Proven Pinterest Strategy Explodes Traffic To Your Site or Store

The Setup

1.// Set up a business account in Pinterest.

The first thing to do is to set up the right kind of account. With this strategy, you will be pinning A LOT. And you want to be able to check your analytics on the performance of your pins. So it is best to set up a business account. After filling out the initial information, Pinterest will walk you through the rest of the very simple and straightforward sign-up process. 

If you started off with a personal Pinterest account, you can switch to a business account by going to http://business.pinterest.com and clicking the “Convert Your Existing Account” button.

2.// Claim your website to improve the analytics Pinterest provides.

You should also claim your website. Now for me, I have a blog and an E-commerce store and I used the same Pinterest business account for them both. But if you have more than one site and the topics don’t overlap, I would suggest setting up a different Pinterest account for each of them. But even if you don’t, this strategy will work. It will just be a little more work to use Pinterest’s analytics to sort through the performance of your pins. 

Instructions on how to claim your website

3.// Enable rich pins to make your pins stand out 

The final important step of your initial set up is to enable rich pins. This will give your pins a leg up against pins that are not rich pins. 

Instructions on how to set up rich pins

There are a few more things that I have done over time to get the full benefit of my Pinterest marketing strategy, but they are not requirements to start seeing a big increase in your Pinterest viewers. If you are interested in getting a more in-depth setup checklist, sign up below and I will send one over to you.

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The Strategy

Now I know that a lot of people call Pinterest marketing “Free marketing”, but in my view, that is not right. Unless you are able to spend at least 3-5 hours a day focusing on pin creation and pinning, you will not see big results. This is because the best strategy calls for you to pin A LOT. I did not start seeing huge improvements in my blog and site  traffic until I got up to around 30-40 pins per day. The only way I was able to do that was to use a scheduler.    The use of a scheduler made it possible for me to set aside 10-15 mins a day to simply add additional pins to my schedule. I still spent a bit of time creating pins, but the total amount of time for Pinterest marketing was cut drastically when I utilized a scheduler and it also allowed me to scale up the number of pins I did per day.  

4.// Create an account with a Pinterest scheduler. I have used both Tailwind and PinPinterest.  

PinPinterest: Lowest cost for this tool is $25 for 30 days. One benefit of PinPinterest is that the service is not a subscription so you will not be automatically rebilled once your 30 days are up. You have to actively repurchase more time with the service. PinPinterest is a more full-service tool than Tailwind. It not only provides you with the ability to schedule pins, but it also allows you to automate engagement, repins, follows, etc. They offer a 3-day free trial that you can access by clicking this sentence. It is a full-suite maintenance tool for your Pinterest account.   Tailwind: Cost starts at $9.99 per month. Membership is in a subscription form. This price covers one Pinterest account. Tailwind is a pin scheduler only. It does not offer the overall maintenance of your Pinterest account as PinPinterest does. However, depending on where you are with the maturity of your Pinterest strategy, you may not need all of the add-ons that PinPinterest offers. Tailwind is awesome for scheduling your pins, and they offer a special kind of free trial. You can schedule and post up to 100 pins for free and your trial lasts for however long it takes you to get to 100 scheduled/posted pins. The training videos and guides on the site make it pretty foolproof to navigate the tool as well.  

5.// Apply to group boards related to your site’s topics. 

As I stated above, the goal is to pin as much as possible without being spammy. The best way to help do this is to have a membership to a lot of group boards. I would say having a membership to at least 25 group boards is a sweet spot for the start of your Pinterest marketing strategy.   

6.// Set up at least 5 boards (niche boards) for each of the main topics related to your site.

For example, if you have a lifestyle blog and you write about cleaning, food, and self-care, you want to have five boards that relate to EACH topic. They should be close enough in topic that it makes sense that you are pinning all of your pins related to the top-level topic, ie food, to that board. For example, for food, you can have boards such as “Staple Recipes, Weeknight Recipes, Special Occasion Meals, etc”.  So if you have three main topics on your blog, you should have at least 15 boards to start with.

7.// Search and take notes on the top pins in the subjects for which you will be pinning 

For each of the subjects, you will be pinning for, search Pinterest, and look at the top 10 pins for each of your searches. Use these pins as inspiration and model your pins after them. To start off, take 3 styles you like, and create your own pin using graphic design software like Photoshop, or a free tool like Canva.  For each design you like, make 5 different color and font variations. So in the end, for each of your subjects (let’s use cleaning, food, and self-care) you will have 15 different pin templates for each. That makes 45 different templates to start off with. 

8.// Create pins for each of your blog posts or site subjects

Using the templates you created in step 4, it is now time to create a pin for each of your blog posts, products, or site subjects. So if you have an e-commerce site with 10 products in two categories (5 in each category), you would have 30 templates (15 for each category). For each product, you would create a pin using each of your templates for that product’s category. In the end, you would have 300 pins. I know this seems like a lot. But this is what it takes to get a lot of traffic.   

9.// Use Tailwind (or PinPinterest) to schedule your pins

To start, set up your Tailwind schedule to pin 15-20 pins a day to start. Tailwind will set the times to be the best times to pin in your time zone. To start off, I would say that you should have a 70/30 split on your boards. This means, for every 10 pins you schedule, 7 should be the most popular pins in that category, and 3 should be your own personal pins. Over time you should move to a 50/50 split and finally, you should move to a 30/70 when your boards are more mature. With pinning 20 times per day, it may take about 2-3 months before you move to a 30/70 split.    (You can do this all manually, but it will be HARD and extremely time-consuming.)  

10.// Analytics review to determine pin performance

After a few weeks of consistently pinning, you should start to pay close attention to the performance of your pins. Look at which one of your templates in a particular category gets the most saves, shares, and click-throughs. The goal is to get traffic to your site, and a factor of that is to have a very popular pin that is SEEN by as many people as possible. And the more engagement a pin gets, the more likely it is to be in the first 3-4 “pages” of Pinterest results.  

Repin the best-performing pins and start new niche boards over time. Repins can also be pin to any new group boards you join over time.

I hope this post gives you actionable steps and tips to grow your Pinterest marketing strategy. 

Good Luck!