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Now that I have been actively engaged in Pinterest Marketing for almost a year, I took the time to take a step back and reflect. 

Learning new things is natural whenever you start doing something new. And generally, I love to learn new things. It gets me really excited and feeling rather proud to have grown just a little bit more. 

However, some things that I did learn concerning Pinterest Marketing would have taken away a bit of the stress, frustration, worry, and unnecessary effort at the beginning of my marketing journey had I only known them sooner. 

Anyway, no sense fretting over the past. Ultimately I am just happy to know these things now so that I can teach them to you and spare you some of these negative emotions. 

With that, let’s get into it! 

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1. Don’t go hunting for the viral pin design

Oh yes, this had given me quite some headache for weeks, if not months. 

If you are looking deeper into Pinterest marketing, you are going to stumble over the expression “viral pin” very often. 

To say it in simple words: It’s a pin that just takes off and does immensely good, meaning it gets tons of saves and a lot of traffic to your website. 

And while talking about viral pins, I noticed many people focusing on the specific Pin design. And there are even statistics about it. 

All together they say things like: 

• “Red color tones get more saves than blue color tones.” 
• “Crammed backgrounds get more clicks than monochrome backgrounds.” 
• “Use bold fonts.” 
• “Put your text into the upper half of the image.” 
• …

And yeah, sure there is definitely some truth to that, especially the statistically proven ones. 

But from my personal experience, your pin really doesn’t need to be very spectacular to do well on Pinterest. 

I’ve created stunningly aesthetic pins (if I am allowed to say so myself) that didn’t get a single save. 

On the other hand, I noticed that utterly unspectacular pins from other people with literally just the title and a one-color background are among the top three performing pins I’ve saved onto my boards. 

Also, if you type in a few keywords into the Pinterest search bar and then look at the top-performing pins. I can pretty much guarantee you, you will find some that are very plain if not even ugly. And that many will look very similar and don’t stand out from each other. 

What does that tell us? 

2. Create easy templates

That being said, another thing I have learned is to create good looking but easy templates for my pins. 

The key here is speed. 

Let’s be real. You are trying to build a business, most likely in the form of a side hustle. Meaning you already don’t have 8 hours a day to achieve this goal. Much less do you have the time to waste on designing your pins when you should focus much more on creating content, products, SEO, and marketing your business. 

And you have to create multiple pinnable images for one Blog post/product (I currently create 9 pins per post). 

Templates are the first way to reduce the time to spend on creating these images. 

You put in a few hours to design a couple of eyecatching pins with Canva, and from then on, you just copy them and change the title and the image for each new content. 

When designing these templates, you need to be careful to not make them too complicated. 

For example, I allowed myself one complicated element, which is a number in the form of a frame in which I insert a picture of the rosé gold color I want the number to have. 

This causes me to have to change and resize the frame every time the number changes, which happens pretty much with every blog post. 

Talking about unnecessary effort, right?

That’s a task that would fall into the “20 percent results for 80 percent effort” scheme of the 80/20 rule. 

What we want is to invest 20 percent effort/time for 80 percent of the results.

But not only unique design elements like that take up time. 

What I have found to take up most of my time is the search for suitable stock images and phrasing the title differently. 

So, how do we solve the image issue? 

1. Design the pin so that the image won’t be noticeable either because it is in the background or because it occupies only a small part of the pin. That way, it doesn’t matter so much what the image shows. 
2. Simply choose pictures of a coherent theme. Like always choosing images of women or of laptops or of nature. That way, you won’t obsess over finding the image that fits the topic of the pin perfectly. 
3. Use the same image for all of your pins on that content/product, but play with the size, direction, and color pattern. That way, it will almost seem like you used many different images. 

3. Give your images a file name.

It’s such a simple thing, and I had heard it multiple times but was always too lazy to name my images once I’ve saved them from Canva. 

But having a keyword-rich image name is going to help them rank even better when you upload them to Pinterest. 

Their algorithm literally searches for keywords everywhere. Even inside the Blog post, your pin is linking to. 

If it’s perceived as high value, meaning it has lots of keywords and other SEO factors, then it is going to give your Pins another boost. 

So just use keywords wherever you can. Don’t stuff them into your description. That’s probably gonna get them marked as spam or be penalized by the algorithm. 

Instead, use the different places where you can put keywords in. The filename of your image is just one of those. 

4. Don’t have too many group boards 

Ok, I know what you are thinking: The more group boards I can pin my image onto, the more people are going to see it, which means I will get more traffic. 

Generally speaking, yes, that’s true. 

