There are many reasons why you might not be growing on Pinterest. Here are 4 main reasons why your Pinterest traffic is not growing.
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#1 YOUR PROFILE IS INVISIBLE
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Most people use and tend to think of Pinterest as a social media platform whereas they should be thinking of it as a search engine. If your profile is not sending the right signals or the right ranking factors for the search engine then you’re not going to be discovered on Pinterest which means you’re not going to grow either in followers or traffic.
How to be visible?
- Make sure that your profile has a business name or a brand name that is associated with the business or the website that you have. If you don’t have a website, you can just stick to your own name as a personal brand.
- Ensure that your profile showcases the most important keywords that will help your ideal audience find you on Pinterest. This means identifying what your niche is and how you can reach your target audience by focusing on 3-5 specific keywords. For example, if you are a business that is all about photography and you focus on couples photography then these are keywords that must be featured in your profile.
- Not only should your business name and bio be keyword optimized, but you also want to make sure that you’re a high-quality account that is only pinning content which links to solid high-quality websites. If you’re adding a lot of spammy links to your website or you’re saving content from creators that are not high-quality then that will also influence the growth of your account.
- To make Pinterest think that your profile is legitimate, you also want to make sure that you have verified your website which means you have claimed your website or your domain on Pinterest as well as connected any social media channels that you might have on Pinterest. This allows Pinterest to understand who you are as a content creator or a website owner and what you bring to the table. The more legitimate and high-quality your profile is, the faster your account is going to grow.
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#2 YOUR CONTENT IS AVERAGE
Questions to ask yourself:
There are billions of pins that are uploaded every single month on Pinterest so why should people be clicking on your pins over anyone else’s pins? When you think of Pinterest as a search engine you have to think about what it is that you are offering through your content to the people on Pinterest, for them to click through to the pins and also find you and follow your account? Why should people be buying your products and services over someone else? What is it that is unique about your brand and business that should attract people to your account on Pinterest?
When it comes to your content on Pinterest, what I mean here is the pins that you’re creating. Pins act as the major form of currency on Pinterest which means that the better your pins the higher the chance that you’re going to rank on Pinterest as well as grow your account.
There are 2 different aspects to creating your pins.
- The visual, or the design – Visually appealing
This is all about creating things that Pinterest loves which means creating vertical pins with high-quality images, a call to action, and making sure that you’re giving people a reason to click.
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- The subject matter – Interesting
The second aspect of creating stellar content is all about the subject matter. What is the topic that your pin relates to? Are you creating a product pin? Are you creating a blog post? What is that blog post going to help your reader achieve? So when you’re creating content on Pinterest you always have to think about the person who is going to be clicking through to that pin. Because when people don’t click through to your pin you do not get traffic and followers which means your account doesn’t grow.
When it comes to creating stellar content that helps your account grow, you gotta have both of these 2 aspects in place. You need to be creating pins that are visually appealing to your target audience to stop the scroll and click through to your pin. Secondly, your subject matter or what your pin is all about needs to also be interesting enough for that person to click through.
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How to create awesome content?
A couple of ways that you can do this is to make sure that you are creating content that is very actionable, specific, and beneficial for your ideal audience. Some of the things people love on Pinterest include list-based posts such as 21 ways to eat healthily, 30 recipes that you can cook for your children, and so on. Another thing people love on Pinterest is figuring out how-to’s, hacks, or tutorials.
If your content falls into one of the categories where you can offer these types of content formats, make sure to test and try them out and see if your audience resonates with them. The key here is to make sure that not only are you creating pins that are appealing to your reader but you’re also creating content that is appealing to your reader as well. The only way to win on Pinterest, in the long run, is by creating awesome content that your audience cares about and wants to read about.
If you’re looking for step-by-step guidance and my support in growing your Pinterest account, you can check out my Pinfluence Academy program which is a step-by-step roadmap to scale your audience and income on Pinterest.
#3 USING ONLY IMAGE PINS
Image pins are pretty much the standard pins that you must have seen across Pinterest which is just a basic graphic on which you can click through and it takes you somewhere on the Internet. However, since the last few years, Pinterest has released video pins and is now heavily pushing content that falls in this category. One of the reasons why Pinterest is doing that is because they want their users to stay long on the platform and engage within the platform.
When Pinterest is figuring out whether or not to put your profile as a high-quality profile and to push it out to more people on the platform, it is looking at how many people are engaging with your content. There can be various types of engagement on the platform including link clicks, impressions, close-ups, saves as well as video plays. When you upload video pins you also allow Pinterest to believe that you are keeping users on the platform engaged which means that they should be showing your content to a wider audience and putting it out to more people.
Which content format to use?
There are so many different types of content formats that you can experiment with on Pinterest besides just the image pins and the video pins. You also have story pins that are in trending right now which you may or may not have access to, but other than that you can also be creating product pins where you can tag your products, carousel pins where you have more than one pin on the particular pin format so you can showcase multiple photos of the same pin to engage your users a bit more.
The idea here is not to stick to just one content format because that limits your reach and your audience. I agree that video pins and story pins don’t necessarily help you bring a lot of traffic because it’s a little bit harder to click through and find the website in these formats. However, they help to expand your reach on Pinterest which means you’re gonna get more followers in the long run.
Once you have more followers, you have more impressions of your existing pins which means you have more traffic in the long run. So do not just think about what are the pins that are going to drive traffic to your account but also think about what are the types of content formats that are going to increase the number of followers and the reach that you have on Pinterest so that in the future when you’re posting content it reaches a wider audience organic.
#4 NOT PLAYING THE LONG GAME
Even though Pinterest is faster than Google or YouTube as a search engine it does not mean that it is magic. It does not mean that if you start posting pins today you’re gonna start getting traffic and traction tomorrow. Now as much as we would all love for that to happen, it rarely ever happens that way. Of course, you might hit it off with one or two viral pins here and there and you might use one of these hacks to get a little bit of traffic here and there. But to build a consistent platform, following, and traffic from Pinterest, you do need to give yourself a little bit of time.
I often get comments on YouTube from people who have started their account last week, posted 3 or 5 times, and are wondering why they’re not growing their audience. Well, you’re not going to grow on Pinterest by posting just for one week 3-5 times. You have to do this for the next 3-6 months consistently, patiently, and with an actual strategy to see growth on Pinterest.
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CONSISTENCY IS THE QUEEN
This year more than ever consistency is the queen on Pinterest and the reason is pretty simple. Pinterest wants its users to stay for as long as possible and engage with high-quality content on their platform which is not just content that was created years ago but it is fresh content that is valid right now. So if you want to be a long term content creator who benefits from the organic reach on Pinterest, you want to make sure that you have a consistent strategy of showing up on Pinterest every single week and month for the next 3-6 months to see the traction that you’re looking for.
Have a little bit of patience when it comes to growing your Pinterest audience because even though it is faster than other platforms it is not magic and it is not going to happen overnight.