8 Pinterest secrets you need to know

Pinterest is like the elusive gold at the end of the rainbow. Everyone knows the way you get people to read your stuff is through Pinterest, but it’s so mysterious! And always changing! It can be frustrating to hear of other bloggers getting tons of page views through Pinterest, when Pinterest seems to be largely ignoring you.

I’ve developed a fascination with Pinterest since three of my posts really took off through Pinterest. I wanted to discover what happened so I could duplicate it with my other posts. In the process I’ve learned quite a bit about Pinterest, as you may gather as this is my fourth post about Pinterest. I’m actually almost done writing an ebook on Pinterest, so if you’re interested in learning all my secrets (or most of them, anyway), subscribe at the bottom of this post to be notified when it is published. In the meantime, here are a few secrets from my book.

1. Join a pinning pod

There are two ways you can do this: if you have Tailwind or BoardBooster you can join a group using the same service and set it up to auto-pin each other’s pins. In Tailwind this is called a Tailwind Tribe. If you are not automated, or even if you are, you can join a manual pinning pod. I just started a Facebook group that has daily threads that do this. If you want to join, check it out here.

Our pod has to be open to experimentation. Because as my good friend Inez from fortheloveofmom.org says, it’s crazy to keep doing something just because if it’s not producing results. I agree with this strongly. If what you’re doing isn’t working, switch it up. Our pinning pod started pinning from our blog boards, and now we’re switching to pinning straight from our pins. As far as results go, I haven’t noticed a dramatic increase in page views, but my followers have been steadily rising at a much quicker rate than before. The other participants say they HAVE noticed an uptick in page views, so we continue on.

2. Secret source page

If you don’t already know, there’s a way to find all the pins that people have been directly creating from your website. This is obviously different from the one on your blog board that you originally created. You can find all these pins at www.pinterest.com/source/yourwebsite.com. Of course, replace “yourwebsite.com” with your blog URL. When you find this page with your pins, you will find that you can like and comment on these pins. You can comment on the ones you’ve created, but you can’t like them. This is a great way to bring attention to these pins and increase their priority in the feed.

3. How to find group boards

I address group boards more in detail in my ebook because I’ve found that sadly, most bloggers don’t understand them. You should probably be spending more time cultivating your own group boards than trying to jump on a zillion other group boards. If you aren’t on any, find some! But don’t try to get on hundreds unless you’ve found it makes a big difference in your page views or repins.

A great way to find group boards is to start with a big group board, go to the original owner’s profile, and look at their group boards, especially if they have a lot of followers or repins. From their you can check out the profiles of the OTHER group board owners, and see what boards they are on. If you need a place to start, check out my Pinterest profile as I’m on a number of group boards: Pinterest.com/gloriousmomblog. If you follow me, I’ll follow you back! Unless you’re naked in your profile picture. Then I won’t.

4. Pinterest Audit and pinning challenge 

If you need that extra boost to increase your followers and your Pinterest referrals, I have a free one week Pinterest growth challenge that can help you do just that. Enter your email below to sign up for the challenge.