The Ultimate Guide To Pinterest Traffic In 2018

Here is your definitive Ultimate Guide to getting and growing Pinterest Traffic in 2018.

I want to make sure you understand:

This is NOT the same rehashed info you have seen in other places.

This is NOT a guide full of theoretical, useless steps.

What you will find inside is battle-tested, working strategies that you can immediately implement and start getting traffic to your blog, niche website or eCom store.

So if you want to finally learn how to get traffic from Pinterest, you're going to love this guide.

Let's get into it.

Pinterest Traffic and Stats

Pinterest is one of the top social networking sites in the world. That’s why I worked hard to get as much Pinterest traffic to my blog as possible.

I’ve had over 223,000 pageviews to my Internet Marketing blog dadshustle.com, most of that traffic coming from Pinterest:

How to get traffic from Pinterest

Does Pinterest traffic convert? Is it high quality traffic?

You bet it is. It’s a growing social media site, with very engaged users who use Pinterest to plan their purchases.

In other words, Pinterest users browse Pinterest looking for things to buy. You understand how powerful it is, right?

Here is the rundown of numbers (according to figures published by Pinterest.com):

Pinterest Traffic Infographics

[xyz-ihs snippet=”Pinterest-Stats-Infographics”]

The best part is you can easily get your own slice of Pinterest audience.

And in this post, I have outlined every single step of my method. The process is simple, it can take a little work on your part to get it going, but the results will be absolutely worth it.

What Are The Best Niches For Pinterest Traffic?

In reality, ALL niches will work. Just like any social networking site, there are millions of people who log into Pinterest daily.

No matter what you’re into, you can find your audience and drive traffic to your site.

Pinterest is amazing for affiliate marketing, building your list, driving traffic to your blog, selling own products, and dropshipping (by the way, if you do dropshipping, don’t forget to check this excellent blog post from the MailMunch Blog with great tips on Shopify dropshipping).

Of course certain niches will do better than others. For example, your potential to get traffic from Pinterest to a wedding dress blog will be much higher than if you have an acne blog. Diseases and other “disgusting” niches don’t do well on Social Media.

The good news is that it leaves you hundreds of other niches that will do really well on Pinterest, for example business, ways to make an extra income, family, babies, relationships, gardening, toys, home decor, pets, weight loss, exercise, diets, recipes (this is not a complete list).

My Pinterest Traffic Method Overview

We’re about to get into the detailed step-by-step process showing how I personally get traffic from Pinterest.

But first I want to make sure you understand the big picture and what we’re going to be doing.

My method relies on something called Pinterest Group Boards. They allow you to leverage the following that others have built, and to market to that following.

Here is an example. Check out this group board. I am one of the contributors to this group board with my blog:

As you can see, this group board has 48,711 followers.

If you get accepted into the group board, that means that you can share your content to this group board by adding your pin. And your content will get shared out to all these 48,711 followers.

How powerful is that? Even if you only have 50 followers on your own profile, you can instantly tap into 48,711 followers that someone else has built.

And you can be part of 50, 100, 200 or more group boards, sharing your content to them all, and gaining traffic from them.

Excited? Me too, so now let’s talk about exactly how you can use Pinterest to get traffic to your blog.

Here are the 9 steps I took to gain 223,000 pageviews from Pinterest traffic

Step 1: Get a Pinterest Business Account

If you’re trying to get more Pinterest traffic to your site, then you need to have a Pinterest Business Account (not a regular personal account).

Business accounts are free, and provide you with additional features, such as ability to get excellent traffic and engagement analytics.

If you already have a regular (personal) Pinterest account, you can convert it into a business one (and yes you can keep your Personal account in parallel with your new Business account).

If you don’t have a Pinterest account, then you can easily open a Business Account.

Go to the Business Pinterest page. From there, you can set up your business account or follow the prompts on that screen to convert your existing personal account.

