How I Went From 30k to 130k Impressions in 1 Wk on Pinterest

If you’re wondering how to increase Pinterest impressions, you’re in the right place because since 9 March 2020, I’ve been focused on experimenting with Pinterest. In between 9 March and 16 March, I was able to grow my Pinterest impressions from 30k to 130k and in this article I plan to tell you how in a way that you can use Pinterest to get results for yourself.

I’m really enjoying Pinterest and it’s likely that if you’re here, you’re interested in getting results from it too. Starting in 2018, I had dabbled in Pinterest. I started making pins back when a company called “Boardbooster” was commonly used for automation, but when they were shut down, I didn’t transition well, and I kind of “lost my fire” per se.

One reason I lost my fire is because:

• I didn’t know how Pinterest worked
• I didn’t know how to measure my results from Pinterest
• I was simply investing my time and energy without getting results I could see
• and I had alot more conversion optimization to do on my site to get optimal sales (but I won’t be talking much about that here)

I don’t want you to have that same experience, which is why I’m sharing my new results with you, and I’ll also share the strategies that helped me to get there.

How Pinterest Works in 2020

One thing that’s really important to note is that Pinterest recently underwent a major algorithm change. Creators had become very set in their ways, and would reuse content over and over again. Pinterest recently came down hard on that. They want to see new and fresh content.

As a result of the new algorithm update, many people got discouraged and gave up.

In contrast, I decided to “give Pinterest what they want” and create new content and new pins every day. In fact, I was creating 5 or more new pins whenever I published a new post, and 5 new pins for my old posts, so with all of my 400+ blog posts, I have a lot of pins I can create!

My Current Publishing Schedule

Pinterest rewards creators with traffic, so you have to be churning out new content. When you create new blog posts and put new pins out, they will show them to your followers first, then push them out further (depending on the engagement from your followers).

Prior to investing time with Pinterest, I had been publishing blog posts here at least two days per week, but I didn’t start out that way. I started this blog with a 90-day challenge where I was writing one blog post daily, and I kept extending that challenge until it lasted almost my entire first year!

After I’d established a steady flow of traffic on my site from search engines, then I followed the same 90-day challenge on Youtube, and produced one video every day, then I extended that challenge for almost another year.

Now, I have lots of content on my blog and on Youtube. I publish twice per week here and three times per week on Youtube. With that said, I get a steady flow of traffic from search engines and from Youtube, but I wanted more.

How Pinterest Sparked my Attention Again

In February, the live training theme at Wealthy Affiliate was Pinterest Marketing. We had four weeks of live lessons where we were taught about:

• How Pinterest works
• How to design pins
• Pinterest Analytics
• How Pinterest can impact your site Traffic
• How to measure Pinterest results
• How to run ads
• What types of goals you should have
• And, I could tell the platform would be one I’d enjoy

Attendees got to ask their questions to a seasoned affiliate marketer, and I walked away with lots of great insight and enthusiasm. In addition to attending the live training at Wealthy Affiliate, a course I purchased a long time ago by Paul Scrivens had been updated to reflect the Pinterest algorithm changes, and Create and Go did a live event talking about the updates.

I was bombarded by people saying how Pinterest is changing and how it’s more possible than ever to get results there. I decided to look back at the results I was getting when I was putting effort into Pinterest, and I found it was paying off passively month-over-month. In fact, I was getting 30,000 impressions on my Pinterest profile without logging on for months!

As a result, I thought, “If I’m getting 500-1000 visitors to my website without logging on, I bet I could get thousands of visitors if I invest effort”. With that hypothesis, I decided to do a 90-day Pinterest challenge, and assess afterwards if the amount of effort I’d invested was feasible long-term, and if it moved the needle and made my traffic rise or not.

My 90-Day Pinterest Challenge

I told you my publishing schedule. As an entrepreneur, I still have bookkeeping, customer support, taxes, and other things to handle as well, which is why it’s important to manage my tasks well. I knew that adding additional tasks COULD take away from my primary tasks that are already working and causing my business to grow, but I decided not to let an experiment take away from the tasks that have already been proven to work FOR ME.

