If I had to grow my Pinterest account from absolute ZERO this year, this would be my
exact plan to hit 10 Million views in one year. We are talking what I would do day one,
day two, day 7. Grab a pen and a piece of paper because you will
want to follow this plan exactly to get the quickest and best results.
Day One.
What do we do? First, I want to be on a Pinterest Business account, not a personal one.
Now that I have a profile, I want to use a strong profile photo, or if you are not building
a personal brand, you could use here your logo but it has to look good in a circle like this.
If your logo doesn't fit this shape, well you either change
your logo or use your photo for starters. Now you need to make sure that your Profile name
and short bio help you establish your positioning. All three of these things should match and
make sense together. Say, you are in the
travel niche, travel photos make more sense. If you are in the fashion niche, lifestyle photos
would look great for your profile picture. My username is not Anastasia1234,
it's anastasiablogger which makes sense for my niche and I was lucky that it
was available on Pinterest. If your exact domain or brand name is not available try
to add something that would still make sense. For example, if I were an Instagram marketing
expert, I'd make IGAnastasia my username. My profile title includes some of the
words that describe what I teach - online business and blogging tips.
Now this About field you won't believe but it shouldn't be about you! It should be about your
audience. It should tell them WHY they should follow you, what they will get from your content.
If you tell them in this short bio how you can help them, you are already ahead of the game.
Now, you are trying to grow from scratch, right? Your account is small,
but you have one advantage. You can learn from your competitors and do what worked best for THEM.
So Day #2. Competitor Research
So I do it for myself and I always do it when I am helping clients grow
on Pinterest. I look at the top 5 or 10 established accounts in the niche.
You don't have to reinvent the wheel. If someone is successful on Pinterest
in your niche, that's because they are doing something right. So why don't you
look at their accounts and learn a thing or two?
And how can this process look like? First, think what is the main focus
keyword that describes your niche, one or several main keywords.
Say, we are looking for "homemade beauty products" I'll assume you have a blog that gives
different recipes for DIY beauty products. You need to click here on the Profile button
because we don't need to look at the pins. We want to check the biggest profiles in this niche.
Open these top accounts, right on this page you'll see they are usually
showing up here in search results because they have a large following.
When you open their pages, you'll also see they normally have quite high monthly viewers.
The top 3 accounts I opened had 8 Million, 10 Million, 1.5 Million.
If I go a little lower an account with twice smaller following has 3 million monthly viewers.
Why do you need to check this? You want to see what is the potential
of growth for you in this niche. I picked this niche as an example
because it's quite narrow and still has several pretty strong accounts.
If I searched for more generic beauty accounts,
I'd find there dozens of accounts with 10+Million monthly viewers.
But you don't want to start on Pinterest with a niche that has very few strong accounts.
If no one achieved any results with your niche on Pinterest,
it's a sign there is no audience for your niche on this platform.
In that case, Google SEO traffic might be a better place for you to start. Pinterest
is usually best for niches that are broad enough and if you go after something very new,
like a unicorn narrow niche with little to none search volume even on Google,
then forget about it. People will not look for it on Pinterest for sure.
The next thing to check in those top profiles of your competitors is to
look at their most recent activity. Are they creating idea pins? What
type of pins they are creating? Are they video pins? Image pins?
Take a piece of paper and make notes. If you see
something that you like or find is smart that your competitors do, point it out.
Now you need to click on the Saved tab - it will show you all the boards
they have on their profile. Check what are the names of their boards.
But your research shouldn't stop here on Pinterest,
you should open their websites and check what exactly they do. What kind of content
do they create that resonates so well with the Pinterest audience?
You should open their websites on a mobile device
to get the same experience as most of the Pinterest users will get. Because
the majority of Pinterest's audience is on a mobile device using the Pinterest app.
So check how easy it is to share something from your competitor's site on Pinterest.
Maybe they have a few vertical images that work perfectly well as pins to be saved?
Maybe they have somewhere a plugin or a button that encourages users to follow them on Pinterest?
And you shouldn't move forward before you made some notes about the design style that you see
on your most successful competitors' accounts. What kind of fonts and colors work best for your
niche? Take your notes. All of these little things will help you grow your account.
A short story time for you guys.
I recently had a client who told me she's been repinning hundreds of pins daily. Initially it
was working and her impressions were growing slowly but it didn't help her get any traffic
to her site so she was getting discouraged. Well, obviously it didn't help with traffic
because she didn't focus on creating her own pins, she was sending all the traffic to other
sites she was repinning from. Hundreds of repins a day is a lot of work for nothing.
