Pinterest has shown its strength as a highly successful platform to engage with your audience, now accounting for 25% of retail referral traffic and driving 4x more money per click than Twitter. And many businesses are debating if they need to boost their Pinterest marketing efforts. In this article, we will know the step by step process to get followers on Pinterest.
Are you ready to start promoting your business on Pinterest? Let’s get started.
How To Grow a Pinterest Account From SCRATCH
If I were to start a Pinterest account from scratch, what are the exact tips and strategies that I would follow to make sure that I’m able to grow fast on Pinterest, get more views, get more traffic and get more followers to my account?
The first tip that I want to share with you is something that many people ignore, which is one reason why they’re not really able to grow fast on Pinterest and that is to know your competition.
Know Your Competitors
I’m a firm believer that you don’t need to invent the wheel again and again if there’s already been someone who has done the groundwork and the legwork for you.
When starting a new account or helping someone grow their account, you need to do a little bit of market research in terms of who are the people who are already existing in this niche or industry.
How their accounts are performing and what are they doing right that maybe you could emulate and learn from and use that knowledge to grow your account quickly.
One of the easiest ways for you to do it is to simply head into the Pinterest search bar and look for the keyword that you aim to rank for on Pinterest.
So let’s say you want to have an account in the personal finance niche. So simply type in personal finance in the search bar. Now you’re going to sort the search by people or by accounts and then you’re going to look through the top 5 or 10 accounts that show up on the search.
How you can identify these accounts is by looking at the number of followers that these accounts have as well as how many monthly views or impressions their pins are getting.
A good benchmark when it comes to followers would be to look at people with 5 000 followers or more and when it comes to the monthly page views you can look at people with five hundred thousand or half a million page views and more.
The reason why I recommend looking at these top five to ten accounts is because they’re obviously doing something right which is resonating with their audience which also might be the audience whose attention you want in future.
Open a google doc or a sheet or maybe even just take out a notepad and a pen and write down some of the things and answer the questions asked below:
- What do these accounts have in common?
- What are the types of keywords that these accounts are using?
- What are the types of graphics these accounts are using?
- What are the types of pins that these accounts are using?
The second thing to take a note off is the content that these accounts are creating.
- What are the types of blog posts or product pins or whatever else it is that comes into your niche?
- What is it that these guys are doing that you can also learn from and emulate?
The more similar type of content they’re creating means that there is a high affinity for that content to perform on Pinterest. So you definitely need to take note of these top content ideas.
You also want to take note of:
- What are the graphics or the colours or even the fonts that these people are using in their pins?
- What is resonating the most with their audience
So when it comes to what is resonating, the best way to look at is how many pins have likes comments and so on and so forth because if a pin has a lot of comments and has a lot of engagement that obviously means that it is resonating with the target audience which means that it is something that is high in demand and something that you definitely need to take a note off.
So to recap you want to make a note of what these accounts have in common, what are the topics that they’re pinning about, which of their pins are doing the best or getting the most engagement and what are the topics that are also consistently repeating or what are the topics that everyone has in common.
You can learn from it and emulate for your account as well.
How to use the informatons
Now when it comes to using this information, it is not simply about copying and pasting what someone else is doing because even if that works for like a minute, it’s not going to turn into a long-term sustainable strategy when it comes to growing your Pinterest account.
So take inspiration from these accounts and figure out what are some of the common trends, themes and topics that are repeating in these accounts over and over again.
You can also leverage in the same but in a smarter and better way; by creating better and higher quality content to make sure that you can actually leverage and take over some of your competitor’s audience.
When it comes to growing your audience on Pinterest; there are over 450 million people every single month on Pinterest. So there is no shortage of people who will be willing to follow your account or will be willing to interact with your content so long as your content is something that is in demand that they actually like and want to engage with.
So that brings us to the next step which is to test what works
Testing and Figuring out what works
When I first started out on Pinterest it took me about the first six months of experimentation and figuring out exactly what content what topics and what types of images were resonating with my audience.
Had I just jumped in and thought that this was going to be it and I would just do one thing and be rigid on that I would not have been able to grow that account to over 5 million monthly views following that period.
So when you’re just starting out it is so important for you to give yourself that time and space to experiment and to test out what works when it comes to growing followers on Pinterest or any other platform for that matter.