BUT…

…with great power comes great responsibility!!! (Sorry, I just had to be a dork for a moment ^^’)

 But seriously, group boards not only present a possibility of traffic they also give you responsibilities. 

Most group boards have a 1:1 pin ratio. Meaning for one of your own pins, you have to pin one of theirs. 

Which is just fair, in my opinion, so I make sure to follow that rule. Of course, you might say “f#uck this, I just pin my own content,” but that will only work for so long. 

Group boards of high quality are usually managed well, meaning they will throw you out after 30 days or so, if you don’t deliver on your end of the bargain. 

Those group boards that don’t throw you out are most likely pretty trashy. And there are a lot of people pinning not niche related content so you might as well ditch that group board for it will not bring many results for you anyway. 

So you want to keep a 1:1 ratio with pinning and saving images to and from group boards. 

Now, if you pin one of your pins to say, 10 group boards, you have to save 10 pins of others. 

That’s a lot of effort, and it takes away too much of your valuable time. 

That’s why I instead focus on a few quality group boards. Especially since …

5. Tailwind Tribes are much better than group boards

(Of course, you need to be a Tailwind user to be able to contribute to Tribes.)

In Tailwind Tribes, you can 

• find more high-quality pins to save, and …
• receive more repins …
• by more high-quality pinners 

Overall you just reap much better rewards from most tribes then from most group boards. 

6. Have multiple group boards on the same topic

Staying with the issue of group boards, I’ve recently made the frustrating experience that a group board can suddenly disappear. 

They didn’t throw me out or something, the whole group board just vanished from Pinterest. And what was especially painful about that was the fact that this was not only a great group board but also my only group board in the entrepreneurial niche. 

So suddenly, I couldn’t pin my entrepreneurial images to any group board anymore. 

And if you’ve ever applied to group boards, you probably know that it can take a while and a lot of applications to get accepted into one. 

So the lesson I learned was that you should have at least two group boards on every niche your pins cover, should one of them throw you out or vanish into thin air. 

7. If you can’t pin much of your own stuff, pin less in general 

In the beginning, I bought into this whole “you should pin 20-30 images daily”. 

And that indeed seems to be a generally recommended amount of daily pins to have the most success. 

However, if you don’t have much content of your own yet, you won’t be able to fill those 20-30 slots up with many of your own pins. Meaning you will mainly pin other people’s stuff. 

Granted, that will gain your impressions and followers, but if they don’t convert to traffic to your website, what’s the use? 

I much rather save myself the time, effort, and frustration of pinning tons of non-traffic driving pins. 

So if you can only pin 2 of your own images daily, then maybe you should only pin 8 images daily in total. That way, at least 1/4 is your own, and the traffic will be the same you’d have gotten if you’d pin a total of 25 pins.

Try it out for yourself if you want.  

8. Use the Tailwind Smart Loop Function

One way to be able to pin more of your own pins daily is Tailwind‘s smart loop function. 

It will keep pinning the same image every 3 months or so to the same board. That way, your old content gets recognition without you having to manually do it, and it helps you to pin more of your own pins daily without having to create more. 

9. Use Tailwinds Interval Setting

Something I only recently started doing is taking advantage of Tailwind’s Interval Setting. 

It goes like this: 

You have an image you want to pin to 6 different boards. Now, instead of having Tailwind pin them straight after one another or randomly due to the shuffle feature, you can deliberately say: I want this image to be pinned every 4 days. 

This will make your account seem much more professional. After all, it always seems somewhat spammy if the same picture appears multiple times in one row, doesn’t it? 

Also, it gives the image more possibilities to stand out. Imagine you scroll through someone’s Pinterest account and see that there is the same image 4 times in a row. 

You might look at the first one but skip the three others. 

However, if you stumble over the Pin with days in-between, you will read it multiple times. 

I once heard it takes humans 7 repetitions of seeing a commercial, for example, for it to register in our minds. 

If that’s true, interval pinning gives you more of a chance to have someone click on the link of your pin. 

Also, you might reach more people with the same content. If you pin the same image every day for a week and someone’s just not on Pinterest in that week, they might miss it in your feet. 

Of course, these are hypothetical scenarios, I am aware of that. But they might be worth considering. 

10. Don’t panic if you get banned. 

Again, I am speaking from personal experience. One day, my Pinterest account was just shut down. 

As you might imagine, I somewhat panicked and went through all possible scenarios of what I could have done wrong to be considered as spammy and ban-worthy. 

Fortunately, after writing an E-Mail to Pinterest’s support team, they apologized for the mistake (which their system apparently sometimes makes) and opened my account again with all pins and boards just in place as before. 

