How To Dominate Pinterest As A Blogger + How To Make A Pin Go Viral

I love using Pinterest to find new recipes that I may or may not get to, outfit inspiration, cute puppies, and of course blogging tips. Pinterest is one of my favorite social media outlets, and it's where more than half of my blog traffic comes from. If you're not utilizing it for your blog, you should go right now and start! Over the past few months I've been testing different things on the site to see what works, and what doesn't. I've recently had a few posts go viral as well, so I thought now would be a great time to share some tips.

Join Pinterest Group Boards

Unfortunately there isn't a way to search specifically for group boards on Pinterest. However, if you search for your niche and then select search specifically under "Boards" and scroll through, you'll see some with a little gray symbol at the top corner. If you click through to the board, there should be instructions on how to join if  it's accepting new pinners. If you join specific groups that are relevant to your blog and reciprocate by pinning other posts in their niche, it can help make others aware of what you're writing.

Use BoardBooster

I cannot stress how crucial BoardBooster was to my Pinterest growth. It's a pin scheduler that allows you to pin things to secret boards and spread them out over a few hours. This can save you a lot of time during the week if you're available for an hour to pin a solid amount of content which can last through rest of the week. I normally have my scheduling set to 3 or 4 pins per board starting early in the morning and going until mid-day until I can pin things myself if I have free time. This is helpful because it also prevents your followers from getting annoyed if you have multiple pins in a row and you're the only person they're seeing on their feed. Also, if you're scheduling pins evenly throughout the day it will open up that content and your profile to new viewers, thus leading to more pageviews on your profile and blog.

Have a Board For Your Blog

This is such a simple thing that many bloggers don't think about. Even if you put your blog's url in your profile description it's important that you have a board dedicated to your blog posts. It's also important to consistently pin blog posts directly from your blog into that board. I typically use that original pin as the starting point of pinning that same content to other relevant boards. By pinning the content from your blog board to other boards, it will eventually lead all those re-pins back to the board that has your blog name and url. This means that people who trace the origins of your pin will run into your other posts as well and hopefully will either repin or visit your site! 

Apply For A Business Account And Rich Pins

If you look on my "The Classic Brunette" board on Pinterest, you'll see that each pin has a bolded title, a url source, as well as a description on what the image/post is about. These type of pins are called rich pins, and can provide extra information, and make them look more appealing to click on. These pins easily stand out amongst the "regular" pins, and are a great extra tool  when you verify your website. I'm not 100% sure if you need a business account to apply for rich pins, but either way applying for this type of account is one of the best things I did for my Pinterest! Business accounts get you access to analytics for how many views your account and pins are getting, as well as how many of those viewers are interacting with you and your website. If you take one piece of advice from this post I would hope it's this, because having access to these analytics is crucial for understanding which pins are doing well, and how to improve the pins that aren't performing as best as they can.

Vertical Pins Are King

My pins are always vertical. My go to pixel size is 650 x 1000, however evidence shows that the best pins are closer to 700 x 1100. It all depends on your preference, because my dimensions work best for me and my blog, but yours may work with something else. No matter the dimensions though, they should be on the larger side and always vertical. Vertical pins statistically do better and stand out more (aka take up more room on your homepage) than other pins, and will get your content noticed. Once I made the move to have all my pins vertical my analytics skyrocketed! 

How To Get A Pin To Go Viral

Promote, promote promote. My most successful pin has over 45k repins. I never expected to have something go over 100 repins, let alone thousands! I credit the success of this pin (and a few others that have gone "viral") to both the tips above, but also to the amount of promotion that I did with them. I repinned these few pins to as many relevant boards as possible, promoted on other social media, told bigger bloggers who I got inspiration from about it, and continued to promote the pin every few weeks so that it didn't fall out of circulation. I think it is 100% okay to re-pin your own pins every so often, because there could be a number of your followers who didn't get a chance to interact with that specific pin the first time around. If you actively promote the pins you're proud of, and do it in a strategic way that takes your analytics into account, you can bring success to a pin. However, there definitely is a point of over-promotion, so don't re-pin things constantly because it will annoy your followers!

Do you have any pinterest tips that you swear by? Also, apologies for how long this post is!