Step 2: Create 10 Boards, Pin 10 Pins

Remember, everything that we’re doing is about getting accepted into our targeted Pinterest group boards.

And noone will accept you if your profile looks weak and incomplete. So we have to beef up our profile and make it look great.

Once you have your profile created, it’s time to make 10 boards. Think of 10 subcategories you can use as boards.

For example, if your blog is about health and wellness, then your 10 boards can be areas within that niches, like “exercise”, “nutrition”, “healthy recipes”, “motivation”, and so on.

Here is an example of how I’ve set up one of my profiles:

My layout to get maximum Pinterest Traffic

My profile is about “online marketing”. So as you can see, I’ve added boards to cover different things within “online marketing” – YouTube, Twitter, Traffic etc.

Once you have your 10 boards created, it’s time to start adding content. You must fill the boards up with pins so they don’t look empty and boring.

People love content, so if you have it, more of them will be inclined to follow your profile.

Additionally, the owners of group boards will be much more likely to accept you into the group boards if your profile looks full and complete.

“Beef Up” Your Pinterest Profile

A great way to get a bunch of pins quickly so you save time is find other Pinterest profiles in niches similar to yours and use their pins, simply “re-pinning” them to your own boards.

Here is exactly how you can do that:

Go to Search, then search for any keyword relevant to your niche. For example, if you’re in the Health niche, you will create 10 boards such as “Recipes”, “Exercise”, “Natural Supplements” etc.

Let’s say you’re populating the board called “Recipes”. So then you’d type in “best recipes” into search:

How to get traffic from Pinterest - search results

After that, you will see a bunch of search results, all the different pins that match “best recipes”.

You can mouse-over any of them, and click the little “save” button:

Pinterest traffic search results

After that, you will see a new window where you can choose to save your pin to one of the boards. Choose the most appropriate sub-topic board, and click the save button:

That’s it! Your first pin is saved to one of the boards.

Now simply repeat the process and make sure that you have at least 10 boards with at least 10 pins in each of them.

Step Three: The Follow and Unfollow Method

You might not think this works, but it’s hugely effective at gaining new followers and generating organic traffic.

You have to follow a bunch of people…and then unfollow them. I’ll show you why in a second, but first, let’s look at how you follow people.

The fastest way to find people to follow is finding other Pinterest profiles in your niche with a lot of followers.

Using the ‘health and wellness’ example above, you’d type “health” into the search bar at the top and click on “People”, then hit “Enter” to start the search. That will take you to the various profiles that are in the health niche.

How to search profiles on Pinterest

The great thing about those profiles is that they already have followers. For example, look at this one:

Pinterest people search results

See these profiles with 513k followers and 3.5 million followers?

These followers are already interested in pages revolving around health, so the odds are great that they will want to follow you as well. All that’s left is to somehow alert them to your presence…

So, just click on any profile, then click on the “Followers” tab, and you’ll see everyone who follows them.

Simply start following them.

As you do that, you must be careful not to get sucked up into Pinterest’s spam filter. If you go and try to follow everyone you can, the spam filter will notice you and stop you from adding anyone else.

That’s why we follow a simple formula for the best results.

  • Follow only 100 people per day
  • Follow only 20 people per hour
  • Track your follows
  • After 5 days, unfollow anyone who has not followed you back

You can grab my tracking template here to help you track who you’ve followed and when

Simply click on their profile, select to “copy link”, and paste that link into the template. Remember to add in the date that you added them.

The reason why you want to keep track of your followers is so you can Unfollow them after 5 days.

Make Sure You Keep A Balanced Profile

If someone comes to your profile and you are following thousands of profiles, but only have a handful of followers, it can set off alarm bells, as it looks a bit spammy.

Between 1% and 15% of the profiles you follow will follow you back, so that’s why you need to start unfollowing some profiles after about 5 days.

Your goal is to have between 50-100 followers. This seems to be the range where Group Board owners will deem it acceptable to let you into their group boards.

