Are you new to Pinterest and worried that you’ve made mistakes along the way? Maybe
you are confused by the contradictory Pinterest tips you found online.
Then you are in the right place, I’m going to explain
the top 10 biggest mistakes that I see people make on Pinterest!
Hi! I'm Anastasia of anastasiablogger.com and on this channel, you'll find the latest
Pinterest marketing and online business tips. And mistake #10 is Repinning the Same pin
to Multiple Boards Back-to-Back Pinterest used to be a platform
where content creators would repin the same pin many times to multiple similar boards. Some users
would do like 10 repins of the same pin in a row. This might have been ok in 2018 but
we are in different times now and this practice is considered spammy.
If you try to repin the same pin multiple times you may get away with it for a while
but it doesn't mean that one day your account wouldn't get caught by Pinterest's spam filters.
You can do a few repins to the most relevant boards. And Tailwind, the authorized Pinterest
scheduler, recommends saving each of your pins to about 3 most relevant boards.
But do it using Tailwind's interval pinning and keep the recommended
interval of about 7 days between the pins. If you don't know what I am talking about,
check out my most recent video on Tailwind scheduler up there and create your free Tailwind
account using my link in the description below. Mistake #9 Following Outdated Advice
Just like other platforms, be it Instagram, Youtube, or Tiktok, Pinterest keeps evolving and
tweaking its algorithm as well as its spam filters. So it is crucial to follow the
tips that are up-to-date. What worked great on Pinterest 4 years ago, today is considered spammy.
Even when you are watching MY channel, always keep in mind that I started talking about Pinterest
years ago. And some of my older videos might have been great at the time I published them,
but they might include some tips that don't work on Pinterest anymore.
By the way, Subscribe to my channel and hit the Bell button if you
want to get updated Pinterest tips from me. Just to give you a few examples of the things that
have changed on Pinterest in the last few years: Hashtags on Pinterest are not even a thing
anymore, you can add them but they are useless Group boards, especially large and generic boards
are also dead on Pinterest Repinning the same
pin to multiple boards is spammy. Now let's move on to the next major mistake
#8. Creating Ugly Pins and Hoping That "That Will Do"
No, it won't! Yes, some pins with terrible pin design can accidentally get traction due to
other factors, mostly because of the user engagement on them - comments, repins and so on.
But remember that people who spend time on Pinterest are typically visual searchers,
they are naturally more sensitive to what looks good or bad in terms of pin design.
So bad color combinations (see here the text is lost on the background), weird choices of
text fonts, small text that is hard to read on mobile devices - this is a recipe for a useless
pin that won't get any views, saves or clicks. I'm not trying to say that you have to be a
graphic designer to succeed on Pinterest, you can totally use free design tools like Canva that
give you thousands of beautiful pin templates. All you need to do while editing these templates
is try to not ruin them. You could ruin them by adding unmatching or pixelated background images
or adding 10 words in the template that was built for only 3-4 words of text overlay originally.
If you never used Canva, I don't know what you are waiting for.
You can use my link anastasiablogger.com/canva and start your forever free Canva account.
In addition to lots of image pin templates, it will help you create all the other pin formats.
Speaking of which, mistake #7 is Using Only One Pin Format
It is true that image pins are the best for generating traffic to your website.
Users can click from every image pin and they'll be sent directly
to the respective page on your site. So many content creators will just stick to image pins
ONLY and never create Video pins or Idea pins. Yes, the other pin formats don't generate as
many clicks. But they get quite a lot of space in the Pinterest feed and you could allocate
at least 10% of your efforts on Pinterest to create these different types of pins.
For video pins. Pinterest needs very short videos, about 5 seconds long is fine, so
they shouldn't be hard to create. In Canva, you can find lots of templates for
Mobile Video and all you need to do is upload your photos here and
they will be automatically animated in Canva. Then Idea pins are also important, especially
for new accounts. Since Idea pins are a relatively new format, Pinterest gives them
priority distribution on the platform and as a new account, if you want to grow your followers,
you can't ignore Idea pins. But the other extreme I've seen on some
accounts is creating ONLY Idea pins - that's not helpful as well because then you are not sending
any traffic to your site, so all your efforts are spent on keeping your audience inside Pinterest.
I would say, spend 10% of your efforts on Idea pins, plus 10% on Video pins,
and the rest could be your image pins. Mistake #6 Using the Same Pin Templates
Over and Over Again You might have seen
some accounts that you open and they look like they've posted the same pin hundreds of times.
When you look closer, the pins might have different text overlays,
and different images on the background but since they used the same templates and the
same color scheme, their account will look very repetitive. Users will get bored after the
10 or 20 pins that look the same and will feel that it's the same old pins they've already seen.
Surprisingly, many Pinterest "gurus" will teach you to create a branded template for
your pins and then use that template for years. Some brands will also bring that from their
Instagram accounts where it's more important to keep a consistent style and design on your profile
as users typically will open your profile and check all of your Instagram posts.
