How to Get Millions of Monthly Views on Pinterest

Updated November 4, 2019

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Last month, my Pinterest profile hit nearly 7 million monthly views.

I constantly talk about Pinterest with my fellow bloggers because, duh, it’s free advertising!

Whenever I get contacted by a new reader or a blog friend, 80% of the time I hear that they found me on Pinterest. This always makes me smile because well, whatever I’m doing, it must be working.

So yes, in today’s post I’ll tell you exactly what I do to get millions of monthly views on Pinterest. But I’m also going to tell you this: numbers aren’t everything.

Why?

Well, I guess you’re going to have to keep reading to find out.

HOW TO GET MILLIONS OF MONTHLY VIEWS ON PINTEREST

SIGN UP FOR A BUSINESS ACCOUNT

Creating a business account for your blog will give you an insight into a ton of different statistics. You can see which pins from your blog or website perform the best, which earn the most clicks, saves and repins. Here’s a little example of how I take advantage of this.

I noticed that one of my older posts was getting a ton of new referrals from Pinterest. Going through my Pinterest statistics I analyzed which posts, in particular, were earning clicks and repins. I then visited those posts and immediately noticed that since they were published a while ago, they looked nothing like my current posts do. I immediately updated my posts, added a free incentive to my post to encourage those new visitors to subscribe to my email list and once again, went over the post to see if I can update it in any way. A very important thing to remember when doing this is to never change your URL unless you are planning on redirecting it. Otherwise, those who click on your post in Pinterest will be directed to an error page.

This is why Pinterest is so much different from any other “social media” outlets out there. Your posts live on forever and even if you’ve written something years ago, it can still continue to bring you traffic and grow your audience and subscribers. Unlike with Facebook or Twitter, where they usually only stay visible for a few hours. It also acts as a visual search engine, so your images, text, and keywords matter here quite a bit too.

 

Creating a Business Account will let you dive into the analytics, see which pins perform best, which earn most saves and clicks. You can either start a new account or convert your existing Pinterest account to a business one, which is what I did. It’s completely free. You can start right here. Also, if you don’t already use Rich Pins for your blog, that is something you need to do ASAP.

KEEP A SCHEDULE

I pin daily but only spend about an hour or so a week scheduling my pins. You probably know all about my favorite scheduling tool by now- Tailwind. I already talked about, in detail, how I schedule my pins with Tailwind in this post. You can get a free month of Tailwind to try it for yourself right here.

You need to stay active and pin quality content, in order to grow your account. Keeping a schedule and automating it is the best way to do it. You can just schedule it, and focus on different things- like creating more awesome content. It’s important to remember to not only pin your own content but to also create high-quality boards and pin other content- but more about that in a minute.

Tailwind’s smart schedule automatically picks the best time slots for your content to go live. You can adjust your pinning schedule according to how many times you want to pin a day. If you’re fairly new to Pinterest, 10 is a good place to start. Posting on a regular basis is actually one of the fastest ways to grow your Pinterest following. Remember not to only post your content, but other valuable posts, articles, and tutorials you come across online. I use Tailwind’s browser extension all the time- it allows you to pin from pretty much any website or an online store. The browser extension definitely makes scheduling pins easier and faster.

One other thing that I really like about Tailwind, is that it also tells you if a particular pin has already been already added to the board. Not only that, but it also tells you exactly when the pin was added. So, if I’m scheduling a pin from one of my blog posts, and I get a message saying that I already shared that particular image to that board, I can also see how long ago that was. If it was last year or a couple of months ago, then I can easily schedule the pin to be added to that same board again. If, I added that particular image/pin to the board recently,  I try not to add it again to that same board. You definitely do not want to pin the same image over and over again to the same board- instead, try adding it to multiple boards. You can also group your boards so that you can easily share one pin to multiple boards and set an interval at which the pins will go live. That way, the pins aren’t added to all the boards all at once.

PIN CONTENT RELEVANT TO YOUR NICHE

Using Pinterest as a tool for promoting your blog/business/website and using it for personal purposes, are two different things. You have to pin content that is relevant to your audience and relevant to your niche.

Try to pin content that is related to the topics you write about. That way, you will attract the kind of people who will be interested in your content.

What do I do if I already have a decent number of followers?

