Last Updated on May 4, 2020 by ellduclos
Why Pinterest isn’t Growing your Blog Traffic, & How to Fix it
A hot topic in my Boss Girl Bloggers community is Pinterest. If you have been following me for a while, you know that Pinterest is my FAVORITE tool to use to help grow my blog traffic. Pinterest is a free marketing tool for bloggers! If you haven’t used it yet, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to grow your blog + biz audience!
The issue that many bloggers have with Pinterest is actually making it work for them, and knowing the proper strategies to utilize when trying to grow.
Today I want to share some guidance that I have to offer about Pinterest and how it’s helped grow my monthly Pinterest views to over 1 million, and within the first month of utilizing my strategies my blog traffic DOUBLED, then TRIPLED.
Disclaimer: Affiliate links are used, read my disclosure policy here.
Important Pinterest Tips to Consider
1. Business Account/ Rich Pins
First you want to make sure you convert your Pinterest to a business account. This will allow you to see important statistics which is going to come in handy! It will also allow you to claim your website and set up rich pins. Having rich pins set up will make your pins look more trustworthy to Pinterest users (Instead of it saying “visit” it will say “read more”) Rich pins will also come in handy for food bloggers, you can show a lot more detail with rich pins. For example it will allow you to list recipes in the pin description etc. (Confusing to explain but just trust me, SET UP RICH PINS)
When claiming your website, Pinterest will give you a code to insert to your header. If you aren’t self hosted you may not be able to claim your website on Pinterest. It’s best to be self hosted anyway in my opinion, BUT if you are on a free platform like wordpress .com or wix you can’t edit the HTML of your site so you can’t claim your website as your own on Pinterest. If anyone has found a way around this, let me know! I believe you can still claim it through Blogger though.
If you are wanting to transfer to self hosting it’s fairly easy if you go through Siteground. That’s who I use and I reached out to their live chat and they did all the transferring for me! Starts at $3.95 a month depending on the plan you sign up for. (You save money in the long run if you sign up for an annual plan.)
Once you get the code for claiming your site you can insert it to your site a couple ways. I used the plug in “Insert headers + footers” and placed the code in the “headers” section of the plug in. OR you can use YOAST SEO plug in and insert it to Pinterest section under social.
If you are using HTML coding you would want to find the “<head>” code in your theme editor and place the code right after that.
Click here to set up a business Pinterest account
Click here to claim your website on Pinterest
Click here to set up rich pins
2. Join Group Boards in your Niche
Something that is really important and will help to grow your reach on Pinterest is to join group boards and pin to them! The reason Pinterest group boards are great is because it helps get your content seen by more eyes.
For example – let’s say you have 50 followers BUT a group board you are a part of has 2,000 followers. Whenever you pin your content to that group board, your reach expands by 2,000. Instead of only having 50 potential people see your content, you could have it seen by 2,050 people! Pretty cool huh?
I recommend joining 15-20 group boards that are related to your niche.
You should still make sure to create a variety of your own boards as well and pin to those too! Not just group boards.
What should you pin to group boards?
For me, I only pin my own content to group boards. To share the love I will repin other’s content from the group boards I am a part of to my own boards.
Should you only pin your pin once to the group board?
It all depends. Every group board has their own rules which you can usually read in the board description. Some board owners don’t want you to pin the same pin more than once, others won’t care. If I do pin the same pin to the same board more than once, I will usually wait 30 days before doing so. I don’t want to seem spammy.
How to find group boards?
You can use the Pinterest search feature to search for group boards in your niche, OR you can do what I do which is check out some of your favorite bloggers on Pinterest and see what group boards they are a part of.
3. Use Tailwind
I don’t want to beat Tailwind to death but my traffic and Pinterest monthly views wouldn’t be where they are without Tailwind. Within just a month of using Tailwind, my blog traffic doubled! I was pleasantly surprised.
Tailwind does have a free monthly trial BUT it does not compare to their paid services. I didn’t see much growth from the free trial but once I switched to annual Tailwind, the money was worth it.
You do need to have somewhat of a technique when using Tailwind to truly benefit from it. If you check out this course it has a detailed tutorial of how to use Tailwind properly to double your blog traffic and grow your Pinterest. It’s only $32 and super helpful!
Tailwind is a Pinterest schedule tool which allows you to schedule pins to your queue so that you can pin throughout the day without having to do it yourself.
