If you want your small business to be successful in 2024, then having a solid Pinterest marketing strategy is a non-negotiable. This powerful guide will show you how to get your brand and business in front of your target audience so you can make a massive profit of off Pinterest traffic for free!
Date: December 17, 2022
Today I’m sharing exactly how I was able to build a Pinterest profile using a special Pinterest marketing strategy that helps me get over 140 million impressions organically each month and how you can do it too.
At first glance, your Pinterest feed may look like a blend of unrelated pictures, but there is actually a powerful algorithm that’s working behind the scenes to curate the millions of images that are uploaded to the site every single day. The update to the Pinterest algorithm has made it easier to go viral if you follow the strategy shared below.
I started my blog in late 2018 when the site was already oversaturated with bloggers and EVERY post that I read about blogging told me that now was not the time to start. I started blogging anyway 😏 with the ambition of turning my little blog into a business that generates passive income daily.
Well, here I am on the other side, proud to say that I am indeed a full-time blogger who also runs a Pinterest virtual assistant agency. 👌🏼👏🏼🙌🏼
In the beginning, I could only manage to work part-time on my blog and Pinterest yet somehow during that time, I managed to grow my brand into something much bigger than me. About a year after I started blogging, I grew my Pinterest account to 40,000 followers and my blog had over 100k monthly website visitors. Then C.o.v.1.d happened…. I felt burnt out from living life in Los Angeles, & decided to take a break. I stopped blogging for a year and a half.
I thought for sure that my views would go down, because that’s how the other platforms work. Pinterest is different. Oddly enough nothing happened to my Pinterest account engagement throughout my sabbatical.
In fact, several of my pins went viral during my break…
This is what my account looks like today after a year and a half of not pinning ANYTHING. My account followers and impressions grew over this period to 70,000 followers and over 50 million monthly impressions.
See, success on Pinterest definitely doesn’t happen overnight but if you follow these tips, you will see more traffic to your pins. Traffic that is CONSISTENT. Today I’m sharing the exact Pinterest marketing strategy I use to get my content seen by people on Pinterest.
ATTENTION: If you are COMPLETELY NEW I have a beginner guide for properly setting up your free Pinterest for Business profile you can read that here.
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Pinterest marketing strategy: 2024 Update
Recently, there’s been a complete revamp to the Pinterest algorithm. Now, as long as your profile and boards are optimized correctly, your content will get in front of those who are looking for that type of content… even if you have only 500 followers.
So if you’re browsing through Pinterest marketing info and blog posts, make sure the publish date is in 2024.
Any Pinterest marketing strategy that worked before 2024 will NOT work this year and if you follow any of this advice it will most likely ruin your chances at gaining pin authority with the Pinterest algorithm.
Everyone pre-2020 promoted schedulers like Tailwind but I never liked how it cluttered other blogger’s feeds with duplicate posts. So when I started out,I focused only on SEO and looked for trending keywords, and not only did it work but I continued to work even when the algorithm changed.
So how exactly does this new algorithm work?
First, we need to understand engagements on Pinterest. Engagements are called “actions” in the algorithm and include:
- Clicks (Outbound clicks)
- Long clicks (Outbound clicks with a dwell time of 30 seconds or longer [source, Definition 4.1])
- Close-ups (now called Pin clicks)
- Saves
Here’s what the algorithm looks like
And if you’re into the nerdy stuff, you can read the full breakdown of how the algorithm filters through related pins by clicking here
The engagement rate is the number of engagements divided by the number of impressions on a pin. This definition can be found in your Analytics dashboard under Top Pins > Engagements..
Here’s the kicker: if you have high impressions and low engagement, your pin will literally do nothing. But if you have LOW impressions on a pin, and it gets just a tiny little bit of engagement, your engagement RATING will shoot up super high, increasing the chances for that pin to start ranking in search, in the recommendation system (underneath related pins), and in the Home Feed! The trick is to publish fresh pins faster. This means low impressions are OK, because you’re maximizing your chances to get high Engagement Rates on your pins by increasing the number of fresh pins on your account.
I’ve noticed that the high Engagement Rate pins are the ones that usually end up ranking in search results. It’s directly tied to that high engagement rating (and good SEO, of course).
Here’s a couple of Do’s and don’ts of my Pinterest marketing strategy
DO’s:
Optimize your profile with SEO – from your username to your about me and of course all of your board names and descriptions. You’ll learn more about this in a minute.
Get Creative – You want to pin at least 1 new pin image a day. You do not need to be creating new posts every day. You can link a new pin image to an old post. Make sure to change the layout and appearance of each pin.
Don’t have photoshop? Meet Canva, your new best friend. Canva is a website that I use to make my pins look pretty and professional, and it’s 100% free. Image generation is quintessential to your pinterest marketing strategy – you need to post a lot of images frequently and Canva is a great platform to streamline the process.
Save a pin to no more than 10 boards
DON’TS
RE-PIN THE SAME PIN OVER AND OVER. For years this technique worked, but not with the recent update. Pinterest wants us to pin new content over re-pinning something that’s already on the platform. It’s ok if others re-pin your content but if you do it, that’s bad.
Save no more than 25 new pins per day
SEND PINS TO GROUP BOARDS. General group boards are NOT optimized with SEO or specific keywords
Use Tailwind. Pinterest hates tailwind and does not promote any content published by the platform. Any blogger telling you otherwise is only hoping that you sign up because they get a $30 kickback for each person they signup
Keyword study: How to find what’s trending
So let’s dive into exactly how you find the proper keywords for your content. These strategies can even help you plan your content better by seeing what’s already highly searched for and trending.