You can’t just skip the hard work and get to the good part. You do need to spend the time on the ground working on your strategy and figuring out exactly what works.
When you do this foundational work right your account tends to grow faster and more steadily in the long run, instead of having random spikes and bumps along the way where one month you’re getting lots of clicks and traffic and the next month it is a dead down.
So when it comes to testing out what works there are three main things that you need to focus on:
1. CONTENT
The first thing that you need to focus on is the content that you’re creating. The content will help you grow on Pinterest whether that is a blog post, podcast or video.
It doesn’t matter what type of content you’re creating, producing or promoting but you need to make sure that it is actually resonating with your audience.
- Does your audience like a specific type of blog post more
- Do they like review videos more than they like educational videos
- Do they like to see different types of product pins from your particular store instead of just seeing one static image of your product
These are the things that you need to test out especially in the first three to six months of creating your account to understand what it is that your audience wants because at the end of the day what you’re aiming to do is to connect nurture and grow your audience on Pinterest and you cannot do that if you’re not providing the right content in the first place.
2. CREATIVE
The second thing that you also need to focus on Pinterest is Creative. What I mean by creative is all of the visual aspects of being on Pinterest which usually comes down to the fonts that you use, the graphics that you create, the way that you create them, what colors that you use and what is the overall visual aesthetic and appeal of those particular pins.
Now clearly the Pinterest feed is organized by pins that are visual by nature and knowing that Pinterest is a visual marketing platform I cannot stress how important it is for you to test out what visuals are working really really well for your audience.
Even though a lot of people on the internet will tell you to use X color or Y font at the end of the day you still need to implement that for your niche.
You still need to put out those spins to your audience and you still need to gauge your audience’s response in order for you to understand whether or not this creative strategy is working for you or not.
3. STRATEGY
The third thing that you also must test is your pinning strategy. When I mean by Pinning strategy is what are you pinning, where are you pinning, how often are you pinning and what is the type of pinning that you’re doing.
Are you pinning through your phone which is basically manual pinning or are you pinning through your desktop or are you pinning through tailwind and so on and so forth.
There are so many different strategies when it comes to pinning that you really need to understand.
What is it that is working best for your particular niche?
Some people swear by manual pinning and say that that is something that works really well for them. Some people say that tailwind works best and their pins would not perform as well if they were not using tailwind.
Now, this really heavily depends on the type of niche that you’re in, the audience that you have and the type of content that you’re creating in general.
When it comes to a beginner I always recommend starting out with five to ten manual pins every single day so that you can actually gauge and assess what is working for you before you move on to an automated tool like tailwind.
In order for you to be doing automated pinning, you first need to have a clear idea of who you are targeting, how your account works and what is the best pinning strategy for you.
The next step is to leverage new formats. Gone are the days when you could simply create static image pins and expect to blow up your account. Though it is still possible to some extent to do that if you have spectacular content but chances are your account isn’t going to grow as fast or isn’t going to expand its reach if you’re only using image pins right now.
You should include pins like video pins, story pins carousel pins or even product recipe or article pins if that makes sense for your niche.
What this means is that instead of having a linear content format strategy where you just keep posting the same image pins over and over again, you want to be experimenting and figuring out if you’re getting a better response with other types of content formats and even though five years ago it was possible to grow on pinterest with just using image pins that’s not really the case anymore so you want to make sure that you are including different types of fins especially video and story pins to your pinterest strategy
to see if your account can grow faster by including those pins now a lot of people complain that by using video pins or story pins they’re not necessarily getting traffic because you can’t add links as of now to these particular pin types however the strategy here is to be a long-term sustainable account on pinterest and you can only do that if you’re using all the tools of the game it is no different from instagram now releasing reels and really pushing out those accounts which are actually using reels versus the accounts who are just still posting to their feed and not creating any other type of content at the end of the day every platform wants its users to stay within the platform for the longest time and have the best experience when it comes to interacting with the content on that platform and one of the ways that you can do that is by leveraging different and new content formats so that your audience is also engaging with your content within the pinterest platform and not just outside of the pinterest platform the next tip that i want to share which i believe is also very very critical in the growth of any pinterest account and that is to understand seo or search engine optimization now at the end of the day despite all the pretty images that pinterest throws at you the core of the algorithm is a search engine when it comes to growing on a search engine you’ve got to play by the search engines rules which means that in this case you have to be strategic about the content that you’re creating and the way that you are showcasing them on pinterest this ensures that the right people can find you at the right time on the right platform which is pinterest just like on google or youtube you can’t start ranking your content the minute you post it it’s pretty much the same on pinterest as well unless you are already an established account with an established amount of followers and high engagement it is going to be hard for you to get ranked on the first page which means that you need to be looking at seo and leveraging that from the beginning itself now when it comes to pinterest seo there are two main things that you need to focus on the first thing is your profile now when it comes to optimizing your profile you always want to be thinking about your target audience or your target reader or your target customer
