5 Steps To A Highly Successful Pinterest Marketing Strategy

Today we are going to discuss the steps you need to take to create a highly successful Pinterest Marketing Strategy. If you have a website or blog, marketing your content on Pinterest is one of the fastest ways to get free traffic and grow your business.

Gone are the days where new blog owners had to wait months for Google to start sending them traffic. With Pinterest, if you follow the steps outlined in this post, you can start generating traffic exponentially sooner than if you just rely on Google alone. And best of all, it’s free, all it costs is your time, perseverance, and dedication.

So, how do you find success on Pinterest, and start generating that targeted traffic to your site?

Learn How To Get Over 300,000 pageviews/mo of FREE Pinterest Traffic to Your Website!

Patience, Perseverance, and Dedication

I was going to save this step for last, but the more I thought about it, and the more I thought about my own experiences using Pinterest, and building this blog in general, I think it should be the first step. Patience, perseverance, and dedication is a mind set you must have when you begin any new endeavor, and it is no exception for growing on Pinterest.

Contrary to popular belief, Pinterest is not a social media platform. It is actually a search engine. Just like Google, it takes time to index content on Pinterest. Unlike Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, which bring instant, yet temporary, traffic right off the bat, Pinterest takes some time to index your pins, and unlike a Facebook post, a pin gains traction as time goes on.

Like Google, Pinterest uses keywords, which we will get into in the third step, and it takes some time for Pinterest to figure out exactly what topic your pin is optimized for, and who they should show your pin to.

When you upload a pin to Pinterest, you should have the mindset before hand that you are going to pin it, forget about it, and move on for awhile. Yes, you can check your analytics, and your views, clicks, and engagements, but don’t get too hung up on the numbers right away. Give each of your pins some time to gain traction and start bringing you in traffic.

If your end goal is to bring traffic to your website, the only real stats that count are the ones you see in your website’s analytics that show you where people are coming from when they arrive at your pages. If your pins are bringing you traffic from Pinterest, that’s all that matters in the end.

Either way, having patience will really pay off in the end, and prevent you from getting discouraged and giving up prematurely. Any successful blog or online business you see online has an owner behind the scenes who is working their tail off getting it to where it is. So, just don’t forget this mindset as you gear up to create your Pinterest account and develop a Pinterest strategy for your site.

Use Pinterest For Business

If you are serious about developing and growing your Pinterest account, you need to create a business account. If you already have a personal account, you can easily convert it to a business account. Business accounts are free, and aside from being able to link your pins back to your business website, you will be able to access Pinterest Analytics and run ads if you choose.

When you create a business account, Pinterest lets you verify your website. It gives priority to pins linked to verified domains over non-verified domains. So, this step is crucial to get the maximum exposure for your pins.

Of course, you don’t have to create a business account, but if you want to link your pins back to your website, Pinterest does not want you doing this with a personal account. In fact, it is actually against Pinterest’s terms of service to do this, and you could put your account in jeopardy by doing this without having created a business account first.

Imagine building up your account and having Pinterest be your main source of traffic, and then one day, out of nowhere, your account is suspended and all your hard work goes down the drain. Lots of time and effort wasted. It’s better to just start off right out of the gates and create your business account. It’s quick and free.

SEO Your Pinterest Boards And Pins

Your Pinterest account is made up of a collection of boards that you create, and each board is a collection of pins related to the topics of your boards. Your boards and your pins should be fully optimized for keywords that users type into the Pinterest search bar to find your content. Keywords and key phrases should be used in the titles and the descriptions of your boards and in the titles and descriptions of your pins.

Ideally, your boards should be specific to the kind of content you have on your website. For example, if you are a homeschooling blogger, your boards should be focused on topics surrounding homeschooling. Many times, the categories that are on your blog already are perfect to create boards around. For example, your blog categories could be math curriculum, spelling activities, cursive writing, etc. Those category names would also be your board names, and you would pin content from those categories to their respective boards. Your board titles should be relevant to what you already have or what you plan to have on your website.

One effective strategy is to create your boards in advance with topics you plan to write about on your site, and start saving relevant pins from other accounts to those boards. This will show the Pinterest algorithm what your board is about, so by the time you are ready to save your own content to that board, the platform will have a better idea of how to categorize your own pins, and they will get exposure much faster.

For more strategies on how to use keywords and popular searches to get more traffic to your pins and boards, check out this Pinterest Advanced SEO course.

Design Pins That Get Clicks

Bloggers who are just starting out on Pinterest are often intimidated by the pin design process, but really, with all the free online tools and templates out there now days, it is nothing to fear. I use Canva to create all my pins. I use the pro version because you have a lot more images at your disposal, but you can also use it free and there are still a lot of options. Canva has Pinterest templates you can use to create your own pins with, so if you are stuck at the design phase, try using some of their templates for inspiration.

Alternatively, if you can get started with these free templates from Tailwind.

Pinterest prefers vertical images, and the great thing about having to use vertical content is you most likely already create a ton of it on your mobile phone already. You can easily upload images and content straight from your phone.

The recommended size of a pin is 1000 x 1500.

There are several types of pins you can create on Pinterest.

