So you started a blog and have heard about how amazing Pinterest is but nothing you do seems to help you get more traffic to your blog. Want to know why? It’s certainly not because Pinterest just isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Pinterest is a goldmine for bloggers. The reason you’re failing at harnessing the power of Pinterest marketing is simply because you are using the platform wrong.

But hey, don’t feel bad. No one just decides to jump onto Pinterest one day and completely dominates it. It took me a couple of months and LOTS of research to figure out how to start driving traffic. And more traffic equals more money. But want to know a secret? You really don’t need hundreds of thousands of monthly pageviews to make good money. You just need to know you can make Pinterest work for you (I’ll explain more in a minute). Here are 8 reasons you are failing on Pinterest and how to fix it.

If you have already put in hours and hours researching how to use Pinterest and are about to throw in the towel. DON’T! Some of these things you already know but I promise I am going to tell you some new things you have been missing out on! I am far from being the best blogger on Pinterest but here’s How I Got 236k Pageviews In 2 Weeks {In My 3rd Month Blogging} and here’s How I Made $2300 From Home Last Month. If these are things you are interested in achieving, read on!

1. You don’t have a business account and are not using “rich pins”

You can convert your existing account to a business account here. This is important because then you can enable “Rich Pins” on your site. Ever noticed how some people have extra information below their Pinterest image and some don’t? Well, those are called Rich Pins. So why do you want extra information on your pins? Because that will bring more engagement to your pins and Pinterest will take you more seriously (therefore showing off your beautiful pins to more people).

And that means more followers, more traffic, and more money! These are must do’s for any blogger on Pinterest.

2. You are not using the alt text for post descriptions

For every post you write, you need to add a description. This will help your readers to find your content on Pinterest easier. And when you have Rich Pins and put your description in the alt tag, anyone that re-pins your posts will have your description attached. This is a big deal! Imagine a big time blogger on your site and they pin your post but there is no description.

You might get some good traffic, but you would get more with that description attached. Plus, I know there are plenty of bloggers that won’t re-pin things if there is no alt text and share buttons on your site (a hover button over the image is best).

To add a description in the alt text, all you need to do is go to the image in the media file and find the “alt text” box. You can add your description there and insert the image into your post. It’s as easy as that. Then when people pin your images, there will be a description! I suggest adding the same description to every image in every particular post. Sometimes people don’t pin your pinnable image.

So what do you write in your descriptions? There is no right or wrong here. Keywords and creating a sense of urgency are what you are trying to achieve with your descriptions. I suggest looking at some popular pins and then form your own tactics.

But I know you might have hated that answer so here is the exact description I use for one of my top posts. I bolded some keywords (what people are searching for) to give you an idea of what I mean.

• “11 Lazy Girl Hacks That Will Help You Lose Weight Fast. Looking for an easy way to shed some pounds with little to no exercise? Just by making these small fitness changes in your life can help you to lose weight and get healthier in just weeks.” 

See how I added the title in the description as well? I want my description to have those keywords so this is the easiest way to do that.

3. Your images are ugly

Pay very close attention here. Your images will make or break you! Pins that do well on Pinterest consist of bright colors, no faces, and are long. Those are well-known facts.

Now here’s what you don’t know. You can put out multiple images for each post and you will have a much greater chance at it going viral. Here is an example of what I mean.

This is another very popular post of mine. I also like to change the titles sometimes on my images. Not all of the people seeing your pins in the feed will like the same things. One other thing I’ve noticed, once one image goes viral any pin with the same URL will also do well.

So every so often I will make a new image for a post that has done well for me and pin it to my boards. If a pin isn’t doing well for you after a couple of weeks, don’t delete it, just quit promoting it and make a new pin.

I like to use Picmonkey to create my images. It’s very simple to use and the free version has lots of features. But I personally prefer the paid because I like the extras that come with it. You can check out some tutorials on YouTube if you need to, but I highly suggest investing the time into creating good images because honestly, you will fail on Pinterest if you don’t.

4. Your not using group boards (properly)

If you are not using group boards, you really need to get on it! How many followers do you have now? A couple hundred or maybe a few thousand (and that’s taken you forever to get or you’re only getting follow backs, right?) Either way, you have a very limited audience.

Now imagine you are on 20 group boards with 20,000 followers each. You just got a potential audience of 400,000! I promise you, you need to get added to as many group boards as you can if you want to be successful on Pinterest anytime soon. Without them, I don’t know what I would have done. I don’t even want to think about it!

So how do you find them and more importantly how do you find good ones (not all group boards are created equal)? You can use Pingroupie.com and search for boards that have a lot of followers and a high repin rate (a higher repin rate means the board is more active and you will get more repins).

