It seems like having a Pinterest strategy is all you ever hear about online. Pinterest can be a real head scratcher for new bloggers. It sure was for me. I had this love hate relationship with Pinterest. I was seeing all the traffic Pinterest was bringing other bloggers and I wanted in on that action!

Even before I used Pinterest for blogging, I was using it for food, decorating and natural health. I’d scroll for hours curating all these gorgeous images and ideas on how to naturally heal any kind of ailment and delicious vegan, gluten free, sugar free dishes that somehow managed not to taste like cardboard. How on Earth was this Pinterest thing going to generate traffic for my blog?

Pinterest Strategy

My Pinterest Strategy consisted of creating new boards and pinning other people’s stuff. I pinned thousands of things, but why wasn’t it working? Pinterest you mysterious bitch! Why won’t you bring me any traffic???

Does my Pinterest story sound familiar? Well if it does, never fear, we are about to make that bitch Pinterest your bitch with a Pinterest strategy.

Lets start with some Pinterest basics because that’s where the magic of your Pinterest strategy begins. I’m not going to tell you to make a business account or to enable rich pins, those are important and definitely the basics but I’m guessing you’ve already done that. I’m going to give you the other basics.

Pinterest Likes Fresh Pins

What is a fresh pin you may ask? A fresh pin is a new pin with fresh new content. I’ve found the best way to have a fresh pin every day is to make two new blog posts a week and make 3 or 4 pins for each post. Then you have a fresh pin for every single day of the week.

Update Old Blog Posts

You may not be able to create two blog posts every single week. If you can’t create a new post on certain weeks, just update an older blog post. You can go back to old blog posts and proof read them again. You’re probably going to find some type-O’s that you can fix or at the very least a better way to say something. Then, you can add more content to the older post to freshen it up.

If you have a blog post that is a year old or older those posts could probably use an update. Things change and we grow and learn new stuff all of the time. This is a great tip to use for your Pinterest strategy.

After you update that old post with some fresh ideas and some new spell check, change the date your post was published to the date you are updating it and ooh la la you have just served some fresh content for a fresh pin.

Make Pretty Pinnable Pins

The triple P of pinning is to create a pretty pinnable pin. Say that three times fast! I used to make some butt ugly pins. The content was good but the pins were horrible. I didn’t get many repins but amazingly I did get some.

I have a background in art and you think I could make a good pin? Ha! That just goes to show you, no matter who you are or what talents you have pretty pinnable pins take some work.

What makes a pin pretty and pinnable for your Pinterest strategy? I’m glad you asked. Pinterest likes a 2:3 ratio. Basically, that means pins should be rectangular. You don’t want super-long rectangles because those super long pins can get truncated. You don’t want to spend all kinds of work on a pin just to have half of it cut off.

The Perfect Sized Pin

The perfect size pin right now in 2021 is 600 x 900 px. However, you can play around with some longer pins like 600 x 1290 px. Those two sizes are safe and you won’t have to worry about your pins being truncated.

What Makes a Pin Pretty?

So now that we know what size to make our pins for our Pinterest strategy we need to figure out how to make them pretty. The best way to figure out what a pretty pin is to go to your Pinterest feed and look at other pins. Which ones catch your eye?

An ugly pin can have a catchy headline and it will still catch your eye but a catchy headline and a pretty pin? That will be a totally pinnable pretty pin! I’m not telling you to copy other people’s pins. But you can get inspiration and use your own branded fonts and colors to make a beautiful pin for your Pinterest strategy.

The best way to find color combos is to study color palettes. You can go to Lowes or Home Depot and take some paint swatches for inspiration. If you want to do some color research for your Pinterest strategy at home check out Color Combos.

Color Combos does just what their name says, it gives you color combos that work well together and so much more.

Use a Pin Template

If you struggle to make pins a pin template may be for you. I have some pin templates coming soon to my shop that is fully customizable. A pin template can amp up your Pinterest strategy. You never have to be haunted by ugly pins if you use a professional template.

If you really don’t like creating pins yourself due to time constraints or it’s just not something you enjoy a template may be perfect for you and your Pinterest strategy. Why waste your time an energy creating pins when you can use your other talents to do something else productive?

If you are blessed in the pin creation realm you can even go ahead and create your own Pinterest template. At the very least your Pinterest template can be branded with your URL and that’s one less thing that you have to do each time you make a pin. Because let’s face if you have any kind of Pinterest strategy, you’re going to be making thousands of pins throughout your blogging career.

