Wondering how to grow your Pinterest monthly viewers? Spending hours on the app each day, but not moving the needle? Think your following is too small to grow your Pinterest impact?

Heads up – this post contains affiliate links to one of my fav Slow Work tools, Tailwind. If you sign up through my link I’ll receive a small commission – at no extra cost to you – which helps to support my writing and keep this blog free from annoying ads. I was also compensated to create this post, though all opinions are my own. As always, I only share products I actually use and love. Thanks in advance for your support!

In 2019, I grew my Pinterest monthly viewers from 1.7k to 3.5 MILLION.

Yep, you read that right.

In eight short months, I took my teeny tiny Pinterest account with a following of just 500 people and only 1700 monthly views and exploded my monthly viewers to 3.5 million at the peak.

(Oh, and that’s without spending a dime on ads, increasing my followers into the tens of thousands OR spending my entire life chained to the app.)

I did increase my followers – to just over 1000. And that dinky little number rocketed me past heavy hitters in the industry with 60k+ followers and mailing lists with 100s of thousands of names. 

After a year I took a sabbatical from all social media. It took from Christmas to late July for my monthly views to drop below 1 million – even though I did NOTHING active during those six months.

Increasing my Pinterest monthly viewers organically :

• Increased my Pinterest referral traffic to my online shop from 2% to 98% of total referral traffic
• Took my brand new blog from zero views to 5000+ monthly visitors in a matter of months of launching (with only a handful of posts)
• Increased my revenue by 1200% year over year (1200!!)
• Grew a new mailing list from zero to nearly 1000 in a matter of weeks
• Scored me a feature on the website of one of my fav tech companies
• Positioned me as a thought leader in my niche

The best part? I did it all with no ad spend, in about two hours a week.

 

Here’s the thing about social media and Slow Living.

Let’s face it – the two don’t exactly mix. In fact, if you’re not careful, social media can completely derail all your Slow Living goals with one tiny ping from your phone.

BUT, you can’t really run a business or be successful as a modern entrepreneur, especially as a solopreneur, and ignore it completely. (Well, you kinda can, but it’s a carefully choreographed dance that I’ll write about another time.)

Alright, alright I know you’re thinking –

Get to it, woman!!! How the heck did you do it??

Here we go.

 

 

 

How to Grow Your Pinterest Monthly Viewers

1. Focus on the Appropriate Pinterest Metrics
2. Focus on Pin Conversion Stats
3. Create Great Pins
4. Test, Refine, Repeat
5. Use Time Saving Tools for Posting on Pinterest

1) Focus on the Appropriate Pinterest Metrics

Followers count for bunk.

Let go of the vanity metrics. Who CARES if you only have 1000 followers and your competition has 40,000?? If you’ve got 3 million+ monthly viewers and she only has 400,000, those follower numbers mean exactly squat.

Focus on things like views, shares and more importantly, click-throughs. THOSE are the metrics that matter because they actually represent potential bums in seats.

2) Next, Focus on Conversion

So you’re getting views, saves and click-throughs. Great.

What’s happening after they click-through? Are your blog visitors bouncing in a hot minute? Or are they signing up for your mailing list like gang-busters?

At the end of the day, the biggest reason we fall down with fitting social media into our Slow Lifestyles is that we forget what the heck we’re doing it for in the first place.

You MUST measure return on investment for your time and effort or you’ll waste your days doing work that’s not moving the needle.

Obviously I’m assuming you’re here because you want to use Pinterest to support your blog or business. In that case – the numbers that matter need to be sales, sign-ups to your newsletter and views on your blog.

Forget about the rest. They’re nothing but distractions.

3) Create Great Pins

Sometimes I take flack for spending good money on a visual arts degree when I was younger. I never regret it.

I can’t emphasize how important good design is if you want to increase your monthly viewers on Pinterest.

Let’s face it. There’s a lot of hella ugly pins out there.

(Don’t even get me started on people who expand the tracking between letters in cursive fonts. Someone worked really hard to craft that beautiful handwritten font – just – don’t!!)

At the most basic level, a well designed Pin is :

• Clear and Readable. Remember how small pins are when you’re reading them on your phone.
• On-Brand. Use your brand colours and be sure to include your logo or website somehow.
• Engaging. Give your viewers reason to click through and share.

