My 10 Best Pinterest Tips
I’m all about Pinterest right now!
Did you know that 250 million people use Pinterest each month right now?
It’s not just a social media site, it’s really a visual search engine, and one of the biggest places that people go to look up information online.
In fact, the Pinterest search engine is so powerful and unique that many people are preferring it to Google!
In the past two months, I’ve gotten really focused on boosting my Pinterest traffic and have gone from 90k to 1 million monthly Pinterest viewers!
I’m going to share with you my top 10 best tips for growing your Pinterest - without using group boards.
In the past, posting to lots of group boards was a big part of people’s Pinterest growth, but I never got into it, because I didn’t enjoy having ultra-active boards with other’s random pins cluttering up my feed or Pinterest profile.
This year, Pinterest has made some BIG changes, including announcing that pins to group boards are getting de-prioritized in their newsfeed and that they are giving more focus on your pins that you post to your own on-topic boards.
I’m thrilled about this, because group boards are not my thing. Earlier this year, I was researching Pinterest strategies and one Power Pinner’s recommendation was to join at least 50 to 100 group boards and post to them all the time. I just don’t have time for that, as a busy homeschooling mom and entrepreneur.
Pinterest best practices are changing, and now is a great time to update your account, see what’s happening on Pinterest, and learn how you can use this amazingly inspiring website to help people searching for information to find your posts and Pins.
It’s absolutely the best source of website traffic today, and it’s a lot of fun, especially if you enjoy browsing for interesting articles related to your life passions and business.
If you’re busy like me, and you want effective ways to grow your Pinterest traffic organically, without joining a gazillion group boards, keep reading to check out my tips in the list below.
September 26, 2018 - 1 Million Monthly Viewers on Pinterest for the 1st Time!
Here’s the proof! I was so excited to see the 1 million monthly viewers on my Pinterest today, and had to take a screenshot to commemorate this milestone! Whoohoo!
I’m celebrating this moment, because numbers go up and down, and this exciting peak may be just short-lived due to my currently viral Pins - but how awesome to see this right now!
Now, this does not mean that I have 1 million followers, nor does it mean that I’ve had a million hits to my website - this is the monthly viewers number that shows how many people your pins are reaching total on Pinterest in the past 30 days.
I’m excited about this number going up, because it also means that my monthly traffic to my website from Pinterest has grown dramatically!
In one month, Pinterest has grown to refer 15% of all my website traffic this month, up from 5% last month, which it had consistently been hovering around for years.
[Update 1/19: My Pinterest monthly viewers has now settled down to close to 300k per month, but my website traffic from Pinterest has continued to increase now bringing in consistently about 40-50% of all of my traffic. This is due to other pins that did not directly link to my own site not getting as many hits, while my personal blog links keep getting MORE traffic from Pinterest! Even better!]
Which really is exciting because Pins can stay active for months, and even years.
So all this new activity can bring ongoing new website viewers for months to come.
Your monthly viewers is a number that Pinterest shows on business accounts, that is visible to people viewing your profile.
It’s the number of people who see your Pins on Pinterest in that month, as well as the number of people who see any Pin that leads to your website, even when created by other people and posted on their boards.
That’s one of the reasons why having a business account is essential for small businesses and bloggers to do on Pinterest.
It allows you to claim your website, and then get analytics and data for any content on Pinterest that leads to your website. And it’s totally free to upgrade your personal account, and get additional features including analytics, ads, and featured boards.
Honestly, at the beginning of this year, my involvement with Pinterest was minimal, though I’ve had a Pinterest account for years. I was just popping in about once or twice a month to add new blog pins, and look up recipes.
I tried to always add a vertical image to my blog posts, and would Pin most of my blogs to Pinterest, though not always, and I wasn’t necessarily creating my own image pins like I do now.
However, I consistently was noticing over the past year or two that my website traffic from Pinterest has stayed steady, bringing lots of new visitors from old posts shared on Pinterest.
I also noticed that the posts that were bringing in traffic from Pinterest were also ranking higher on Google searches and bringing in more traffic that way too.
I wondered about the connection and decided that Pinterest was a valuable source of website traffic that I should focus more on, because without even focusing on it, it was bringing in better results than other social media sites that I was putting a lot of time into, and Pinterest engagement boosts Google Rank.
Over the past year, the average monthly viewers on my Pinterest account had been around 50,000, and it was bringing in about 4% of my monthly website traffic.
At the end of July, I looked at my Pinterest and saw that it had organically grown to 90k monthly viewers. This was when I decided to start focusing on harnessing the potential of Pinterest, and see what actually putting some effort and strategy into my pinning could do.
Here I took a screenshot in early August when it was at 98k, just after I started investing in daily Pinterest practices, and you can see it’s right before I gained massive momentum into September.
This is when I really started focusing on daily Pinterest practices to boost my blog posts and website traffic, and am so excited that the momentum is growing!