Now, let's make it clear first. Doing a LOT of things that are wrong doesn't mean you'll get
the results. It just means you are wasting your time and potentially even hurting your account.
There are many things beginners do on Pinterest thinking it would help like doing follow for
follow or commenting with your links on Pinterest or sending direct messages to
other users asking to join their group boards - and one day BOOM - your account gets suspended.
You don't want that for yourself, right? So let's continue with the
right steps that will take you from zero to 10 Million monthly viewers on Pinterest.
Day 3. Understand Pinterest SEO to Create Boards
Now we are on Day 3 and you need to understand one thing about Pinterest. It's not just a
social media site, it's also a search engine. It shows you visual search results. It tracks
users activity on the platform, it knows their interests and their history of search queries.
So you've got to play the game on their terms. There is an algorithm,
there are keywords that people might search for and find your account. You need to do keyword
research and know how do describe whatever your account is about with keywords.
The main focus keyword or a few of them. Then secondary
and additional keywords. All of this should be reflected
In your Profile name In your Profile About field.
Then you also need to apply SEO to every single board you create
on your Pinterest account and to every single pin that you publish.
I've got an in-depth video on my channel that's focused on Pinterest SEO specifically, I will
link to it in the description below but here I'll give you a quick idea of how things work.
As a user, when you type in some keyword, Pinterest shows you relevant
pins as a result. They can be Idea pins which are like Stories on Instagram,
or Video pins or regular Image pins. But they will all be relevant to your initial search.
You'll see additional keyword suggestions showing up below the search bar,
these are all popular keywords related to the main keyword you just searched for.
Use this search bar as your first and entirely free Pinterest keyword
research tool to get at least a feeling of what people are looking for in your niche,
what kind of keywords they might be typing in on Pinterest.
I recommend you get back to your notebook and write down a list of keywords that you
find to be the most interesting for you to create content about. Or the most popular
keywords in your niche that you should use to create your Pinterest boards.
By the way, you can filter search results on Pinterest by Profiles,
which means you can find the most relevant user accounts in
your niche. This is how YOU could also be found by your potential audience.
So make sure you watch my video on Pinterest SEO and optimize your entire profile.
When you do so, make sure you print out and go over my Pinterest SEO Checklist
you can download it for free, I'll link to it in the description below.
Day 4. Create Content on your Site to Promote on Pinterest
Well, this you should do on day 4 and move forward for the rest of the year.
You can start a Pinterest account when you don't have a website or if you have just a
few pages on it. But you can't run an account with just a few pages for a long time.
Make sure you keep creating a lot of different page URLs on your site.
Because be it a blog or an eCommerce store, it's won't be easy to grow if
you have only 5 pages on the site and don't intend to grow this number any time soon.
You can't create hundreds of pins for each of your 5 pages,
it will quickly make your account look spammy and repetitive.
It doesn't mean you need to have a huge team to keep up with the pace and create
multiple pieces of content for your site daily. But you should strive
to create at least one great piece of content for your site per week.
Day 5. Make your Pinning Plan
You need to know about all the different types of pins on this Platform.
You have regular image pins which are linked to your page URL and usually,
they generate the highest amount of traffic.
Then you also have video pins. They are vertical videos which should be really short,
about 6-15 hours is enough. Video pins also can be linked to a specific page.
Wait what did I say, 6 hours for a short video? I was just checking if you were listening! :)
I'm dropping here the golden nuggets and if you want the best ROI from watching this video you
better grab a pen and a piece of paper and point out that videos on Pinterest should be
only about 6-15 seconds long. This is official recommendation on Pinterest's video guidelines.
Idea pins are the most recent pin format so they get an additional boost in the Pinterest
algorithm. Idea pins include several slides, each slide can be made of a short video or an image.
I recommend to use a short video as the first slide in Idea pins because
this way your Idea pins will look more dynamic in the Pinterest feed.
Then I would highly recommend you to use my favorite time-saving
strategy - content repurposing. On Pinterest, it looks like this.
For one Idea pin, I need to create a short video and an image and upload them as first
and second slides. Then I'll upload the same video as a separate video pin and save it
today. And upload the same image as a separate image pin and schedule it for a week later.
Video pins and image pins allow you to add a destination URL so that will drive you traffic.
Idea pins don't drive you traffic directly but they are great for growing
your account overall - including following numbers and impressions.
They are also helping you get more traffic to your regular image pins.
I published another video explaining how creating Idea pins for a month helped me
grow my traffic by 50% and I've shown how this works in the Pinterest algorithm,
so check the link to it up there and in the description below.