And if you look at my statistics, I also assume they gave me a We-are-sorry-for-the-ban-boost since my impressions soared after that for a few days before dropping back down to their average level. 

So if you should ever get banned, don’t panic! It might very well be a mistake and can easily and quickly be reversed. 

(Still, it, of course, teaches us that we shouldn’t put our eggs all in one basket for the long run. Just think of all the careers ruined by the sudden shutdown of Vine. Yet if you are just starting out and don’t have much time on hand, one source of traffic is alright while you improve your SEO rankings.)

11. Don’t use your own URL on other people’s pins 

I admit I am guilty of this one crucial mistake. That’s also the reason I thought I might have been banned. 

Rather often, pins don’t have a URL of their own. Whenever that happens, Tailwind doesn’t let you schedule them. 

Now, after multiple times of that, I got extremely annoyed and put my URL in the empty field of 1-3 quotes. I only did it with quotes that were similar to my own anyway, so it wasn’t like I wanted to lead people to an utterly irrelevant website. 

But still, it felt fishy and wrong to do, so instead of my own URL, I just put Pinterest.com in there. After all, it were really great images, and I wanted to pin them. 

This worked for some pins, but over time most of them came up with errors when Tailwind tried to pin them at the scheduled time. 

So, unfortunately, now I simply don’t pin the image if I discover it lacks a URL. In the end, it’s mainly the other person’s loss and not mine. 

12. Don’t overvalue hashtags

Hashtags are essential on Instagram and Twitter. On Pinterest, though, not so much. 

Sure, they help your ranking somewhat, but I’d instead put those keywords inside a compelling text that convinces the reader to click through. 

Pins with hashtags are ranked chronologically for that keyword, which gives you a chance to stand out for a few days after having pinned the image. 

But then again, who searches for Hashtags on Pinterest? 

Try it for yourself. 

Search for “fempreneur” and #fempreneur in Pinterest and compare the results. The latter ones are probably not going to be very appealing to you. 

13. You should have at least 3-4 of your own boards to pin a pin to

It’s easy to get caught up thinking you are pinning your images to a lot of boards. And sure, that might be true. But what kind of boards are you pinning them to? 

Because ideally, you should pin them to your own boards first, before you pin them anywhere else. 

Inside of group boards, your pins quickly drown between tons of other pins that are being pinned daily.

Inside of your own boards, however, they get to shine for themselves! 

Also, if your ideal customer/fan stumbles over your Pinterest account and checks out your boards, you want him to see your pin multiple times. 

Also, if you can pin the same image to multiple of your boards, it fills up your pinning schedule, and you can pin more in total with creating fewer images. 

Therefore try to have at least 3-4 boards where you can pin an image to. 

For example, if I create an “11 Steps To Become A Confident Boss Lady” image, I could pin it to the following boards of mine: 

• Boss Lady Tips 
• Personal Development
• Mindset Growth 
• Tips For Success 
• Women In Business 
• Striving for Felicity

I admit this is a point where I am still in need of improvement. Sometimes I do have images that don’t seem to fit into more than 2 boards, and that’s frustrating. 

To solve that, look at your already existing boards and the images you are pinning in there. What topics repeat themselves? Could you single them out and create a more specific board for them? 

Another tactic is to look at your competitors’ boards. If you are a vegan Pinterest Marketer, chances are the board topics of your fellow vegan Pinterest Marketers might also be fitting for you. 

Or they could inspire you to come up with totally new board themes. 

14. Beware of Quotes

Alright. This is a hot topic for me. 

I’ve mentioned it before in The 5 Biggest Pinterest Mistakes I Made In The Beginning. 

At the beginning of my Pinterest Marketing journey, I thought: YEAY QUOTES!

I have always loved quotes. Pinterest users love quotes. My business niche is very compatible with motivational and inspirational quotes. 

So? I, of course, created tons of quotes. 

And they did well! Brought me lots of impressions 

BUT … no link clicks and, therefore, no traffic. 

After realizing this, I thought: F#CK QUOTES! 

I don’t have the time to create quotes that won’t convert into traffic. 

I would have to create tons of new daily quotes like those Instagram accounts to start gaining some traffic through them, and who’s got time for that as a side hustler?!

BUT… 

Now, I think: Maybe there is potential in quotes after all. 

See, I’ve recently been working on my Affiliate Marketing strategy on Pinterest. But I haven’t been able to get many clicks on the links yet. 

Most affiliate sales over Pinterest always seem to be clothing or DIY stuff and not necessarily business tools and courses (as far as I have observed, but I am still learning). 

Then I noticed that the affiliate marketing kit that K Money Mastery gives its affiliates has Instagram quotes with a caption that talks about the product. 

