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If you’re a blogger struggling to get traffic to your blog, you need this guide. It’s the step-by-step breakdown I wish I had when I just started out.

You may or may not have heard that Pinterest can drive massive amounts of traffic to your blog.

It’s true.

Pinterest is the one social media platform that doesn’t make it excruciatingly difficult to get your content out in front of hundreds of thousands of people relatively quickly.

When you’re a new blogger, you need traffic relatively quickly.

When I was on the come-up, I scoured hundreds of blog posts, took Pinterest courses, and read Pinterest e-books to get my traffic game on point. I was determined to get the numbers other bloggers bragged about getting from Pinterest.

When I finally cracked the code, it felt good as hell. My efforts were finally paying off and my pocket was loving it. So I wrote the guide I wish I had when I was just starting out. It would have saved me A LOT of time and a whole lot of money.

Let’s Start With Getting Your Profile Pinterest Everything Ready

Read this post first if you’re completely new to Pinterest. It explains what Pinterest is, why you need it and how to set it up properly to get the most out of all the features.

Now let’s get into some tips.

1. Remove Off-Topic Boards

If you’re like me then you’re converting a personal Pinterest account to a business one to use for your blog. If not and you’re starting brand new, then you can skip this tip.

I had a bunch of boards on my personal profile that were very random and had nothing to do with what I blog about. Things like home decor, wedding and my vision board. I still wanted these boards for my own personal use but I made them secret so I would be the only one with the ability to see what’s on them.

Tidy up your boards by removing the unwanted or off-topic boards, either deleting or making them private.

2. Create More On Topic Boards

While you’re tidying up your boards, you’ll want to create more boards that are relevant to what you blog about or things your audience would find interesting.

Fill them in with at least 15 high-quality pins from other people to get them going.

3. Create Your Best of Board

Create a board where all of your blog’s pins will be housed. You will use this board as the hub for several campaigns and other marketing efforts further down, but you also want a place where you can quickly and easily find all your pins.

You also want a board that you can showcase the best of your blog right at the top of your Pinterest profile so anyone visiting your profile will have something to check out to quickly see your content.

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4. Arrange Your Boards at the Top of Your Profile

Your boards are moveable. Drag and drop them in order of importance with your best of board as your very first one.

5. Add a few board covers.

This is not incredibly important but it is very useful to me to quickly identify my board in a long list of boards when I’m pinning. It also makes my profile look pretty when it’s visited by anyone, which people who are considering adding you to their group boards will do as well as anyone considering to partner with you for a paid social media post. I only do this for my most important boards at the very top of my profile.

I went lazy and just did my logo on my covers, you could have yours designed in Canva to fit what each board is about. Either way, it’s not that important so don’t spend forever on them.

6. Add Keywords to Profile Name, Bio and Boards

The importance of keywords are explained in my Everything Pinterest course where I give you the breakdown of Pinterest SEO. You’ll need to understand Pinterest SEO in order to get your pins at the top of the smart feed for relevant search terms. Here are a few basic tips.

7. Make your profile picture on brand

I use this same profile picture across all my social media platforms to keep things recognisable. If I change it on one, I will change it on all.

My profile pictures used to be my logo however I find that putting your face out there helps to personalise the brand and build a connection with my readers and greater community.

8. Make Your Profile a Business Profile

I spoke about how to do this in my Pinterest post here. Converting your existing account or setting up one as a business profile from the get-go gives you access to analytics and rich pins. You’ll need these.

You can also promote pins via a business profile if you need to.

Adding Pinterest Group Boards

Once you’ve set up your profile and have filled it out with your own pins and pins from other people onto your relevant boards, it’s time to start applying to group boards.

Group boards will be the key to your traffic success on Pinterest. It gives you access to someone else’s audience, which might be quite larger than yours. To get on a group board, you’ll need to ask the owner to add you as a contributor to their board. If they agree to do so, you will now have the ability to pin your pins to their boards with their much larger audience.

Here are the tips you’ll need to know when it comes to group boards.

9. Finding Relevant Pinterest Group Boards

When I just started out, I jumped on all the general niche group boards I could find, as long as they had a larger audience than I did. These catch-all boards can be great. There’s one of them I love because it sends me a ton of traffic and has over twenty-three thousand followers, but it will be beneficial to also find group boards in your niche.