and how you can reach out to them so what are the keywords that they are going to be using to find your account what is the content that would help them what are the products that you can create that they would desperately need and love and when it comes to the second aspect of seo that is your pins most people focus a lot on pins and pin optimization but they forget that they also need to create a profile that supports their pins now what this means is that when it comes to looking at creating content you always want to have a keyword for strategy which means that you should be spending time while doing your market research in identifying exactly what keywords you can potentially rank for now obviously the more competitive keywords you target and the more common keywords you target it is going to be harder for you as a new account to emerge in that space one of the best ways to look at keywords by search volume is by looking into the ads manager and i have a detailed tutorial on this on my youtube channel so you can check it out over there as well by far one of the best ways for you to look at keywords is to simply head into your ads manager and figure out exactly what keywords are trending and how much search volume so that you can see what are the keywords that you can target now if you don’t have access to ads manager such as if you’re in a country where ads manager is not yet valid then maybe you can use a simple keyword tool such as key search or google trends and see what are the different trends that are trending on this particular platform now when it comes to looking for keywords google and pinterest have a lot of similarity because a lot of the same people are looking for similar things in both of these platforms
so if you don’t have access to keyword research on pinterest you can definitely use keyword research tools for google as a proxy and create content around topics that are high in demand and that you can actually rank for the bottom line when it comes to understanding seo is that you want to be working smart instead of working hard so you don’t want to be creating 100 pins in a day and having none of them rank on the search feed and none of them send you any traffic or any followers you want to be creating one or two strategically created pins or topics that you’re posting on your account and making sure that they bring you the maximum results possible and that is exactly what i mean when it comes to having a strategic approach when it comes to pinterest seo all right moving on the next tip that i want to share with you is not really a tactical tip but rather a mindset tip and that is to either wait or invest now when it comes to growing on pinterest specifically as a beginner there are only two different parts that you can take the first part is the do-it-yourself path where you go down the rabbit hole or looking at all the blog posts all the podcasts all the youtube videos and you try to stitch different pieces of advice together until you find something that works it’s kind of like throwing a lot of spaghetti on the wall and then hoping that something sticks the other strategy is when you invest in a mentor or you invest in education or coaching and you basically follow that mentor’s proven successful strategy now personally i’ve used both of these strategies in my life and business so i cannot really say that one is better than the other but it really does depend on your goals and where you’re hoping to get in the next couple of months when it comes to the diy route you have to be willing to be patient for months and maybe even years to see your results pay off because you have to accept that you don’t have the clarity and the success framework that somebody who is following a mentor would have on the other hand if you’re willing to invest even if it is in an ebook in an online course in a coach or a consultant you are going to get the proven formula that that person used to grow in different niches and you can use that to basically fast track your success and to fast track your results now if you have the time to wait for years for your results to pay off and you don’t mind a lot of bumps along the way and a lot of mistakes and failures along the way then it’s absolutely okay for you to go the diy route but then you should remember to be patient and not give up in the first month when you don’t start seeing results however if you value your time and you want to grow your side hustle or even your business to a better stage in a faster and in a more proven manner then it definitely pays off to invest in a mentor even if it is just investing in an e-book or an e-course the advantage that you have is that you can learn from the mistakes and failures of that person and you can skip ahead the years that took for that person to master that particular skill and start using their proven and successful framework right from the start either way both of these approaches are completely fine but you’ve got to have the right mindset behind either of these approaches don’t expect your results to show up tomorrow if you’re not willing to invest the money and the time that it takes to grow your account now if you’re interested in learning more from me about how to grow your pinterest account there’s a free pinterest traffic masterclass that i’m gonna link in the description box below so make sure to check that out once you’re done watching this video make sure to give this video a like and subscribe to the channel if you’re new here thank you for watching and i’ll see you in the next one
