3 Things That Exploded My Pinterest Traffic in 1 Month

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While I consider Instagram and YouTube my most important and time consuming content channels, growing blog traffic is always a competing priority. Using Pinterest to drive traffic to my blog never quite clicked for me until recently. The platform is incredibly active and has a huge potential to drive tremendous traffic with just strategic optimizations. So over the holidays I had some downtime, and I started to tinker with my Pinterest strategy. I honed in on a few key things that are really starting to yield results. It’s been a little over one month since I implemented a new Pinterest strategy and I’m seriously excited to see how things progress! Here are three things that exploded my Pinterest traffic in the course of just one month.

Pin Impressions

Blog Referrals

1. Tailwind

Tailwind is an industry-leading Pinterest optimization platform and an official Pinterest Partner. You can use it for pin scheduling, analytics, and connecting with communities of other pinners. On average, Tailwind users see a 30% increase in repins after they start using their service.

First, they offer smart scheduling that optimizes your scheduled pins for peak performance. You can also publish unlimited pins; best practices I’ve researched suggest 30-40 pins per day. Second, Tailwind Tribes are pods of similar pinners that help each other grow virally. Participation in Tailwind Tribes has immediately resulted in my content being repinned and shared with more relevant audiences.

Another feature I love are board lists, where I can assign quick repins to a series of boards in just two clicks. For example, when I create a new travel pin I can queue it up to repin to 25 of my pre-defined travel pinboards. This has saved me so much time, almost automating my pinning routine.

Membership costs between $9.99 to $15.00 per month, depending on if you pay annually or not. This is the most significant tool helping boost my Pinterest traffic, and I wouldn’t recommend it if I didn’t see actual results. If you decide to use my affiliate link, you can get no-risk trial to publish your first 100 scheduled pins free! You’ll also get $15 off a paid plan should you decide to upgrade.

2. Canva

Canva is not only how I create my YouTube thumbnails, it’s how I create my Pinterest graphics as well. The free plan offers so many amazing templates for Pinterest, so you can confidently create images that are the optimal size for the platform.

While I prefer the desktop version, I love having the mobile app to create graphics on the go. When it comes down to it, beautiful images are essentially what drive Pinterest traffic. The right metadata, meaning rich pin copy and pinboard relevance, obviously help too!

3. Joining Group Boards

This has been another total game-changer and something I wish I got started on earlier. Think about it this way: joining group boards can expose your content to a whole new lot of pinners. And if the group board has more followers than your Pinterest account, even better!

There are countless amazing group boards to join, you just have to find the ones relevant to you and ask to join them. It’s important to note, all group boards have different rules on posting frequency and reciprocation. I applied to about 90 group boards over the holidays, and I’ve been successfully added to about 60 of them. Moving forward, I plan to ask to join 25 per month to maintain my Pinterest growth.

While I’ve grown in both pin impressions and traffic to my blog, repins and follower growth are an area of improvement for me. It’s not a huge focus right now, because I don’t believe you can focus on four goals simultaneously. I will continue to monitor it and keep it in mind for the future, as repins and follower growth can absolutely drive Pinterest traffic as well.

If you’re a blogger, how are you using Pinterest to break through to new readers or followers? I would love to hear your thoughts and learnings in a comment below. I don’t often write about blog or social media strategy on my blog, but if it interests you I’d be happy to write more posts related to the business of blogging. Don’t forget to pin the image below if you’d like to share the love!