So why not try this method in Pinterest as well? Quotes always do exceptionally well. 

If I create a “Tired of 9 to 5” image, for example, and put the description and link to a Kindle Book Publishing course that can help you quit your 9 to 5 in there, it’s no trick, but actually a valuable and related addition to the quote. 

Don’t you think? 

Disclaimer: This one I haven’t tested out yet. I just thought it might give you some insight into how I am improving and experimenting with my Pinterest Marketing strategy. 

Also, I don’t want to entirely discourage you from creating quotes images and pinning them. 

This is just my experience with it. 

15. Don’t wait to buy a course

And last but certainly not least, I have learned that I might as well simply buy a course from an expert before I have to figure it out on my own. 

I get it; money is scarce if you are trying to build an online business from scratch. Even more so, if you are a student like me with no income and want to invest in tools like Tailwind. 

But maybe this course is worth it and will save you not only time but also money in the long run. 

I had been doing Pinterest Marketing for half a year by the point I bought Melyssa Griffins Pinfinite Growth Course. 

By that time, I already considered myself an advanced, if not expert, Pinterest Marketer. 

After all, I had over 2 million impressions. 

Yet, barely 20 daily blog visitors. So I knew I had to be doing something wrong, and I needed the strategy of an expert to fix that. 

Sure enough, Pinfinite Growth did teach me quite a few additional tactics that made a positive impact on my results. 

But the majority of the information I had already known at that point. 

So maybe, I would have benefitted from buying that course sooner. Perhaps it would have saved me some time and frustration. 

Anyway, that’s no general rule, and everybody has to make that decision based on their current situation. Still, it might be a point worth considering. 

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Alright, I hope I provided you with some new insights that you can implement to improve your Pinterest marketing strategy. 

If you are patient and unrelenting, Pinterest can be a great source of high-quality traffic for you. So please don’t give up! 

I wish you all the success you can dream of with your Pinterest marketing strategy! 

Sophie 

It can be frustrating and very confusing when you have tons of Pinterest impressions, yet barely any traffic to your website.

I’ve been there myself. At one point, I had over 2m impressions yet barely 20 daily website visitors. How could that be?

Obviously, I had to be doing something wrong! I figured out my most significant issue on my own, but to be on the save side I also purchased the Pinfinite Growth Course.

In this article, I want to share with you the pitfalls I have discovered you can make that will give you tons of impressions yet no traffic.

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1. You are pinning too much of other people’s content

Alright, first things first, you need to be pinning pins that actually link to your website.

I know it sounds obvious, but it isn’t. I know how easy it can be to get wrapped up in pinning only 2 out of 20 pins from your own website. Because after all, it seems like you are pinning a ton of content. And basically, you are … just not content that will help grow your traffic.

And I get it, it can be challenging to create so many pins. Especially if you don’t have much content yet.

In the beginning, I created one pin for each blog post. Later on, I raised that number to three per post. Nowadays, I create nine pins for each blog post I make!

With one blog post per week, that’s 36 pins a month. In addition to that, I use Tailwinds Smart Loop feature to repin a couple pins a day.

That nicely adds up to the right amount of my own pins daily.

And if you are at the very beginning of content creation and therefore don’t have many pins to loop, I recommend to just pin less in general.

Don’t feel the need to pin 20 times a day when you can’t pin at least 10 of your own images.

You should then instead pin 10 times a day with 5 of your own pins. That way, they won’t drown in between all of the other people’s pins you are pinning.

2. You are pinning quotes

That was by far my biggest pitfall. I pinned a ton of motivational and inspirational quotes, be it my own or others.

Read also: The 5 Biggest Pinterest Mistakes I Made In The Beginning

Why? Well, because they kinda fit into my niche and I adore quotes like that.

And the results were crazy high impressions and a considerable amount of saves of my own pins.

But that’s already it. Barely any link clicks and, therefore scarcely any traffic. But if you think about it, it makes sense, doesn’t it?

3. You are pinning infographics

Personally, I see the same problem with infographics despite them being liked a lot by marketers.

I know that I rarely click through on the infographics that I see on Pinterest.

They already tell me the most important things. So why should I spend the time to click through?

What’s so tragic about that is the fact that creating an infographic takes so much more time than a quote.

You really don’t want to waste your time like that if it doesn’t convert to traffic.

4. Your Pins are eyecatching, yet the topic is not interesting enough

Sometimes you do create stunning and eyecatching pins that get a ton of impressions, yet nobody clicks on the link.

Why is that? Simple: They are not interested in the topic.

I see it time and time again. There are simply some topics that do incredibly well, and others don’t.