I was so thrilled when my Pinterest account grew this past month to over 100k, then over 500k, and then to 965k!
Within the past two months of putting into this practice, I’m so excited to have now reached 1 million monthly viewers on Pinterest for the first time! Whoohoo!!!
There are specific things that I am doing to grow my Pinterest account and get more of my blogs and images shared.
I’ve been busy doing research, trying out different methods, and finding what works for me.
The exciting thing is that Pinterest has so much potential for creative entrepreneurs and wellness professionals, as well as all kinds of small business owners and bloggers, to share your gifts and skills.
Pinterest is a place that people go to learn how to do stuff, and be inspired by what to make, eat, buy, or do.
If you want to share information with people online today - you have to seriously think about how Pinterest can help you.
I’ve had several people asking about what I’m doing on Pinterest, and what I recommend to get started with growing on Pinterest.
Here’s my essential tips for the best practices to grow your website traffic with Pinterest today.
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Top 10 Pinterest tips:
#1: Have a Business Account
To get the full benefit from what Pinterest has to offer for small businesses, bloggers, and website owners, it’s essential to have a business account.
You can upgrade your personal Pinterest account to a business account for free.
This allows you to claim your website, set featured boards, have access to helpful analytics to know what’s performing best on Pinterest for you, plus be able to do promoted Pins.
#2: Use The Showcase & Dynamic Cover to Feature Your Top Brand Boards
At the top of your Pinterest business profile you can set 5 boards of your choice to be featured in the Showcase.
I highly recommend having these 5 featured boards be specific topics that cover the main focus of your business and blog, and post to them frequently.
You also can choose which of your boards to feature in the new dynamic cover image, which shows at the top of your account the recent Pins from the board of your choice or from what you’ve been posting.
I highly recommend having a board that is exclusively all your own Pins that you’ve created for your blog posts and website pages, and to set that board to show as your dynamic cover image.
#3: Enable Rich Pins
Once you’ve set up your business account, and claimed your website with Pinterest, then make sure you’ve enabled Rich Pins.
There are four different kinds of Rich Pins: products, recipes, articles, and apps. Depending on what kind of business you focus on, you may want different types of Rich Pins.
I have Article Rich Pins enabled, which means that when my blog posts are shared on Pinterest, they automatically appear with a headline, author, and description added.
This is absolutely important for increasing the click-throughs and saves on your blog posts!
I can tell you that from looking at my Pinterest analytics I can see that ALL of my top ten best performing Pins from my website are all Rich Pins.
It makes a big difference and will help your blog posts to look just like the Pins from big magazines online, giving your Pins a more professional appearance, and increasing your trust-factor.
Find out more about how to enable Rich Pins here.
#4: Create High-Quality Vertical Pins
Create lots of beautiful unique Pins for your blog posts and web pages.
Pin them to your boards with the most specific related topic first, then re-pin them to all other boards with fitting topics over the next few days.
You can create up to 5 unique Pins per blog post, and post your Pins to at least 5 different boards to position them for best potential reach.
Check out my previous post and video on how to create beautiful graphic design images for your blog posts here: How to Create Pinterest Images with Canva
#5: Research Long Tail Keywords in Pinterest Search
The Pinterest search bar is a GREAT place to research keywords in your main topics for blog posts, Pins, and business research.
All you need to do is starting typing into the Search bar what you are looking for, and Pinterest will show you additional suggested words for what other people are looking for.
You can use this search feature to study the keywords that Pinterest is suggesting, and you can use this to discover the specific 4 to 6 word long tail search terms that people are using to find what you are sharing.
Use these specific long tail keywords everywhere on Pinterest: in your bio, your board descriptions, and in the description of every pin, as well as the title and subtitles of your blog posts.
Using the description area of Pins to write about what the topic is about, and including keywords, will teach Pinterest what the Pin is about, and help them to show it to more interested people, boosting your reach.
Tip: 70% of searches online are for long tail keywords with 4 to 6 specific words used.
Find out what people in your niche are looking for and use the various keywords in your titles and copy.
#6: Schedule Pins with Tailwind
Tailwind is the most amazing app for growing your Pinterest organically today!!!
I am loving Tailwind, because I can schedule tons of Pins to post throughout each day, without having to be on Pinterest.
Tailwind will create a Smart Schedule of optimized times for you to automatically post scheduled pins to Pinterest with, and you can adjust it and add as many times as you want, depending on your plan.
I am currently scheduling about 15 to 20 Pins a day through Tailwind, and I know people who schedule 50 to 70 Pins per day with them.
Tailwind is also an awesome source of analytics and insights to boost your Pinterest.
I love being able to see through Pinterest all the Pins that people are posting from my domain, and their stats. This is so valuable!
If you are wanting to increase your Pinterest reach, which I highly recommend since it’s the best source of website traffic today, than I highly recommend Tailwind.