But it's not the case on Pinterest, users will very rarely check all pins on your profile and
repetitive pin templates and colors will not help you get more clicks.
People will quickly get bored and will stop opening and clicking on your pins.
So what I recommend you to do is create 5 or 10 different pin templates in Canva,
use some templates of 2:3 image ratio and others of 1:2 image ratio, and use all of them to create
more variety of pin designs on your profile. Mistake #5. Not Doing Keyword Research
If you didn't realize it yet, Pinterest is not just a social media platform like Instagram or
Tiktok. Pinterest is more similar to Youtube to be honest because just like on Youtube,
on Pinterest people ers often use the search bar. And the platform suggests pins based
on your previous searches and interests. So keywords and search engine optimization
on Pinterest play a big role. You can't ignore them. And you shouldn't spam on Pinterest by
posting lists of keywords separated by commas in your pin titles and descriptions.
You might have seen other accounts do it but it doesn't mean you should copy what
they do wrong. Again, like with any other spammy activity, you might get away with it for a while
but if your account gets caught, Pinterest's support representative will need just a glance
at your profile to spot keyword stuffing in your boards and pin descriptions.
If you want to do Pinterest SEO the right way, watch my free Pinterest masterclass,
check the link up there and let's move to Mistake #4. Expecting Overnight Explosive Growth
Oh boy, how many times I've seen comments like this on my channel:
I created 5 boards and 10 pins but I'm not getting any traffic, please help, what am I doing wrong?
Well, my friend your biggest mistake, in this case, is being impatient. I don't
know where you've got the idea that you can create a Pinterest account with 10 pins,
of which I believe you expected to get 10 viral pins and thousands of visitors to your site.
This doesn't happen like this! Pinterest is a search engine.
So you have to think about the long-term benefits of posting today and benefiting
in the future. Once you created your boards, optimized them for SEO,
and saved some relevant pins to them, Pinterest will only start featuring what your account is
about in the first few months of its existence. Whatever you created or saved on your account,
will have to spend about 3-4 months on the platform to get indexed, and this is the time
that Pinterest needs to collect some kind of data about your pins and boards so that the algorithm
can show your pins to the right audience. Mistake #3. Never
Looking at Your Pins on Mobile Devices Most of the people use desktop to create
and schedule pins. On Pinterest, you can automate your pinning to a point that you rarely need to
open your Pinterest app on the mobile phone and that's where a lot of people make a huge mistake.
They create pins and never test them on mobile. You see, when you are designing a pin on desktop,
you can easily read any text because the pin size is large.
But if you publish it and try looking at it in the mobile feed,
you will be surprised that now you can hardly read the text overlay. Pinterest feed shows 2 or
3 columns of pin images and they are much smaller on the mobile screen than on your computer.
When users can't read the text overlay, they will just skip your pin and move to another image that
clearly shows what it's about. Mistake #2. Ignoring
Trends and Seasons on Pinterest If you heard that Pinterest is all about seasonal
and trending content, and you are actively adding this type of pins to your boards, you
are one step closer to success on this platform. But you will be even closer to achieving your
goals if you create and publish your pins for each trend, season or holiday about 4-6
weeks in advance. This will give your pins enough time to get indexed by the time when
Pinterest will start showing them more actively. You will be surprised but for some holidays people
tend to search content even 4 or 5 months in advance. For example, I start seeing
some traffic coming from my pins related to Christmas as early as in September each year.
If you want to get an idea about the right trending topics and when you should publish
pins for them for every month, click up there I'll give you a link to my Pinterest Trends Planner.
Mistake #1. Not Optimizing Your Site for Pinterest Shares
This is one of the most common mistakes I see when people ask for my
1:1 Pinterest consultation. It's common not just for beginners, but also for large companies and
established brands. They don't optimize their sites in order to maximize the number of saves
made by their existing audience on the site. You see, for most of the established Pinterest
accounts it's very common to see in their stats that the top performing pins are not
the ones they created. It's the pins saved by other users from their site.
My idea is that Pinterest prioritizes pins shared by others from any given site because
the page has great content on it. When you are saving your own stuff,
it's obvious that you are interested in promoting it. When some random visitor on your site likes
your content enough to find the Save button and share it on Pinterest, this REALLY means your page
is worth being shown to a bigger audience. So many people are actively trying to grow
on Pinterest and then I check their site and there is not even one single
Save button anywhere on their pages. Look on my blog - I have Save buttons hovering
on top of my images, I have Pinterest buttons on the left always following the user while they
read the content. I have sticky buttons
at the bottom of the page for Mobile readers. I am also reminding users at the end of each post
that they could share this to the Pinterest board. If you have a Wordpress site, you could use Grow
Plugin from Mediavine and do the same exact settings as I've shown on my site, and you
will constantly remind your readers that they could save an image from your page on Pinterest.
That was a lot but now you know which mistakes to avoid when starting your own Pinterest account
and I will leave you with my video that covers my personal
Pinterest growth strategy for THIS year. Check the link up there and I'll see you in the next video!