How to Use Pinterest for Business and Grow

A lot of people get the idea that in order to be a successful blogger you need to have a massive social media following, particularly on Instagram. Ever since I shared how much money I made blogging last year, I've had people of all different sized platforms tell me ways in which I could improve. The interesting thing was that your Instagram size doesn't matter. There were people bigger and smaller than me offering advice, all making more money than me, because they know how to drive traffic from Pinterest. This lit the fire in me to get my act together, and finally make Pinterest work for me as well.

If you're looking for a step by step action plan to drive more referral traffic to your blog, here is how I am gaining traction with Pinterest users without being a professional social media marketer, without paying for promoted pins, and without driving everyone crazy on all my other social networks.

How to Use Pinterest for Business and Growth:

Before I tell you how I did this, lets take a look at where I was at with Pinterest previously. From November 1, 2019 through November 30, 2019, my blog was getting 2038 page views a month from Pinterest (top image below, multiply the sessions by pages per session). Since implementing these changes in just the last 30 days, Dec 24, 2019 through Jan 23, 2020 my Pinterest page views have grown to over 6,087 per month. That's triple the amount of traffic in just a month since I've adopted my Pinterest strategy.

Making Pinterest Friendly Images:

The first thing I did was go through all of my recipe posts on the blog (almost 400 posts!) and made them more Pinterest friendly. I had a ton of old recipe posts with horizontal images instead of vertical (vertical do much better on Pinterest), and I converted them into those fancy Pinterest images that everyone loves pinning. You can see in the images below, all I did was take these old spaghetti images, make a vertical collage with text (tutorial coming next week!) and that one change already makes the image for this Slow Cooker Meatball Recipe look more interesting to pin.

One more note about images, Pinterest likes pictures to be 1500 pixels long by 1000 pixels wide (Again, vertical pins are much better than horizontal images.) If I'm pinning a vertical image from my blog, I don't worry about them being this correct size, but if I'm adding text to a vertical image on Picmonkey, then I resize it in Picmonkey to meet that image size. 

How to get people to see your images on Pinterest:

After I spent an entire week correcting all of these recipe posts to have better images, I then had the task of actually repining them to Pinterest, and cross my fingers that they got some traction. The key to Pinterest is to write your captions with searchable terms. What are people going to type into the search box in Pinterest that is going to allow your pin to appear in the search results? This is what I ask myself when I write my new captions.

Previously I would write something like, "This spaghetti was so good. My kids loved it and even asked for seconds! It's sure to be a crowd pleaser at your next big gathering!"

That kind of caption might be great for Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, but it's not going to get you incredibly far on Pinterest. At least, it wasn't getting me very far.

My new caption for this pin is. "Easy slow cooker meals. Easy crockpot meals. Easy weeknight meals. Dinner ideas. Easy dinner ideas. Easy meatball recipe. Easy meatballs. Easy crockpot meals. Five ingredient meal ideas. Slow cooker spaghetti and meatballs. Easy spaghetti and meatballs. Spaghetti and meatballs recipe."

While that might seem like overkill, that has gotten this post a lot of traffic in the last couple weeks, and has taken this post from 57 page views in the last 7 years, to 476 page views in the last month.

You can even use hashtags on Pinterest, which I'm still playing around with, but for a post like this you could use things like #food #dinner #spaghetti #slowcooker #crockpot #healthymeals #meatballs #marinara etc... You aren't going to be using the same hashtags that you would on instagram though like #foodporn #foodie, etc...

Utilizing Group Boards:

Group boards are huge on Pinterest. These are boards where many people collaborate together and pin onto one board. These boards then have the ability to reach the entire audience of all the people that are in the board. If I have 3,000 followers and someone else has 10k followers, and another person with 80k followers, now all of a sudden I have the ability to reach 93k people instead of just my 3k people. This leads to more eyes on your pins, more potential repins, and more potential followers for you. Right now I'm a member of a small handful of group boards, but this is something that I really need to be proactive with getting into more of them.

How to Get into Group Boards:

I used to be a contributor for a couple larger blogs, and part of those deals allowed me to be on their boards. Other ones I'm a part of through Tailwind, a company that allows you to automate Pinterest posts (we'll talk more about that in a second!). Another part of Tailwind is joining tribes. These tribes are group boards you can join through Tailwind, and pin your content on them through the Tailwind platform, and reach more people that way too.

Tailwind and Scheduling Pins:

I've been a Tailwind member on and off for the last few years. I've gone through phases where I tried to make Pinterest work, join tailwind, can't get it to work for me, cancel tailwind, and repeat the cycle 10 times and here we are today.

Tailwind costs $14.99/month (you can get a month free through my link), and allows you to schedule your pins for the most optimal time of the day so that your pins can be seen when the most people are on the platform. When I'm pinning a pin on Pinterest I schedule it on Tailwind for all the possible relevant boards it can go onto (usually about 6-7 different boards), and then move onto the next pin. Right now I'm scheduling about 72 pins per day, which I read somewhere online that 72 was a good number, decided that worked for me, and then went with it. I also have 1,280 blog posts though, if you have fewer posts than that, you might want to shoot for around 30 pins per day.

Tailwind has a plugin for Google Chrome, so if you're on your blog and want to pin something, you just need to hover over your image, click the Tailwind button, write the pin description, select the boards you want it to go to, and then schedule it.

I've read a lot of things that say you should also be pinning other people's content too. I've been doing that the last couple days and don't know if it's really helping anything, but all this major growth from Pinterest has come without sharing other content too. So take that detail for what it's worth.

Organize your Pinterest Boards:

I used to have a lot of random boards with weird titles, and a million different food boards for different things. I finally consolidated boards (you can do this by taking a board clicking and dragging it over to another board and plop it inside the new board and Pinterest will combine them for you!). I then labeled all the boards that were specifically pins from my own site with "Flammily" on them, and then organized them at the top of my profile. I then organized the rest of my boards alphabetically, with all my group boards at the bottom. You can see how mine are organized here.

Other Random Notes:

I don't really know what this means, but I have Rich Pins setup on Pinterest. You can see how to do this here. I also have a pin it button installed on my blog so that whenever people hover over my images, they can pin them directly to their Pinterest profile. You can have a Pinterest Business Account, but I'm 99% sure I don't have that setup.

The Results:

You can see the results for themselves in the screenshot below. Previously my Total Monthly Audience was about 130k per month on Pinterest. This is the amount of people seeing my Pinterest pins and profile each month. By implementing these things right after Christmas (where you can see an immediate increase in the graph below!), I've had steady growth these last few weeks and am now at 591.23k for my Total Monthly Audience. This is basically a 500% increase in just a few weeks, which has led to 300% increase in the amount of traffic actually getting to my blog from the platform.

Anyways this post was crazy long, but that's everything I've been doing these last few months, and it's hard work that is paying off. If you have any further questions, let me know in the comments and I'd love to answer them if I can! 

If you liked this post, How to Use Pinterest for Business and Growth, you might also like:

• How to Start a Blog
• How to Get Traffic to Your Blog
• 3 Ways to Increase Blogging Revenue

Be sure to stay up-to-date on all of the latest things in our lives by following along on instagram @thehappyflammily!