How We Grew Our Pinterest To 9 Million Monthly Viewers

Why Do You Need Pinterest?

Whether you are blogging, building your presence online through social media platforms like Instagram, or just really enjoying Pinterest itself, building a good following and monthly viewership on Pinterest is so important. But you are probably already overwhelmed by the amount of content you are creating regularly. So why should you care about how to get followers on Pinterest?

There are a few main reasons why Pinterest is so important for anyone building an online presence:

• Traffic – Pinterest can drive massive amounts of traffic for you if you use it right. It is the second biggest traffic source for us after Google. Pinterest drives more traffic to shopping sites than social media platforms.
• Conversion – 89% of US Pinners use Pinterest for inspiration in their path to purchase.
• Demographics -54% of women aged 34-55 are on Pinterest—35% of them have a household income over $100K
• Influence -according to research by Millward Brown, 87% of Pinners have purchased a product because of Pinterest. The same study found that 93% of Pinners have used Pinterest to plan a future purchase.
• Longevity – since pins last forever, investing in good Pinterest content pays off in the long term

Needless to say – investing in getting followers and views on Pinterest can be extremely beneficial to your blog/business. But growing your Pinterest can be a little confusing..

Do You Need To Get Pinterest Followers Or Monthly Viewers?

This can be a little confusing. On most social media platforms follower count is pretty important. But Pinterest is more of a search engine rather than a social media platform. So reach and impressions here are key.

Due to the way pins can get saved and re-pinned by multiple users and eventually still lead to the original source of the image, a great pin can reach way beyond your own followers. And since Pinterest switched to a smart feed instead of a simple chronological sorting, follower count is even less important. Nowadays you can reach millions of people and generate millions of impressions monthly with just a few thousand followers.

So, in our opinion, monthly viewers and engagement are way more important to grow on Pinterest than followers.

So, let’s get to the fun part – how we grew our Pinterest followers and got to 9 million viewers a month!

Step 1. We Switched To A Business Account

The first thing you need to do if you’re serious about growing your Pinterest is switch to a Business account. Go to your Settings -> Account Settings and then scroll down to Account Changes. Here you can convert your personal Pinterest account to Business.

A Business account allows you to customize your profile with beautiful cover images. But more importantly, it allows you to see analytics. You can track your pin performance as well as total impressions, accounts reached, clicks, saves, etc. You can also see aggregate data for custom date ranges. Plus, you can promote your best performing pins to reach even more people!

Once you’re a Business account, you can customize your profile to align it better with your brand. Go to your Profile and then click on the edit pencil button in the top right corner of your cover. You can upload a cover image here or select one of your boards to auto-populate the cover. We picked our Stay Close Travel Far board, which is where we save all of our favorite couple pictures.

The best thing about this cover is that it updates with the latest pins as you keep pinning more to the board you selected.

Step 2. We Claimed Our Website And Instagram

When you “claim” your blog and Instagram profile on Pinterest, you are essentially telling Pinterest that you own them. So Pinterest allows you to track analytics for those channels.

For example, you can see how many people are clicking on pins from your website vs. pins from your Instagram. You can also see impressions, engagement, saves, etc. all sorted by the source of your pins. This comes in handy when you try to tailor your growth strategy to the type of content that performs best on Pinterest. And you get to see which one of your channels is sending the most traffic to your blog.

Step 3. We Started Pinning Great Content

The first thing we need to say about growing on Pinterest is that… it’s all about good taste. People use Pinterest for inspiration so make sure you build your boards to inspire.

The nice thing about Pinterest is that you don’t need to post only your own original content. You can gain a lot of traction just by creating really nice boards and pinning other people’s beautiful content. If you have a great taste and put things together well – people will find you and follow you. If you create useful boards for people, they will appreciate it.

As a couple that travels for a living, we usually save images we come across on Instagram for inspiration and for future reference. We organize them in folders by country in our “Saved” tab on Instagram and refer to them when planning trips or photoshoots. We had a massive library of photos saved there and were honestly struggling with them a bit as Instagram is not the best place to keep such resources.