No matter how many of the other steps you’ll take, your never figure out how to grow your Pinterest monthly viewers if you don’t have great quality content.

4) Test, Refine, Repeat

Don’t just chuck your pins out into the world and then cross your fingers.

If you really want to know how to grow your Pinterest monthly viewers, you have to figure out what works for YOUR viewers – and what doesn’t.

Key to my success has been my focus on A/B testing my pins. 

I know that feels kinda – awkward?

Pinterest is something that most of us are used to indulging in as a guilty pleasure, something to kill time while we’re waiting in line at Starbucks or as a virtual daydream – future homes, parties, crafts or cookies we’ll probably end up submitting to a Pinterest Fail blog. I get it.

But if you’re gonna use Pinterest for business, you have to treat it like business. That means testing.

I always create multiple versions of the same pin when I create a product, blog post or opt-in freebie. I change the text, colours, layout and photos. Then I send them out into the world and see what happens.

Pinterest is a great market research tool if you pay attention. Create pins with the same images but different CTAs, try out different blog post titles, then see which ones performs the best.

Adjust, refine and repeat.

That’s how I have pins like the one above that regularly have in the 10s of thousands of views and drive thousands of visitors to my blog each month.

Bonus? You’ll always have lots of fresh content – key to Pinterest’s new algorithm that prioritizes new pins.

It’s not sexy, but damn, it works.

5) Use Time Saving Tools to Grow Your Pinterest Monthly Viewers

Want to use Pinterest for your business AND still want to life the Slow Life?

You need some tools, womxn.

Don’t forget – I’m a full-time Mama to two kids under 10, I own a farm complete with a brick and mortar farm store and in-person workshops (with zero employees over the age of 10), I own and operate a zero-waste soap company, I’m a homesteader AND I write this blog.

My life may be Slow, but it is FULL.

Without Tailwind, Canva and Convertkit, I would have been spending hours upon hours every week chained to my computer instead of out in the garden chasing chickens, snuggling piglets and raising my two young kids.

WITH Tailwind, Canva and Convertkit I’ve been able to run all three businesses and be available when fifteen 300 pound pigs decide to go for a walk-about in my veggie garden.

Seriously, though, Tailwind for Pinterest was a game changer.

Working on a shoestring as I was, I was reluctant to shell out for something I figured I ought to do on my own (you know, fo’ free.)

Listen, that whole – I gotta do everything on my own with only Google and a bottomless cup of espresso to help me – that’s a big ol’ bag of limiting beliefs right there. The moment that I started actually valuing my time and investing in tools to use it wisely, everything changed.

• Tailwind saved me countless hours of mindless pinning for my dream kitchen – er – promoting my products
• It took away the overwhelm : How much should I pin? How often? When? Am I pinning too much? Not enough?
• An entire year’s subscription paid for itself within a matter of weeks 
• Connected me with a community in my niche, helping me both find great content to share and new communities to share mine with
• When I needed help (cause technology + me = ugh) they have ah-MAZ-ing customer service. 
• And last but not least – averted an untold number of domestic disputes (generally involving me ‘splaining how pinning dinosaur cake toppers actually IS work and I therefore am completely justified in not having washed any underpants for tomorrow.)

But don’t take my word for it. Go try it yourself.

Tailwind has a pretty wicked free trial system in that it’s NOT TIME BOUND.

(A common-sense reminder – My results are the kind that make marketing professionals do that screaming ghost emoji face. They aren’t typical. BUT you can see what kind of awesome results are typical for Tailwind Plus for Pinterest users here.)

Sign up for Tailwind today – without forkin’ over your credit card, btw – and you can try out all the features and get your feet wet for FREE while scheduling up to 100 pins on Pinterest. 

There you have it. That’s how I grew my Pinterest monthly viewers by MILLIONS in just a couple hours a week.

As you tuck in – my main advice is to give yourself time to see results.

I put in some pretty solid work for the first few weeks and it took a little while for my pins to gain traction. That is totally normal.

But once you get things rolling, all it will take is regular, weekly attention to keep your momentum. No chaining yourself to the app, no falling down the rabbit hole of non-work-related Pinning, no fist-fights over empty underpant drawers.

Now, I wanna hear from you. What’s your biggest challenge with using Pinterest for business? Drop me a note in the comments below.