This page is about my DIY Pinterest journey. I’m not going to pretend I’m some expert that has the Pinterest Code in my back pocket. I know there are thousands of bloggers whose reach is in the millions, but I’m just starting out like many of you.
And I’ve noticed two things in my two months of blogging.
- Bloggers all over are frustrated their Pinterest views are dropping while mine are climbing.
- I’ve seen several blog posts stating they grew to 100K or 200K in two months, but they don’t really go in depth on how they did it.
I’ve hit 546K and I am going to give you an in-depth step by step on what I did. And I’m going to be completely honest, this page is as much for me as it is you. I’m going to track my Pinterest growth and share what has worked and what hasn’t. It’ll be my little reference page. And I’m sharing it with you.
Let’s start with the basics.
Quick Links to Information in This Post
What are Pinterest Views and Why Should You Care?
Quite simply Pinterest Views are the number of people that are seeing the pins you have pinned. Getting this number up is important. It increases the number of times your personal pins will be seen. And the more people that see your pins, the more people that are going to click through to your blog. I share some of my stats further down.
For quick reference you can find this number when you are on your Pinterest feed, right below your profile.
Step 1: Set your Pinterest Page Up the Right Way
If you don’t already have a Pinterest page for Business, get one now. You can either convert your personal page to business or start a new one. Having a business page is what will give you the analytics to see how many and who you are reaching. Pinterest has a page to help you do this here.
Enable Rich Pins
This is important. Enabling Rich Pins allows Pinterest to pull your description from your Website. Pinterest is a search engine. If you want your Pins found, enable rich pins. Head to the Pinterest Business page to get started.
I’m not techy. When someone starts talking about code my eyes cross. But this is easy to do. If you need help, check out this video tutorial from Amber Temerity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLd2hqQRsPw
Set Up Your Profile and Boards Correctly
Set up your boards according to your niche first. You want your niche boards to be on top. To move your boards around just click and drag. Create a board that is for the pins that you made only and make that the first board.
Put good great niche relevant keywords in your description and profile. Remember Pinterest is a search engine. If you want people to find you, you need to use the keywords people are searching for. But keep it relevant to your niche. Pinterest will penalize you if you are stuffing a bunch of off-topic keywords in there.
You see in mine I have DIY, Crafts, Projects, Gluten Free Recipes, and Natural Cleaning. I see I missed home decor, off to go fix that.
You also want to add keywords to your page name. Up on the previous pic you can see my page name is DI Why Projects | Crafts, Decor, DIY, and Recipes.
Fill in the description for every one of your boards. Use as many of those keywords you can to describe what that particular board is about.
I haven’t done the fancy slider on my page or set fixed pictures to my boards. I don’t think there is anything wrong with having them, but I don’t see the benefit right now either. So I’m not going to waste my time figuring it out at this point when it’s not relevant to my growth.
Step 2: Make Great Pins
I’m not going to go into great detail on this. Just the basics and to state the fact that I’m still learning too. Get your pictures as great as possible. I’m using my iPhone 5 for pics. Not ideal, but I have to make it work until I can get a DSLR.
They only turn out half way decent because I use PicMonkey. It’s easy enough for my non-techy self to edit pictures and make pins. I absolutely love their templates. In the picture below you can see how I can save a template so all I have to do is go in, drop the new pics and change the text and colors if I want. Super fast and easy. I have three different sized templates saved I can use to make different pins in a snap.
No matter how you do it, make sure your pins are vertical and ideally the text is no more than 1/3 of the pin. Long pins along with bright colors such as yellows, oranges, and reds tend to do better (or so I’m told).
I am only spending money on two things for my blog right now. PicMonkey was the first thing I paid for and it’s definitely paid off. Another great thing they do is let you go in and create and explore without having to pay. You can try it out for yourself here –> PicMonkey. If you want to download your pin, you have to sign up for a plan. I’m on the $7.99/month deal.
Don’t Forget the Pin Description
When you first upload your pin to Pinterest, you have the option of adding a description. Do that. Again you want relevant keywords that describe the Pin and blog post it links too.
If you already have Pins uploaded, you can go back and add the description by opening the pin and clicking the edit button. 
Hashtags. Yes Pinterest has started allowing Hashtags. I generally add one or two to the end of my Pin Description. Hashtags are searchable too. But I wouldn’t go hashtag crazy just yet. One or two should be good.
Step 3: Start Pinning
I pin first thing in the morning. I’m a night owl, so first thing to me is about 9am. If you check my total pins for the two months, you see I’m only averaging 14 pins a day. You don’t have to spend forever pinning each day.
I start with my Pinterest Smart Feed and pin some quality relevant pins to my boards. You can’t just pin your own content, you must pin others too. Then I switch to Pinterest’s Trending or Popular page. To find this on your desktop click the icon I have circled below. Scroll through the pins on that page and pin niche relevant pins to your boards.
Pins on this feed are Pinterest’s most saved and viewed pins of the day. If those Pins are on your boards, that means you will get more views too. Just remember to keep it relevant to your Niche/Boards.
If I need to kill some time later in the day, I will go through those two steps again. But mainly I just do it first thing so I don’t forget. Pinterest likes active users. Make sure you are pinning every day.
If I am just not seeing many pins I want to pin, I search for the closest Holiday. So right now I am searching Thanksgiving and pinning some of those pins. This should work for most niches, how to cope through the holidays, travel tips, staying on budget, fun things to do, how to decorate. You should be writing about these things too.
