How I Got My Blog Post to Go Viral On Pinterest

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(Last Updated On: March 11, 2020)

I am a brand new blogger and Pinterest is my #1 source of traffic. Over 90% of my monthly traffic is directly from Pinterest! In my third month blogging, I received over 25,000 page views.

How was I able to get so many clickthroughs on my brand new Pinterest account which had less than 300 followers? Well, I was able to get a viral pin that brought me 1,000-3,000 views per day for over a week! In this blog post, I will teach you exactly what I did to get a viral pin on Pinterest.

For the purposes of this article, going viral means getting more than 10x your usual traffic!

Also, everything mentioned in this post is my own personal results. It might not work the same as you depending on your niche.

Related: How I Increased My Blog’s Traffic To Over 25,000 Page Views In My Third Month Blogging

1. I wrote an article on a popular topic in my niche

The post that went viral for me was “10 Things I Stopped Buying To Save Money.” When I wrote this post, I had no idea that anyone would be interested in my spending habits. What’s more, this post took me less than an hour to write and I had no intention of it really bringing me very much traffic.

I blog mostly about saving money and blogging. At the time of writing this post, I was mainly focusing on my posts about blogging rather than the ones on saving money. That’s why I was surprised when this post finally took off for me!

Can you guess how long it took for this post to go viral?

I posted this post on May 11. On May 16, this post brought me over 1,000 clicks. May 20, I had over 2,500 clicks to my blog!

Going viral can happen in the blink of an eye. For me, it happened in less than 5 days of publishing my blog post. My post was bringing me excellent traffic for over a week and now I am down to my regular numbers again!

2. I made a beautiful pin that made users want to click

This is the pin that went viral for me:

This is the reason why the pin went viral:

• I used a beautiful stock photo with nice clean colours.
• I used a list (i.e. “10 things”) which is often very effective for clickthroughs on Pinterest
• I created curiosity by not giving away the 10 items that I was going to talk about
• My font was bold and clear (i.e. attention grabbing)
• I used a peachy font. I am quite surprised by this because the pins that normally perform well tend to use very bold colours like bright red or magenta.

Related: Blogging for Profit: How To Start A Money-Making Blog

3. I used great key words in my pin and personal boards

The pin description I added for my viral pin was:

I used to spend a lot of money on these items but now I learned that they are useless and I can find cheaper alternatives to save me more money! #savemoney #personalfinance #budgeting #moneysaving #payoffdebt

I’ve thrown in a ton of popular key words related to saving money such as “save more money” “cheaper alternatives.” All of my personal boards are also optimized for good key words.

4. I checked my daily stats and kept repinning my popular pins

When my pin first started taking off, I made sure to keep the momentum going by repinning it to my relevant personal and group boards. There were so many versions of my pin going around on Pinterest. I found the most popular versions of the pin and kept repinning those.

There are a few ways of finding which pins are performing well. You can use Google Analytics (Acquisition -> Social -> Network Referrals -> Pinterest). You will see a list of your most popular pages referred by Pinterest. If you click on the particular link, you will then find the pins that are driving this traffic!

Here’s a screenshot to show you what I’m talking about:

My post brought me over 16,000 sessions and when I click further, I see a list of all the pins that brought me this traffic:

Another way I like to check how my pins are performing are by using the Pin Inspector on Tailwind. Go to Insights -> Pin Inspector and you will see which pins have gotten the most repins. You can then schedule another repin and add the pin to Tailwind tribes (I will talk more about this in the next section).

5. I used Tailwind

I definitely believe that I couldn’t have gotten a viral pin without Tailwind. Tailwind is a scheduler that pins for you at the most optimal times when your followers are most often online and likely to engage with your content. In my first month on Pinterest, I was manually pinning and I got myself to a very decent level of traffic (by the end of the month I was getting at least 200 clicks per day).

In my second month on Pinterest, I decided to give Tailwind (and Boardbooster) a shot using their free trials. Boardbooster is gone now so I am only using Tailwind.

I couldn’t believe that within a week of being on Tailwind, I already increased my traffic from Pinterest by more than 10x (with the viral post)!!! The reasons to me are quite obvious:

I was no longer pinning at suboptimal times.

I live in Europe and 90% of my followers live in US/Canada. When I’m the most active, they are sleeping. When they’re the most active, I am sleeping. You get the idea.

So, when I was manually pinning, I was getting very little engagement. And this was hurting my profile.

Scheduling pins with Tailwind totally changed that for me. I identified the most popular version of my viral pin, and I then let Tailwind schedule the pin to go out at the most optimal times when my audience is most likely to engage with the pin. This helped me to keep building up the momentum around this pin!

My manual pinning strategy was hard to keep up with.

I highly recommend manual pinning (this is my favourite ebook on how to manually pin to over 200,000 page views a month). You can also check out my post on how I manually pinned to over 100,000 monthly Pinterest views).

I haven’t stopped manually pinning. I still manually pin from time to time. I tried switching to a completely automated pinning strategy (only using Tailwind and no manual pinning), but I found that my profile was performing worse. So for now, I’m still going to continue manually pinning (but just not every single day like what I was doing before)!

The reason I turned to Tailwind is because I was getting really bored and tired of keeping up with all of the pins I was pushing out (i.e. which board I had already pinned to and which to pin to next). It was a pain! I was spending about 30-60 minutes pinning everyday manually pinning and I thought to myself, “Is this really a good use of my time?” Clearly not.

I then outsourced all of my pinning to Tailwind and the rest is history. Now, I spend less than 5 minutes everyday on Pinterest (mostly for my own research purposes).

I used Tailwind’s board lists

Instead of keeping my own list of all of my personal and group boards, I started making board lists (Publisher -> Board Lists). Essentialy, board lists are a list of boards that fit a particular category. For example, I write about both blogging and budgeting. However, I cannot post blogging posts in my budgeting boards, and vice versa.

Therefore, I created two lists, one for blogging and one for budgeting. Under each list, I put in all the appropriate boards that fit under that category:

This is very easy to do and took me only 5 minutes to set up. Now, whenever I publish a new post, all I have to do is ask Tailwind to schedule the pin to all the boards under my board list, and I’m done 🙂

I used Tailwind Tribes

You’ve probably heard all the rage about Tailwind Tribes. For those who don’t know, Tailwind Tribes is like a group board, however, it only exists on Tailwind. You can add your own pins to the tribe, and repin directly from the tribe (which Tailwind will then schedule for you).

I personally have found Tailwind Tribes to be hit or miss. Some tribes perform very well, and others, not so much. It took me a few weeks before I found some tribes in my niche that gave me some quality repins.

When my pin started going viral, I made sure to add a copy of it to all of the relevant Tailwind Tribes. And thank goodness, a lot of my tribe mates helped me out by repinning this pin 🙂

I kept up-to-date with Pinterest Best Practices

One of Pinterest’s best practices is to constantly push out fresh, high-quality content. Fresh content, in Pinterest’s terms, is new pins that have not been shared before. The new pins can link to new posts, old posts, and more.

Pinterest encourages content creators to continually push out new content to increase engagement with your pins. The more engagement, the more the algorithm is going to love your content and recommend it to users!

Tailwind also has a SmartGuide that I highly recommend you check out for more information!

Key take-aways

Well, there you have it. All my secrets on how I got a viral pin on Pinterest. It starts with a good blog post and eye-catching pin. Then, using a scheduler (like Tailwind) to optimize the pinning times.

If you are interested in trying Tailwind out, my link will give you a free trial (free first 100 pins) plus the first month free should you decide to sign up ($15 value).

Are you on Tailwind? Has it worked for you?

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