So we decided to just pin all of those photos to Pinterest! We organized them in boards by country and started to slowly pin them. Now, keep in mind we had over 3000 photos there so it was a process! But we will explain in more detail how we did this with Tailwind later.

Our Own Pins vs. Repinning

One of the basic things to keep in mind when looking to grow your Pinterest is how many original pins you are pinning vs. repins of other people’s content. An original pin is one you uploaded from your computer or you pinned directly from another webiste, Instagram, facebook, etc. And a repin is something you saw on Pinterest already and just pinned it to your account.

The difference is that views, repins and clicks on an original pin count towards your account. And stats on a repin will count towards the person who originally pinned that content to Pinterest. You will notice that you can’t see analytics on pins you repinned from other users.

So the key to growing your Pinterest followers and monthly viewers is to pin more and more original content. Every time your own pin is repinned, it brings more and more traffic to your profile.

As a general rule, we pin about 90% original content and about 10% repins.

If you are already creating a lot of content for Instagram, then coming up with original content for Pinterest shouldn’t be that hard. You can not only pin all of your Instagram photos here, but also all of your outtakes from your Instagram shoots, photos of landscapes, interior, details, and even a lot of “imperfect” shots that will never work on Instagram.

While on Instagram you’d usually post only the one most perfectly curated shot from a certain place or outfit, on Pinterest almost anything goes. Posting more here is always better. And sometimes the less perfect shots get more attention.

Step 4. We Used Tailwind To Schedule Our Pins

If you think posting all of this content on Pinterest is too time-consuming – don’t worry!

This is where Tailwind comes in handy. Tailwind is an automatic scheduling service for Pinterest, where you can schedule your pins for days ahead. Not only that, but Tailwind will also analyze your account’s activity and find the best times for you to post your content to maximize engagement. In other words, Tailwind will post your pins for you at the peak activity times of your followers to maximize the number of impressions and repins they get.

We were a little skeptical of Tailwind at first, as it is a paid service and our Pinterest was doing fine before we tried it out. But once we subscribed to Tailwind and took advantage of its custom scheduling option, our account saw explosive growth.

Take a look at our account stats leading up to signing up for Tailwind at the end of October and the explosive growth that followed:

We used Tailwind to schedule thousands of photos we had in our Instagram “saved” folders. We organized them neatly in folders by country/region and made sure we scheduled only up to 20 pins per day. That way we had a consistent flow of pins for months ahead and our account started to grow quickly.

Step 5. We Created Descriptive Pins

A key difference between Pinterest and Instagram is that on Pinterest it’s not all about the photo. People here value information. And while posts on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook only stay relevant for hours or days, content on Pinterest can be discovered forever. People just need to be able to find it. Pinterest is actually more of a search engine than a social media. So you need to make your pins searchable.

This is why writing keyword-rich descriptions for your pins and boards is really important. If you are pinning shopping items – include prices, if you are pinning travel locations – include some info about them. Make sure you also use relevant hashtags.

And last but not least, create pins with beautiful titles and graphics. When pinning photos from blog posts, make sure you write the blog post’s title on the photo itself with a beautiful font. Make the title big enough and clearly visible. That will attract people’s attention more than just a photo, and compel them to click on the link and drive your engagement up.

Users are also more likely to save a pin like this as the title will help them remember why they are saving this article.

Step 6. We Started Pinning Consistently Every Day

Like any other social media platform, Pinterest likes you to be active every day. Even though we had a Pinterest account for a long time, it didn’t really grow until we started to spend more time on it daily.

It’s also important not to pin too much as this could annoy your followers. When your followers come online, they like to see a mix of things they’re interested in. No one wants to see 20 pins in a row of high-rise ripped jeans right after you had a pinning session of your shopping list.

Make sure you post no more than 20-30 pins a day and space them out throughout the day.

Step 7. Building A Community

Remember to always stay connected to the community. Find other pinners with similar interests and follow them, repin their content, engage. Like with any other platform, the more you engage and build a community around you, the more your profile will grow.

Have Fun!

Above all, enjoy being on Pinterest! If you like spending time on the platform, discovering interesting content and creating useful boards, you will get more followers on Pinterest.

Be sure to also read our guide on growing your Instagram following and how we make money while traveling full time.