The Exact Steps I Took To Go From 0 - 1 Million Monthly Viewers On Pinterest
I'm sure you've noticed that this is not my typical type of post. However, one of my goals for being in the online space is to share information about what has brought me value, inspiration and made my life easier in some way.
I get asked by other bloggers quite often about how I use and keep up so consistently on my Pinterest account so my fellow blogger friends, this post is specifically for you! I'm spilling the beans! If you are not a blogger or interested in growing Pinterest then you may be bored to tears and I do not blame you. You may want to skip to a post that is more fun like this one!
This is not a typical 'how to' post. There exists already so many wonderful blog posts and YouTube videos out there going into detail on the exact 'hows' of everything so I want to bring you something just a little different.
This is a cautionary tale.
A tale of how in just a few short months my Pinterest account shot from 0 views (it had been set to Private) and 23 followers to 276k monthly views and 829 followers. Then..duh..duh...duuuuun..... My monthly views tanked!
See?! It's a tragic tale but don't worry, it's going to have a happy ending!
I'm going to walk you through everything. How I built my Pinterest account so fast, the terrible mistake I made to make it tank, and what I'm doing now to quickly grow it back to where it was and beyond! I'm giving you all of the juicy strategies I used. So hold on to your hats, coffee mugs, or whatever you've got... here we go!
How To Quickly Grow Your Pinterest Account Views And Drive Traffic To Your Blog:
First, I'm quickly going to share my story of quick growth and then major loss so you can learn from my mistakes and not have to go through it yourself! Then, I will go through in detail my strategy for growth.
After starting my blog and doing some digging around in the depths of the internet I realized Pinterest is a major traffic driver to blog posts! So I jumped into my Pinterest account, spruced it up, started creating pins from my blog content, and pinned away. I also learned that consistency and pin quality are two very important aspects of creating and keeping a successful Pinterest account. As I worked on Pinterest I was seeing growth with my account and traffic to my website but I felt there was room for faster growth and I quickly became frustrated with how much time was being eaten away every day just to maintain my account.
Enter, glorious Tailwind to save the day and probably a friendship or two. Within a couple of months of integrating Tailwind into my Pinterest strategy, my monthly views boomed to 276k and about 85% of my blog traffic started coming from Pinterest!
That was amazing on its own but really, the best part was that most of that growth was happening on autopilot, freeing me up to do more of what I'm here for content creation!
It was a dream! I was on Pinterest cloud 9!
And then I moved...
I'm sure everyone reading this has probably moved at least once in their life so you can feel my pain at the time of how crazy hectic it gets packing up and dealing with all of the moving details. Also, I was leaving one state and moving to another so it was just a crazy town for a few weeks.
This is the part of the story where I want to smack my palm to my forehead (gently, of course).
In all of the moving chaos, I let my Tailwind queue empty and did not reload it for a full week! I thought, Oh, I've got so much momentum going a few days of not consistently posting isn't going to hurt me that much.
Tailwind, that wonderful, easy app... I neglected it and that was my biggest Pinterest mistake.
My view numbers tanked! I mean tanked from 276k to 60k!
And it kills me because it would have been so easy to go in and load my Tailwind queue up. What I really should have done, is way before the chaos of my move I could have gone into Tailwind and loaded it up so that I didn't have to think about Pinterest again until well after my move. That's the beauty of Tailwind- get that stuff automated so you can focus on other things!
So, that's my big, tragic tale. The silver lining is that I learned from my mistake and now I truly understand just how important and valuable Tailwind is and I get to share this info with you!
The Juicy Growth Strategy:
On to the good stuff! Below I'm listing out everything I did to grow my account and everything I'm currently doing to get my numbers back up.
01// If you haven't already, change your Pinterest account setting to Business. The business layout is lovely to look at and you want access to the analytics!
02// Make sure you have a bright, clear profile picture of your face. If your profile picture is of you on vacation and you're just a tiny image in the distance people are less likely to feel a connection with you or recognize you. Ideally, use the same picture you use for your other social media. You want your followers to easily recognize you no matter what platform you are on.
03// Think about aesthetics when choosing your banner board. If keeping it so that the pins are constantly changing as you pin looks nice that's great, but consider changing it to your personal content board or a board that always has lovely photos.
04// Add your website to your profile so it's easy for people to find you on the web.