Now I am in group boards that relate to all the various topics I write about and I am seeing much more traction. The easiest way to find group boards is to visit the profile of a blogger in your niche and see which boards they are in. This will take you down a rabbit hole of boards to apply to. I give you all the details of finding relevant, quick moving group boards with high repin rates in my Everything Pinterest course. Not all group boards are worth your time.

10. Start Your Own Group Board

Having your own group board is a great way to get more followers. On Pinterest, if you’re on a bunch of bigger group boards you can get great traffic without a large following, but you still want to slowly build your own following so that your own boards do well too.

Having your own group board and promoting it in Facebook groups for Pinterest group boards in one way I have steadily built my Pinterest following to over 2500 currently.

Perfecting Your Pin Design

Your pin design will be the crux of your success once all of the above is applied. It’s no use being on big group boards if no one ever repins your pins or clicks on them because they’re hard to read or otherwise unattractive. Here are a few tips for nailing your pin design.

11. Choosing the Right Fonts

The fonts you choose can make or break a pin. As a girly girl, I chose a lot of script fonts when I was just starting out. They look great on a design but can be hard to read, especially if they are light in colour and appear too small on a mobile device, which is probably where your pin is most likely to be seen.

That said, you can still utilise scripts as highlights if you choose. Just make sure that the essence of the pin is clear and legible.

This pin, for example, is very simple in design. The most important words are the biggest. The words “right now” aren’t the most essential part of what I’m saying but is a nice addition. Yes, I want to grow my blog, and even sweeter if I can do it right now. So the script simply adds a nice cherry on top.

12. Choosing the Right Size

Vertical pins perform best on Pinterest. The smallest dimensions I recommend that your pins be are the default dimensions that Canva uses: 735*1102. Stay away from square or horizontal pins.

13. Choosing the right colours and images

This is an art that you really need an eye for. Since I am not graphically gifted, I tend to scan my feed to see what catches my eye and use it for inspiration when creating my pins. After a while, you begin to develop your own personal style which should also be influenced by the type of pins that you notice performing really well for you.

Pinks and reds tend to do really well on Pinterest, however I have lots of pins that are darker that take off. Same with the rule of not using faces. I am a lifestyle blogger blogging about hair and fashion so faces are on lots of my pins. One of my most popular viral pins is this one:

So experimenting is key. Bottom line: Make your pins easy to read. Do not try to add text over busy images without some sort of background for the text itself and stay away from too much script.

Unsplash and Pixabay are two places that I like to get free stock images to use for my pins.

14. Brand Your Pins

Always make sure to add your logo or website to your pins. This will help to build your brand. People who are familiar with your brand are more likely to repin and click through to your pins.

It can also help to deter people from stealing your pins, though this is very possible still.

SEO For Pinterest

Pinterest is a search engine and so should be optimized for similarly to Google. Here’s how to do that. This is my basic Pinterest SEO strategy. You can get the full picture within my Everything Pinterest course.

15. Find Good Pinterest Keywords

When you start to enter a search on Pinterest, some suggestions will come up. Take note of any that matches your content as you will want to use this in your pin description. Once you’ve hit enter and completed the search, some more keywords will be at the top of the Pinterest search result page.

The buttons that run across the top show the most popular keywords relating to gardening. Choose one or two relating to your post and add them to your pin description.

16. Create Catchy Headlines

The title of your post will be pulled as the headline for the pin so make sure it is keyworded as well. You want to have a good mix of your Google SEO keyword as the first couple of words and your Pinterest keyword being in there as well (if it’s not the same thing)

Refer to this post on how to identify your Google SEO Keywords.

The headline that you use on the image itself should make an impact and inspire that repin and clickthrough. Here’s where you can test a different headline than your blog post title, since that title may work better on Google than social sharing.

17. Add your Keywords to your Alt Tags

When you read the SEO post above, you will be able to identify your alt tags and know why they are important. Pinterest pulls the alt tag as part of your pin’s description, so make sure your keyword is in there as part of a flowing sentence or two.

