for your Pinterest profile really is?

I thought I knew, but I was wrong! Although my first five months on Pinterest were quite successful, as I managed to generate more than 100,000 monthly page views, for the next few months I couldn’t break through that limit.

Then I realized that my first strategy wasn’t 100% focused on writing ONLY the best content.

How did I come to this conclusion?

I have a few blogs that cover motherhood and parenting. The first one is quite large, with about 200 articles and more than 3,000 Pinterest followers. The second one is a 2-month-old blog with around 120 Pinterest followers.

I decided to conduct an experiment. I wrote two articles about a certain topic. I used the same title for both articles, but the texts were written differently (to avoid duplicate content). I also designed a different Pin to each blog post.

First, I pinned the larger blog article on Pinterest. It took 7 days for both Pins to go viral. The results were outstanding! These two Pins drove more than 7,200 page views to my blog in one day! And that was just the beginning. Over the next 6 months, these two Pins drove more than 100,000 page views to my blog!!!

Then, 6 months later, I pinned the smaller blog article.

And guess what happened?

BOOM – another viral pin! More than 4,600 page views to this article in one day and more than 14,000 page views in just two weeks!

A brand new blog with only 120 Pinterest followers and less than 30 articles was getting this kind of crazy traffic!

Until that point, my goal was to write EVERYTHING about pregnancy and kids. And that was my mistake.

Instead, I needed to write only about the popular topics that my audience was interested in!

I took a break from work and started thinking about the best content to drive me that kind of crazy traffic! That moment caused a switch in my mind and made me change my whole strategy.

I finally felt that I had the answer for all the underperforming Pins that I had created before. Believe me, I had so many articles published and pinned on Pinterest, and no matter what Pins I designed for them, no matter what board I pinned them in first or in what order, no matter if I pinned them manually or with Tailwind, NO MATTER WHAT I DID – they just didn’t drive this kind of traffic, and not even 1% of it!

This study case made me focus my Pinterest strategy. Before that, I was pinning everything that was published on my blog. But my mistake was that the boring stuff just wasn’t driving traffic through Pinterest. The boring stuff was actually hurting my Pinterest profile by lowering my engagement.

Your blog content strategy doesn’t need to be the same as your Pinterest content strategy! These are two different strategies.

If you have the same strategy for both, it will save you time. But if you want your blog to cover everything about motherhood, which is a common blog content strategy, that doesn’t mean that your Pinterest should cover everything, too.

PIN ONLY THE BEST STUFF THAT WILL MAKE YOU VIRAL ON PINTEREST!

So, now ask yourself again – Do you know what the best content for you is?

Remember – Content is your written articles, but it’s also the titles you create, the images you use, and the Pins you design.

If you are not sure, just pin it, watch the results, and learn from them. Delete all the pins that are simply not working on Pinterest! And write more about the viral stuff.

It’s all about optimizing your content and putting your best content in front!

What Kind of Content Should You Write

This is a tricky question, since deciding which article is better is not an exact mathematical science. Whatever you might find extremely interesting may not be as interesting for someone else, and there goes your blog traffic…

So what can you do?

Although as a new blogger you don’t always know exactly what your audience will love, here are a few simple guidelines to follow if you want to write good, monetizable content:

• Write posts that solve problems. By helping your readers, you will get them to trust you. This will increase your website traffic and monetize your content.
• Write evergreen content so that your blog always remains relevant.
• Use attractive and catchy titles to increase the CTR (click through rate).
• Tell your powerful personal story to gain your readers’ trust.
• Write your post narrative so that it has short paragraphs that are clearly separated from each other.
• Write long posts, with a minimum of 500 words. The longer your posts are, the more Google likes them and rewards you. Long posts are the key to increasing your ad revenue too.
• Write posts about popular topics and try to make them THE BEST EVER. This means that if everybody is writing about the best 10 online clothes shops, then write an article about the best 20 shops!
• Write posts that are worth pinning and saving for later.

Need an indication of what content is popular on Pinterest?

Use the Pinterest algorithm to tell you what the most popular topics are:

• Check out Pinterest Audience Insights (Pinterest Analytics) and search for popular topics.
• Search for popular keywords on Pinterest and look at the top Pins that come up in the results.
• Check out the notifications you get from Pinterest about Pins suggestions – usually, the top 1-3 are popular pins on Pinterest.
• Check out which long-tail keywords are popular on Pinterest – use the keyword research from Step 5 to identify the most searchable topics that your audience loves.
• Check out your Pinterest analytics to find other users’ Pins that have high engagement on your profile.