05// Make it very obvious to your viewers who you are, what kind of content they can expect from you, and what you're all about in your description. Try not to use flowery words or descriptions. You want to be simple and concise so there is no confusion about what you are offering.
06// Very important! Get set up to create Rich Pins! This will make you look more legit, and help people to recognize you. Type rich pin instructions into Google or YouTube and you will find fantastic and easy instructions on how to make rich pins. Trust me, you do not want to skip this step if you plan on pinning content from your own website.
07// Create boards. Your very first board should be the content of your website. Make sure you organize your boards so that your content is the first board people see! The rest of your boards should be about the types of content you write and post about. So if you are a finance blogger have specific boards such as: get out of debt, how to pay off your house, savings, investing... subject matter that relates to what you offer. Remember you can also make boards secret, so anything you want to pin for yourself that has nothing to do with your brand can still be pinned, just pin it to a secret board.
08// Spruce up each board. Give each board a board cover photo, a detailed description of what types of pins will be found on the board, and a proper category. All of these items are important for Pinterest SEO. Pinterest is a search engine so you want to fill in details about the content so Pinterest knows what it is and knows how to categorize it.
09// Create pins of your content that make people want to click and re-pin! I use Canva to create images to pin. I love Canva because I find it easy to use and they have a Pinterest pin template that makes it very easy to create a pin of the correct size. It's a good practice to make at least two different pins for each blog post. You never know which one might take off and go viral!
10// Give your pins detailed descriptions. Make the first part of your description keyword-rich conversational sentences. Follow that with appropriate hashtags.
11// Start pinning!
12// You want Pinterest to love you so let them know you are a valuable pinner by pinning consistently. This is huge! Pin several times a day every day! You do not need to pin hundreds of pins every day. 10-15 a day will work great. Spread the pins out over the day to reach a wider audience.
13// Pin your own content every 10 pins or so. Keep your audience and the experience they want in mind. They probably do not want to see your pins constantly popping up or the same pins constantly in their feed. Mix it up.
14// Pin quality pins!! This is also a very important tip to keep in mind. Quality is huge for gaining viewers and keeping them! Make sure the pin is pleasant to look at, that it contains valuable content for your particular audience and that if it's supposed to link to a website make sure there is actually a URL attached to the pin. Also, check for a good description. Add a description if it's missing or is just a bad description.
15// Pin with the seasons and holidays. Keep in mind a lot of pinners start looking to the next season or holiday for inspiration around 45 days in advance so pin with their interests and needs in mind.
16// Pin each fresh pin to its most relevant board first. This is most important for the first rich pin you create from the content of your website. If you write a post about shampoo, pin it to your haircare or shampoo board first and then drip feed it out over time to your website’s board and other relevant boards, groups, and Tailwind tribes. Pinterest uses the information from the first board you pin to, to help categorize that pin. So it's important for SEO.
17// If (like me) you do not have hours every single day of your life to devote to Pinterest use a Pinterest scheduler such as Tailwind to schedule your pins on autopilot to all of your boards, groups, tribes, Facebook, and Instagram!
Using Tailwind to schedule out my pins in advance is the reason I was able to grow my Pinterest account so quickly. It was my lack of using Tailwind for a week that caused my massive fall. Lesson learned. I now understand how truly invaluable Tailwind is to my Pinterest account and business.
Tailwind is truly amazing because you can take a few hours once a month and schedule out for the entire upcoming month, or spend a little more time and schedule out as far as you want! All of your posting on autopilot!
Tailwind also has a fantastic feature called Tailwind Tribes which allows you to join a Tribe or several, share your posts for other members to reshare, and also reshare from the tribe. Everyone helps each other out. Your content reaches a far wider audience and it's a great place to find quality pins!
Tailwind also emails educational posts on Pinterest growth and best practices so you can grow with the platform as well as emailing you analytics of your posts! Very helpful!
Phew! That was a lot of content! I considered going into detailed steps on how to do each step but realized that wouldn't be possible to do in a single post, it would require a full course!
Learning this info was a game-changer for me and I wanted to be able to share all of it with you in case it might help your own journey. I've given you a guide for the actions and steps to take. What I recommend doing if you have questions or need help implementing any of the steps is to Google or Youtube your question and you will find many detailed instructional posts and videos for free!
Happy pinning!
xx Sarah
