There are many facts and tips about Pinterest traffic generation and marketing success floating around. Some of them are true and it is good to follow them. Other tips are old and simply will not work anymore. But some of the facts and tips about Pinterest marketing have the power to seriously hurt your marketing success.
The hard truth about Pinterest marketing is that it can be awesome when you get all the bits and pieces of the marketing process right. But Pinterest marketing can be an utter failure if you add just one piece of bad marketing advice to your activity.
I know – because I have fallen for some of the bad tips out there. And seriously, until you understand the Pinterest algorithm and the basics of Pinterest marketing, it is so easy to fall for some of the tactics that can kill your marketing. If you do not know how Pinterest works, you may never know why you are not seeing the success you were looking for. And at the same time, all those blogging gurus promise you that Pinterest is going to be the holy grail of traffic generation for bloggers.
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FREE Step-by-Step Twitter Marketing GuideFREE Pinterest Marketing Ebook
Here are 6 surefire ways to ruin your Pinterest marketing and fail at Pinterest traffic generation.
1. Treat Pinterest as a social network
Pinterest is always listed alongside big SOCIAL networks like Facebook and Twitter. And that makes it easy to assume Pinterest follows the same rules as these social media outlets.
Image Source Shareaholic
But be honest, when was the last time you had a conversation on Pinterest? Do you engage with your followers? Do you believe the key to more reach, repins, and clicks from your pins is “engagement”? You may be up for a surprise.
Pinterest may be a social website – but it follows rules that are much closer to the mechanisms of the Google search algorithm. Keywords play a vital role.
IF you are up for failure, treat Pinterest as a social network…
2. Pinterest is for DIY, Recipes, and Travel – for all other niches go to Twitter
I have heard similar arguments for Twitter: My niche is not on Twitter – or Pinterest. Are you sure about that? I would not be so sure!
Pinterest is growing and it has an immense traffic power – that is one side of the story.
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FREE workbook: CREATE AWESOME BLOG POSTSFREE Beginner's Guide: START A BLOG
Pinterest is also a search engine. People actively look for information on Pinterest. And you may just have the information that people are searching for. Even Google displays some search results from Pinterest.
So if you think your niche is not that big on Pinterest, it may just come down to the fact that your competition is not that big on Pinterest but your audience may well be. You cannot tell just from seeing a ton of recipes and DIY projects.
If you want to miss out on all the Pinterest traffic fun – just ignore it for all the other niches.
3. Pinning more to automatically reach more people
That is simply not the case. While more tweets may just sum up to reaching more people, Pinterest has an algorithm in place that decides which content to show to which people. Posting more dos not necessarily result in reaching more people.
You have to earn your reach on Pinterest. Earning a ton of repins can boost your reach far more than pinning lots of new pins to Pinterest.
The recommended number of daily pins ranges from 30 to 80 – but you should always aim to earn MORE repins than you add pins to Pinterest!
Recommended Pin Frequency
Image Source Louise M
Plus, just pinning thousands of pins to Pinterest has another problem in the long run. Pinterest has a limit of pins that each account is allowed to make. Once you reach 200k pins you cannot pin another pin. That may sound like a lot of pins for now. But you may get there faster than you thought.
Do you want to fail with your Pinterest marketing: just keep pinning more and more pins without questioning your results.
4. Concentrate on more followers for more traffic
For Twitter and Instagram, marketing success is a numbers game: More followers mean more marketing power. (No, I do not mean fake followers. Those are worth nothing but vanity.)
Pinterest marketing success may well be a numbers game, too. But the number that counts the most is certainly not the number of followers.
If you love the follow-unfollow routine to get more followers, don’t invest too much time into it for Pinterest:
- You will not get big results for Pinterest with the follow-unfollow anyway
- You do not need many followers to drive big-time traffic from Pinterest
- Once you get the Pinterest marketing algorithm right, you will earn new followers from sheer magic!
More followers will not hurt your Pinterest marketing but pursuing followers in order to grow traffic from Pinterest may not be your best option.
5. Create “beautifully designed” images – instead of pins
When I first became aware of Pinterest, I loved it. But I was totally intimidated by the need for images. I was also at a total loss as to what I could use as images for our articles.
And the answer would have been so easy:
- Pinterest friendly format
- Background image
- A catchy headline (learn what headlines usually work well)
- Text overlay
- Make sure everything is easily readable
“Beautiful design” was just a concept I could not follow. I have no clue what that actually is.
I wasted so much time on creating ugly infographics, getting frustrated with images. But creating pins or rather some basic pin designs that work well for all our blog posts simply using the headlines or a variant of it – that is something that even I can easily do. So can you!
If you are looking for Pinterest marketing success, don’t get fooled by that useless tip that you need beautifully designed pins.
And just in case you would rather love to use videos on Pinterest, read here how you can succeed with Pinterest video pins.
6. Join multiple group boards to get traffic from Pinterest
This was probably the worst tip I ever got. Using group boards to get more reach for your pins. It looked as if it was working for a time. Until I had all these pins sitting idle on dead group boards. And these pins that never had a chance of reaching any kind of success killed my account for a while.
Group boards have worked for marketing in the past – that is true.
Some group boards still work because they are active and the members repin stuff from the group.
But most group boards are just flooded with pins from marketers. The members have only one thing in mind: Pin more pins. They are not going to repin your pins from the group board. And that is what Pinterest does not want.
Just pinning endless stuff without any results from it is what Pinterest does not like – and certainly will not reward. If you still want to try your luck at group boards, make sure they are on topic – a conglomeration of random pins is definitely not going to show you good results.
Jumping blindly on the group board train will result in total frustration.
So, if the above are all wrong, what do I recommend you should do on Pinterest for traffic success? Here is the short version of what I think you should be doing:
- understand the basics of the Pinterest algorithm
- learn about Pinterest and the similarities to a search engine. Learn about the importance of keywords
- Create some pin designs for your brand
- Learn to create great headlines for marketing – then use these headlines on your pins
- Create on-topic boards for your content
- Earn more repins – pin more – work your way up from there
- Pin strategically instead of blindly!
Do you want to learn more?
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