For example: While you are sleeping at 10pm you could have pins scheduled on Tailwind to pin. This helps so that you are getting your pins seen at all times on Pinterest, including the audience that might be awake across the world while you are sleeping! The more active on Pinterest the better.
Pinterest actually says that it’s best to pin consistently throughout the week rather than just pin a ton at one point during the day.
The key is to use Tailwind but to STILL manually pin when you can.
4. Create Click Worthy Pins
Monthly Pinterest views are great and all but that’s not what matters most! You really want to focus on creating click worthy pins for your content.
What does click worthy pins consist of?
- Catchy title that makes viewers want to click and read more
- Eye popping colors and easy to read fonts
- Not too busy, to the point
- at least 600 x 900 (vertical pins are a must! The longer the better.)
I use canva to create all of my Pinterest graphics. It’s free and easy to use! There is a tutorial on how to create the perfect Pinterest graphic in the $32 e-course I mentioned above as well!
*Make sure when you are uploading your pins to Pinterest that you create descriptions that have keywords! Pinterest is a visual search engine so keywords are extremely important!*
Related: How to get your pins to go viral
5. Fresh Pins
The thing is, you want to create fresh pins monthly, even weekly! Pinterest loves fresh pins and will reward you for creating them. This is why I am constantly creating and uploading new Pinterest graphics weekly to my Pinterest. Play around with different Pin styles and wording to see which Pin style and text gets you the most clicks!
For each blog post I have about 3-5 different pin styles circulating throughout Pinterest. At this point I probably have about 8-10 different styles for each blog post (NO LIE.)
This also makes it so that you have more content to pin! Maybe you only have 5 blog posts because you are a new blogger, well if you create 2 different pins for each blog post that’s 10 pins that you can promote across 15-20 group boards and your own boards! It adds up.
6. How Often Should you Pin?
This is a great question and I still don’t know if there is a DEFINITE answer. It really varies and all depends. I have been playing around with this for a while and have found that what works best for me is to schedule 50 of my own pins to Tailwind and manually pin daily 25-30 times.
You really just need to play around with it and see what works best for you and your audience!
Something to keep in mind!!!
If you are just starting out on Pinterest it’s important to not bombard Pinterest with just your own content. You want to build trust on Pinterest so in order to do so you want to try and pin 80% others content and 20% your own!!
Once your views on Pinterest start to grow, you can switch this up and start to pin more of your own content!
Currently with over 1 million monthly Pinterest views I am pinning 80% my own content and 20% others and this has been great for me. BUT you need to build an audience and trust first in my opinion so that you don’t come off as spammy.
Related: 7 Pinterest Truths No One Talks About
7. Use your Analytics to your Advantage
Make sure you are paying attention to your analytics as they will help guide you in the right direction. One of the most important analytics is your website clicks! Go to Pinterest > Analytics > Website > Clicks
This will show you your top 20 most clicked boards and pins! You can see which pins are getting you the most clicks to help you decide which pin designs are most popular and which titles are attracting your audience to click.
You want to also pay attention to your most clicked boards and continue to pin your content to your most clicked boards as that will help drive traffic to your blog!
I also like to use Tailwind Board Insights to help determine which group boards are active and engaging. If you are a part of any group boards that have very low engagement scores, I would consider ditching them as they are just a waste of your time!
*Note it takes at least a month or two to really get accurate stats. So if you are new to the Pinterest thing, give it some time.
You might find it surprising that some of your most clicked boards and most engaged boards are YOUR OWN boards!
These are just a few important tips to remember, but if you are really wanting to master Pinterest and learn ALL of the techniques and strategies that helped me turn my blog into a full time career, then I definitely recommend you check out this e-course as it will take you through it all STEP by STEP.
I have been growing Pinterest accounts for a while now through Pinterest Strategic Management and the results I get have always been because of the strategies I learned.
Here are examples from different clients I have utilized my strategies with and their results so far! You can get these results even if you have a brand new Pinterest!
Happy Pinning!
Are you interested in a Pinterest audit? contact me here for details!
– Ell
Great tips! One of my Pinterest accounts is growing great utilizing all these. I just started a new account for my blog and it’s slowly growing. Hopeful that continuing this way will get me there in no time. Thanks for sharing all this info!
That’s so exciting! Yay keep it up (: and so glad you found this helpful! Thank you!
I love this! This has really helped me understand Pinterest and how to use it better. This was a very good post.
Thank you so much! So glad it helped (:
Thanks for precious advices. I hope my pinterest account grown up too (;
such a lovely and informative post and i am inspired by your results so far…
Thank you so much!