Join a Facebook Group
I’m also on a few Facebook groups for Pinterest. My favorite is Pinterest Pals. In this group you can drop a link to your pins for other members to see and pin. It’s not a pin for pin or follow for follow group, and Amber will probably kick you out if you try that. In exchange for dropping your link, you choose at least 6 other pins to pin to your boards.
I always find way more than 6 to pin. This group has a lot of talented pin makers of many different niches.
I joined a webinar that Pinterest put on a few months ago and they mentioned more than once that they are looking for fresh content, and out of the box, non traditional ideas. If Pinterest is looking for that, then so am I. And I think pinning new pins every day from the Pinterest Pals group is helping my reach. Plus it’s getting my pins out there too.
And Pinterest’s statement knocks out the “well my niche isn’t DIY or Recipes” argument. Yes, I’m in that niche because it’s my passion, but Pinterest is flooded with this stuff. If you have something new and different, Pinterest will probably make it visible. I think they are trying to grow their platform to more than people just looking for recipes and crafts.
Step 4: Join Group Boards
Group Boards are boards bloggers have opened up to contributors. You’ll be able to tell it’s a group board by its description and by all of those little circle faces off to the side. These are the contributors.
You want to be on group boards because most of them have a ton of followers and an insane reach. So if one of your pins lands there, you’ve just increased your reach by potentially hundreds of thousands. And if people see your pins, hopefully they will be clicking through to your blog.
How do I join a group board?
I’m sure you’ve seen join group boards, join group boards all over the place without anyone ever actually telling you where to find them or how to join them.
Here’s how I did it. In your Pinterest search bar type in one of your niche topics followed by group. Go on over and click the boards tab. Viola, tons of group boards in your niche.
Click on a board that you would like to join. In the board description, you should find the instructions on how to join. Most of them have you email the group owner with your request. You won’t hear back from everyone, so put in requests to several boards.
When you do get a response it will come to your Pinterest inbox and you will have to accept the invitation. So check your inbox regularly, they don’t always (or ever) send a notification that you have a message.
In the description you will also find the board rules if there are any. Pay attention to any that say no duplicate pins (that means you can’t repin there) and no affiliate links or promotions. If your pins are landing back to an item you are selling, you can’t pin there.
Also, a lot of boards have a pinning rate rule. Like you can only pin one pin into the board a day and you must pin one pin out of the board a day. Pay attention to these and make sure you follow the rules.
If you are still having trouble getting into group boards join a Facebook Group like Pinterest Group Boards. People post the group boards they have open for new contributors. A lot of them are newer/medium group boards, but growing together is better than not growing at all. I am currently in a mix of new and established group boards.
And keep the group boards in your niche. I’ve heard tell that Pinterest is not giving much relevance to generic group boards like “the best bloggers” that every niche gets dumped into.
Step 4: Start Repinning Your Pins
Remember that board you set up that contains just your pins? Yea, you need to repin those. And having them all in one place makes that easier.
Don’t go all spammy. You should be pinning more of others content than your own. I have heard a general rule of pinning 5 other pins for every one of yours. I pin more of others content than that. Just make sure you don’t have boards that are full of just your pins. Except for the one board that holds all of your pins.
Also, don’t do this all at once. I’ve seen people getting their accounts suspended because they pinned one of their pins to 5 different boards at one time. More on this later.
How to repin your pins
You can do this a couple of different ways. First, make a spreadsheet that you can list what pin that you repinned to what board on what day. You need to keep track of this so it doesn’t get spammy and each of your pins get recirculated.
I choose to do it the easy way. I use Boardbooster. I’m putting all of my eggs in the Pinterest basket right now. So the two things I’m willing to pay for have to do with Pinterest. Boardbooster is one of them. If you sign up here you will get 100 free pins to try it out. I haven’t even used up my 100 free pins I was given when I signed up yet. After that, it’s only $5.00 a month for up to 500 Pins.
Totally worth it. Totally. It’s a set it and forget it type deal. So once I have all my pins set up, Boardbooster repins them for me on a nice spread out schedule. I don’t have to worry about being spammy and I don’t have to fill out a spreadsheet.
The week I set up Boardbooster I got my first viral pin. I followed this youtube tutorial from Rosemarie Groner on how to set it up –> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBFUf_EQoOk You definitely want to make sure you get it right!
Before Boardbooster my Pinterest views were around 175k and traffic to my blog was trickling in. After Boardbooster my Pinterest reach shot up and now traffic to my blog is a steady stream, with my highest day over 1K.
Are you ready?
That’s everything I’ve done so far! I know if you are in the beginning stages it may seem overwhelming. But just take it step by step. You’ve got this!
One more thing, do you really want to grow with Pinterest? Then you must be an active pinner. So many times I read a tutorial and put the items on my to do list. That turns into my someday list. If you are serious about wanting to grow, decide right now to spend 15- 30 minutes a day working on Pinterest.
I can send you a FREE PDF version of this post to put in your blogging binder. Then you can highlight, scribble and mark off each step as you get it done. Just drop your email below and I will send it right over!
Or if you just want to stay up to date on my DIY Pinterest Journey, I’ll send monthly updates, tips, and encouragement. And as I said in the first paragraph, I’m not an expert, but my strategy is working very well for me at the moment. Who knows what next month will bring.
Happy Pinning!