Remember that it is simple as that! There are specific topics that can drive incredibly high traffic to your blog, no matter if your blog is new or advanced. For that reason, your top priority should be to identify these topics and write your content about them in order to grow your Pinterest traffic.

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STEP 8 – Design Pinterest Pins That Drive Traffic

How to Create a Successful Pin for Pinterest

Here we come to one of the most important elements of Pinning. Some of this might sound familiar or it might cause you to feel overwhelmed. But read it carefully since getting a high Pinterest CTR (click through rate) is what you need!

Designing great Pins is essential for increasing your blog traffic since your pins’ design will determine whether Pinterest users click on them and access your blog or not.

Now let’s go straight to the point. How can you design a Pin that will go viral?

Follow These Guidelines When Designing Your Pins:

1. Use attractive titles

After you select a popular topic for your article, it is now time to pick an appealing title for your Pin. What should you pay attention to?

• Pick up a short and accurate title – don’t confuse your readers.
• Make the value clear so people will understand what the post is about.
• Use strong and frank language – “Things Nobody Tells,” “Things People Hate,” etc.
• Focus on the How to’s and who’s, not the why’s – People often care less about why – They want to know how to solve a problem and see examples of other people who do that. Using more who’s and how to’s will increase your CTR.
• Use Google’s automatic question suggestions that are shown in the search results to find popular, frequently asked questions. The suggestions look like this:

Your article title and your Pin title don’t have to be the same, but it is important to note that your readers will get an answer in the article, otherwise they won’t save your Pin.

For example, if the article title is “The most common reason why babies cry,” possible Pin titles might be: “10 reasons why your baby cries you haven’t thought of” or “What does a baby’s cry mean?”

2. Design your Pins with Canva or Photoshop Now that you have a catchy title, it’s time to create an effective Pin design. Basically, there is a whole theory behind designing a banner that makes people click on it. Here I’m going to share with you my technique for designing Pins, which you can optimize over time as you gain more experience and a greater understanding of what works best for your audience.

Follow the next steps:

1. First, you will need to design a template or two, which will help you create great Pins quickly.

Currently, I use Adobe Photoshop to design my Pins. There is another version called Adobe Spark. Both are paid programs.

If you want a FREE program, then Canva is a great choice. You could also try Picmonkey, which is another paid package and used by many bloggers use it’s very similar to Canva.

1. The purpose of creating a template is to make your work easier, reduce your work time, and brand your Pins. Each Pin will have your logo, Call-To-Action button, title area, and photo position. So the next time you create a new Pin, all you have to do is to place your catchy title and a relevant photo in the designated places, and your Pin is ready to be pinned.

Follow the next Do’s and Don’ts when creating a template for designing a Pin:

Do’s

• Create 600 x 900 pixel Pins – or use any 2:3 aspect ratio recommended by Pinterest.
• Make sure the title covers at least 30% of the Pin area.
• Place your logo at the bottom of the Pin.
• You can add a small “Pin it” icon in one of the Pins’ corners.
• Use clean and legible fonts for the title.
• Use uppercase for all the title letters – it’s easier to read.
• Change the font in one word of the title to highlight it.
• Place a light/dark rectangle behind the title to emphasize it – make sure to use a contrasting color with a low or a high opacity level.
• Use a frame to highlight the Pin or its title.
• Add a Call-To-Action button.

Don’ts

• Don’t overuse handwringing fonts – reading the text might be difficult for some users.
• Never place the title on a colorful background photo.

• Don’t create a heading that is so small that it will not be seen – Make sure it covers at least 30% of the Pin’s area!
• Avoid using free stock photos on a regular basis – EVERYBODY uses them!

The Importance of Using High-Quality Stock Photos.

By using high-quality topic-oriented photos, you will attract more attention and more effectively convey the topic of the post to your potential readers. Purchase high-quality stock photos or even take the photos yourself! No matter where you get them from, be sure to use creative, high-quality, topic-related photos. Another option, which is not my favorite, is to use free stock photos. But keep in mind that since they’re free, everybody uses them. The photos are not always high quality, and you have to check the license type before using them.

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STEP 9 – Pinterest Pinning Strategies

Understanding The Pinterest Algorithm

Pinterest is a giant search engine. When a user searches on Pinterest for a certain keyword, she gets a list of pins.

When you give Pinterest Pinners a high-quality Pin, they’ll engage with your Pin by saving it or visiting your website. As long as Pinners continue to save your Pins, your Pins will spread to more Pinterest users through search results and feeds. This means that as long as people save your Pins, you get more website referral traffic.