Your Pinning Strategy

Now that you’ve done the legwork of getting your profile and pin design ready and even done some SEO, you’re ready actually get your pins in rotation.

It’s important to manually pin as much as you can so that Pinterest recognises that you are active on their platform. As a blogger, everything you do should be driven by strategy. So it’s not just hopping on Pinterest pinning all willy-nilly, there’s an art to manual pinning that will bring you the traffic that you deserve so check out my book.

You won’t have time to manually pin every single day though but you want your pins to be going out to your group boards every day! For this, I automate my pinning in different ways.

19. Tailwind

I use Tailwind mainly for Tribes and to automate pinning third-party pins. I explained how Tailwind works fully here.

Tribes are like one big group and everyone’s pinning everyone’s pins. It keeps everyone accountable since on group boards you have no idea if anyone is even pinning from the board even when it says so in the rules.

It also opens you up to a much large audience since a bunch of people can be pinning your pins instead of you adding your pin to just one group board with one set audience. Check out Tailwind here to get a free trial of 100 scheduled pins.

Optimizing Your Site for Pinterest Sharing

There’s no use to do all of this work if you’re not encouraging your readers to share on Pinterest. Here’s how I recommend doing that.

20. Adding Share Buttons

Use a social media share button plugin on your blog so that your posts are easily shareable to all the top platforms. I use Shareaholic, Social Warfare is good too. Add buttons to both the top and bottom of your posts as people rarely make it all the way down to the bottom of your posts.

I even have one floating on the side so wherever you are, if you feel to share, you can.

21. Adding Your Pins to Your Posts

People ask all the time where they should add their pins to their posts. Should it be top or bottom or looming there looking large in-between?

To that I say, it really doesn’t matter.

Yes, pins are rather large and obnoxious on a blog post when viewing on a laptop/desktop. But what many people aren’t realising here is that they can change the size of the image inside the post without having that affect the size of it when it’s shared to Pinterest.

All my pins are generally to the side of the words in my posts unless you’re viewing it from mobile which then it really doesn’t look that large anyway.

22. Create Multiple Pins

Create more than just one pin. This is how you’ll know what works best for your audience, by testing what colours, headlines and images work well you’ll best know how to design pins in the future.

Also, when a pin eventually dies down, you’ll want to create another to stir more traffic to that post.

Multiple pins also give you the option for adding your post to many different group boards without having your Pinterest profile looking spammy.

23. Experiment With Pinterest Follow Boards or Popups

One way to experiment with getting more Pinterest followers is by adding your Best Of board to your sidebar or footer or even trying one of those social media popups that bring attention to your Pinterest profile and a chosen board.

I have not tried the popup, I like to use the methods above for getting more traffic and feel like my pop up is best used to encourage sharing rather than follows but you can certainly give this a try.

General Pinterest Tips to Boost Traffic

24. Pin Often and A Lot

You should be pinning every single day just like you want to get traffic every single day. That’s why I use the above tools to help me automate when I cannot pin every day.

You also want to be pinning multiple times throughout the day, not just at one particular time.  Tailwind is quite handy for helping with this. Around 30 pins per day is optimal but with lots of pins and posts now, I pin way more than that.

25. Remember to Repin Your Own Pins

Especially if you’re not using Boardbooster to loop your pins, you want to remember to repin your own stuff to your relevant boards often.

But not your pins from your own boards, pins of yours that other people pin. You find these in your Pinterest notifications where it says “10 of your pins were saved”  or similar.

Go to those boards that they were saved on and repin them to your own relevant boards or other group boards.

26. Keep Track of Your Analytics

In my free blog traffic challenge, I show you how to track your pins inside Google analytics to see what’s trending.

You also want to keep an eye on your Pinterest analytics to see what the demography of your users are, what else they’re pinning and what types of accounts they’re following so you can get ideas for future posts.

Ok. That is Pinterest everything!!! If you couple your Pinterest marketing efforts with affiliate marketing, you will begin to earn significant income from your blog.

I do hope you found this post helpful! Let me know if you did in the comments below and please pin to Pinterest if you liked it!

Thanks so much.

• So you’ve started a blog, what now? Learn how to grow a blog from scratch here
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