Step Four: Create Killer Content On Your Site

One other thing that Group Board owners look out for is: “How much value can this new contributor bring to my Group Board?”.

And the best way to add value to the Group Board is for you to share the amazing content that you have on your blog or your niche website.

So you need to create some excellent content on your site. Then you need to pin some pins on your Profile pointing to that content.

For example, I always make a board called “Best of [my site name]”, so for example “Best of Dad’s Hustle”:

Best of layout [how to get pinterest traffic]

Then, I pin all pins linking to the blog posts on my site into that board.

Step Five: Create Pinterest Graphics

Now it’s time to create those cool funny-looking vertical images 🙂

A great site that will help you do this is Canva. There are all different types of images and graphics you can make on that site to share on your boards, from posters and fliers to logos and cards, it’s all available to you.

Watch this video to learn how to create awesome Pinterest Graphics with Canva:

You can get royalty-free images from Unsplash and Pixabay.

Step Six: Upload Your Pins To Pinterest

Once you’ve created your own graphics, upload them to your Pinterest profile, and link to the content on your site.

You would then post these images to that board called “Best of XYZ.com”. Make sure that board is the very first one people see. You can re-order how the boards appear on your Pinterest profile.

You need to make sure that you link each pin to the URL of the article on your site. This way, if anyone clicks on the pin image, they’ll be taken to your site URL.

Plus, this link will also create a “no-follow” backlink from Pinterest for your site.

Make about 10-20 different pins in the “Best Of” board, linking to the articles on your site.

Step Seven: Find Group Boards

This step is where you put your authority into action!

By this step, you need to have 50+ followers, 10 boards with 10 pins in each board, and your blog board with the different content pieces on it.

So you’re now ready to start asking to get accepted into group boards.

There are thousands of different group boards on Pinterest. Joining a group board is what will dramatically increase the number of people who follow you and the traffic you need to be successful.

One fast way to find groups is by using Pingroupie.com which is a search engine that allows you to find boards from which you can get Pinterest traffic.

Check out my video where I show every step of how to find and join group boards on Pinterest:

Step Eight: Request Board Invites

This is gold – membership to Group Boards is like opening the doors to Pinterest traffic.

As you find these groups to join, you’ll find that you can’t just join right off the street. You have to request an invite from one of the board administrators to get in.

It’s quite easy to find out who the admin is, as Pinterest will reveal them. When you click into the group board, the Administrator will be the first name that you see amongst the contributors:

Collaborators

If you’ve ever joined a group on Facebook, this is sort of the same thing. Some groups will have specific instructions. They might ask you for an email and/or to answer questions.

The first thing you should do is follow their profile, as well as the board. They’ll almost always have that condition as part of the acceptance.

Other times you can direct message the admin and request to be let in, which often works fine.

And sometimes in the board Description field you will see instructions to send them an email or contact them via Facebook and so forth.

Contact them, send them a nice message, explain who you are, explain that you’d like to join and you promise to follow all rules.

Something like this will probably work:

“Hi, my name is Greg Kononenko and I run a blog over at CaffeinatedBlogger.com. I would like to join your Group Board called [insert name]. I have already followed you and the board. My content is quite similar to what you already post. I understand all rules [list rules], and will never spam. My Pinterest email is [insert email]. You can see all my details here:

[insert links to your Pinterest profile, your blog, your other social media accounts]”

Note: they will need your Pinterest email address in order to send the invite.

Step Nine: Start Pinning!

Once you get the invite, you will receive a notification email as well as a Pinterest notification within your Pinterest dashboard.

Very soon, your email inbox will start looking like this:

Pinterest group board invites

Once you accept, you will be able to start pinning your content to the group board.

It’s important to be aware of how fast or slow the group is moving. If it’s slow-moving, then you shouldn’t be super active and give off the appearance that you’re spamming the place.