When you drill down into the algorithm, you see that Pinterest Pins are shown in the order of “best first” rather than “newest first.” Newest first is actually the new Smart Feed.

Pinterest’s Smart Feed is responsible for prioritizing and ranking pins based on their quality, where quality is determined by the Pinterest algorithm. How is the quality of a Pin determined, and what does “best first” mean? Here is a list of optional criteria that probably help Pinterest evaluate profiles, boards, and Pins:

Profile

• Number of followers
• Number of group boards/boards
• Number of new pins
• Number of repins
• Number of deleted pins
• Monthly engagement
• Frequency of use
• Are all the boards active?
• Are the boards relevant?
• Pinterest SEO level
• Related keywords
• Related hashtags
• The use of relevant descriptions

Domain quality

• Is the website claimed?
• Is it a business profile?
• Are the Rich Pins enabled?
• Website SEO

Pin quality

• Optimized publishing schedule
• Number of repins
• Number of different users who repinned a pin
• Pin engagement
• Pin designs
• Titles
• Related keywords
• Related hashtags

As you can see, there are many criteria that help the Pinterest algorithm evaluate the quality of your Pins and determine your niche.

Your next step is to keep all these parameters in mind when optimizing your Pinterest profile.

My Pinterest Strategy

I believe in SEO and putting your best in front. If you do that, working with Pinterest will be the best thing that ever happened to you! Pinterest users love creative, quality and visual appealing pins.

By implementing your Pinterest SEO, you will be able to rank your Pins and boards at the top of Pinterest search results.

Your audience wants your best stuff. When Pinners roll down their feeds, they are looking for creating ideas that will inspire them. You have less than 1 second to catch their attention. Don’t spend this second on displaying your mediocre pins.

When new Pinners reach your profile, they want to see awesome Pins that will make them follow your profile to get more of your content.

You don’t want to waste their time on boring and irrelevant Pins. You need to BLOW THEIR MINDS!

You have plenty of competitors out there. Pinning everything you have will not make you successful on Pinterest. You need to put only your best Pins in front! The viral stuff! And optimize your Pinterest keywords constantly!

As I said earlier, content is king! My Pinterest strategy consists of:

50% – Writing viral content and designing irresistible Pins

50% – Implementing Pinterest SEO

So, let’s move one step further towards the practical part of this guide – the action plan.

Get Ready to Pin

Here are the things you must complete before starting your action plan, follow these steps: Your blog:

• Make sure you have at least 20 blog posts ready to be pinned. Each blog post must include:
• A well-written article (minimum 1000 words)
• An attractive title
• 1-2 well-designed Pins
• “Subscribe for newsletter” option
• Monetized ads/affiliate links
• Make sure to add a SAVE button
• Make sure your website is claimed

Your Pinterest profile:

• Create at least 10 niche-related boards
• Join 20-30 niche-related group boards
• Start your own 3 niche-related group boards and start inviting contributors
• Perform a keyword research
• Write relevant descriptions for the profile, boards, and pins you create. Use the list of keywords based on your keyword research
• Use keyword hashtags in your profile, boards, and pin descriptions
• Make sure your Pinterest profile is a business profile
• Make sure to enable Rich Pins
• Add a high-quality profile photo of yourself or your logo

Don’t Spam – Pinterest Algorithm Update 2020

In early 2020, Pinterest made a major algorithm update, caused many Pinterest creators lose big cut of their traffic and even more.

They had to deal with Pinterest spammers and creators who used to repin their pins too often—sadly, got into this category as well, and so did I! Group boards began to be perceived as more spammy due to the high number of repins within them.

During that time, I suddenly lost all my traffic and received no traffic at all from Pinterest for a month and a half. When I reached out to their support trying to figure out why I lost all my traffic, they said that my account looks legit, but they made an algorithm update and somehow my account got into that category, but it should be ok.

Once my website traffic got back (after a month and a half of ZERO TRAFFIC from Pinterest) – I had to adjust my strategy.

So I significantly lowered the number of pins I repin. Before that change I used to repin  more than 60% of my pins daily. I stopped doing so and focused on pinning mostly FRESH content! Check my current pinning principles in the following step.

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STEP 10 – Pinning Principles

Now that everything is set up, it is time to start pinning! Here are some important guidelines for pinning:

How to Pin on Pinterest?

• Pin at least one new Pin every day (5-6 times a week) – Pinterest LOVE FRESH CONTENT!

