thehollypeck

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I’ve had Pinterest since the early days, when you needed an invite to create an account. I’ve had boards for everything: Trim Healthy Mama, handmade leather goods, capsule wardrobes, and nail art. When I dug into the blogging and direct sales world, I found that Pinterest was a common source of traffic for most bloggers, which made me realize: I needed to figure out how to crack the Pinterest code. Here’s how I went from 13,000 views a month to 1.3 million views a month in 8 months.

I Signed Up for Tailwind

My Pinterest habits tend to be fairly bad – or at least, for someone who wanted to use Pinterest to promote my work. Before I created my Pinterest strategy, I’d be laying in bed before I slept, marathon pinning a ton of pins in the one particular thing I was interested in that day….for example, if I was thinking about food and meal planning, I’d pin a ton of recipes. Or if I was dreaming of leather goods, I’d pin a bunch of purses and fantastic shoes. Anyone who followed me would wake up to a flood of single-topic pins in their feed.

I mean, that’s not BAD on Pinterest….but the thing is, it’s not strategic for a business owner or blogger. It’s important to pin a lot of content, consistently. However, my schedule is more limited. I couldn’t spend all that time browsing Pinterest and manually pinning.

Enter Tailwind, my Pinterest lifesaver. Every week, I spend a few hours scheduling out content for the entire week, and I let it go automagically. The only thing I have to worry about is making sure that I have scheduled the week, and I’m golden. Now, I will say that I still lay in bed before I fall asleep pinning random things….but now I do that on a secret board, so my followers don’t get inundated with one topic.

The thing is, Tailwind isn’t 100% intuitive, BUT there are courses out there to help you learn it well. I took a Tailwind bootcamp from SaundersSays that is the prototype for her Totally Tailwind course, and I learned SO MUCH. This investment in learning how to use tools effectively has helped me be consistent and strategic.

Want a free month to try Tailwind out? Click HERE to try it out for one month for FREE, and get your pins working for you!

I Started Pinning on Pinterest Consistently

A huge part of using Tailwind was that I began pinning more consistently. Most bloggers would say that you need to be pinning around xx pins per day. However, the thought of that was incredibly intimidating. Rather than starting with that amount of pins per day, I decided to start with 15 pins per day.

Here’s how it worked:

• 15 pins per day for 2 weeks
• 20 pins per day for 2 weeks
• 25 pins per day for 2 weeks

And so on….you get the idea. That meant that I could get used to finding quality content and build up the discipline of pinning consistently. Rather than starting with my desired end goal and burning out quickly, I was able to slowly build the discipline.

Now, I pin about 30 times a day, and have a growth trajectory. I incorporate more and more of my own content as I am sharing the content of others, leading to more traffic on my blog.

I Started Pinning Strategically

Like most people who use Pinterest, I pinned what I liked. I pinned recipes, travel photos, and hand-crafted leather goods (I am a sucker for well-made leather items – I can’t help it). If you followed me, you’d find that my feed would be an explosion of interests: a barrage of pins about Tieks; an onslaught of Trim Healthy Mama recipes, and then, a pile of pins about leather conditioner.

Worse, however, was when I’d write a new blog post and create pins. I’d pin it all at once, to every applicable board, instead of spacing it out. A flood of a single pin would hit my feed, creating an aesthetic attack.

My pins now hit a very particular ideal client:

• someone interested in a passive-income business
• busy woman with health and balance in mind
• entrepreneurs who want to find exceptional resources
• women who like feeling put together with a minimalist or capsule wardrobe
• those who like pretty, easy to apply nail polish

I catch followers who find any of those items interesting, but now my pins are more focused and balanced around these topics.

Now, I should add a disclaimer here, because let’s be real, Pinterest reach can be a vanity number. It simply means that someone, somewhere, SAW that your pin existed. It’s not a number that shows interaction; clicks, saves, or conversions. HOWEVER, creating more content has definitely led to an increase of my personal site traffic, and Pinterest is the number one source of traffic to my website. The more that I create and share, the more clicks and visits that I get to my site.

So tell me – how has Pinterest impacted your site? Have you seen your traffic increase?

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About thehollypeck

Chief writer on this corner of the internet. Likes harps, dogs, making passive income, and food.