Use Pinterest for Your Keyword Research

If you want to make Pinterest work for you, you have to be strategizing with a Pinterest strategy from the very beginning. Before you even write a blog post, use Pinterest to do your keyword research. What is keyword research? Keyword research is optimizing your blog post with a keyword or keywords for search engines. Pinterest is really just a visual search engine. So before you write your blog post you may as well optimize it where you want to be found, Pinterest.

If people are already searching for what you want to blog about they are more than likely going to be pinning your pin.

Take Your Topic To The Search Bar

The first thing to do with your Pinterest keyword research for your Pinterest strategy is to take that topic you are thinking about writing and head up to the search bar on Pinterest.

So for example, I typed in “blog”. Pinterest suggested blogging for beginners and blog post ideas for the first two suggestions. Those are great keywords for your Pinterest strategy! People are searching for those keywords so maybe I want to make a post called “Blogging For Beginners – How to Create a Blog” or something like that. Those are loaded keywords I can use to write my blog post.

Pin Description

Once I create my pin, I can use this same Pinterest strategy to write my pin description. If I’m creating pins that have a topic that no one cares about, no one is going to pin my pin.

When you don’t already have a blog post in mind, Pinterest can tell you what’s trending. If a topic is already trending you can create a blog post that is in demand. To find out what’s trending go to the Pinterest search bar on the home page and click on it. A drop down menu will appear with trending ideas.

As you can see, Inspirational Quotes appear to be the number one trending search on Pinterest today. I do a lot of inspirational quotes so this would be perfect for me. A nice info-graphic would be give me some fresh content ideas. If you can find a way to incorporate what’s trending into your pins do it!

Make Money With Pins

Another way to make Pinterest work for you is to make money directly from your pins. To make some money with Pinterest you can use affiliate marketing links right on your pins. Not all of your pins need to go directly to your website. Your pin can link directly to your affiliate links.

You can make money through selling your own products and linking to your store or shop. You can advertise and sell your coaching services or your courses all with a pin.

Remember how I told you that I used to browse Pinterest for hours looking for food, decorating and natural health? When I was looking for something and when I would find a pin that would direct me to where I was looking, I’d buy it. I’m not alone in this.

Because Pinterest is a visual search engine people are always buying things directly from it. You’ve probably purchased from Pinterest yourself and that’s a great Pinterest strategy!

Pin Consistently with Tailwind

Pinning consistently was my biggest problem when I first started pinning. I had no idea how to be strategic with my pinning. I’d just pin here and there and mostly just other people’s content and not really any of my own.

Now, because of Tailwind I’m able to schedule out my pins for weeks in advance. You can pin your own pins or other peoples pins all on a schedule with Tailwind.

Tailwind Tribes

My favorite part about tailwind is their tribes feature. What exactly are Tailwind Tribes? Tailwind tribes are where you share your pins with other tribemates whom are bloggers. Because you are part of a tribe your pins get seen and shared creating a much better chance of your pins being seen by even more pinners and multiplying your reach on Pinterest.

Tribes have rules. One tribe I belong to their rule is for every one of your own pins you post in the tribe you need to post two pins from your tribemates. Each tribe has their own set of rules which are posted clearly under each tribe.

If you don’t already have Tailwind you can use my referral link and get a free month of Tailwind which will cause you to up your Pinterest game.

I have had tribes for quite some time, but like I said earlier I was pretty clueless how to use it. Now that I feel like I’ve finally somewhat mastered Pinterest, because I’m really starting learn how to make Pinterest work for me. I’m getting more shares and creating much prettier pins. Nobody hardly pinned any of my stuff before and now I’m consistently getting repins and shares.

I made the changes I outlined here and because of those changes I am finally tarting to get some traction on Pinterest.

This is just the tip of the Pinterest iceberg but most importantly, I hope you learned some new tips to make Pinterest work for you.

That was a lot of information so lets Recap the Pinterest strategy:

• Pin Fresh Pins – 7 new pins a week tied to two new or repurposed blog posts.
• Make pretty pinnable images.
• Use a pin template. If you don’t want to make your own, you can buy a ready made template from my shop.
• Use Pinterest for your keyword research because then you will be ahead of the SEO game.
• Monetize some of your pins with affiliate links, your own products, services or courses.
• Pin Consistently using tailwind and get your pins noticed!

Follow me on Pinterest and let me know in the comments if this helped you with your own Pinterest strategy. Stay tuned because I no longer have a love hate relationship with Pinterest so there will be more Pinterest posts coming your way!