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Well, now that I’ve been blogging a year, I’ve learned so much about Pinterest. I had no idea I would need to become a Pinterest strategist in order to succeed at this whole blog thing. Literally, I dive deep into my Google Analytics, Tailwind analytics and Board Booster stats at times to really understand what the heck is going on. This post contains affiliate links.
It took a couple months for my traffic dropping below 100k a month for me to push myself to learn more. I can’t tell you how sad I was when my traffic started dropping, but it taught me so so much, and how to get it to go back up. My traffic dropped mainly because of that darn Hurricane Irma (my manual pinning strategy went out the window with no wifi), traveling, solo parenting, moving and basically having a massive amount of life changes to keep up with to throw my strategy off.
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But, what I did do was look deeper into my manual pinning strategy, and why big life events could throw my traffic off so much. Through deeper looking and analyzing, I was able to figure out the exact components to a perfect Pinterest strategy.
I’ve written numerous times on the importance of Pinterest Strategies by Carly at Mommy on Purpose to my strategy. This book, her strategy, is the nuts and bolts of my strategy, and I accredit most of my ability to reach over 100k pageviews in one month because of her book, and Lena Grott’s Traffic Transformation. I now get over 100 visits a day from organic search because of the tips in her book. You can grab her FREE Blog Traffic Bonus Guide to get you started with more traffic!
I’ve taken all the tips and tricks from these books, but still figured out how to develop MY OWN strategy. That’s important for all bloggers, and here’s how you do that.
Let me also say that you need to understand how to make money once you get your Pinterest strategy in check. I currently make over 3k a month just blogging and raising my babies. I would never have that opportunity if I didn’t just go for it and start. If you want to know how I make that much money, I break it down in a pdf with FREE TIPS AND TRICKS to make money blogging without teaching people how to blog!! I make no money with blogging courses and very little from blogging affiliates per month.
Grab the free pdf! I only send out FABULOUS blogging tips once a week, including income reports and my plans to grow my blog. I seriously hate salesy emails, so I will send myself to the grave before I send those to you!
First, sign up for Tailwind and Boardbooster. You won’t necessarily be using these for scheduling, but they both have great analytics with information you want. You are also going to want to try both of these schedulers to compare you stats. You can start for free just to get the stats, then decide if you want to use them for scheduling if you don’t show results from manually pinning.
Second, make sure you are in a lot of group boards. I personally never wanted to search Pinterest or that PinGroupie thing other bloggers talk about. Who has time to email all those boards? I found this gem of a Facebook group, Pinterest Group Boards, and there are daily posts of group board owners looking to add contributors. I never go anywhere else, and I’m in about 50 group boards now, almost all from this group.
Third, choose a scheduler to test. I started with Board Booster. I used Board Booster with my manual pinning for a bit, then took away Board Booster and switched to manual pinning only. My traffic jump was so obvious, I don’t do any scheduling with Board Booster anymore. I’ve read a lot of bloggers get massive traffic from using a campaign strategy. That didn’t show results for me, but it doesn’t mean it won’t for you. I followed this post by 2Sharemyjoy to set up and test. Do this for a week, then stop and try manual pinning.
Manual pinning strategy. This is a very specific strategy that involves Google Analytics. You can try just pinning random pins from your blog to your group boards, but there’s a better way. What Carly teaches in her book is how to look at Google Analytics, find your best pins and use that information to pin for the most traffic. Its genius really. She also goes super into designing your pins, setting up your profile, and lots of tips and tricks that worked for her, which have in turn worked for me. If you don’t want to get the book, you can start with re-pinning your blog pins that get re pinned bu others. That way you are adding to your re-pins, and helping that pin get more boost. Try this for another week and monitor your stats.
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Try Tailwindapp. After you’ve dabbled in Board Booster and manual pinning, start scheduling some pins with Tailwind. The nice thing about Tailwind is its an approved partner by Pinterest. I think this helps with the algorithm a bit. I used this post to guide me on how to set up Tailwind. I also just grabbed the Chrome extension to schedule pins super quick. Now, I only dabbled into Tailwind because I had a dip in traffic after a hectic few months, and I was hoping I might be able to boost my blog back up by adding some pins. It didn’t work for me, but it could for you. However, I did find the Tailwind stats and information highly useful! Before Tailwind, I had a hard time determining my best group boards. That’s another aspect to your manual pinning strategy. You need to figure out which of your group boards are actually bringing re-pins and traffic. Tailwind can show you all of this.
Review Your Stats. After you’ve spent 3 weeks testing various methods on Pinterest, you should have some idea of what works best for your blog. Does you blog respond well to manual pinning or scheduling? Once you have that answer, you can dive deeper into what’s working.
Work on refining: Once you know what works for your blog, start refining the pins, the boards and the times your schedulers or you are pinning. All of this matters for pageviews. If you aren’t pinning at the right time (Carly talks about this in her book for manual pinning) and Tailwind suggests the best times to pin. Lena also has an amazing Pinterest Tracking Template that is awesome to help you refine and keep track of your pinning with a video. What’s interesting about this is that she doesn’t manually pin at all! So, if the manual pinning wasn’t working for you, this is a great option to help you really get your strategy perfected using schedulers.
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Final thoughts. Every blog is different. My advice is to take advantage of other blogger’s expertise, then develop your own expertise for your blog. Take the tedious time required to see what’s being pinned when and from what boards. Use Pinterest Analytics (you have to have a business account) to make sure you can see what Pins are performing. There’s so much to learn with Pinterest, and if I didn’t buy other people’s valuable knowledge, I’d be way farther behind. I’m now earning over 2k a month, and I talk about making my first 1,000 in this post.
Looking for more blogging tips? Read
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