RVE 107: How We Grew Our Website Referrals from Pinterest 14x in 3 Months

This post may contain affiliate links. See our affiliate disclaimer here.

Hey guys! Alyssa here taking over the podcast today. Back by popular demand due to episode 78 (AKA Heath forgot to post a podcast, so I got to jump in and record one!), when I took over the podcast with our podcast producer, Kelsey.

Today, I’m bringing Kelsey back on the show to interview her about Pinterest. Because in addition to editing the podcast, Kelsey runs our Pinterest account for us.

In this episode, we talk about everything she has done to grow our Pinterest account, including some strategies around creating awesome pins and automating your pinning. This is an intensely tactical episode! You can get a downloadable Pinterest Starter Guide below loaded with tutorials, stats, and a case study showing how Kelsey’s strategies affected our growth.

Disclaimer: As of June 2018 Board Booster is no longer available as a tool for Pinterest, but we recommend Tailwind, which has similar features.

For many bloggers, Pinterest is their #1 referrer of traffic and yet Heath and I never created pinnable images, created a Pinterest business account, or did anything really to be on Pinterest whatsoever.

Then in the spring, we noticed one day we had 100 views to an old blog post through Pinterest, when we were previously averaging 5 views from Pinterest a day. I looked at the pin causing all the traffic and it wasn’t even an image! If someone pins your link and you don’t have a pinnable image, Pinterest will auto make a pin that just says the title of your blog post on a brown square. It’s totally ugly and I would never click on it, but 100 people did in one day! That was huge for us!

So I instantly got into Canva.com—which is a great place to make social images for any platform—and made a pinnable image for this blog post. (The post was 13 RVing Essentials: What You Need to Buy AFTER You Buy Your Rig.)

That post with the updated pin consistently gets a couple thousand views each month all because of Pinterest. And bonus! That post is loaded with Amazon links, so we’ve noticed a huge spike in our Amazon Associates commission each month.

So we finally realized the power of Pinterest and that we really should’ve developed a Pinterest strategy YEARS ago. We knew we wanted to do this right, but Heath and I have a lot of projects going on and didn’t have time to learn something new.

Interestingly enough, around this time Kelsey, sent us a proposal with all the reasons why we needed to be on Pinterest. It was kind of freaky timing actually. She sent a super intense presentation with screenshots about what we were currently doing on Pinterest and what she could help us do to make it better. So instantly, we said okay you’re hired! Here is my password — go work your magic.

And she did! We went from averaging less than 500 referrals/month from Pinterest in August to over 7,000 referrals in the month of November thanks to Kelsey’s insight.

To make this podcast more beneficial for you, I asked Kelsey to update her initial proposal to share with you. You can download her strategies and tutorials in the Pinterest guide below:

 

A few things we talk about in this episode:

• Our Pinterest strategy and how we’re doing
• How to set up a Pinterest account or clean up your existing one
• How to get clicks back to your website
• How to automate your pinning
• What is a winning pin and how to make it

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Our Pinterest account, where you should really follow us
• Tailwind
• Canva
• Gleam
• Michelle’s awesome affiliate marketing course!

Thanks for Listening!

You’re awesome. If you liked this episode, I’d love a review from you in iTunes. Be sure to mention how my podcast episodes are way better than Heath’s and that while he is awesome, I’m slightly more awesome and should be on the podcast more often.

To leave a review, click here and then go to “ratings and reviews”. Thanks!

Oh yes, and this post contains affiliate links for products we use and love!