Pinterest loves when people post regularly. It’s not as effective to hop on once a week for and go on a pinning spree, than to have posts pinned regularly each day. They are able to understand that you are an active user when you consistently are pinning each day, and will boost your reach accordingly.
You can try out Tailwind for FREE and schedule up to 100 Pins before having to upgrade and purchase a plan.
Plus you are not limited by time, you can use up your 100 free Pins in a week or months, while you get to see what Tailwind is all about.
Get 100 Free Scheduled Pins:
Sign Up For a Free Trial of Tailwind Here
#7: Join Tailwind Tribes & Power Up
One of my the BEST things about Tailwind is the Tailwind Tribes feature.
In Tailwind Tribes, you can share your blog pins to a private group of other Pinterest bloggers based on topics, and find other pins that you want to share from quality Pinners.
The Tribes feature can get your blog posts pinned by many other Power Pinners dramatically increasing your monthly Pinterest views and re-pins.
This is an AMAZING way to get your new blog posts out to a wide audience right away through other active Pinterest users!
With your Free Trial of Tailwind, you can also join 5 Tribes and share 30 Pins to Tribes for free.
I quickly realized how incredible this feature was, and upgraded to a Tailwind Plus account for unlimited scheduled Pins and got the PowerUp to be able to join an unlimited number of Tribes.
Get Your Free Trial of Tailwind and Try Tribes Today:
Free Trial of Tailwind for Pinterest Scheduling and Tribes
I’m really enjoying using Tailwind to boost my Pinterest reach and it’s been a big part of helping me to grow to 1 million monthly viewers. These are my personal results, but Tailwind also publishes the Typical Results of Tailwind for Pinterest Members every year, so you can see exactly what the average growth rate looks like for their members.
#8: Daily Manual Pinning
I make sure to pin manually on Pinterest every day.
Daily manual pinning means logging directly into Pinterest on the computer or phone app, and browsing and pinning from my feed, or search.
Pinterest is still a social media site, even though they are more of a search engine now, but they like and reward SOCIAL behaviors, particularly being an active user on their website.
It’s also great to manually pin, because it gives you an opportunity to check in and see what Pinterest is promoting to you. You can use this as research time to see: what’s trending, what’s popular, follow new interesting accounts, and get inspired.
I try to do these four things regularly:
Scroll through my Pinterest News Feed to see what they are promoting to me.
Scroll through my Followers feed to see what the people I follow are sharing.
Click on the Search Bar, and scroll down to see what “Ideas for You” that Pinterest suggests.
Click on the Search Bar, and scroll down to see what “Trending Ideas” are popular on Pinterest right now.
While it’s easy to schedule all your Pins through Tailwind, I focus on using Tailwind to schedule the Pins that I am sharing from other Tailwind Tribe members, and to schedule my blog Pins to post to a number of my own boards with an interval, so I’m not adding one pin to 8 boards all at once.
#9: Add a Full Description To Each Pin with Keywords
I know I already mentioned keywords, but seriously this is KEY!
The most important place to add your keywords is in the description of every Pin.
Don’t just save a pin with a photo and no text!
Pinterest gives you lots of room to write sentences about your pin, use that space to describe in rich detail what you Pin is about using a variety of long-tail keywords that I talked about finding in tip #5.
If you are sharing other people’s pins, before you re-pin them you can edit and add to the Pin description as well.
The description of your pins, and their placement in related boards on Pinterest, makes a massive impact in how that Pin gets found online.
Pinterest is also prioritizing hashtags more. So go ahead and add 5 hashtags to each pin as well.
#10: Re-Pin Quality Pins
It’s important to make sure that you only re-pin quality pins that lead to active links that are what the pin says it is.
Always click through on the Pin to the website to check that the source of the pin is legit, and not just a stolen viral pin with a random sales pages attached to it, or a link that has been reported for spam.
If you share pretty pictures without realizing that they are attached to bad links, and Pinterest notices that several of your posts are dead links or spam, that can cause all of your Pins to get less priority in the news feed.
Your followers will want to follow you, because of the fact that you consistently share high-quality Pins with active links to helpful sites and blog posts.
It’s also important to make sure that if you re-pin something, that the person who originally pinned it owns the content, or has permission to share. For this reason, I never re-pin any pictures or content that come from Tumblr blogs, as they are all too often photos taken from other places without proper attribution.
Even in Tailwind Tribes, I always click and read the link and post before re-pinning anyone’s content, because even pro bloggers can make mistakes and mess up links.
Your Pinterest feed offers high value to viewers when it’s well curated with beautiful Pins that lead to high-quality content and websites.
I hope these tips have inspired you and help guide you to activate your Pinterest account and share your blog posts and helpful articles with more of people today!
Remember, the important thing is not your monthly viewers, it’s are you effectively getting your content seen and found by the right people who are your ideal customers and clientele.
Pinterest is an incredible source for quality website traffic referrals today, and I highly recommend taking it seriously - while also having fun with it!
And, come on over and follow me on Pinterest: