A beginner’s guide to a Pinterest strategy – in 5 easy steps.

Learn the basics – plus follow the quick 5-step plan to sort your Pinterest Strategy!

New blogger, are you feeling overwhelmed? You might have heard that Pinterest is great for short-term traffic and SEO is better for long term traffic? Well, let me take the scary out of strategy with this beginner’s guide to a Pinterest strategy.

No doubt when you first started reading about this idea of being able to work from home or blogging as a side hustle, it started out looking pretty sweet.

• Write a few blogs ✔
• Hang out on Pinterest ✔
• Make some extra coin ✔

Looking good so far. 😉 You start researching, take a few free courses, and maybe even throw a website together if you’re really on a roll. But then things start to take a turn…

You’ve fumbled your way through hosting platforms, domains, plug-ins, SEO, keywords, themes and slugs, and your grip on this whole thing is starting to slip a little. Then, it comes, bam!

STRATEGY.

Pinterest Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Blogging Strategy… everyone is saying you must have one. But what exactly does this even mean?

First, take a deep breathe and relax. It’s not hard and I’ll walk you through it.

A strategy is just a plan of what you are going to do to achieve something.

And the reason you need a strategy is this – if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. I’m not sure who to attribute that to, but that little pearl of wisdom is not my own 🙂 Some clever person thought it up!

You probably already have a few strategies in your life that you didn’t even know! Maybe a budgeting strategy, saving a certain amount of money to pay off a debt or make a big purchase. Or a meal planning strategy… do you sit down on a Sunday and plan dinners for the week ahead?

Heck, you might even have a tidy-up strategy – wait until there is no longer a clear path from your bed to the door and then it’s time to put some clothes away.

Yes, I can take the credit for that one!

So now that we’ve taken the scary out of strategy… let’s look at how you might plan out your strategy for Pinterest. Given that you clicked on this beginner’s guide, you probably are a beginner, or are at least somewhere between thinking of blogging through to the early months of launching your blog.

I believe it’s really important to work at a pace that matches your skill and experience. Yes, there are some detailed, comprehensive strategies out there. But for now, just getting started and deciding on a schedule is the most effective way to balance progress with becoming overwhelmed.

You’ll be surprised at how quickly you learn and will be ready to step up to the more advanced. But you’re never going to get there if you are overwhelmed and give up! Give yourself a fighting chance.

1. Set up your Pinterest account

Alright, nice and easy. Be sure to set your Pinterest account up as a business account (this will give you access to Pinterest Analytics), add a photo or logo so people can relate to you, and update your username so that it shows your blog name.

2. Add some boards

Set up some boards, including a Best of “the name of your blog/business”. Once you’ve done this, you can shuffle them into any order you like by just selecting ‘boards’ and then click and drag the board you want to move. This is the order other people will see your boards, so make sure you get your ‘Best of’ board first up! This is where you keep all of your own pins (as well as on other boards).

You’ll also want to make sure that you’ve written a description for each of your boards. One of the most common things I see written about using Pinterest is understanding that it’s more of a search engine than a social media channel.

So be sure to use good key words in your descriptions so that it’s easy to tell what you are all about.

3. Get started pinning

Get a few pins on your boards to start to make them look pretty. Remember, although Pinterest is essentially a search engine, it’s still a visual platform. People want attractive pins. So at this point you are pinning other peoples‘ pins that relate to your boards. Even once you get around to making your own pins, you will still keep pinning other peoples pins as well. Sharing is caring!

4. Decide on a schedule

And don’t be scared by this step either!

It’s just important that you make a decision and then stick to it. So that you pin in a consistent way and that this task doesn’t get bumped down the list when you get busy.

Work out how often you want to post. How many pins you aim to make for each post and when you’re going to pin them. Let’s say you’re going to post a new blog twice a week. For each new blog post you write you can make multiple pins, this way you get more bang for your buck! You might start off with five different pins per post, so that’s 10 a week.

Now remember! The number is not critical, the important bit is that you decide on a number and remain consistent. You can always adjust as you go.

So you have 10 pins of your own and you might choose to post 50 in total per week, so that’s 40 pins from other people’s boards. This means you would pin about 7 pins a day. That’s it! That’s your schedule. How easy is that?

5. Keep an eye on your strategy and adjust as necessary.

Pinterest makes this super easy with their analytics, but you can also use Tailwind or another scheduler which offers more detailed analytics. And if you don’t have the time to manually pin every day, then Tailwind can also help you with that too. But if you do have the time, manually pinning is just fine.

So that’s it! A quick and easy 5-step Pinterest Strategy. Over time you can work on making your pins more clickable, seeing what time of day works best and whether more or less pins is effective for you.

Ready for more?

Check out my review on Carly Campbell’s (from Mommy on Purpose) course – Pinteresting Strategies. Her focus is on manual pinning, but you’ll also learn all about keywords, SEO and branding. It’ll definitely take you to the next level!

Let me know in the comments below if you have any other hints for a beginner’s Pinterest strategy!