After establishing your blog, continue to write at least 3 new articles every week. By designing 2 pins for each article, you will have 6 Pins to pin each week.

Pinterest love profiles that post new quality content on a regular basis, so your goal is to pin at least 5-6 new Pins every week. If you can’t write 3 articles during a certain week for any reason, you can write 2 articles and design a new Pin for one of your old articles. Being consistent with your posting frequency is very important for growing your Pinterest audience and boosting engagement.

Use writing services if you need help with your writing tasks.

• Every new Pin you create should be first pinned to the most related board.
• Over the next few weeks, repin that Pin to NO MORE THAN 4-5 most relevant boards or group boards that you have. You don’t want Pinterest to think that you’re spamming! Remember their algorithm update. Ensure you have more than a 4-day gap in between each repin. In fact, Tailwind is defaulting to a 7-day interval in between pin. That means that if you have a total of 5 boards that are relevant to this Pin, it will take a minimum of 20 days to repin that Pin to all those boards.
• If you get any web traffic from that Pin after you complete pinning it to all the top 5 relevant boards, take at least a 6-months break before you start repining that Pin to all the remained relevant boards or for the second time to the same boards.
• In case you don’t get any traffic from that Pin, especially if you already pinned it to all the relevant boards, DON’T repin it because it’s not working.
• If you see that an article/pin got viral and get good traffic – design more pins like them. Your priority is to create new Pins for articles that that you know are working – meaning people love this content. This usually indicated that new pins will work great for the same article and bring more traffic.
• Pin 10-20 pins every day.
• Make sure to spread out the time you pin. Don’t pin all 10 pins at the same time – you can use Pinterest’s or Tailwind scheduler to spread and pins them on the most active hours.
• Once a month, use Pinterest analytics to identify the 10 most popular pins that drove most of the traffic to your blog and create more of those.
• If you are a new Pinner, which means that you don’t have a lot of your own content to pin, use 20% of your own Pins and 80% of other users’ Pins to do this. Over time, when you have created more content of your own, start pinning more of your content, until you get to the point where you are pinning mostly your content. Pinning other Pinners’ content will help you grow your boards faster, get more followers faster, increase your profile engagement, and engage with other users. Make sure to always click through on other users’ Pinterest pins to view the website and check if it has quality content that isn’t spammed.
• Try to keep all your boards active by pinning for them.

Manual Pinning

By using the follow-up spreadsheets, this pinning strategy can be implemented manually or by using a scheduler. When pinning manually, my advice is to save your spreadsheets on your mobile device, log into your Pinterest account whenever you have the time, and start pinning. Enter all the pinning details in your spreadsheet each time you pin so you will be able to track your action plan and results.

Below I explain how to rate your posts and how to promote each type of post pinning tasks into 2 or 3 pinning sessions, for example, by logging in to Pinterest 2-3 time a day, at the most active hours when your audience is using Pinterest, and pin 5-10 Pins each time you log in.

Pinning times are important; you should pin your Pins before your audience is most active on Pinterest.

Scheduling with Tailwind –You can use Tailwind’s time slots, which are already optimized for the best pinning times.

On my Pinterest account – I do both – I pin manually freshly created pins but I use Tailwind to repin them to additional 3-4 related boards. I’m not repining all the pins – only if there is another related board  where I can repin it to and that’s it! 

The only time I might repin pins again is on holidays or seasonal content – For example – a few months before Christmas I start repining Christmas related pins to another board – just to start preparing them and make them more active towards that holiday. Having said that, seasonal pins start getting traffic even if I don’t repin them a month or so before the season/holiday.

Bottom line —

Your Daily Pinning Schedule Should Include:

• 1-5 NEW pins for new article
• 5-10 New pins for old content
• 2 repins for high performing Pins or seasonal content
• 2-3 other users’ Pins

Total daily pinning: 10-20 pins – Make sure you pin more FRESH content than repinning – at lease 60% fresh content!

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STEP 11 – Pinterest Group Board Strategy

If you just started your Pinterest account, you don’t have lots of followers and pins. This is when pinning to group boards can help you grow faster. After you have organized and SEO optimized your Pinterest boards, it is time to implement the Group Board Strategy for beginners.

If you have fewer than 3,000 Pinterest followers, this strategy can definitely help you. 

While pinning to group boards has a very positive impact on small Pinterest profiles, by achieving 3,000+ followers milestone you will be leaving behind most of the low performing group boards that might prevent advanced profiles from getting bigger exposure.

This is simply because you no longer need them and you can continue pinning to your own boards which will generate a lot of traffic for you anyway.

What Is Group Board Strategy for Beginners?

This group board strategy is a short-term strategy in which you boost your new account by joining as many group boards related to your blog niche as possible and sharing your Pins.

As a newbie on Pinterest with a small number of followers, your profile engagement is low, and you don’t have a steady high exposure.

By collaborating on these group boards, you will accelerate the growth of your followers and expose your Pins to new audiences and convert them into followers.

How exactly?

When you join and pin to group boards, you increase the number of people who are potentially exposed to your Pins. That is because the content that you share on these group boards is also exposed to the followers of the group board contributors, even if they are not following you.

This means that these group boards are a great way for new bloggers that don’t have many followers to achieve growth.

It is achievable for new Pinterest account to get at least 3,000 followers in less than a year, depending on your blog niche and your perseverance.

How Many Group Boards Should You Join?

There is no precise number of group boards you should join to achieve this milestone, but I recommend joining at least 30 relevant group boards with at least 100 collaborators.

Sharing Pins on these group boards can only help your account grow faster.

Having said that, over the years Pinterest noticed that some users have taken advantage of this method and in response reduced the power of group boards. As a result, using group boards has become a little more complex.

It is simply not enough to pin to every group board that you find. Furthermore, pinning to the biggest group boards doesn’t mean that you reach more users or grow your blog traffic faster.

What has changed?

This doesn’t mean that you should join any board you see! Carefully pin on topic and check the quality of each group board before you join.

Does Pinning to Group Boards Still Work in 2023?

Yes, it’s working! As a new Pinterest user, pinning to group boards can increase your account exposure and help you reach new users. In the past, Pinterest group boards were very popular and worked even better until Pinterest noticed that people started to manipulate the system.

As a response, they changed their algorithm and reduced the importance of pinning to group boards. However, this doesn’t mean they are obsolete. Pinning to group boards is still a great way to get attention, especially when you’re a beginner.

How to Determine If a Pinterest Group Board Is Good for You

First, when pinning to group boards, you must be on topic. The group boards you choose must be related to your Pins’ niche. Second, you must pin to high-quality group boards. Check the following guidelines when searching for and selecting group boards:

• Group boards with 100-300 contributors are usually better.
• A high number of followers – Try to join to group boards that have a higher number of followers than yours.
• No spammers – Check if the group board Pins are on topic, not repeated, and are of high quality.
• SEO optimized – Check if the group board name and description are well optimized with relevant keywords.
• 1:1 repin board – Check the board description to see if the board has a 1:1 repin rule, meaning that the contributors must repin at least one Pin from the group board for every new Pin they pin to that board. Although it is almost impossible to confirm that all the contributors follow this rule, I have noticed that group boards whose descriptions include this rule usually have a higher Virality Score.
• High quality contributors – Check the identity of the boards’ contributors. Are they professional? Do they have many followers? Are they creating good topic-related content?

How to Join Pinterest Group Boards

The easiest way to find Pinterest group boards is to check other Pinterest users’ board lists (under the Boards section on each profile).

To join a group board, follow the instructions in the board description. You may be requested to send an email with your details, complete an onsite application form, join related Facebook groups, or perform other activities.

Before sending a request to join a group board, make sure to have a few boards with relevant Pins related to your blog niche, because good group board owners usually will check your profile before adding you to their boards.

Start Your Own Group Board on Pinterest

Starting your own group boards has many benefits. The greatest benefit is the opportunity to boost your popularity on Pinterest and gain more followers. Unlike joining other group boards, when you create your own group board, you can request anyone who asks to join your board to follow you and your boards as one of the conditions. Other benefits include:

• Increase your engagement with other users
• Control with whom you collaborate
• Allow you to create high performing group boards
• Allow you to participate in niche-related group boards that you manage
• Help you grow your profile faster

I started 4 group boards when in my first year on Pinterest. At first, I had to invite people to my group board but eventually, I started to get more and more requests to join the group boards. I published an article about the best Pinterest group boards to join and add my own boards to this list to help me promote then and increase their collaborators.

It helped me grow my Pinterest account and get more followers. Today I no longer accept new people to the group boards because it’s time consuming. But the group boards are still live and people are using them.

How to Start and Grow Your Own Group Board?

1. Create a new group board – To make it searchable, include a popular keyword in the group board name.
2. Add a board description that includes a short description of the board topic, a few related keywords, and pinning rules. You can use this template:

“THIS IS 1:1 REPIN BOARD! This board covers XXX… WANT TO JOIN THIS GROUP BOARD? Follow me & the board you want to join and send me an email with a link to your Pinterest profile account and the name of the board you want to join. My Email: XXX”

1. Add the board Category (click on the edit board option).
2. Add a cover to your board to brand it.

 Who Should You Invite to Your Group Board?