All kinds of “habit pins” do pretty well, for example.

You can do some research on different topics that are popular and create blog posts and pins about them to increase your traffic. Of course, you don’t want to be just mainstream, but it’s beneficial to have those few high converting pins that drive traffic to your site.

You can do your research with Google keywords or Ubersuggest or simply by analyzing what kind of pins do well with your Pinterest analytics.

5. You don’t give them a reason to click through

Sometimes a little demand or offer prompts people to click through. So try to play around with adding phrases like “click here!”, “Click through”, “free worksheet,” “free course” to your pin designs.

Some Examples…

6. You need to have patience

Lastly, you do need to have patience with Pinterest. It is a search engine, after all. The results won’t come overnight.

I, for example, am currently seeing a steady increase in my daily traffic from Pinterest.

It didn’t just jump from 0 to 1,000 daily website visitors but from 0 to 20 then to 30 then to 40 and sometimes even 70.

The more pins I put out there on Pinterest, the more traffic I can generate.

So please have patience with your Pinterest marketing strategy. If you keep it up consistently and always improve it a little bit, you will reap the reward soon enough!

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I hope this will help you to convert your Pinterest impressions into traffic, and I wish you much success with marketing on Pinterest!

Sophie

Time flew by, and before I realized it, I have already been blogging for one year! Crazy to think about how far I’ve come in that year. How much I’ve grown. How many things I’ve did in my first year of blogging!

Sure, I am not one of those people who have created a full income-producing business within a year, but I am actually ok with that. 

I started from absolute zero and therefore had to learn so much. And the funny thing is while in the beginning, I was pretty desperate to start making money with my business, now a calm and security have settled over me. 

I don’t care so much about the fact that I haven’t even made 100€ in my first year of blogging. Sure, that would have been great, but I know it will come eventually. 

That knowledge, combined with the joy of the journey, has made me much less desperate and left me with the hunger for learning and growing even more. 

So even though I have not made much money in my first year of blogging, I have planted some important seeds that will no doubt explode my income soon enough. 

This post is dedicated to sharing those seeds I’ve planted in my first year of blogging. 

I hope this gives you a more realistic view of how that blogging journey can look like. 

Not all of us have those crazy success stories we read online. And because it seems like ‘everybody else’ has them, many people get discouraged and quit when things don’t work out as quickly for them. 

Just because you don’t see results yet doesn’t mean the seeds aren’t growing! So, let this post inspire and motivate you to keep working through that initial phase of seemingly no growth. 

Read also: 10 Lessons I Learned In My First Year Of Blogging

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Recap 

1. Getting comfortable creating content 

As mentioned previously, I’ve started from absolute zero. I first got introduced into the whole idea of online entrepreneurship in October 2018. 

And as Black Friday came around in November, I jumped straight into my first business model. It wasn’t exactly what I had imagined, though, and I put it on hold a few months later. 

Then on the 1st of April 2019, I published my first blog post on my brand new Blog. 

By that time, I had gathered some little insights into the online business world. However, I still knew very little about content creation or marketing. 

Therefore I dedicated the first two months to simply get the hang of it. 

I didn’t do any marketing during that time. Merely coming up with content ideas and writing blog posts. 

It surely wasn’t very spectacular, but I believe that this time of purely focusing on writing content gave me some very much needed confidence and ease in my whole blogging journey. 

Now, looking back, I realize how incredibly far I’ve come. 

It took me much longer than those initial two months to get truly comfortable and efficient in content creation. 

I remember it as being rather difficult for me to come up with content ideas, and it seemingly took ages to actually write it out. 

Nowadays, I find inspiration for content out of nowhere. If I am inspired, I can write a 2,000-word post in half or even a third of the time it took me back in the beginning. 

Now, one year into my blogging journey, I have lost the fear of running out of content ideas. The quality and value of my content are steadily increasing, and I am actually feeling proud of it. 

In the beginning, I struggled a lot with creating content that I myself liked and was proud of. Very often, it just didn’t feel very original or valuable. Now, that has changed, and I couldn’t be more grateful for it!

2. Becoming clear on my niche 

Maybe the biggest problem I have struggled with throughout my first year of blogging (and quite honestly I am still struggling with it a bit) was finding a niche I felt aligned with. 

I started somewhat in the Personal Development niche. By now, I am more in the “Boss Lady” niche, meaning Female Entrepreneurship and parts of Personal Development. 

I am much happier with it now, but I still don’t feel like I am entirely aligned with it. But I guess I just keep going with the flow and developing my business with time. 

But this uncertainty about my niche has definitely slowed my progress down significantly. Would I have a niche I would feel crazy passionate about I would be able to give 130% and create tons of content and products and therefore make an income quickly.  

You can read more on that topic in 4 Things That Determine How Long It Will Take To Build A Profitable Business.

3. Creating a Blog 

I know I’m captain obvious for stating this, but I’ve created and published a Blog. 

Nowadays, everyone can do that and even in a matter of a few minutes. 

But still, I consider it something to be proud of. After all, putting myself out there on the world wide web for the first time can be a scary thing. 

That’s one reason why so many people don’t ever get started with building a business. 

4. Settling for a branding design 

The word “settling” here is a loose term. I am still not entirely fixed on my business branding. 

But I have at least come to find somewhat of brand-specific colors and fonts I try to stick to. 

Of course, it is beneficial for your business if you stick to the same branding from the very beginning. 

But personally, I try to not stress myself too much about it. After all, this is my business and my rules. If I want to change my branding into using only hot pink, I will do so without asking a business advisor for permission. (I am so not going to have a hot pink business!)

5. Learning about SEO 

Ah, search engine optimization, you love it, or you hate it. 

In the beginning, SEO can feel utterly overwhelming. After all, search engines like Google use over 200 algorithms to rank pages and posts. You will never be able to do well on all of these 200+, and who knows when Google will just suddenly change them? 

On the other hand, you can reap great rewards with SEO, and it can actually be rather easy and fun. 

For learning about SEO, I like to use Neil Patel’s content. He always shares excellent little tips and tricks that you can implement to make your content rank better. 

Through his content, I have learned a lot about SEO in my first year of blogging. 

Granted, I am nowhere near having my SEO game on track as much as I want to, but I am getting there. 

6. Marketing consistently on one platform 

One of my best decisions during my first year of blogging! 

Marketing has been the scariest topic for me in building my business. I dreaded doing it for a long, long time. 

What also didn’t help was the fact that I didn’t particularly like the social media platforms. 

Thankfully, however, I discovered Pinterest marketing and dove in headfirst with Tailwind and Pinfinite Growth. 

I have been pinning somewhat around 20 pins consistently each day for months now on my Pinterest account. 

That effort has been rewarded, and Pinterest is by far my most significant source of traffic. And the best part: It is steadily growing!!!!

Again, I am nowhere near the traffic I want to have. But I’ve recently hit the 1,000 monthly sessions mark on my Blog, and that is a motivating development. 

7. Creating my first Freebies 

Another milestone I was pretty proud of was creating my first freebie as an opt-in incentive to my email list. 

I am still struggling with having freebie or course ideas I am truly passionate about. 

So having the first one was a big and comforting step for me. 

If you are struggling with this, too, just create something basic and small. Like a printable planner or a Journaling prompts list. 

Offering a one-page pdf file might not seem very exciting, but there are people out there that will want that! And most importantly, it will get the ball rolling for more fabulous and better freebies and eventually, also your own courses. 

8. Starting an Email list 

As mentioned in my previous point, I also started an email list! Again, there was some resistance towards doing that, which makes me all the more proud to have overcome it. 

It’s still in its beginning stages, but I am sure it will grow massively during the next year. 

If you are anxious about having that more personal connection to your audience an email list provides, you should use the time to build it when you only have little traffic to your Blog. 

Sure, it will feel a bit like a waste of time to write weekly emails to a handful of people. Still, it allows you to grow more comfortable with it, with only a few people watching you. 

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What’s next 

Alright, so those were the most significant milestones I ticked off during my first year of blogging. Naturally, the question that follows is, what’s next? 

I want to do or accomplish a few things in my second year of blogging: 

• Becoming more passionate and inspired about my business
• Creating my first course 
• Having at least 10,000 monthly visitors to my website 
• Earning 2,000 €/month with my business 
• Hiring my first virtual assistant/outsourcing a few tasks 
• Starting a YouTube channel and a Podcast 
• Proudly telling my family and friends about my business (I am still keeping it a secret until I have finally begun to make a regular income and established it as a ‘real business.’) 

I guess in a year from now I’ll be able to tell you how many of these I’ve actually accomplished ^^ 

Until then, I hope you keep working as ambitiously as I on your business or whatever goal you currently have. 

Have patience and be consistent! If you keep going, success is inevitable! 

With much love 

Sophie

I always find it interesting to hear about the lessons people learn in their first year of blogging. And since my own one-year anniversary has passed, I decided to share my biggest lessons with you.