STEP 1:
First off, Pinterest publishes a quarterly trend report. Here’s a link to the Pinterest Predicts trend report page. If anything, what they publish is a reflection of what they want to see on the platform, so creating content around these topics will help you get on Pinterest’s good side.
Step 2:
If you haven’t done so already, definitely sign up for a Pinterest Business account. It’s completely free. Now that you’ve switched to the business profile, you can follow these steps to see the most highly searched-for trends of the week.
Click Trends under the analytics tab.
Search for your topic in the bar. Before clicking search, take note of what other keywords pop up. These are other long-tailed keywords that people are searching for.
If you scroll down, you can see what’s trending in different categories. This image shows some Women’s fashion / style keywords that are gaining some traction this week.
Another approach to see exactly what the audience size is for certain keywords
Go ahead and click on the Ads button on the top left. You’re not creating an ad but in order to see monthly keyword searches, this method works best.
Click CREATE AN AD, then click the CONSIDERATION button, and then click NEXT. Don’t worry about filling out anything else.
This will land you on the AD GROUP DETAILS page. Here is where you will find your keywords.
Click FIND NEW CUSTOMERS under “Targeting details.” Then scroll down to KEYWORDS AND INTERESTS.
Let’s take the keyword STYLE for example. Clicking on some of them you can see the potential audience size for each keyword. The interest Korean fashion shows up and it has nearly 1 million monthly searches. That’s huge! If I were a fashion blogger, I definitely would want to write an article about Korean fashion.
See not only is this tool good for finding popular keywords but is also how I come up with post ideas that have the potential to go viral. You need to have a deep understanding of what keywords are trending in your niche to have an effective Pinterest marketing strategy.
Designing your pin
If you’ve spent any time on Pinterest, you know that it’s all about beautiful Pinterest Pins. And if you’re like many Pinners, you’ve spent more time looking at all those Pins than you have adding your own Pins! So here are some tips to follow when you’re designing pins
Let’s start with the basic size dimensions for creating a Pin. Pinterest’s preferred image aspect ratio is 2:3 or 1:2.1. The minimum width of a pin is 600 pixels although the ideal is 1000 x 1500 for high- quality, unblurred Pinterest Pins.
Think of your Pinterest Pins as your visual portfolio, and make your images as appealing as possible. Remember that your goal is for your content to be saved alongside someone’s hopes and dreams on their treasured Pinterest Boards.
One thing you should always remember to do, is adding your logo and branding to your Pinterest image so people can recognize your Pins in their feed.
Your image should be clear and your text easy to read on a mobile device. Make sure you add text on high-contrast backgrounds, so people can understand what your Pin is about from any size screen!
There is one website that I’ve used since the beginning of my blogging journey and that is Canva. Canva is a free photo editing site that offers millions of free templates to help you make beautiful pins and images for your business. I used their free service for years before I upgraded to their $12.99 per month pro service. I can literally thank them personally for the number of views I get per month. If you are a blogger you need to be using them.
Next, Where to put your keywords and Properly SEO your pins
Let’s take a look at one of my pins that is trending at the moment.
After pinning an image directly from your site (important! don’t add image from Pinterest) then you can go into Pinterest and click the three dots in the top corner to EDIT PIN.
Here is an example of everywhere you can add your keywords. Technically the example on the left fringes on “keyword stuffing” and I wouldn’t recommend this practice, but because this pin is pre-2021 and is on so many boards already, I think the algorithm is overlooking it.
Pinterest (much like google) prefers long-tailed keyword sentences.
This example was used last year at the Pinterest content creator conference: let’s say your pin links to a post about Italy Travel. Having sentences like “Cheap USA travel tips” will help the reach of. your pin MORE than doing this: Travel | ITALY | Travel tips.
Example A: “Cheap ITALY travel tips” will help that pin TEN TIMES more than example B.
The most important part of your Pinterest marketing strategy is to make sure that your pin description is formatted correctly!
Now let’s take a look at your website. You need to be putting keywords here:
- Your URL
- Your BlOG POST TITLE
- The first Paragraph (A clip of your first paragraph shows up on pin as well)
- .jpg name (I don’t know if Pinterest picks up on .jpg name but Google’s algorithm will and it won’t hurt you)
- Image Alt text (it’s just good SEO practice for Google’s algorithm. You can edit by clicking image in your clicking image will editing post or in your MEDIA folder on your WordPress/host site)
Now I’m going to share with you a tip from my Pinterest marketing strategy that I haven’t seen anywhere else.
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Make Your Pinterest Pins Go Viral
Today, after posting 10 quotes that a create for my blog I went ahead and open 4 of them in Pinterest and clicked through to my site. Well, guess what? Pinterest ended up showing the pins I clicked to three times as many people! 👀
The algorithm counts even your engagement on the pin. So go ahead and heart your pin, write a comment, and click through to your site. 🙂
Et voila! I hope this Pinterest marketing strategy gives you insight as to how to properly SEO your pins and content so that your content gets seen.
Are you a business that is looking for a Pinterest assistant?
I can help you
I offer multiple packages from fully optimized SEO Pinterest business profile setup to SEO pin design and scheduling.