To get a quick response, you need to invite active users. Invite the users who most recently pinned to other group boards related to your niche.

Each day invite up to 4 new users – be careful not to invite too many at once. If you do, Pinterest might block or even ban you.

Over time, as your group board grows, you will not have to look for new contributors anymore. Your group board will be popular enough so you will start receiving requests from other users to join your board.

To keep your boards spam-free, make sure to check your boards from time to time and see if all the Pins are on topic and not repeated.

What Happens When You Reach 3K+ Pinterest Followers? Boards Board Strategy for Advanced Bloggers

Now that your blog has reached 3,000 followers, it is time to start leaving the group boards that are no longer doing any good for you.

That may sound strange. Why should I leave the group boards that provided me so much exposure, now that my Pinterest account is growing? Won’t this hurt my profile engagement or reduce my blog traffic?

As a new Pinterest blogger with few followers, joining good group boards helps you grow your account, but now, when your Pinterest profile has attracted a high number of followers and engagement is on the rise – pinning to low-performing group boards just hurts your account.

If Pinterest aspires to be a good search engine, like Google, it must consider a blog’s backlinks as an indicator of the blog’s quality when evaluating blogs.

What does that mean?

When you optimize your blog for Google, adding new quality backlinks is an essential part of the SEO process. Google takes into consideration the sources and the number of web page backlinks when estimating the importance of a page and then ranking it.

This is also the case with Pinterest: Links to your profile from low quality group boards (through your Pins) devalue you in Pinterest’s eyes.

Since optimizing your boards is how you signal Pinterest that your profile is better than other profiles and you deserve to be ranked at the top, you should eliminate any connection to low-performing and low-quality boards!

So, if the first goal was to join as many group boards as you can (to gain more new followers and increase your profile engagement), the goal now is to leave all the group boards that no longer help or even devalue your profile.

How to Evaluate Your Group Boards 

Tailwind used to provides all the necessary statistics, including boards’ Virality scores that made it easier to optimize Pinterest boards. The Virality score showed the ratio between Repins and Pins in each board. The higher this score – the better it was. However, in early 2020, Pinterest made a major algorithm update, caused many Pinterest creators change their pinning strategies and Tailwind removed some of their popular insights like this score.

Therefore, to evaluate your group boards, you will need to check how spammy they are by answering on the following questions:

• Do contributors pin not relevant pins this this group board?
• Do contributors pin the same pins over and over again? if yes it’s spammy.
• Do the contributors look spammy (not legit creators you would follow), have low number of followers and pin not quality content?

If the answer is YES to one of these questions – you can leave the group board and stop pinning to them.

Afraid of Leaving Group Boards

I used to be afraid too. One of the reasons was that several bloggers claim that huge group boards work well for them despite their low Virality scores.

Finally, I decided to try, and left a few group boards. Do you know what happened? It didn’t hurt my traffic at all. On the contrary! My blog traffic increased gradually over time.

Look at the advantage of this situation: You are the one who controls your profile’s performance, and growing the profile depends mainly on your optimization work!

Anyway, before leaving a group board, you can always stop pinning to it for a while and see if there is any change.

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STEP 12 – Pinterest Follow-Up Spreadsheets

How to Use an Excel Tracking Spreadsheet for Pinterest

When you pin on Pinterest, you can follow-up your daily Pinterest activity to help you stay on track and get better results. A spreadsheet like this can help you:

• Track your Pins
• Maintain a daily pinning schedule
• Pin each Pin to all the relevant boards
• Mark the best performing or seasonal Pins

Use spreadsheets to track your daily activity. Either an Excel file or Google sheets, whatever is more comfortable for you.

Your spreadsheets should include a list of your boards, a list of your Pins (with their links), a pinning schedule, and additional details that will help you sort your pins, such as pin topics, article number, etc.

Here is a screenshot of the spreadsheet I use:

Click here to download the follow-up spreadsheet template>>> Explanation:

• Last Pinned/scheduled on Tailwind – Last date the Pin was pinned or scheduled to be pinned.
• Topic – The topic of the Pin. Use this criterion only when your blog covers more than one niche.
• Article number – chronological order of your published Pins/articles.
• Pin Scale – Marked Pins from 1 to 5 – to help you find faster the pins you want to repin (seasonal/highly performing pins) – simply by sorting the column.
• Article – Name of the article.
• Pin URL – Link to the Pin.
• Sum – The total number of times you repined a specific Pin.
• The pink cells – Filled with all the boards/group boards you have on Pinterest.
• The yellow cells – Will contain the number of times you pinned a specific Pin.