Other people are seeing results from Pinterest, but I didn’t want to fall victim to “shiny object syndrome” where I’m chasing results because other people have them. I know that can go bad.

I was seeing some results, but I committed to sustaining my previous tasks and pushing myself harder by adding Pinterest in addition to everything else. I use Trello for task management, so I have a basic recipe of what I need to do in my business to get the results I have. Since I want to get more results, I decided that I need to work harder, then re-evaluate what tasks are driving 80% of the results later.

If you’re interested in managing the tasks in your marketing plan better, you can download my editorial calendar template here to manage your tasks the same way!

My Pinterest Challenge meant that I’d be:

• Observing successful pinners in my niche and making my own version of successful designs
• Publishing 8-12 blog posts per month
• Publishing 12 or more Youtube videos per month
• Publishing 5 pins for each new piece of content
• Repin 30+ pins daily or 900 repins monthly
• Boosting pins with $100 in the first month and equal or higher thereafter
• and, I’d use “extra time” to make 5 new pins for content that’s already been published

I committed to making at least 100 new pins per month and optimizing them for Pinterest SEO. Within one week of creating content that’s in demand, publishing pins to Pinterest, and boosting some pins, I was seeing results–that’s when I decided to be more efficient to amplify my results. I went from 30,000 impressions to 130,000 impressions, and I had barely touched my ad spend!

How I Improved my Efficiency on Pinterest

Within one week of publishing onto Pinterest with the native scheduler, I was noticing that:

• Some publishing times do better than others
• You can only publish out 2 weeks
• I’d be on Pinterest a lot to publish 100 or more pins and 900 repins manually
• and I felt the Pinterest analytics was limited

As a result, I decided to sign up for the annual membership to Tailwind. I manually pin my original content directly to Pinterest, and schedule all resharing and repinning with Tailwind–this has made my process so much more efficient. It’s also much easier to find relevant and high-quality content to reshare within the tribes.

Added to that, Pinterest doesn’t show share counts, but the algorithms reward accounts with high numbers of repins. If you share lots of pins that don’t get repins, then you’re growth is slower because Pinterest seems to note that you’re pinning content that people aren’t interested in.

With Tailwind, you can see the number of reshares, so you can knowingly share content that’s in high demand, or make a well-informed decision when taking risks on content that’s not proven yet. Since getting started with Tailwind, my # of impressions has skyrocketed even more! At the time of this writing, my Pinterest impressions has went up by 389% and my audience engagement has went up 321%!

Disclaimer: These results are my own, but these don’t represent what normal Tailwind users are able to achieve. If you’re interested in what normal Tailwind users are able to accomplish, check out what Tailwind has published about the typical results of their users.

Answering Commonly Asked Questions About Pinterest

After one month of conscious pinning to Pinterest and watching how my actions influence my Analytics, I’ve learned quite a bit. I still have more to learn, of course, but I can answer some commonly asked questions like…

Do monthly viewers really matter?

Yes and no. Monthly viewers is an important metric IF you’re views correlate with your engagement and traffic to your site. Pinterest counts how many impressions are coming to your content and the content you’re resharing on your account as a combined number, which means the number of views on your content will be significantly less than the monthly viewer number.

If you repin high-quality content, then it can boost the Pinterest algorithm by demonstrating that you know your niche, or you’re conscious of pinning what other people would like. When you’re pinning good and relevant content, then it kinda boosts your authority with Pinterest, your profile is promoted more, you attract people interested in the same niche, you gain followers, and when you post your own content, it’s shown to more people.

More visibility to your profile should translate to more traffic to your site, but that’s only possible if the topics your creating pins about are in high demand, and your pins are just as good as the pins that are getting the reshares and repins. If everything lines up, then a high number of monthly viewers will translate into more engagement and clicks on your pins.

What do Pinterest impressions really mean?

Impressions is a common metric used on social media and search platforms. It tells you how often people have seen your post or pin in their results. For example, when you search on Pinterest, several pins show up and your can be one of them. When your pin is shown in someone’s feed or search result–that’s an impression.