Image Pins – These are the normal, familiar images you are used to seeing on Pinterest. To design a click worthy image pin, keep your audience in mind. If you have a baked goods blog, obviously, your target audience will be most enticed with beautiful images of savory, mouth watering desserts. If you have a travel blog, your audience will be most inclined to click through on an image of beautiful places around the world and scenery images.

Most users of Pinterest are female, and prefer brighter colors and pretty images and text. They like to ‘feel good’ when they look at a pin, so if you can achieve that for them, you’ll get more clicks and engagements.

Some bloggers I follow have said that pins that don’t show faces get more clicks. I have no evidence to back that up, but if you choose to use images of people on your pins, maybe try showing with a face, and without a face looking directly at the viewer to see which yields more results.

For this blog, I haven’t used too many images with people, most of my pins are just text overlay on a background.

Video Pins – These are kind of new …. ish…. Pinterest is encouraging content creators to create video pins that are vertical, and are between 5-15 seconds long. You can easily create a video pin in Canva. It doesn’t have to be anything too fancy. If you are not a video buff, a simple image that has some movement on it will do.

Even though Pinterest wants us to start making more video pins, at the time of this writing in 2022, video pins on Pinterest do not get as many clicks as image pins. A good strategy would be to experiment with video pins, but use the bulk of your effort designing image pins.

Idea Pins – These are the newest addition to the Pinterest platform. They are very similar to stories on Instagram and Facebook, and in fact, when Pinterest first came out with idea pins, they were actually called Story Pins. Idea pins can contain both videos and images.

Pinterest is currently encouraging its users to create more idea pins. However, it has been challenging to get creators to create them because there is no where to input a link back to your website or blog, but even so, Pinterest favors idea pins, and gives them more exposure than image or video pins.

Since idea pins are getting so much exposure in the search results, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to play around with creating a few to see if you can get more views and followers. When it comes to traffic generation, idea pins aren’t all loss, they can still drive traffic to your blog indirectly if a user clicks through to your profile and discovers the link in your bio to your homepage URL. If your homepage is set up to captivate your visitors or capture emails, this can work in your favor.

Currently, in the US and UK, you can link to products from your idea pins, but apparently it only works on the Pinterest app on a mobile phone.

Automate Your Pinning Schedule

One of the main keys to exposure on Pinterest is consistency. Since Pinterest’s new algorithm update in 2020, where they stated they will be focusing giving more exposure to fresh content, you’ll want to consistently be pinning fresh pins for your blog posts. Does this mean you have to sit at your computer day and night to consistently pin? It could if you decide to pin manually. However, if you want to make your Pinterest strategy less work, automation of scheduling and batching your pins is crucial.

Some bloggers recommend you pin up to 25 -50 pins per day to stay consistent. That can be a mix of your own fresh pins, your own repinned pins to different boards, or other people’s pins. It is not recommended to pin them all at once. That could either mean running to the computer multiple times a day to pin, or scheduling them in advance to hit on different days spread out at different times.

You can schedule your pins on Pinterest directly, however, you have to manually upload each instance of a pin and you can only do it one at a time. This means that if you want to pin one pin to multiple boards, you’ll be uploading multiple instances of that pin, and then figuring out the dates for spreading them apart in intervals so they don’t all hit at once. That’s a lot of work.

I use a software called Tailwind to schedule pins in intervals. They have interval pinning built straight into their program where you only have to upload (or pin from the web) one instance of a pin, choose which boards to send it to, and it will schedule each board 7 days apart.

Tailwind is the most Pinterest oriented scheduler out there, and if you use Tailwind, you can also plan your content for Instagram and Facebook under the same account. If your blog is still small, and you don’t have much content, managing scheduling through Pinterest itself is doable, however, if you are managing Pinterest for a website that has lots of posts, consider Tailwind for automation and batching. You can sign up for a free account here.

Another reason I love using Tailwind is it helps me learn what’s working on Pinterest currently. Pinterest is always updating their algorithm and best practices, so what worked a year ago, might not work the best now. If you are using outdated Pinterest strategies, at best they won’t work, at worst, they could put your Pinterest account at risk of suspension. If my pinning activity seems like something Pinterest might misrepresent as spam, Tailwind’s SmartGuide will alert me right away, so I don’t put my account at risk.

It’s good to stay up to date with the most updated best practices on Pinterest so you don’t waste a ton of your time and effort doing things that just don’t work anymore or get your account suspended.

Conclusion

I said it at the beginning of this post, and I will say it again. Patience, perseverance, and dedication is key. So be patient, work hard, and don’t get discouraged. Be prepared to be in it for the long haul. Just like with anything in life that bears fruit, working on and growing your blog and your Pinterest account is a labor of love. And it will pay off if you stay the course.

Do you see all those other successful blogs out there with tens of thousands of Pinterest followers, bringing in thousands of dollars in monthly revenue through ads, affiliate marketing, and product sales? They started at nothing too, and built those businesses from the ground up. All of us have to start somewhere. We all have a beginning. And there is no reason you cannot be just as successful as anyone else who puts in the time and work.

Learn How To Get Over 300,000 pageviews/mo of FREE Pinterest Traffic to Your Website!