My Daily Pinterest Strategy: How to Increase Website Traffic with Pinterest

I’ve been getting so many questions lately about my daily Pinterest strategy, so it’s finally here!!!

*THE* highly anticipated post about my daily strategy + how to increase your website traffic with Pinterest!

(okay, maybe not *that* highly anticipated – but whatevs! let’s get to it)

Before I go over my daily Pinterest routine, let’s go over a few ‘rules’ that will help you increase your traffic with Pinterest.

4 Pinterest ‘Rules” to Follow:

1 | Be Consistent.

Daily, regular activity is better than a once a week binge.

While it’s easy to think you’re knocking out all your Pinterest work during a marathon Sunday night TV session, it’s actually better to spread them throughout the week. So 10-20 Pins a day, instead of a crazy pin binge.

I use a scheduler so I can still “batch pin” on the weekends, but it looks like I’m consistent during the week. You can learn more about Pinterest schedulers here – I use Tailwind if you want to try their free trial!

2 | Be patient.

Unlike on Instagram where most likes/comments come in the first few hours or day of posting, Pinterest plays on the long game. Which is a good thing.

But it does require you to be a bit patient when getting started. The half life of a Pin is 3.5 months (i.e. it takes a Pin 3.5 months to get 50% of its engagement – or in other words, 50% of a Pin’s engagement will happen 3.5 months from now!). The half life of a Facebook post is only 90 minutes. This means that the half-life of a Pinterest Pin is 1,680 times longer than a Facebook post. (source)

3 | Be proactive.

Pinners are PLANNERS.

If you remember the point above that it takes awhile for a Pin to gather steam and that it will get engagement for months, not just hours or days; then it makes sense that you’ll need to plan ahead with your content.

Plus, people are using Pinterest to plan for upcoming events in their life – holidays, a party they’re throwing, back to school season, their wedding (whether they’re even engaged yet or not! lol), 

According to Pinterest, the average pinner starts saving Pins relevant to the upcoming trend/season/holiday about 45 days in advance.

PRO TIP:

For the Christmas/holiday gift season, pinners start even earlier as “the event” is when they start shopping, not the actual holiday itself. Which is why it’s so important to start planning your products + content well in advance – I recommend starting in the summer! YES. The SUMMER.

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You can sign up to take the free Holiday Prep Shop Detox challenge here! You’ll get a series of emails for 14 days to help you clean up and re-focus your shop. It’s full of mini challenges and suggestions with actionable tips to accomplish to move you forward, fast.

We’ll go through:

• how to identify product changes + transition between seasons
• common hangups in the checkout process
• how to quickly earn trust (especially important for those new customers that find your shop)
• inventory + shipping tips for a more profitable season
• and so much more!

Get your shop ready for the holidays, join here.

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4 | Be clear, not cute.

When I was starting out, my favorite thing to do on Pinterest was to come up with clever or funny board names. After all, there’s not a ton of space to show off your personality, so the board names seemed like a fun way to do that.

The problem is, no one’s searching for clever cute phrases. They’re searching for solutions, inspiration, products, and answers to their questions.

So clear > cute will win every time.

So yes, you can include some personality in your Pin descriptions, Pinterest does want you to sound like a human and not an on-ongoing stream of search terms. BUT you still want to keep keywords in mind every time, and that’s especially true for board names. Your board names help Pinterest understand the bigger categories your Pins fall under so they can serve them up to people with those same interests.

How are we feeling? Ready to see what I do daily on Pinterest?

Last year in 2017, Pinterest was responsible for over 56% of my traffic. And in my first six months of this site, it was honestly Pinterest that saved me. If I hadn’t seen my traffic increase, I think I would’ve quit before I even really got started. (ps. don’t quit – it gets easier with traffic!)

This screenshot is from the first six months of The Shop Files… ahhh, memories.

Before January (when I started using Pinterest), I got an average of 22.5 pageviews a day.

UGH. It’s not exactly motivating to write blog posts when you’re seeing those numbers. And yes, that’s why I’m including that little “.5” – sue me. But it’s okay, we all gotta start somewhere!

But from January through March, in my first three months of using Pinterest, I got an average of 274 pageviews a day!

That’s an 1,118% increase in traffic from Pinterest!!

While it was largely helped by that “mini viral” spike, and I share my experience and takeaways from a viral Pin here, the trend continued on even without viral Pins.

For the next three months, April – June 2016, my average pageviews were 227 a day.

July – Sept 2016: 288 pageviews/day, not great growth, but steady

Oct – Dec 2016: 514 pageviews/day! yuuuusssss

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THIS POST CONTAINS AFFILIATE LINKS; WHICH MEANS I MAY EARN A SMALL COMMISSION, AT NO ADDITIONAL COST TO YOU, IF YOU PURCHASE THROUGH MY LINK. I ONLY RECOMMEND PRODUCTS I USE + LOVE, AND APPRECIATE YOUR SUPPORT OF THE SHOP FILES!

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My Daily Pinterest Strategy

Want to know the really good news right away?

While I promise it’s not a bait-and-switch title, should know right off the bat that you don’t really need a “daily” Pinterest strategy.

Yeah, that’s right – free your mind and let goooo of the stress. 

Is Pinterest really a platform that drives crazy traffic AND doesn’t requires constant feeding + energy?!?

YES. YASSS. and YUUUUSSSSSSS. 🙌🏻 🙌🏻 🙌🏻 🙌🏻 🙌🏻

Okay, so if I don’t have a daily strategy, what do you need to increase your traffic with Pinterest?

The simple answer is – a Pinterest scheduler + daily activity + an overall strategy.

The reason I don’t have to log into Pinterest and do daily work is because I batch my Pinterest work and use Tailwind to consistently share my Pins throughout the week.

