My Pinterest traffic exploded!

I hit 1.1 million monthly views on Pinterest before my 6^th month blogging birthday.

This happened with less than 20 posts, and in less than a month. I’m here to give some inspiration to the new bloggers in town.

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My blog stated out strong. My second month blogging I hit over 10K page views on my website and over 360K monthly viewers on Pinterest. It only had 5 blog posts. When I found out I was getting all this traffic, I was on vacation in LA. I didn’t know what to do.

During this time, I didn’t have Tailwind set up or have Google Analytics. I wasn’t in any Pinterest group boards or Facebook groups. I didn’t even try SEO tactics!

Nevertheless, I was able to maintain that traffic going into my 3^rd month of blogging. I continue to add more posts and pins and eventually signed up for Tailwind at the end of my 3^rd month. I did, however, take the Make Money Blogging course and followed all of the traffic methods in that course.

But as all good things must come to an end, so did my stamina.

Everything died down going into my 4^th month including all of my traffic. I almost gave up. It was hard balancing mom life, teacher life, and now blogger life all at the same time. I was defeated and knew my motivation was to blame.

Working full time with blogging was difficult, especially as a special education teacher. I had IEP’s and progress reports to write. This meant a lot of meetings.

And for the first time, I had duties as a co-curricular leader for my department. I used all my free time at home to lesson plan, correct papers, and meet the needs of my students; I was overwhelmed.

Somehow I had to get back to that fire I had when I started my blog.

I begin to go through a reflection process that consisted of these things:

I started writing in a personal journal. This is something I’ve done on and off throughout my life since I was 9 years old.

I prayed. I asked God to help me find the time. I didn’t want to be frustrated with myself when I didn’t make time to fulfill my goals. Sometimes you just need a little talk with God.

I printed out blogging planners. These were from various bloggers. At first, I was really against this because I always thought I had it all figured out. I don’t know why I thought this.

Overall, I didn’t want to be personally responsible for another planner. I already use 2 planners for work. But boy did this make a difference in the direction I wanted my blog to go. It also led me to see my blogging future.

I filled 10 months of blogging content with an editorial calendar and mapped out all my daily blogging duties. I was surprised I had almost a year of ideas just waiting to be written.

I made a blogging schedule. I scheduled myself just 2 hours a day just to blog. Usually, I would spend this time in bed watching TV until I fell asleep. Not anymore!

I educated myself. I bought more blogging courses to fill out my area of weakness

On my way to 1.1 million monthly viewers!

For my 4^th month of blogging and into my 5^th, I added a new post every week. I already had a few ideas that I was pre-writing in my mind-my usual process so it was easy to write quick posts.

Then I made at least 2 Pinterest pins. I posted and promoted on Twitter blog trains. Twitter is kind of sleeping giant for bloggers believe it or not. I used Twitter since 2010 so I’m used to how it works. It can bring in viewers and for me, that is all that matters.

Next, I promoted on various blogging Facebook groups I’m in. I don’t have my own group and I haven’t had my own personal Facebook account since 2012 so this is fresh ground only for my blogging world.

Finally, I utilized Tailwind as I never had before. I organized my board lists and made specific niche related boards.

I’m not a part of many Pinterest boards or Tailwind Tribes and when I received my 10K page views blogging my 2^nd month in, I wasn’t a part of any boards or Tailwind at all.

However, this time, I promoted to the Tribes I am in and decided to fully fill my Tailwind scheduler to at least 50 pins daily. I would also manually pin here and there after all my scheduled pins were already submitted for the day, this was usually around 10 pm.

One tip that I think is extremely important was that I made it very apparent to post other content from Pinterest more than ever to fill out my daily scheduler. I tried to follow the 80/20 rule. 80% my content to 20% other Pinterest content.

I also made it a focus to not repin my “viral” content from Pinterest to Tailwind. This will make it seem like a fresh pin with no views. I wanted all my pins to look hot or have some sort of virality. I repinned only those pins from Pinterest that I noticed that were just making the “rounds”…which to me they didn’t have a lot of pins.

I continued to monitor my growth daily to see the gains I was making. I went from virtually no page views (less than 40 a day) to over 1000 and now averaging around 600 a day. My Pinterest monthly viewers are consistently resting at 1.1 million monthly viewers.

I’ve been playing around with Tailwind to find how much I should be pinning too and with a lot of trial and error, I found that 50 pins a day seem to be my sweet spot. I’ve also been trying to work manual pinning and various ideas from bigger bloggers.

**Update- This “trial and error” now has my Pinterest monthly viewers less than 1 million but it topped out at to 1.2 million monthly viewers at the most.

My goal is to have steady 1000 pages views a day and I hope to achieve this within the 1^st quarter of the year. I was able to reach 15K pageviews to my blog with all the new traffic from Pinterest. That was an increase of 12K from the previous month!

I will continue to publish weekly content and follow the same pinning techniques and social media promotions. I will keep everyone posted on my future with blogging.

Using Pinterest in 2020

It’s cool to see your Pinterest monthly views soar to over a million but the truth is, that doesn’t take in account what your true pageviews are to your blog.

After blogging now for slightly over 2 years, this are some things I have done differently:

• Stop using Tailwind. Yes Tailwind was awesome for the first 18 months of my blogging life, but after I qualified for Mediavine after a year, I didn’t need Tailwind much anymore. I decided to drop down a pro level and when I noticed that my traffic didn’t change and even went up, I then got rid of it all together.

• Pin new pins daily. I’m not pinning 20 pins a day anymore. I now pin just 2-3 NEW pins a day, about 10 new pins a week. Although my monthly viewers on Pinterest is down, my followers are up and my blog pageviews are steady. I also focus more on pinning my own content and not so much of others.

• Make new content. Instead of blogging just a couple times of month, I started blogging more consistently up to a couple times a week. People like new content especially if it can help them.

• SEO. I’m glad I started working on SEO early in my blog and I’ve been continuing to be more intentional about keywords and tailoring my content to what people are searching for.

Final Thoughts

Pinterest is still the way to go for gaining traffic to your blog fast, simple, and easy. I accredited it to my success my first couple months of blogging and being accepted into Mediavine 12 months after starting out.

If you would like to start your blog please check out my start a blog post.

Also, if you are just starting your blog, this blogging course is great for beginners!

Let me know if you had any recent success with Pinterest as well or if there is anything I can help you achieve comment below and I can help!