I Grew My Pinterest from 20k to 800k Monthly Viewers in 3 Months and Here’s How You Can Too

Jumpsuit: Zara; Shoes: Alexander Wang

I’ve been so overwhelmed with your sweet messages about my last blog post! Nothing makes my day more than knowing that I’ve been able to help you guys. So a ton of you guys messaged me asking about Pinterest. Since I couldn’t get into the details over individual DMs, I figured I’d dedicate an entire blog post on how to use Pinterest as a powerful business tool.

Here’s my Pinterest story: in June, I had 20k unique monthly visitors on Pinterest, and no referred traffic from Pinterest to my blog. Then, I did a Pinterest workshop with Meagan Williamson, hosted by my talent management agency, Shine Influencers, which was a total game-changer. In 3 months, my Pinterest UMV went from 20k to 800k (you can’t make this shit up). My blog traffic also went up by a staggering amount. Up until the workshop, I had absolutely no idea that Pinterest could be such a powerful tool!

So here’s what you need to know about Pinterest: it’s an image-based search engine. This means, that you have the ability to direct traffic directly to your website by optimizing your images. Before this workshop, I used to use Pinterest to repost images to my boards. Just things that would inspire me. However, I then learned that by posting my own images, I could actually use it as an important business tool. Here’s what’s cool about Pinterest: you can literally not post any new content on your blog and still get an insane amount of traffic. How? By recycling old images you’ve already put on your blog and optimizing it for Pinterest.

I know this may be a lot of information, so here are 5, bite-sized steps to making Pinterest work for you:

1. Create an aesthetically pleasing feed

Pinterest is no different from Instagram in the sense that first impressions matter. You want your boards to be labeled in the same way, and for your lead images to work well together. You want people to actually stop to admire your Pinterest feed when they come by your profile. I recommend creating 7-10 boards and making sure each of them has about 30 images each.

2. Optimize your boards

Now that you have your boards, it’s time to optimize them. That board description section? It’s not there for no reason. Fill it up with keyword heavy sentences that describe what the board is about. Don’t know wtf a keyword is? Okay, so here’s how you do it: say your board is about travel. Go to the search panel, and type in travel. See what other words come up after travel. Those mini phrases are your ‘key words. Check out my travel board description for an example.

3. Sign up for Tailwind

The most important thing about Pinterest is consistency. I’m not talking posting 1 image a day. I’m talking 3-6 minimum. Listen, no one has time to post on Pinterest all day long. So how can you be consistent without being a slave to the platform? Enter Tailwind. Tailwind is a powerful Pinterest scheduling tool which finds optimum times for you to post. You can start with the free version and move on to paid. Scheduling is so easy, too. Everyday, you sit in the morning and figure out what exactly you want to post that day, schedule it on Tailwind, and get on with your life. Super easy!

4. Create keyword-rich Pin descriptions

K now you’re ready to post! This is the fun part. So the whole point of this post is to learn how to direct traffic to your blog. You start by taking an image from your blog (should be high quality), and posting it. The ‘description’ should be, again, laden with keywords. So just like you did with the boards, say you’re trying to direct traffic to the amazing London Travel Guide blog post which you recently worked on. Go to the search bar and type in London travel, and see what comes up. Use those keywords and integrate it into your picture description. Oh and throw in some hashtags too!

5. Find balance

You want your account to be a good mix of your own pins and other people’s ones. The general rule is 50% your pins and 50% reposts, but to be honest, I wouldn’t worry to much about adhering to this guideline. Just make sure you’re pinning both, your images and other people’s and you should be fine.

I hope this guide helps you with the basics! The most important tip I have is to consistently post, and get the hang of using keywords. And if you guys have any Pinterest tips of your own, share them in the comments!