Day 6. Improve your Pin Design
Creating different format of pins is good but not enough. You need to create
beautiful and click-worthy pins that people will LOVE to save to their boards. And pins
with intriguing text overlay that will make people click on the image and visit your site.
I can't stress enough how important is the visual appeal of your content on Pinterest.
Users who don't care about pretty and visually attractive design don't hang out on this platform.
No does this mean you are doomed to never grow on Pinterest if you are not a graphic
designer or you can't afford to hire one. I am not a graphic designer and my account
has grown to 10 Million monthly viewers and I use Canva templates to create most of my pins.
Canva is a free online tool that gives you thousands of templates for different
formats of pins including video pins. You can start a free Canva account using my
link anastasiablogger.com/canva and all you need to do there
is customize the templates by changing text overlay and / or background images.
Canva also has a huge collection of stock photos right inside the tool so you can
just do a search for what you need, drag and drop the image and you are good to go!
When you do use these Canva templates, my best advice for you if you are not
a designer and are not sure about your own choices of colors and fonts,
just stick as much as possible to what was offered in the template. Because sometimes
people take a pretty template and change it to a point when it becomes the opposite
of visually appealing. You want to use the templates specifically because they
already have good fonts and color combinations selected. Don't try to fix what works well :)
Now, within my program Pinterest SEO Traffic Secrets I go into the
nitty gritty of creating beautiful and viral pins,
if you're interested in learning more about kind of pins go viral on Pinterest and much more,
you can check out more about my paid program in the description box below.
Day 7. Batching Content
This step is entirely up to you! If you like to log in to your account several times a
day and post everything manually, you can do that. For me, I would probably try to batch
everything that it is possible to batch. So for instance, you can schedule video
pins and image pins but for now, you can't schedule Idea pins. You can plan
pins on Pinterest native scheduler only up to 2 weeks upfront and only to one board at a time.
So I personally prefer to use Tailwind scheduler. You can start a free account with them using
my link anastasiablogger.com/tailwind and by the way, it also allows you to
schedule on Instagram and Facebook. Anyway, what I would do is always schedule
in Tailwind every image or video pin to be saved to 3 most relevant boards with a 7-day interval.
But I understand that batching can be not a good idea for everyone. Maybe you are a stay-at-home
mom and you have many short periods of time throughout the day while your baby
sleeps when you can do just a little bit of work. Or maybe you are a student on holiday
and you don't have any other responsibilities in your life right now, so you can sit for a
whole week and batch your content up to 3 months in advance.
Now what do you do next? Uff this is a lot of information! So I hope if you are still with me,
leave me a comment below. Say I'm still here! :)
And I can tell you if you stick to these strategies, it is totally doable to reach
10 Million monthly viewers on Pinterest in a year. I know it because I've done it this way,
and I had students who achieved the same results. But I'll leave you with a few bonus tips that you
can implement beyond the first week for the rest of the year.
Bonus Tip #1. Pay Attention to your Analytics.
If you see some of your pins are getting traction, study analytics for those pins.
Pinterest does give you stats for the account overall and also for a particular pin as well.
Be a learner, try to understand why this particular pin stands out and what makes
it go viral. Marketing is not about hard truths, it's all about experimenting.
Bonus Tip #2. Don't Join Group Boards
I told you to do competitor research in the first week but one thing I wanted to note is that a lot
of older accounts might be in group boards but it doesn't mean you have to waste your
time trying to join them as well. It only seems like being in group
boards is their advantage. In reality, posting to group boards used to be a common practice and it
worked well but that was over 3 years ago. Pinterest has changed their algorithm and
announced that large, generic and spammy group boards will lose distribution power
and they are pretty much useless. Most established accounts still
have some of those groups because they a) could be group boards on their own account,
meaning they'd have to delete their own boards and it can be risky for their stats or b) they just
don't know these group boards stopped working and they don't see any point in removing them,
these group boards could just sit there on their accounts and do nothing.
Bonus Tip #3. Study What Works in Your Niche.
So I like to say that pins with text overlay are more efficient. And that's true for the
most part. But in some niches, people want the image without any distractions. For example Art,
or wallpapers that users might want to use as a background on their smartphone. They want the
image without any text on it. The same goes for example for 3D art or architecture. People want
to save some ideas and see what's on the photo and the text would only ruin the image for them.
You will only discover this when you do your own research for your niche. Don't put the pressure
on you to reinvent the wheel. Do what already works in your niche to get the quickest results.
Now that you have the plan to grow, I also want you to avoid the worst mistakes on
Pinterest I see people do all the time, so now you should watch THAT video, I'll see you there!