So once or twice a week, I’ll go into Pinterest (usually on my laptop as it’s a bit easier to work faster within Tailwind that way) and schedule out Pins for the following week or so.

Since I use board lists, I can easily schedule out 200+ Pins a week in an hour or so. Board lists are a Tailwind feature where you can group similar boards together. That way if you have a Pin that would fit on multiple boards, you can schedule that Pin to all those boards with just a quick click, and even set a “Pin interval” in order to space out the Pin frequency.

For example, if your Pin would fit on your shop’s brand, summer outfit inspiration, and striped tees boards; you could set the Pin to Pin to each of these boards with a 1.5 day interval. There’d be a minimum of 36 hours between each Pin so your profile doesn’t look flooded with any single image.

If you want to try Tailwind, you can grab a free trial here!

Once my Pins are scheduled for the week, I’m still active on Pinterest most days.

Daily activity is still important because while I don’t have time to manually pin every.single Pin., Pinterest wants to see you active on their platform (just like any social media, they want users to actually engage and be active!). 

You may hear a lot of debate between schedulers and manual pinning.

(Which ps. “manual pinning” is just regular pinning within the app, no scheduler, just good ol’ fashioned pinning)

The idea was made popular by the blogger Carly when she shared her huge increase in website traffic when she switched to manual pinning. She shares her strategy and findings on how she reached 200,000 pageviews/month without a scheduler in her ebook, Pinteresting Strategies.

And while she gives A TON of great information and detailed tips on the how + why certain things work on Pinterest, I absolutely do not have time – and don’t want to make the time! – to pin manually every single day.

(The ebook at just $32 is still a great purchase as you can learn a lot from her insights.)

So from the results she saw with manual pinning, I slightly adjusted my strategy and now do a mix of scheduled Pins (through Tailwind) and some regular pinning each day.

So for real, here’s my daily Pinterest strategy:

1 | In the app, I check my notifications.

• For new followers – is there anyone I want to follow back or check out their profile further?
• For re-pins of my content – which pins are being shared a lot? did anyone “big” re-share a Pin?
• For re-pins of other content – did any particular Pin take off? Is there a trend I should capitalize on?
• For the people you follow – Pinterest will show you what they’re pinning, what type of content are others pinning? does that give me any new content ideas?

2 | From there, I’ll take a few actions:

• I’ll manually re-pin (or “live pin”) a few of my Pins to group boards.
• If there’s interesting content that others found, I’ll re-pin those Pins to one of my relevant boards (not a group board)

3 | Next up, I’ll scroll through my home feed throughout the day:

• I’ll manually re-pin Pins that catch my eye, are upcoming trends/events, or from categories I haven’t shared lately
  • I do more in-depth review of category/board needs and trends in my weekly review

4 | Lastly, I’ll add Pins to Tailwind Tribes I belong to:

This will need its own full post, but Tailwind Tribes are an amazing way for your Pins to get more exposure.

They’re free to join on Tailwind (even if you don’t sign up for the full service, you can join Tribes).

Tailwind Tribes act as group boards, but with much more accountability — which is SO helpful.

Essentially your content’s being put in front of a group of people and everyone who joins the group is required to share pins from the Tribe (most will have a 1 for 1 or even 2 for 1 rule – so for each Pin you add of your own content, you need to share 1 or 2 of someone else’s).

Tailwind tracks the activity of each member, so unlike with group boards, it’s really easy to see who’s not following the rules and enforce them.

Which means greater sharing among the group and gives your Pins a better chance of actually being re-shared. Which is the main goal of joining group boards — getting exposure AND getting re-pins.

I typically will “batch share” from Tribes on a weekly basis to ensure I’m following the rules and sharing in relation to the number of Pins I’m adding. I’ve found it easier to share Tribe pins in advance each week, so I know I can safely add my own each day. Plus it gives me new Pins to add to my weekly schedule; and since the Tribes are almost “pre-qualified” (if you join specific ones that match your content niche), it helps me load up on new Pins that much faster as well!

You can try Tailwind Tribes for free today – sign up here!

They also just recently added Tribe Analytics, which has been helpful.

Since Tribes are a bit more manual  – you have to “add” your content live, there’s no pre-scheduling + most groups have limits on the number of pins you can add each day – it’s nice to see if your work is paying off.

Here are my two “awards” – LOL – that I got this week.

 

I’ve been pretty spotty at participating in Tribes, but stepped it up a bit recently and have been happy with the results.

Last week, Tribes gave my pins an additional 667.7K reach!

And that’s it!

That’s the daily Pinterest strategy that I follow *most* days… but I’m not super strict about it. If I miss a day, I still have my scheduled pins ready to go out — Pinterest still sees me as active, consistent, and my content is put in front of my audience daily.

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How many times should I pin per day?

Recommendations here are all over the place – you might hear 20, 50, or even 100.

My recommendation is to pin an amount that’s sustainable for you.

As your brand’s content pool grows (product Pin variations, blog posts, etc), you can easily increase your daily pin amount.

As a good starting point, I recommend pinning 20 times a day – whether that be through a scheduler or manual pinning.

I have my Tailwind schedule set around 20-40 Pins a day. Tailwind uses your account’s analytics to determine your best times + days to pin; and helps you set an ideal schedule.

Here’s an example of what my schedule looks like:

The green time slots are my scheduled times and the white represent times Tailwind suggests because my Pins often receive high engagement at that time.

It’ll also adjust by your daily activity, so in my case, Monday’s are better days than Tuesday or Wednesday; so it appropriately spaces out my Pins throughout the week.

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I’ll be sharing much more about Pinterest in upcoming posts, so if you have questions, please leave them below!