I have been using Pinterest for literally years. I signed up when it was so new that you needed to be invited to join. At the time I didn’t quite get what Pinterest was for. I then went to college and was encouraged to use Pinterest to do visual research. I’ve done that ever since and in 2019 hit 100k Pinterest views.

I realise that number probably sounds a lot more impressive than it actually is. Getting 100k Pinterest views in a month is very impressive if you use them in the right way. This is why so many bloggers say you should use Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog.

Gaining traffic wasn’t my aim when using Pinterest. But in 2019 I realised I was doing some things right, I decided to do a little experiment to see just how much I could improve my Pinterest stats. The result was I got 100k views.

As someone who does not use Pinterest as a way to drive traffic to my blog, I was quite impressed by the results. Before 2019 most of my traffic from Pinterest came from one pin and it linked to one post on my site. It wasn’t even a post I wanted to drive traffic to.

But I learned a lot about Pinterest over 2019, some of which I have started using to drive traffic to my blog. So I thought I would share some of the techniques I used to build traffic and share how you can use them with your own Pinterest account.

How I Got 100k Pinterest Views

Why You Should Use Pinterest

The first thing you need to know about Pinterest is that it’s not like other social media sites. Pinterest is more like Google than something like Facebook or Twitter. Its a search engine for pictures. This is why my college lecturers encouraged us to use Pinterest. It links you to webpages, but the most important part of the content is images.

Pinterest is also a great place to find interesting content and other people who like the same things as you do. I’ve found it to be a great way to find new artists and bloggers. If you want to use Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog the first thing you should be doing is using it to share other peoples work. So pinning and following other users.

Pinterest won’t work for every niche. You have to figure out your ideal blog reader, if those readers are the sort of people who would also use Pinterest then this is a great website to advertise your blog. Pinterest is very popular with young women, so you will find topics like crafts, DIY, organisation and decorating will do very well on Pinterest.

I’ve seen some people say that you can get so much traffic from Pinterest that you don’t need to think about SEO or other social media sites. While you can get a lot of traffic, I wouldn’t recommend you only focus on Pinterest.

I mean yes if you figure out that your readers mostly use Pinterest then spend more time on that. But it’s not a good idea to be entirely reliant on one website for the majority of your traffic. I mean what would happen if Pinterest shut down? You would have no traffic to your blog.

How I Actually Got 100k Pinterest Views

Before 2019 I didn’t pay attention to my Pinterest stats. I had a vague idea that my stats would increase when I used Pinterest more regularly but I wasn’t interested in using Pinterest to advertise my blog.

At the start of 2019, my stats started increasing significantly. I knew that Pinterest likes active users, and will show their pins more regularly compared to others. I was using Pinterest more at the start of 2019, but nothing to justify the significant increase in my stats.

To give some context, before 2019 I was getting somewhere between 5 and 7 thousand viewers a month. At the start of 2019, within the space of a few days, this number increased to 21,000 monthly viewers. As you can see from the image my stats went almost straight up.

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I found this quite interesting and decided to do a little experiment with my Pinterest account. I wanted to see how much I could increase my monthly viewers on Pinterest. Just around the same time, I discovered a podcast called Thrive. This podcast is for bloggers and at the time they were doing a series which focused on a different social media account each month. The point of these episodes was how to optimise your accounts to increase the number of viewers going to your blog.

So I listened to that episode, actually, that whole series was great and I would highly recommend listening. The techniques I learned in that episode was the basis for my Pinterest strategy and how I started increasing my monthly views, to the point that in September 2019 I reached 100k monthly viewers on my Pinterest account.

Now that you know how my Pinterest account gained nearly 100k views. I want to share some tips on how you can do the same thing.

Fix your profile

The first thing you want to do is convert to a business account. This will give you access to a lot of features the normal account doesn’t have. Such as the ability to view your stats. You should then go through and connect your website to Pinterest, this will give you more information about pins which come from your website.

You then want to make sure your profile is up to date. So ensuring you have a good profile picture. As well as checking your profile name and description has some keywords relevant to your niche.

Create New Pinterest Boards

The next thing you want to do is create some new Pinterest boards. If you’ve been using Pinterest for a while I would recommend you don’t delete old pins. Similar to deleting webpages those links will be broken and it will hurt your overall stats.

It’s better to create new boards relevant to your niche and organise the pins you already have. When making new boards its a good idea to give them descriptive names. When I first joined Pinterest you would usually have cutesy board names. Such as ‘wanderlust’ or ‘recipes I’ll never try’. You don’t want to do this. You also don’t want to use names such as T R A V E L. Yes it looks nice but its harder for the search bots to understand what this says.

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You also probably want to create a catch-all board for stuff from your blog. This is where you can post everything related to your blog. Of course, you should also be organising your pins into more relevant categories. But having one board for everything blog related can be handy too.

The next and most important step is populating these boards with content. I don’t know if there is an upper limit of how many pins you can have on one board. But you want to have at least 20 pins on each of your boards.

Optimise your profile, boards, and pins

You should then go through and make sure everything is optimised so it can be found easily. This means pin titles, board names, and descriptions. Also, your profile description if you haven’t updated that yet.