In your monthly viewers, Pinterest counts how many impressions you’ve gotten on your content and adds that together with how many impressions your repins have gotten as well. It’s important to go deeper into your Pinterest Analytics to see how many impressions the content that leads to your conversion goals is having.

Google tells you how many impressions your content has had in their search results in your Google Search Console. Facebook analytics shows you this information as well.

When your content is shown to a targeted audience, it should get engagement of some sort if:

• It solves a problem
• The content is high quality
• and it’s shown at the right time

Pinterest tells you impression numbers (like other platforms do). If you have results from other platforms, it might be helpful for you to look at how many impressions you were getting there in order to get the results you have.

For example, since I already had results on Google, I decided to shoot for the same # of impressions and click thru rate in Pinterest as my goal because I assumed the amount of traffic from Pinterest might correlate to the amount of traffic I’d get from Google if I achieved that. If you don’t have results on other platforms, then you can take some training on Pinterest, and look at other Pinterest accounts that are getting results, and make hypothesis based on the results they’re sharing.

Can you get the same results manually?

Some people are able to get great results on Pinterest by pinning manually, but I’m not aware of anyone that’s getting the same results by manual pinning as the Tailwind users are getting. People using Tailwind are having exponential growth because they’re given more insight, more detailed analytics, and optimized publishing times.

How often should you pin?

Like all online platforms, they reward consistency FIRST, and you can read the Pinterest recommendations on content posting frequency here. Like I illustrated in this article, I’ve always started out with brute force and I like to do 90-day challenges. It helps to build the new habits, it helps to analyze compounding results, and it gets the algorithms and bots aware of what type of content you’ll be publishing at a quicker pace.

For this reason, I always make my challenges based on as much as I think I can consistently accomplish, and I’d recommend the same for you. If you work a job or have kids, and you’ll be doing this on the side, then you may want to take the challenge I did and subtract a few tasks from it.

Can brute force pinning (like you are) get you banned?

Pinterest has clear guidelines on what can and cannot be pinned. They also clearly say they want fresh content rather than creators to repeatedly repin their own content.

On the other hand, Pinterest as a search and discovery engine is still being tweaked and improved. As a result, some pins won’t get classified or understood by the Pinterest bots unless you repin them to boards that help Pinterest to understand what the content is about better. There is a fine line between repinning and spamming, and that’s why it’s helpful to automate repinning using a software like Tailwind that will warn you if you’re violating policies, so you know before you’re banned what you did wrong.

Brute force pinning seems to be the best option because it signals Pinterest about what’s good content and it tells them more about you as a pinner and contributor to the platform.

The Tailwind and Pinterest partnership seems quite close-knit. They meet and make sure their software helps users to abide by posting guidelines. 

From experimenting with Tailwind, I could see that when I try posting more than 40 times per day, that’s when I’d start to get spam warnings, however, I’m not sure if that rule is universal, or if it was due to my previous posting patterns.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m very happy with my results on Pinterest, and I look forward to helping more people, gaining more reach, and getting sales from Pinterest. I’ve had a lot of fun using the platform, learning from other posts, and sharing my own. The community there is full of ideas and information, so that alone can be life-changing (even if you only use it for personal growth).

As a business owner that is looking to help people grow, Pinterest is a great tool for providing insight and helping others. Being empathetic and helping others is the first step to making sales, so seeing that potential on Pinterest is a really good sign.

I’m glad I’ve taken more note of it. If you’re looking to get more customers and sales with Pinterest, I recommend you check out:

• The Tailwind software and training resources they offer (my #1 recommendation for Pinterest)
• The Pinterest Marketing Training at Wealthy Affiliate (my #1 recommendation for overall digital marketing training and software)
• and Create and Go’s Pinterest Avalanche

If have more questions about how I was able to grow my Pinterest impressions or traffic, leave them in the comments below and I’ll get back with you.

If you have tips to help others grow on Pinterest, definitely share them! I’d love to hear.