Simulation

Let’s simulate how to track these actions using the spreadsheet:

How to Use Pinterest Follow Up Spreadsheets Youtube Tutorial

Click here to download the follow-up spreadsheet template>>>    

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STEP 13 – Manual Pinning Vs Scheduled Pinning

Tailwind Vs Manual Pinning: Which Is Best?

Some say Pinterest rewards manual Pinners…

Others say there is no difference whether you pin manually or schedule your Pins …

What is the truth? What is really better?

No one really knows what kind of pinning method is better, except Pinterest. We can only guess, and anyone who tells you differently is guessing, too.

But to make a good guess, we can test these pinning methods and look at the results we get in each case. When I first started pinning, I was a new blogger, and I was skeptical about using a scheduler and therefore didn’t rush to purchase it.

I pinned manually for the first 7 months of blogging. At first, I was very excited by the idea of blogging for money and I was extremely determined to succeed, so I spent all my time exploring Pinterest.

As I become more experienced, I started to think about ways to optimize my work time.

Then, in my seventh month of pinning, I started using Tailwind, which is a Pinterest & Instagram Scheduler, Analytics & Marketing Tool. Tailwind is also on the list of Pinterest’s approved third-party partners.

What did I notice?

I reached the conclusion that you can get great traffic if you pin your Pins manually or schedule them. In other words, the method you use to publish or repin your pins will generate results.

BUT,

We need to remember that Pinterest want active users. For this reason it’s important to log in to your account, publish content and engage with your audience.

An interesting thing that I noticed is that no matter what method you choose to pin, you have to follow an active weekly schedule for managing your Pinterest profile and you must continuously optimize your profile to get better traffic over time.

In other words, if you use a scheduling platform, you can’t just schedule the Pins for the next year, or loop a group of Pins constantly, forget about your Pinterest profile and hope to get the same traffic or even better results over time. You need to work on your profile and pin manually from time to time.

Moreover, if you pin manually, you will have to optimize your profile too, which means that pinning manually alone will not guarantee that you get the best results. Optimization work includes designing new pins for old articles, engaging with other users, optimizing your keywords, and the other tasks that we covered earlier.

So, what about the question – Should you pin manually or use a scheduler?

I use both! As I mentioned earlier, I publish most of my pins manually and use Tailwind to repin the Pins to relevant boards.

Now you know that you can pin manually or use a scheduler and still get probably same results. To choose the pinning method that’s best for you, ask yourself these questions:

• Do you have money to purchase the scheduler service? If yes, you should consider purchasing a scheduler because it can save you pinning time.
• Do you have 30-60 minutes to spend on pinning each day? If not, you should purchase the scheduler and spend that time on monetizing your blog.

It is important to note that the biggest benefit of using Tailwind scheduler is the statistics that it provides you!

Before I started using Tailwind, I was blind.

The statistics that Pinterest shows us are very limited. I couldn’t really identify my best performing boards/group boards or my Pins’ repin count. The lack of this information made my optimizing work way harder and, in some cases, even impossible!

So, you should know that the most powerful Pinterest Analytics are available on Tailwind.

In addition to scheduling Pins on Pinterest, Tailwind helps me to:

• Schedule my Pins for the optimized timeframes (especially if you are located in Europe and your audience is in the USA)
• Access profile performance statistics and insights
• Optimize my Pinterest profile more easily
• Save time Pinning
• Go on vacations without being bothered by manual Pinning

Bottom line: If you can’t decide whether to use a scheduler or not, don’t be worried about the scheduler hurting your Pinning results. On the contrary, a scheduler can only help you and save you plenty of time! If you have the money, go for it!

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STEP 14 – How to Use Tailwind for Pinterest

In the past I used to check more insights, use the looping tool, and even use Tailwind tribes to share my pins with more pinners. But these days I use Tailwind just to repin my new pins to related boards. 

Here is how I do it:

Once I publish a new Pin on my Pinterest account – I click on this small Tailwind icon (you need to use their Chrome extension):

I add up to 5 boards, and set interval to 4-7 days.

Then I click Set Intervals and click on the Schedule Now button. Done!

STEP 15 – Make Your Pins Go Viral

How to Make Your Pins Go Viral

Based on my personal experience, it usually takes up to 14-30 days for a new Pin to start getting good traffic, but pinning a Pin once and praying for it to go viral is not something that you want to do.

