The 5 Biggest Pinterest Mistakes I Made In The Beginning

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It´s time to get rid of your Pinterest mistakes! If you are reading this, I am assuming you have already discovered what an amazing and unique tool for traffic Pinterest is.

So did I a few months ago as I excitedly jumped on the easy and fun opportunity to create traffic to my blog. Within the past few months, I’ve come a long way and have stepped up my Pinterest game significantly.

This post is all about the biggest Pinterest mistakes I made along the way. Errors that, if I had avoided them, would have given me more traffic way faster.

I hope you learn out of my Pinterest mistakes and go on and step up your pinning game!

1. Pinterest Mistake: Believing impressions and monthly views matter

When you open your Pinterest business account, two of the very first analytic stats that come to the eye are your monthly viewers and your monthly impressions.

Now, of course, you are aiming to get them as high as possible. However, there can be a big difference between your impressions and your traffic.

That’s what I had to learn at the end of last year, as I celebrated reaching 2 million monthly Pinterest viewers, yet only 20 daily website visitors.

Out of freaking 2 MILLION monthly viewers, only 20 a day, meaning 620 a month, converted to my website! That’s almost nothing.

That’s when I knew I had to change something. So I purchased Pinfinite Growth by Melyssa Griffin and focused on growing my traffic instead of my impressions.

And out of that first lesson came the following lessons.

2. Pinterest Mistake: Pinning without my target audience in mind

Now, the first and most important thing you have to get into your head is this: People are not interested in you and your interests (yet).

So you might like those vegan recipes and pin them like crazy to one of your boards. But if your blog is about training dogs or dancing, then you won’t be able to pin your own content to that vegan recipes board.

The result: Your Pinterest account get’s a ton of impressions and followers, who love vegan recipes, but barely anyone clicks on your links to visit your blog. And when they do, they are probably disappointed not to find vegan content.

Now, this was, of course, an obvious example. I dare say most (not all, though) people figure this out on their own.

Now, I fell into a different yet similar trap. For a few years now, I’ve been obsessed with motivational and inspirational quotes! I love them!

And I knew that my content would also be motivating and inspiring. Furthermore, many people like quotes images, and they are incredibly easy to create.

So what did I do? I created two quotes boards and pinned a ton of quotes images to them, some I created myself.

And the people loved those boards. My impressions soared upwards, and those boards were in all my analytic categories the best ones. And my quotes pins also had way more impressions and saves than my blog post pins.

Great, right? Well, not really. At first, I got really excited, but then I noticed I had a ton of impressions, and not even 1% of those converted into traffic for my blog. Talking about Pinterest mistakes, right?

And when I thought about it, I couldn’t even be that surprised. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I may love quotes images and save a ton of them, but I can probably count on one hand how often I clicked the link they were referring to.

I mean, why should I? The quote was all I wanted, and I already got that.

So, don´t make this mistake and always have your target audience in mind. Very often, you want to attract people that are eager to learn something. They are hoping your content solves a problem or answers a question they have. What kind of Pinterest Pins are those people clicking on?

3. Pinterest Mistake: Pinning other peoples content

Another mistake that originated from me unconsciously solely focusing on impressions was the ratio of my and other people’s content I pinned.

In the beginning, I read somewhere that 30 pins a day are the right amount to pin. So I did that by scheduling all kinds of pins with Tailwind. And when I had some of my own content, I would schedule that.

Somewhere else, I read that 20 % of your pins should be your own content and 80 % other people’s content. Now, in the beginning, that’s hard to accomplish when you don’t have much content yet, but you try to pin 30 times a day.

However, by now, I know you should instead aim for 80% of your own content and only 20% other content. After all, you want people to click on your pins, so they shouldn’t drown between different people’s content.

So what I recommend you to do is this:

When you start out and don’t have much of your own content to pin yet, don’t worry at all about how much you pin a day.

Pin so much that you can maintain that 80/20 ratio. So out of 10 pins, 8 should lead to your website. Out of 5 pins, it should be 4. Get it?

Then as you create more content, you can also increase the number of images you pin daily. At most, I would aim for 25 – 30 a day.

4. Pinterest Mistake: Worrying too much about viral pins

Viral pins aka that one pin that takes off and skyrockets your traffic into unimaginable heights. We all want that. And apparently, some people manage to do this.

So, over the months, I found myself experimenting with my image designs over and over again, trying to make them eye-catching so they could go viral.

I even tried to implement some statistics that said stuff like “warmer colors and red colors get ?? % more clicks and saves”.

Typical me, I completely obsessed over a more or less unimportant detail.

Please don’t understand me wrong, your pin design should be eyecatching so that people want to save it and click on it out of all the other pins.

But if you look at successful pinners like Melyssa Griffin, House of Brazen, or Anastasia Blogger, who all have their own Pinterest courses. Their pins don’t look very extraordinary.

Or an even better example. Type in any keyword relevant for your niche and look at the top pins. You probably could create more gorgeous and eyecatching ones, right?

But what I had to learn is that it is far less about the aesthetics and much more about keywords in your pin description, alt-tag, and title.

So, please don’t get a headache over the whole viral pin topic. Instead, focus on steadily increasing the clicks and saves of your pins through keyword, board, and profile optimization.

5. Pinterest Mistake: Trying to succeed without a professional course

Now, this thought was not entirely wrong. I still believe I could have succeeded without purchasing Pinfinite Growth. But ladies, it would have taken time!

Time, frustration, insecurity, and confusion.

Why bother with that when I can have a Pinterest guru teach me proven methods that get results fast? And I have lifetime access to her course. So if something significant on Pinterest changes, Melyssa, who is in contact with the Pinterest team, will know about it and update it.

I won’t have to worry about being confused or having to figure out a new strategy. Instead, I can enjoy comfortable and fun traffic to my website and, therefore, a steady flow of income into my pocket that has paid me back tenfold what I had to pay for Pinfinite Growth.

I hope this will help you grow your traffic and income through Pinterest. They might not seem like big mistakes, but they can genuinely make all the difference.

Other than that, I wish you a happy pinning! ^^

Sophie