How to Grow Your Pinterest Traffic

Great Big Hairy Goal

I’m still wrapped up in my world that I wrote about in the Learning to Love the Process blog post and I’ve been focusing on the last push for the end of 2014.

I’m moving forward with my 100 Day Sales Goals but to get there, I need to create action items that would get me to those big money numbers.

It really came down to one basic thing: I need to increase the number of people I connect with online. I need more people to come to my website, read my posts and click on my stuff.

From tracking my website traffic with my Google Analytics, I know that Pinterest is consistently my top referral social site. So the best place for me to start growing my online presence was to kick my Pinterest marketing up to the next level.

What did I do? I set up a great big hairy goal for Pinterest: Increase my followers to 10,000 in 30 days.

I started the month at a little over 8,650 so I figured, that’s about 1350 Pinterest followers. I can do this.

I’ve done my research about how to grow my followers. I’m on Pinterest every day. I make my own images. Yeah, I can totally do this.

Let the Pinning Begin

There’s tons of articles out there telling you what you need to do to increase your Pinterest followers. Most of them have the same list of recommendations to help you grow your Pinterest presence:

1. Verify Your Pinterest Account:

It’s pretty simple to do.

When you verify your account, you’re basically letting people know that your account is connected to a real website. Just click on this link to get the steps to help you show other pinners that you’re a trusted place to visit.

{ OK, I’ve done this over a year ago! How does this tip help me? }

2. Make Your Site Pinterest Friendly:

Whether you have a WordPress site or not, there’s an easy way to add Pin It buttons your site. Pinterest has it’s own Pin It Widgets you can use – just grab the coding and drop it into your site.

You want to make it easy for your site visitors to repin your content so adding these simple Pin It buttons allows anyone to pin your content or products with a simple click.

And if they like what they see, they’ll hit that red Follow button and start following you on Pinterest.

{ Of course, I’ve got these on my site! I even have a Pinterest widget on the sidebar to show you the latest pins in my top board called Social Media with a Strategy. }

3. Optimize Your Boards and Pins:

I went into detail about how to optimize your boards and pins in the post Is Pinterest the new Google? Take a look at these few quick changes you can make to your Pinterest account to help increase your chances of getting found in a Pinterest search.

{ I wrote the darn post, so yeah, I’m doing those things! }

There has to be more

How was I going to get to my big hairy goal if all these ‘experts’ are telling me to do the stuff I’ve already done? I knew there had to be more steps that I could take to get that number up there.

I dug down deep into my Pinterest research and found a few cool suggestions. I messed with them, tweaked it to fit my schedule and found out what worked and what didn’t.

My increase in followers didn’t happen overnight but every day I worked at it. I slowly started to see that follower number creep up towards my goal.

Here’s my list of what worked:

1. Ten Pins in 10 Minutes in the Morning – Every morning about 7am EST, I pinned 10 pins in ten minutes.

I tried not to get distracted and fall down the Pinterest rabbit hole (if you need to set a timer, do it to make sure you stay on track). I counted my pins and when I got to ten, I stopped.

Why this worked:

• Not everyone pins at the same time. 7am EST is morning in my time zone but it’s lunch time in Europe. Plus, there are people who pin in the morning with their first cup of coffee. If you’re not pinning at different times, you’re missing another audience.
• Ten is just enough to spread the content around on your different boards. Not everyone is following ALL of our boards so when you add new content in your boards on a consistent basis, then your pins get found more often in a Pinterest search.
• I pinned at least 2 – 3 pins of my content to my top boards with the highest number of followers. At the time I was doing this big push, my top boards were group boards.

2. And that leads me to tip #2 – Find Group Boards to Join. This step took awhile to get added to group boards with a lot of followers.

First, I went to Pingroupie and did a search for the categories that made sense for my account. I used the filter feature to find group boards that I could join.

This is how I sorted through the group board options:

• Pingroupie will show you the last time someone pinned to the board. If the last ‘crawl’ was months ago, skip that board. You want an active board where people are constantly pinning to add content.
• If the categories don’t fit what you’re looking for, add in a key word in the description/filter search area. The boards that come up will have that key word in their board description so if you can find it on Pingroupie with this key word search, people can find that board on a Pinterest search.
• Click on the boards that come up in your category search and take a look at what’s going on. Look for the instructions on how you can be added to the board. Most of the time your options will be to add in a comment or email the board’s owner.
• Do this with several boards – it took one of the board owners over a week to email me back and then she took about 3 more days before she added me. This process takes time so the more group boards you reach out to, the greater your chances of getting connected to more people.

3. Pin, pin and repin

As I continued to add more group boards to my Pinterest account, it gave me a new group of people to pin to. Sometimes I would share the new pins in my feed but mostly, I shared pins I had pinned (and read) from my other boards.

Here’s the steps I took when I was pinning:

• I already have a several boards with loads of great content so I shared the pins that had the most repins to the group boards.
• I always added in one pin that was my content (a blog post that made sense for the category of the board). While I wanted to share great content from others to these new followers, it was also important to share my own blog posts. I wanted pinners to see the links back to my Pinterest account so they would start to follow me.
• I pinned 3 pins for each group board. Three is just enough to make my profile name stand out in the group board’s follower’s feed but not too many that I looked spammy. { Because three is a magic number …. going Old Schoolhouse Rock on you! }
• I rotated the boards I pinned too. Sometimes I would pin to them in my 10 pins in 10 minutes morning time or other times, I would do my board pinning at night. The last thing I want is for people to think of me as a pin dumper.

Did I reach my goal?

As of the publishing of this post, I’m at 9,300 followers. Not quite the big hairy goal. And I was a little disappointed that all that work didn’t give me the big push I wanted.

But a funny thing happened when I checked my site traffic after the experiment. I may not have reached my Pinterest follower goals but something better came from all that pinning:

• My website referral traffic from Pinterest doubled! Holy cow – more people came to my site during those 30 days then the 2 months before it combined.
• And the pinners stayed on my site – the number of pages they viewed and how long they stayed doubled as well.
• More people signed up for my newsletter – I saw a big jump in my email list from connecting with all these new people coming to my site.
• Content comments and engagement increased – I started to get more comments on my blog AND I was getting more comments on the pins I posted on Pinterest.

Before my experiment, I thought I had a pretty good idea about how to market on Pinterest. But my big hairy goal taught me quite a bit about this pinning stuff.

And it didn’t add more hours of social networking to my day. The additional morning pinning sessions and the research time to find new group boards took me about 15 minutes each time I did the steps. That’s less time than it takes me to go through my inbox in the morning.

Even though I didn’t reach my Pinterest followers goal, my pinning experiment brought me more than just a bigger number on my profile. Now when I’m pinning, I’m doing more than just pushing my blog posts on Pinterest.

I found a way to connect with more people. And not just more Pinterest users but the right people who want to connect with me.

PS Are tips like these helpful to develop your your social media marketing? Download the Strategy Builder workbook and get more of my secret tips with an easy to follow marketing strategy workbook to help you create successful social media campaigns.