How to Get Traction on Pinterest

Q&A Friday

Every week I tackle your burning Pinterest questions helping you maximize your Pinterest strategy. This week’s question comes from Vanessa,

How to get traction. If you pin consistently and are strategic about pinning on brand and what you feel to be high quality pins, how do you get a lil traction? I feel like once the ball starts rollin’ and you start to get followers, you will appear more in feeds & get more opportunities to be seen. But, until then, I’ve been in a complete stalemate. And that’s after I’ve gone through all 3000 pins on my boards and reevaluated them based on content, repins, and vertical orientation.

The million dollar question!

I like to refer to Pinterest as the slow moving train that drops off consistent passengers along the way. It used to be fast, like a sprint, but over the last year it’s morphed into a marathon. Slow and steady will yield good results. So the question really is, how do you not throw in the towel and motivate yourself to keep going even when you feel like you’re not seeing results? Here’s my suggestions:

Take a look at your content. Are you producing helpful, useful and shareable content? The most powerful share tool you have are those who read your blog or love your products. This grows your following indirectly. Create images you know resonate with your audience. Test a few different types of images and see which one gets repinned the most.

Use all your boards. Vanessa is already doing this as she mentioned going through all her boards but make sure you’re pinning to all your boards. Word on the street is that Pinterest likes an active account using most of the boards. If you have 250 boards, most of which are group boards, start by getting rid of at least 50 that you no longer use. It’s worth testing, and you can always join more later.

On the group board note, make sure you’re assessing group boards and pinning often to the high quality ones. Don’t waste your time on the ones that have a really low repin rate.

Promote your Pinterest page in other places. Whether that’s a Facebook link to a board people should check out or promoting your top pin from the past week in your email newsletter. Consider a Promoted Pin campaign!

Don’t follow rabbit trails. Every week I’m reading some new ‘trick’ someone has tried on Pinterest and they got a zillion followers in 4 days (not really, but you get the point). Following those rabbit trails not only kills time in your business but it can kill your traction. Pick a strategy for at least 3 months and stick with it. Then evaluate your efforts. Did you see any kind of growth on anything? Even the slightest bump in page views indicates something. Follow that and figure out what worked. Was it an image, topic, etc? Every account has a unique culture. What’s your account culture and how can you tap into that and give people more?

My advice…Keep pinning! It’s the same advice I would give someone training for that marathon. Keep training. I’ve grown accounts from zero and I use these same tools. It’s just a little at a time but you will have that big win in the end with daily traffic coming from Pinterest.

And if you don’t want to be in front of the computer all day consider using Tailwind!

What tips do you have for getting more traction on Pinterest?

Have a Pinterest question you want answered? Send me an email and we’ll add it to our weekly Q&A Friday post.