UPDATE OCTOBER 2018 – the experiment continues – read on to the bottom of this article where I am giving away a Pinterest account makeover…
At the end of April
So two months ago ago I wrote about how I had decided to try marketing my blog on Pinterest, as Facebook is becoming more and more disappointing.
Research suggested that I needed to use Tailwind so I bought a course, invested in the software & got going with it. So I began at the beginning of April with about 1,300 followers, 1,405 monthly unique viewers and 32 monthly engaged viewers. And one or two of them per month were coming to my site. Not a great place, but I guess you have to start somewhere!
When I wrote my first post at the end of April, I was excited to have got to 5,704 monthly unique viewers, 104 engaged viewers and a total of 13 that had visited Mums the Boss, my highest month ever for Pinterest viewers.
To be honest I was delighted with that and detemined to carry on with the project.
And things kept getting better in May, until, on or around May 23rd this happened!
One of my pins took off and got shared…..and the viewers started to come. On 20th May and prior to that I had approximately 4,000 pin impressions on a good day – by 24th May, I had topped 50,000, and I passed the 100,000 daily impressions mark on 31st May and the 150,000 mark on 1st June.
At the end of May I had 1,447 followers, 254,000 monthly unique viewers, 6,389 engaged viewers and a total of 435 that had visited Mums the Boss from Pinterest during the month.
By the 4th June, I already had 433 visitors for the month to date, and as at 20th June 2018 I have had 1,871 visitors to my website from Pinterest.
Update total visitors to my site from Pinterest in September 2018 were 8,387!!!
I certainly could not have believed figures like that back in April when I began using Tailwind.
736,000 monthly unique viewers and 29,400 engaged viewers!
Update – as at October 2018 I have 2.6 million monthly unique viewers and 118,400 monthly engaged viewers
I’m finding this a little hard to believe too – you can check where it has got to when you read this by looking at my profile – Mum’s the Boss on Pinterest.
So what have I been doing? Funnily enough not exactly what I was taught in my course.
I’ve done some stuff by the book and some I’ve made up as I go along, and now I find out from Elena at Twins Mommy that the book has changed slightly & Pinterest is rewriting the rules as we speak.
So here from my own experience is what is working right now:
1: Using Tailwind
Seriously, using Tailwind to schedule 50-100 pins a day has been an amazing find for me. You can schedule a whole load of images from one blog post to a few of your boards, then schedule a whole load of other stuff from different people to different boards, then finally mix the whole lot up by shuffling your queue so your posts do not end up all squashed up together.
If you haven’t tried Tailwind yet then I can’t recommend it highly enough. Like every other Tailwind user I have an affiliate link with which I can give you a free month and a credit when you sign up to the paid programme – my link is here – Try Tailwind Now
When I get a moment I will do a few videos to show you exactly how I use Tailwind to schedule my posts – you will be amazed at how quick and easy it is to grab and post 50 pins every day.
2: Post Size and Format
Up until very recently it was definitely the case that Pinterest preferred really tall images compared to normal shaped ones. And it seemed that Pinterest preferred posts with a graphic style and a whole load of fancy lettering.
I was steeling myself to make these lookalike type pins for all my blog posts once I got the basics sorted, but then the pin I had which first went nearly viral was this one, which is neither tall nor fancy……
That one completely outperformed this one which I designed for the same blog post….
I’ve since had it confirmed that Pinterest are definitely moving away from favouring the long pins (hot off the press in June 2018) and they now want people to start using Square pins, or a maximum of 1.5 times taller than they are wide.
Pinterest recommends 600×900 or 600×600 as perfect sizes and does not want anything longer than 600×1200.
3: Group boards
I have joined a couple of group boards and started one of my own too https://www.pinterest.co.uk/mumsthebossblog/the-blogging-mums-club/ which you can join if you are a mum blogger – jjust follow it, follow me and send me a message.
But I can honestly say that I am having much more success with stuff pinned to my own boards than I am with group boards, so I am now making lots of new boards and specialising them a bit so I have more places to pin my stuff.
So, in the food line, I now have Recipes, Healthy eating, Smoothies and Breakfasts and I plan to add more food related boards as I start to publish recipes in different categories.
The latest news from Pinterest in June 2018 is that this is a thing they are paying attention to, and posts on your own individual boards will probably be ranked higher than posts on group boards going forward.
4: Paying Attention to Analytics
I’ve been paying a lot of attention to my Analytics to see what’s been working, studying the Tailwind stats, Pinterest Analytics and Google Analytics.
I’ve pinned all kinds of photos from all kinds of blog posts and I’ve been looking carefuly to see what sticks, what people share and what they click on and read..
In my case the conclusions are clear. Even though I think that Mum’s the Boss is about helping people to run businesses from home, it is very clear that the subject that my Pinterest viewers want to see more of, are posts about healthy eating and particularly recipes.
So, I plan to do more of those alongside my other stuff, in order to appeal to my new Pinterest market.
I’m quite happy, at the end of the day my family needs to eat, mums running businesses from home still need to feed their families while they work, and health is definitely a good thing. If the food posts bring people to my blog, and they then stay to read the start a business stuff, then who am I to complain?
More viewers is more viewers, and that will attract more advertisers, so as far as I see it, it’s win-win for me, and hopefully makes the blog more interesting.
On the other hand, maybe the conclusion that I have to draw from this is that food posts can get away with photos of just the food, but to make my business posts stand out I will have to dress them up with fancy cover pages, keywords and graphics. Or maybe just make the posts better…..That’s an experiment for the next few months.
In conclusion, I can definitely say that after nearly 3 months, Pinterest has grown from being a totally insignificant part of my blog traffic to something that is growing fast and showing great potential. So this Tailwind experiment will continue, and I will keep you posted…
Please take a look at my latest posts
I’m currently using PinPinterest for my 4 accounts and by far this is the best tool I ever discovered for my pinterest. I have never used any tool as powerful as PinPinterest before. The results I got were steady, legit, safe and most importantly automated. The best part about this tool is that it runs on cloud storage and there is no need to download any software on your pc. You just need to provide information to PinPinterest of what you want or to be scheduled which takes very few couple of minutes and once you are done logout, close your browser or even turn your computer off and enjoy your day PinPinterest will be your assistant and will do the whole work for you at the right time for better results.
There seem to be quite a few people using PinPinterest at the moment, and it does promise a lot, but I will stick with Tailwind, as it is one of a very few companies that are approved partners of Pinterest (the other 2 are Hootsuite and Buffer). With the recent collapse of Boardbooster, which was also popular, I am going to stick to the approved ones.
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