How I generated over 10 000+ visitors every month by automating Pinterest SEO for a personal development blog

Pinterest is an exploding channel for blogs and e-commerce companies that can get you a ton of exposure and help build brand awareness.

In 2017, I started a Pinterest account for Reussir A Deux, a french blog dedicated to personal development.

In 10 months, I went from 0 to over 40,000 visitors/month to this website.

To date, I’m sitting at 220K+ impressions and over 13K followers.

In this article, we’ll discuss:

• How community-driven content promotion can help your business, no matter the niche — if you do it right;
• A step-by-step research process on finding where your audience lives and breathes content;
• A detailed analysis of how I used Pinterest to generate awareness;
• The results I’ve achieved so far.

Why community-driven content promotion is your gateway to growth

Content promotion is a beast of a topic. It’s something that many marketers don’t take full advantage of. A lot of them tend to focus on creating some fantastic piece of content, publish on their blog, add a link to their FB and Insta and then… they forget about it.

Yet content promotion, while not glamorous, can lead to some pretty awesome results for your business.

If you want to promote your content online and build a Global audience, you usually need to do two things:

• Find communities where your IC spends time;
• Engage with your IC and build relationships.

I’ve seen a lot of SEOs and content marketers take a “shooting in the dark” approach to promotion.

This usually involves a bunch of social media sharing, maybe a guest post or two, and then they wonder why their traffic isn’t increasing.

The issue here is that there is no plan for promotion. Promotion should be an integral part of your content marketing strategy right from the start, and usually, it is what drives your content plan, instead of the other way around.

In my case, I discovered that quantity matters more than quality. I tested different types of pins and while some didn’t get any traction, others were generating 10K+ impressions and over 1000 clicks per month.

A research process to streamline your community-driven content promotion efforts

The obvious reason why you aren’t building an audience is that the people you’re targeting are not the right fit.

It’s challenging enough to drive hundreds, if not thousands of visitors to your site per week — but when they’re not the right audience, it becomes a double-edged sword. You spend even more time trying to hack the platform, and you’re still not generating results.

When I started Reussir A Deux, my audience was women 20–40 years of age, middle class, that were into self-improvement and who were particularly interested in becoming happier.

The next step was figuring out where my audience looks for inspiration online. A simple Google or Quora search can give you entire lists of relevant online communities.

For the purpose of my Pinterest case study, I wanted to choose a platform with an already existing community where I could grow my audience and see if it was enough to generate interest.

A Google search for “pinterest for personal development” generated results for blog posts outlining the benefits of using Pinterest for bloggers.

Pinterest Metrics for success — engagement or followers?

If you want to build a successful readers base, then having conversations with your audience should be a top priority.

Engaging your followers will make them feel like they are part of something bigger. They will feel like they are part of the brand’s success since they are helping you grow by giving their advice or sharing your content.

People love talking, and they love to show off either their expertise or their knowledge. By engaging in these conversations you will get more feedback on what your target audience wants and you can tweak your strategy according to that.

How I used Pinterest to generate over 40K+ engaged audience

Is Pinterest right for your business?

Niches that do particularly well on Pinterest are:

-Photography

-Home Decor

-Cooking

-DIY

-Fashion

-Design

-Technology

-Marketing tips

Of course, topics aren’t limited to the niches mentioned above. What you want to keep in mind is that Pinterest is best suited for online businesses, businesses that are not location dependent and who sell online services and products.

SEO on Pinterest

Developing your Pinterest marketing strategy goes hand in hand with SEO. The keywords that you will be using will play an important role in making sure your pins get traction.

Here is what worked for me:

• Conduct keyword research

You won’t be able to use Ahrefs or other SEO tools when conducting keyword research on Pinterest.

However, you can use Pinterest autocomplete to come up with relevant keywords. For example, I searched for “Grow traffic” and came up with a list of related keywords from the autocomplete section:

• Use your keywords in the pin description.

Pinterest uses Keyword Prominence in its SEO algorithm to determine what’s important to the user.

This means that to rank well on Pinterest, you need your keywords higher up in the description area. And it makes sense when you consider that Pinterest is trying to deliver content that’s most in-demand by its users, in order for them to be able to find it in the feed.

• Explore related niches.

I didn’t want to get stuck pinning only about personal development. Compared to Google SEO, Pinterest doesn’t actually care about you being relevant to one, single sub-niche.

If you search for “Personal Development”, Google tends to reward websites that post content solely about personal development. On the other hand, on Pinterest, you can create separate boards targeting different niches.

How automation took the efforts from my shoulders

The truth is you need to be consistent and post frequently to maximize your chances to build a huge audience. That’s because not all of your pins will get traction.

I certainly didn’t have the time to curate pictures and post 100s of them daily, so I looked for an automation tool that could do this for me.

I found Tailwind, and scheduled automatic posts directly from my blog. All I have to do is log in on Pinterest once in a while and optimize those posts for SEO.

Pinterest case study results — what I learned from growing my blog

I stopped posting in 2018, and it still generates engagement even though I have not written a single new post nor pinned anything since 2018.

Selling through Pinterest

Social media content, similarly to top-of-funnel content, has its benefits. It generates brand awareness, introduces your brand to new people, and gets a ton of natural backlinks and traffic.

This is great for entrepreneurs wanting to grow their overall brand awareness on a visual channel like Pinterest.

But, if you want to make it work, you’ll need to think one step past this and also consider what types of social posts and topics would lead to sales and conversions.

For example, in the personal development space, that would be:

• more promotional pins;
• pins featuring services and offers;
• using sales-driven CTAs;

You should test a few social media channels and see what clicks. Double down on that and create both original and curated content. Don’t be afraid to have a “quantity over quality” approach on platforms like Pinterest.

If you’re curious about how I can help your business get MORE traffic & sales, book a free Pinterest Strategy call where I’ll deep dive into your business and give you a roadmap that you can use to start building traffic to your website.