Pinterest is essentially a fancy search engine which means that SEO is really important if you want your pins to be found. You need to make it easy for people to find your stuff, you do this by using words and phrases relevant to your niche.

So for example, if I made a pin showing a picture of my bullet journal. I would use words related to bullet journaling, stationery, and organisation. You aren’t writing these phrases for people to read, though they should be readable. It is the search bots who look through the description to find out what the image is because the bot can’t look at the image. Basically what you have to do is describe the image as if to someone who can’t see what they are looking at.

SEO is far more complicated than that. But it is something you will get better at over time as you practice.

Create A Pinterest Strategy

Once you have your account sorted you then want to figure out some strategy for how you are going to share pins. At first, I would advise going through old blog posts and creating new graphics to advertise posts. You don’t want to do this for every post. Just pick ones which will always be relevant.

So, for example, I wrote a guide on how to choose a notebook for bullet journaling. Someone will find that useful no matter when they read it. My review of the 2019 Paperchase stationery advent calendar isn’t so useful after Christmas is over because no one will be looking to buy one.

Once you have your pins created start sharing them to relevant boards. You can then start thinking about a system going forward and how you’re going to share new blog content.

I make Pinterest graphics for each blog post as I’m doing all the other work for a post. When it comes time to start scheduling social media posts I will schedule the Pinterest graphics at the same time. I use CoSchedule for scheduling all my social media posts and I find this useful because I can schedule pins as well.

Create nice images to pin

You want your Pinterest graphics to look nice, this will encourage people to click on them. Websites like Canva or Adobe Spark are great because they already have templates available for you to use at the right sizes. All you have to do is drop in your own images and customise them with your branding.

An image with a vertical aspect ratio tends to work better on Pinterest. Fortunately, if you use a website like Canva this isn’t something you will need to worry about because the templates will already be in the right size for you.

When taking pictures for Pinterest images you want them to look good, bright and in focus. Though ideally, these should be pictures from your blog posts and that is something you should be doing already.

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When it comes to Pinterest graphics you ideally want to be using consistent branding. This could be using a similar layout for each graphic. Or using the same fonts and colours in your graphics. Some images do better than others on Pinterest so it can be a good idea to experiment with a few different styles and layouts to see what works best.

One of the things you can do is experiment by creating multiple images for one post. This way you will be able to see which posts perform best. This can also be handy if you are sharing pins to multiple boards. You can share a link in multiple places without coming across as spammy by just sharing the same photo.

It can also be a good idea to experiment with the size of your images. Pinterest recommends using a vertical image. Though I know some of my square images have done really well and I have had a good number of clicks on those images.

Use a Pinterest Scheduler

One of the things Pinterest likes is users who are active on their website. The pins from those users are recommended more. It’s not possible to be manually pinning things every day. This is where a Pinterest scheduler comes in.

Tailwind allows you to schedule pins out in advance. You can set what days you want to pin and how many pins you post each day. This means you can take an hour and schedule out a month’s worth of pins. Rather than having to visit the website every day.

Ideally, you should aim to pin anywhere from 20 to 30 times every day. Though this is a number you could experiment with and pin much more per day. One of the advantages to Tailwind is that it can show you the times of the day where your audience is most active, so you can schedule pins based on this time.

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You probably don’t want to only pin your content. Ideally, you want to find a balance between sharing your content and sharing other peoples. So for example, if you schedule 20 pins per day maybe only 5 of those pins point to your website. Of course, this number could change depending on how much you use Tailwind, the most important thing is that you don’t come across as being spammy.

If you think a Pinterest scheduler would work for you Tailwind offers a trial version of their product. It allows you to schedule 100 pins. From this, you should be able to get a good idea if a Pinterest scheduler will help you advertise your content on Pinterest.

Out of everything I’ve mentioned Tailwind is probably the thing which was most helpful for getting 100k Pinterest views. Its not something you need to have. But scheduling pins made my activity much more consistent which can help your pins be seen more.

My Top Advice For Pinterest

That was a lot of words so I thought I would share my top tips for Pinterest. Firstly don’t just promote your content. Yeah, Pinterest is great for getting traffic to your blog but if you’re constantly sharing your content it can come across as being spammy. Try to break up your pins with other peoples.

If users aren’t clicking on your pins try and figure out why, rather than posting it over and over again. Maybe it doesn’t have enough keywords so no one is finding it. Make sure you’re using good graphics, as I said earlier experiment to see what sort of graphics work best for you.

One of the most important things is to focus on good content. Spamming links to a post isn’t going to help if no one wants to read that post. You need to be making content that people want to read. I’m still getting traffic from 4-year-old pins because people still want to read that post.

Finally

And that was how I got 100k Pinterest views. I’ve used Pinterest for a long time if you are an artist I would highly recommend you use Pinterest for research. But over 2019 I also learned how useful it can be if you want to drive traffic to your blog.

I hope I’ve shared some useful tips that you can implement on your Pinterest page. But honestly, my biggest tip of this whole post is making good content. It’s much easier trying to encourage people to read your stuff if its a post which sounds intriguing.

Have I missed anything out? Do you have some tricks you learned for Pinterest? I know I didn’t even mention sub-boards. Something I’ve been wanting on Pinterest for years. If you have any other tips I would love if you shared them in the comments.