Instead, to boost your Pin virality, you better repin that Pin to your best relevant boards if you want it to realize its maximum potential.

I noticed that older boards that get more repins from other users, have more viral pins in them.

Here are a few tips:

Starting from the day you pin your Pin for the first time, repin that Pin to a relevant board/group board for the next few weeks according to the pinning principles. Use the original Pin URL and repin it.

The boards should be high performing and related boards. Make sure to optimize your pin for SEO.

The Boost Technique to Get Consistent Traffic

I have several viral Pins that continue to drive traffic to my blog for months and even years. 

Once you have a viral Pin, you know that this Pin is like your winning horse. Keep on promoting this Pin (but not too much because you don’t want to spam your account!) to renew the traffic continuously.

To help keep a Pin viral longer you need to follow the daily pinning principles, and make sure to pin the viral Pins more often to your best and most relevant boards.

By doing this you will expose your viral Pin to more relevant people and help it stay viral.

When you have many high performing Pins, make sure to Pin the viral Pins every few months to generate continuous traffic. You can also create new Pins that are similar but slightly different to this version. 

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STEP 16 – What to Do If Your Pins Are Stolen

Did Someone steal your Pins?

I want to share with you something really annoying that’s been happening to me lately. A few days ago, I logged in to my personal Pinterest profile and while scrolling down my Pinterest Smart Feed, I found more than 15 Pins that were stolen from me by other Pinterest users! I was shocked! One of them even copied one of my articles word by word – He didn’t even miss a comma! How rude!

Despite the fact that it was extremely frustrating, there was a part of me that was pleased. Do you know why? Because I knew that my Pins were working. More than 10 users stole my Pins and used them as if they were theirs. Most of them did so without even removing my logo.

I immediately sent a removal request to the Pinterest copyright violation support team, and the very next day they removed all the copyright infringing content. What a relief!

So, if you find your Pins being used by other users, don’t hesitate – Send a removal request to Pinterest straight away! They will fix this as soon as they find that your copyrights were violated.

Don’t spend your time trying to ask the users to remove your Pins, it usually doesn’t work. Believe me, I tried. Some of these users run multiple blogs for ad revenue and often steal content and Pins from other bloggers. Unfortunately, asking them to remove your Pins just will not work. Luckily Pinterest support can resolve the issue quickly.

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STEP 17 – Avoid Pinterest Jail

Pinterest Account Suspended For Spam?

You will be surprised to know how easy it is to get in to Pinterest Jail.

One day you are pinning happily, adding new Pins, inviting new users to your boards, your Pinterest profile is getting bigger, and your blog traffic is thriving, and the next day you find your Pinterest profile shut down and you are suspended!

This is exactly what happened to me!

Pinterest takes spammers very seriously.

Each time you send too many invitations to collaborate on your boards, repin too many Pins, send too many messages, etc., your Pinterest profile is flagged. And if you will keep on getting these flags, Pinterest will decide to ban you.

This might sound like it can’t happen to you, but when it does happen, suddenly with no warning, your blog traffic — and your income — start to drop quickly, which makes the whole situation very unpleasant.

And believe me, I had a few bad experiences with Pinterest. And when your account is suspended or blocked, it’s very hard to reach our their support and get clear answers. 

You can learn from those hard lessons I learned. Here are the rules you should follow to avoid being banned:

• Don’t do anything too many times or too quickly, since it might cause Pinterest to think that the actions are being performed by a bot and ban you.
• Don’t quickly pin a large number of many pins at once – spread your pinning tasks over the day.
• Don’t send more than 10-20 messages at once.
• Don’t follow a high number of users in a short period of time.
• Don’t invite more than 15-20 collaborators at once.
• Don’t pin tons of affiliate links.
• Don’t use short links.
• Don’t post violent content or porn.
• Don’t log in too many times in a short period of time.
• Don’t spam.
• Don’t post pins that infringe copyrights.
• Don’t try to trick the system.
• Don’t redirect links on your website to another website, it’s better to just open a new Pinterest account for the new website.

Read more about Pinterest guidelines and policy here.

Final Thoughts

I hope you’ve enjoyed Pinterest Traffic guide and found it helpful. This guide describes the exact strategies and all the steps I used to grow my blog traffic. I truly believe that by following these strategies you will increase your Pinterest traffic and grow your blog business.

Have a question? Leave a comment below!

Feel free to share your thoughts with me and let me know how it worked for you.

 

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