Your number of followers will differ from board to board. Just because I have over 25k followers on Pinterest, does not mean that all my boards have 25k followers. With Pinterest, you can choose to only follow certain boards, when following an account. Once I decided to make my profile more attractive for my audience, I got rid of boards that had a low following or that I didn’t pin to very often (you can always make those boards “secret’ which is what I did). At the same time, I did have a lot of boards with large following where the board category didn’t have a lot to do with my niche (life fashion or style boards). Since those boards already had a nice following, I decided to keep those up and still pin to them, just not as often as I do to other categories that are closer to my own niche (like “blogging” or “personal development”).

The point is if you’re running a food blog but all you pin are pictures of cute animals, don’t expect to get a ton of repins when you share your own content, since your Pinterest audience probably expects just that: pictures of cute puppies.

PIN + CREATE QUALITY CONTENT

Pinterest is an extremely visual platform, this is why every single one of your blog posts should contain a pin-friendly image. Your images should also be vertical, as those get more exposure in the feed. I use Social Pug to add keywords to my images- it’s my favorite sharing plugin (and I’ve used A LOT of them over the years). You can select which particular image will be shared to Pinterest whenever someone decides to share it. I always set my Pinterest-friendly images (with text) as default images to be shared. I also add any keywords relevant to the post, so that they’re more likely to be found on Pinterest. This is very useful since Pinterest doesn’t display content in chronological order. Pinterest works just like a search engine, which is why your image descriptions should contain those keywords that are relevant to your post. That’s how your posts get found.

This is how Social Pug works- under each of my posts in WordPress, I can select a custom Pinterest image and add a custom description that will be displayed whenever someone decides to share my post on Pinterest. 

DON’T FOCUS ON A NUMBER OF FOLLOWERS

Here’s the thing- unlike with platforms like Twitter or Facebook, your number of followers doesn’t matter as much as you think when it comes to bringing traffic to your blog.

What matters most, is the amount of repins and clicks your pins get, since that equals traffic, it equals new readers, customers, subscribers. While this blog post is titled “How to Get Millions of Monthly Views on Pinterest” I want you to remember this: do not get caught up in numbers. I know of bloggers who have over a million followers on Pinterest, yet can’t drive decent traffic to their blog posts. I also know of bloggers with 2-3k followers who were able to make a full-time living blogging when using Pinterest as a tool to market their products or affiliate programs.

Here’s an amazing thing with Pinterest that a lot of bloggers or business owners often forget about: it’s free advertising!  You don’t have to promote your pins with Pinterest Ads to get amazing results. You also can’t always rely on places Facebook or Instagram to get people to find your posts, especially with all the algorithm changes. The most valuable thing a potential reader or a customer can give you is their email address- it’s a way to get in touch with them directly and let them know that you published a new post, or that you’re launching a new product. You can use Pinterest to attract those people to your blog, provide them with value and make them stick around. So, it’s not just about driving traffic to your blog- it’s about attracting potential readers, customers- people who will find your content helpful, useful and will want to sign up to your mailing list.

I mean, realistically, you can use any of those platforms to do that, but from my experience, Pinterest is one the least-frustrating ones and as someone who always stays busy, I don’t have time to spend hours a day promoting my posts- I just automate it. Once you get the hang of it- create a few image templates with overlays, texts, adding a Pinterest-friendly image to your blog will take seconds. I keep a folder with a few ready-to-use templates where I just add layers and text overlays to one of the images in my post. That way I don’t always have to remember which fonts or colors I usually use and it also saves me a ton of time. As I mentioned in this post, I use Photoshop to edit my images, create email incentives and Pinterest images, but you can also use programs like Canva or PicMonkey, which also come with ready-to-use templates.

JOIN MY TRIBE

Here’s another thing I love about Tailwind: Tribes. This is a fairly new feature that is still in its Alpha stage, which means that you need an invite to join in. This is how Tailwind Tribes work: it’s a group of bloggers who share their own content, connect with each other and share each other’s pins. It’s a little easier to manage than a Pinterest Group Board because it shows you how many people from the tribe have re-shared your pins. So, the idea behind them is that for every quality pin that you share from your blog, you pin content shared by someone else. This is also a great way to find quality content to add to your boards and to connect with other bloggers and expand your reach.

 

If you want to join my Tailwind Tribe for Bloggers that I just created, you can click this link for your invitation. If you’re new to Tailwind you will also receive a free month of Tailwind Plus (Tribes is a free feature, even if you don’t already use Tailwind). Before you decide to join in though, there are a few rules: pins need to be vertical, high quality and need to be relevant to lifestyle/blogging niches.

For more blogging tips like these, see my BLOGGING section.