How I Get 400 Views a Day from Pinterest (with only 700 followers)

Of all my social channels, Pinterest has the lowest number of followers; yet is easily one of my biggest referrers. Doesn’t make sense, does it? Despite a paltry 700 Pinterest followers, I average 400 hits from the network each day- and that’s why I am so certain of its power to boost your numbers. Let’s learn more about how I use Pinterest to drive traffic and make money (this is a great guide for using Pinterest for affiliate earnings too!) without many Pinterest followers.

1.Focus on evergreen content. This is the biggest one for me. For Pinterest to do well, your pins need to e evergreen-meaning the information is relevant all year round (with the exception of seasonal content which does well at specific times of year). I believe every blog should ensure it’s content strategy is focused on evergreen content as that’s where the views are long-term.

The type of evergreen content that does well on Pinterest tends to recipes, tutorials, how to guides, information articles and listicles. While it’s certainly easier to do well on Pinterest as a food and health blogger, everyone has the potential to create evergreen pinnable content. Fashion blogger? Try a DIY customisation tutorial. Beauty blogger? A list of thrifty beauty hacks. Try to focus on doing this at least once a month. Looking into Pinterest trends can also be useful.

2.Make sure your image is pinnable. Making sure images are tall and thin (like the one below) means they will do better on Pinterest. I subscribe to Canva so use their magic resize function (which automatically resizes any image to      optimal Pinterest size. Here are two examples I created. It’s simply a case of using stock images (try Ivory Mix and Pexels to source them) and then layering texts over the top.

Read: Working with icelolly.com    

 Read: How I Turned My Blog Into A Job

3.Use tailwind. Tailwind is my biggest secret and has pretty much revolutionised my pinning. I mentioned this in my How I Turned My Blog Into A Job Post but Tailwind is key for me. Tailwind is offering my readers a free 30-day trial (which you can grab here). This should give you enough time to decide whether to pay to subscribe (which works at about £10 a month. For me, because of the traffic potential, it’s worth it but you can make that decision after the trial as you should get an idea of how it works by then).

• Tailwind will identify the best time slots for you to post. You can select these by going to ‘your schedule’ and decide how many times you want to pin a day. You might be surprised by the time slots by the take into account different audiences too (e.g. those abroad, those with different interests etc).

• You then add each pin you want to use and schedule it to as many boards as possible. You can upload it via an image on your computer or install Tailwind so it becomes an option when you hover over each image in your blog post. Once you have uploaded the pin, you select which board to pin it too. You can create ‘board lists’ to save time, e.g. ‘all recipe boards’. This means it’s then simply a case of uploading the pin and clicking ‘all recipe boards’ and Tailwind will automatically distribute it to those boards in your chosen time slots.

• You can also choose to use ‘interval’ mode so it’ll spread the pins out over a few days rather than bombarding all your boards at once (a good idea not to look spammy)

• You will still need to write a description in the box when using Tailwind. Make this as informative as possible using your key words. Another tip I heard once was to almost spell out what the content contains as people will be searching for that information, e.g: This turmeric anti-inflammatory smoothie uses dairy free milk, turmeric, banana and nut milk. It’s perfect smoothie for those with irritable bowel syndrome and IBD as it’s an easy to digest smoothie.’  This is a description for one of my most popular pins (around 20k pins) so it obviously does the trick!

• Once that pin is pinned, you can access it in your published pins board (and use analytics to see how it’s performed) so it’s simply a case of then going back in and repinning it every so often. It’s a good idea to repin popular pins every week or two.

• Tailwinds works at its best when there’s plenty of boards to pin to so using group boards is important.

Remember to sign up for your 30 day Tailwind trial  here

4. Use Group Boards

The key to growing your traffic when you don’t have many Pinterest followers is making the most of group boards. The best place to find these is to check the Pinterest Group Boards Facebook group DAILY.  There are always people opening up their boards and if struggling, why not open up one of your own? I recently opened my ‘GROW YOUR BLOG’ Pinterest board which is open to contributors. If you want to join, just pop your email in the comments below. Aim to join at least 20 group boards. Read the rules of each board carefully but also do your bit by popping in every day and repinning members’ content to your own boards.

5. Get in and Get Out

Once you’ve scheduled your pins, you shouldn’t be spending much time on Pinterest. I spend 10 minutes a day, pinning others content to my own board and then leave it at that. There are lots of tips about growing your own following- spending hours engaging and making beautiful board covers- but the key is actually to create pinnable images, automate your pinning and join group boards.

Remember, your most hits will probably come through people searching for a pin; which means that while number of pins may impact how high up in the search rankings your pin is, the number of followers you have won’t be seen by the person (unless they want to learn more about you and click your profile). So, it is definitely one of those platforms where follow numbers are almost irrelevant.

Pin It For Later

If you also want to focus on gaining followers, I haven’t addressed it here but this post ‘How I gained over 7000 Pinterest followers; might help!

I hope this guide helped! If you enjoyed it, make sure you follow my blog with the methods below.

Disclaimer: This post contains a referral link to Tailwind.