But first: Can you believe it? It’s already been ONE YEAR! I am so damn proud of myself for what I’ve accomplished this past year! I actually published content each and every week! If I put my mind on something, you can be sure it will be performed with scaring consistency ^^’

And of course, I am incredibly grateful for every single one of you! Whether you are a first time visitor to this Blog or you’ve been a loyal Felicity Seeker for a while now, you are the heart of this community. Without you, I would not spend my evenings working on this business.

So thank you immensely, for keeping my passion and hope alive!

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1. Lesson: Task batching is MAGICAL!

I still don’t do this all the time, but I’ve come to learn that doing a bunch of the same tasks at once saves you soooooo much time.

For example, I might spend a few days writing my content for the next few weeks. That way I don’t need to worry about it every week anew. And since I am already in “writing-mode” it flows so much easier and quicker.

The same goes for creating Pinterest pins or scheduling my pins with Tailwind.

It’s just really nice to focus on one thing for a while and get it all out of the way before moving on to the next thing.

Then again, sometimes, I do feel more like doing a bit of everything. In those moments, I like to go with the flow and just do what feels most aligned to me.

2. Lesson: Focus On One Traffic Source

It is easy to feel like you need to have a business profile on every social media platform out there. After all, you want to reach the biggest audience possible, right?

However, especially in the beginning, I believe you should only focus on ONE platform to market your content on.

When I started marketing my content, I created a Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter profile.

But to be honest, I never really liked marketing on social media. I much more enjoyed it with Pinterest (which is a search engine by the way).

So after half-hearted marketing on all three platforms, I first dropped Twitter and, at the end of 2019, decided to drop Instagram, too.

3. Lesson: Pinterest Beats Instagram, Facebook & Co. By Miles!!!

As previously mentioned, I’ve always felt like I had to do marketing through social media. Yet I always dreaded the thought of doing so.

But then I discovered Pinterest marketing, and I honestly fell in love!

With Instagram, Twitter & Co., your posts are pretty much only relevant for a day or so. The majority of people won’t spend the time scrolling through your older posts. Therefore you have to produce a ton of content whose lifetime is very limited.

In search engines, however, your content can rank for years to follow! Sometimes your content suddenly starts to take off after months of posting it and provides a steady source of traffic.

For example, my most significant amount of traffic comes from my blog post 10 Ways To Tune Into Your Feminine Energy. I’ve created multiple pins for it, but the initial one is over six months old at this point, yet it produces traffic for me, each and every day!

Can you imagine that happening with a six-month-old Instagram post? Probably not.

Also, Pinterest doesn’t require you to interact much with others. It might be my introverted side speaking, but for some reason, I’ve never liked interacting much on social media. Not on my private accounts nor my business accounts.

I love talking to people in person, but the whole commenting, liking, and chatting feels very stressful and bothersome to me. And it takes time!

With Pinterest, I don’t have to do any of that. I just do my thing, and whoever is interested in my content clicks on or saves my pin.

Pinterest is literally like a perfectly uncomplicated friend ^^

Read also: The 5 Biggest Pinterest Mistakes I Made In The Beginning
Read also: My Pinfinite Growth by Melyssa Griffin Review

4. Lesson: Marketing can be fun!

For the majority of my first year of blogging, I hated marketing. The thought alone made me uncomfortable, and I dreamed of the day I could hire a virtual assistant for that task.

But as I started to learn more and more about marketing and only focused on Pinterest, I actually found myself enjoying it more and more.

It was mainly that initial phase of being overwhelmed and anxious because I had no idea how to market correctly that kept me from enjoying it.

Now, I know that marketing can actually be fun if I do it my way and push through that initial phase of overwhelm by investing in a course like Pinfinite Growth and amazing tools like Tailwind.

5. Lesson: The best progress follows after frustration

Without fault, there will be frustrations throughout your journey of building a successful business.

You will never reach a level that is entirely without frustrations. Still, they will most likely become rarer than in the beginning phase of building a business.

So naturally, I had my fair share of disappointments throughout my first year of blogging. And yes, it was frustrating to try such much time and time again and not see the results I had hoped for.

What I noticed, however, was that after those phases of frustration – especially the bigger ones – followed highly motivating stages of growth.

That’s why for a while now, I’ve actually become excited every time I am in such a frustrating phase. Because I know that very soon some significant progress will be made!

You might also be interested in: 9 Hardships You Have To Face In Life

You might also be interested in: 25 Quotes That Help You Recover From Failure

You might also be interested in: 7 Reasons Why Failure Is Important For Success

6. Lesson: There are no spontaneous growth spurts, and that’s ok.

We always hear all those success stories of people changing one little thing about their strategy or taking one course, and suddenly their traffic spikes like crazy!