Start with one pin per day and move up from there.

As you grow your followers and gain authority in the group, you can post more and get away with it.

Comment, Let Me Know What You Think, And Implement!

Well, that’s it! Now you know exactly how to drive traffic to your website with Pinterest.

Enjoyed the article? Comment below, tell me what you thought, and also tell me what else you’d like to know about? I always try to write on topics that my readers want to hear.

This is exactly how I get Pinterest traffic to my blog, it works extremely well, and I hope you learnt something useful.

    15 replies to "Pinterest Traffic: How I Got 223,000 Pageviews to My Blog"

    • Marc

      Very useful training and highly recommended. I did this training 3 months ago, yesterday I hit my first 1070 page views in 1 day!!! I had to say that I had my account suspended for 3 weeks, because I made a couple of mistakes.

      Thanks to Gregg I got my account back and with his training., Now I only focus in the next problem, conversions.

      Thank you Gregg. Please keep posting useful trainings, free and paid, both!

    • Sue

      Thanks Greg – this is a wonderfully succinct summary –
      We really value your emails and appreciate the quality of all you deliver

    • Felix

      Really awesome information… you always post the best. thanks for the information.

    • Michelle

      Simply wonderful information. Thanks so much.
      I am implementing your strategy and I know it will work because of your success.
      Michelle

    • Mayank

      Hello Greg! Your step by step guidelines about creating pins and boards on Pinterest helped me a lot as I am new in the blogging community. Only if you could help me out on Step 3; if I do not have a niche specific blog, so how many people should I follow to get a good traffic and also how often should I be posting contents to my site?

      • Greg Kononenko

        Hi Mayank, thanks for the comment! If your blog is not niche-specific, that’s ok. Is your Pinterest profile niche-specific? And what niche are you in? There must be a niche, right? 🙂 You should create a niche-specific Pinterest profile and follow people in that niche, build up to 50 followers from follow-backs, and then you can join group boards.

        If your niche is not niche-specific (I can’t think of how that could be, but maybe it’s a general interest blog?) then your profile on Pinterest can be about that as well.

        Just check what other similar profiles are doing on Pinterest.

        Sorry, can’t give more exact advice unless I know more about your blog and niche.

        • Mayank

          Hello again Greg!! Glad that you could make out time to reply to my query! You got me right, it is absolutely a kind of a general interest blog involving socio-political issues, sharing life experiences and tips about how I learnt something etc… Thanx to your guidelines that helped me get a good number of followers on Pinterest and I am looking forward to join a couple of group boards that are into the topics I wrote blogs about. Can you help me out with tips for making my Pinterst profile more interesting..I know I am asking for a lot..but only if it is within your convenience… Thanx again!

          • Greg Kononenko

            Hi Mayank, very welcome, and I recommend you reverse-engineer other profiles. Find a few profiles that you think are great, and borrow the best bits from them! 🙂

    • Sanskar Tiwari

      well before i want to thank you for the full pinterest course as you showed step by step how to get traffic i take action and did that and i as i see the potential i got in a contact of person who is also getting great results from pinterets i got excited bought the domain and start working on pinterest and it about 25 days i think and i am getting 30-55 daily visits which is good stats for me looking for more

    • Randy Gardner

      Hi Greg, this is a nice guide and I would ask for a detail about your pinning, you will only pin the craft image from Canvas or the image can be repinned from other source and edit out link there? Kindly elaborate me this

      • Greg Kononenko

        Hi Randy, you can create the image in Canva, after that you can download it from Canva to your computer, and then upload it to Pinterest using the “save” option. Then as you’re saving the pin, you will upload your image, and insert the URL of where you want the traffic to go.

        • Randy Gardner

          Thank Greg for the reply. So, usually how many images you created for each post?

    • Hey Greg! That’s a really useful guide. I love that it’s so detailed! I only have one question: how can you check on Pinterest if someone follow or doesn’t follow you?

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