How to Get Your Pins Found on Pinterest

Swimming laps

During the summertime, I start swimming laps in the morning.

My usual weekly exercise program includes walking my dogs for several miles. But when the miserable Florida heat hits in the summer, it’s hard for my dogs Winston and Cooper to be outside for long periods of time. I worry that the hot pavement will hurt their paws and that they’ll get heat stroke.

Since I still need to get some exercise, I replace our weekly walks with swimming laps in my community pool.

I go early enough in the morning before anyone in the neighborhood packs up their pool noodles and decides to spend the day at the pool. It’s usually just me and the birds. Occasionally, one of the neighbor’s cats will slip into the opening in the fence and hangs out on the pool deck to stare at me for a bit.

I did a little research and found that if you swim 33 laps in a standard pool it would equal a mile. One lap is counted as swimming to the deep end AND back.

I admit, that when I wait most of the year until summertime hits to start swimming, I have to start all over again to get my full workout. I know that there’s no way that I’m going to be able to just jump in the pool and swim a full mile on my first day. I have to come up with a way to ease into my new exercise program.

I have to use the slow and steady approach to get to a mile.

My first day I swim 15 laps up and back. My next swim, I add 5 more laps and then 5 more and continue to add 5 more laps until I hit 33 laps.

I am always beyond thrilled the day I swim my first mile.

Slow and steady wins the race

You’re probably wondering why I’m telling you a story about me swimming a mile when this post is about Pinterest.

I’m bringing this up because I get asked all the time how I get 80% of my site traffic every month from Pinterest. They’re convinced it’s this one big secret tip that everyone knows about but them. OR that I’m spending a bunch of money on Pinterest schedulers.

Honestly, it’s neither one of these things. { I still pin manually. }

It’s that I learned that there’s no quick fix to growing my Pinterest presence. It’s a slow and steady process.

There is no ecourse you can take and you’ll get thousands of pageviews in a week. It took me several months before I even started to figure out what to pin and where to pin it.

Just like my swimming program, I created a slow and steady process by adding in 5 more laps to my Pinterest process by discovering a new step to do my pinning strategy faster.

Accept that when you dig in and do the work, Pinterest will start to work for you and your business.

How to Get Your Pins Found on Pinterest

I know that you’ve wondered to yourself that there has to be some steps to do this pinning stuff. There’s gotta be a system to get your content into Pinterest’s feed so more people can find your pins.

There has to be a process to get more people to find your pins, click on them and go to your website.

I’m here to tell you that yes … there really is a Pinterest Process and here’s how this works to get your pins found on Pinterest:

1.Understand how Pinterest’s Smart Feed works:

What is Pinterest’s Smart Feed? Basically Pinterest assigns a score or a ranking to each pin that gets uploaded to the social site.

The Smart Feed ranking is based on these three factors:

• The quality of your pin’s image
• The quality of the source or website link that’s connected to the pin
• The activity of you as the Pinner

Then Pinterest uses the pin’s rankings combines it with your interests { the type of content you pin } and pops them into your home feed. The order of when the pins are uploaded to the site no longer makes a difference { in the main home feed – NOT the Follower Feed which is timebased } in what you see when you log on for your next pinning session.

Pins are now shown as “best first” rather than “newest first.” And Pinterest’s Smart Feed is the reason for how the “best first” is determined by the Smart Feed algorithm. And then they drop in a feature called Related Pins based on your interests and what content they believe you want to see in your home feed.

And this is what we see when click on that red Pinterest app when start scrolling through the pins in our home feed.

 

2.Pin Consistently:

The easiest thing you can do to get your pins found on Pinterest is to pin consistently.

Using a Pinterest scheduler can certainly help to make sure that your pins are posted when you’re busy BUT don’t let that be the only way you’re using Pinterest. Try to log into the program at least 4 times a week, even if it’s just for 10 minutes, to manually repin quality content.

Pinterest has become so much more than just posting an engaging image. It’s about what you’re pinning, the content you’re repinning to your boards and how often you’re pinning  – basically, how you’re using Pinterest.

It’s really pretty simple when you break it down to this:

Pinterest wants us to use Pinterest, not just drop in an image and leave. They want us to spend time clicking on pins in our Pinterest feed. They want us to do research for things we want to buy in their guided search feature, which is like a visual Google search.

Pinning consistently is just like the steps we go through to ensure that we’re blogging consistently. It’s about sharing more content using SEO based keywords to send you more traffic to your website.

And like blogging – Pinterest is a long tail process that takes time to see results. The more you pin, the more you increase your level of engagement with Pinterest, allowing your Smart Feed ranking to increase.

 

3.Create Fresh Content:

In a recent Pinterest workshop, the Pinterest rep shared with us that you should always be adding fresh content to Pinterest.

Some of you might be wondering ‘what makes content fresh?’ Does it have to be a totally new image or could it be an old image that gets re-pinned?

Pinterest’s answer was: “It doesn’t have to be a totally new image. Other categories count as fresh as well, such as a new pin from an older blog post or an old image re-pinned with fresh and more relevant descriptions.”

What falls under the idea of Fresh Content?

• A new Pin for your email opt-in or anything else you want to promote { not Repin }
• A Pin for a new blog post
• A new image for an old blog post

Spend some time every week thinking about your best content and how you can create fresh content by making a new pin. Do some research using Pinterest’s Guided Search bar for new keyword phrases and hashtags that you can add to the pin description.

 

3. Review Your Pins to Re-purpose into Fresh Content:

You’ve created some great content, you’re starting to see an increase in your followers and your traffic … but how can you really know which pin this traffic coming from?

How can you figure out what parts of your Pinterest pinning strategy is working and what needs tweaking?

The best place to look to find this information is to click into your Pinterest Analytics.

To find your analytics, you must have a business account. If you haven’t converted your personal account to a business one, go to the Pinterest Help section and look for the information to convert your account to a business account. It’s super easy and you won’t lose any of your pins or boards when you convert your account.

For those of you who already have a business account, just go to your profile page, click on the Analytics links in the far left corner and you’ll see a drop down list of options.

 

 

 

There’s a ton of crunchy Pinterest goodness in there to see what’s working with your Pinterest marketing plan, which boards you should use to pin your content and which pins were getting clicks back to your website.

The best place to start looking for which pins you should re-purpose as fresh content, go to the Activity from your website section, click on the CLICKS section and review your top pins that sent your site traffic in the last 30 days.

Impressions are good to look at and seeing your number of repins are totally cool BUT – we want people to come to our website. We want people to read our posts, check out our online programs and download our workbooks.

Chances are, you’re going to see duplicate images of the same pin listed in the Most Clicked list — but that’s a good thing! These are the pins that are already resonating with people on Pinterest. Scroll through the list and you’ll find loads of opportunities of pins that you can re-work with a new image and pin description.

 

Need more help with your Pinterest Process?

If you need more help with your Pinterest Process, I’ve pulled together a 25-page Pinterest Process Workbook to give you simple easy to follow action steps to give you clarity with your Pinterest strategy.

What you’ll learn:

• Understand how Pinterest decides which pins show up in the feed
• How to get more people to repin your blog posts, products and services
• Step-by-step process to create a personalized Pinterest strategy
• Monitor what’s working and what needs tweaking

You’ll also get a tracking guide that you can customize to monitor your Pinterest marketing plans so you can see which boards you should be pinning to and where to focus your time on Pinterest. Plus, you’ll get printable tracking worksheets to use every month to track your progress … all of this cool stuff for just $7 bucks!

Click here to get your instant download of The Pinterest Process Workbook.