So far, I’ve not had those crazy spikes. Sure if you look at percentages you could say I had great moments of growth. But even if going from 10 views a day to 40 a day is a 400% growth, it’s not necessarily the spike I had in mind. (But it’s of course still very much appreciated!)

Anyways, what I’ve found in the last few weeks is that somewhat of a calm and security has settled over me.

I am not desperate anymore to get those crazy growth spikes or finally make tons of money online. Sure, I am still working towards that, but I am much more patient and don’t really care that much if it happens today or next week.

Mainly because I am 100% certain that it will happen eventually. I have this unwavering faith that success will come sooner or later. And since I am genuinely enjoying myself and the steady progress I am making, I don’t feel in a desperate rush for it.

I love that feeling of calm and ease. And I have the feeling that once you reach that, you finally open the doors to let the Universe deliver your manifestations.

It feels like that practice of letting go and not clinging to that dream, the law of attraction teaches.

Should you still feel impatient and desperate to have that success, remind yourself of how far you’ve already come. Maybe look at your Google analytics and see the steady growth your traffic has made throughout the past months.

You will enjoy running and growing your business so much more if you just let go of that impatience and enjoy the steady progress.
Because in the end, steady growth will benefit you more than one crazy spike.

Also, you never know how long those over-night successes have already been growing for that “sudden” success to happen.

One press account said I was an overnight success. I thought that was the longest night I’ve ever spent.

– Sandra Cisneros

I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I’d been publishing for 20 years.

– Mary Karr

It took about 10 years’ time for Shopify to be an overnight success.

– Tobias Lutke

7. Lesson: One Blog post per week is enough

Looking at some of my business role models – Alux.com and ProjectLifeMastery.com – I kind of thought I’d need to publish content at least three times a week to be truly successful.

But quite frankly, I’d much rather publish one fantastic quality content each week and focus the rest of my time on creating amazing products or improving my existing posts.

I learned this mentality from Neil Patel. Neil has a crazy successful SEO marketing Blog, and you guessed it, he publishes one post per week. Yet he has three employees working on improving and updating is already existing content.

I immediately fell in love with that strategy! I think it’s rather sad to think of the crazy amount of content that gets published, but barely anyone takes notice of it.

I think the idea of carefully curated and regularly nurtured content is a lovely one.

8. Lesson: Content is king …. but inside a constitutional monarchy

This is an addition to the previous point.

For a long time, people preached that “content is king.” Meaning who has a lot of quality content succeeds inevitably.

But in today’s age, where there are billions of pieces of content out there on the internet, it’s much much harder to get people to discover your quality content.

That’s why marketing is so important.

Again, Neil Patel is a fantastic example for someone who spends a minority of his time creating content but a majority on marketing it.

So, yes, I’ve learned that my content is not everything. In fact, I should probably only spend 20% of my time with it and the other 80% with marketing it.

9. Lesson: Same content – many faces

One excellent way to get a significant impact from a few but quality content is by multiplying it.

So you’ve written a blog post. Let’s read the text out loud and record it. Then hire a virtual assistant to create a YouTube video and a podcast out of it. And suddenly, you have that same content on three highly used platforms without much more effort on your side compared to the one initial Blog post.

Two people, who are doing this are Stefan James from Project Life Mastery and Jim Kwik.

I absolutely adore this strategy! It’s the perfect example of “working smarter, not harder.”

What’s especially great about it is that most people won’t even notice or be bothered by this duplicate content because they only consume your content on one platform.

I, for one, am not reading the blog posts, watching the youtube videos, and listening to the podcast of the same entrepreneur altogether. I mostly do one or the other.

And in the few cases of me being a rather loyal follower of that entrepreneur, I love to have the variety to choose in which formate I want to get the information.

It’s honestly a win for everybody!

10. Lesson: My business can be anything I want it to be!

You might have noticed a recurring theme in the previous points. A lot of them mention me thinking I needed to do something a certain way but then realizing I could actually do it in a different and much more enjoyable way.

So I guess one of the more profound lessons I’ve learned in my first year of blogging is that I should just do what feels right to me and not what I think is correct to do.

I am genuinely believing more and more that building and running a business can be easy and fun if you just find the right balance between being in flow and pushing your comfort zone.

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On that inspiring note, I want to end this “lessons of my first year of blogging” list. I am already getting excited about doing another one in a year from now! It is just so amazing to look back and realize how far you’ve come. I love that!

Let this be a reminder for you to look back on your journey and be proud of how far you’ve come.

And if you’ve thought about starting a Blog yourself, do it already! Before you know it, a year will have passed, and you will have gotten so much closer to your dream life.

Until next time!

Sophie