Or you can stalk other bloggers in your niche and see what groups they are a part of. Now some boards will say no new contributors (ugh..I hate that), but others will make it easy for you and give you exact instructions to join. And then there are the ones that have no instructions.  You can go to the board owner (the first picture on the group of pictures of all collaborators) and comment on one of their own pins and ask to join or you can contact them on their website.

I suggest saying something like this.  “Hello! My name is ___  from (your website). I really love your group board (name of board) and was hoping to become a collaborator. I promise to never spam the board and will follow all of the rules {if this applies to said board}. Thanks for your consideration!”

You can never be a part of too many group boards (I think I’m at 50 now). So you have plenty to do. Don’t get discouraged when people don’t respond. It happens all of the time, unfortunately. The more followers the better and I recommend leaving any group boards once you surpass the number of followers you have to what that particular board has.

5. Your strategy needs improvement

So you are on group boards and your images are nice but you are still failing. That’s because you either don’t have a strategy or you don’t have a good one.  You may have heard of other bloggers using a Pinterest scheduler. A scheduler is so important because pinning throughout the day is much better than pinning all at once (this gets you more exposure). I doubt you have all day to be on Pinterest. Who does, right? Viraltag, Tailwind, and Boardbooster are all popular and I’ve tried all of them.

I hate the first two. They take up too much of my time and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be on Pinterest all day to schedule two weeks of pins! Oh, how many hours I’ve wasted on that. I love Boardbooster and I am so thankful for it!

For scheduling, I only pin my own content to the group boards and I pin others content to my own boards. I highly suggest watching a tutorial on Boardbooster (it’s kind of hard for me to explain without boring you to death and completely losing you).

But there is a scheduler option that you can use to connect all of the boards you are a part of and your own. Then it creates a secret board for each group on your actual Pinterest page. This way you can pin to the secret boards very quickly (even from your phone in bed!) and have all your pins scheduled for the month so fast. You get your first 100 pins free and accounts start at only $5 a month. You pay more the more pins you use.

Here is an example of what each of my boards looks like. I determine the amount of pins per day by things like rules for that board and how busy the board is (you don’t want to be repinning the same pins over and over unless it’s a faster moving board).

6.You are not pinning enough

I suggest pinning anywhere from 30-50 pins a day of others content to your own boards and 30-50 pins a day of your own to the group boards (depending on how many boards you are a part of and how many pins you have of your own). Just don’t overdo it or you might get dropped from the board!

Every blogger does something different, but I pin about 60 (mine)/40 (others) and I’m pinning 92 pins a day currently (it will go up as I get on new group boards).

Also, you should be repinning to your own boards. You can see on Boardbooster the best time to pin for a higher repin rate. I like to repin my own pins manually to my own boards on Saturday and Sunday around 10 PM. Maybe just one or two pins per board. Don’t be scared to pin the same pin to multiple boards. I think a good rule of thumb is to not repin the same pin to the same board more than every five days.

So if you have one really good post, you should definitely be re-pininng that more than a post that isn’t performing well for you. I actually don’t promote the majority of my content. Just my best stuff.

7. Your page (and boards) need more everything

Does your page and boards contain keywords to help people to find you? Do you have a best of board with all of your best content? Here is an example of my description for my Health and Fitness board.

“Tips, quotes, motivation, food and workouts to help you lose weight and live a healthy lifestyle.”

These are things people are searching for when they search in the health and fitness topic. A good way to figure out what people are searching for in regards to a particular board is to go to the Pinterest search bar and type in, let’s just say, “Food”.

The words below are things people search for. So maybe your board is titled “Food” and your description would include some of the keywords you see.

Also, make sure the main picture for each board is appealing and put your best boards closer to the top of your profile. No faces is pretty important here. This will make people more likely to follow you and therefore see more of your great content down the road in their feeds.

8. Your boards aren’t doing you any favors

Okay, do your boards reflect your website and are they popular topics on Pinterest? These are kind of two different topics so I’ll break them down to give you a better understanding as to why each is important to you.

I am a lifestyle blogger and my main topics I write about are health and fitness, beauty, Christian living, parenting, making and saving money, blogging, personal development, etc. I need boards that I can pin my content I write about too, so I definitely want boards on my page that will help me to do that.

But I also have boards that I don’t have much (if any) pins of my own being pinned to a particular board. Like my DIY board. I am not a DIY project blogger, but that board gets me a lot of followers since there are many people on Pinterest that are looking for DIY projects. Sometimes they just follow that board, but a lot of the time they will follow all of my boards. So my other content has a better chance of showing up in more people’s news feeds.

Making Pinterest work for you regardless of pageviews

So remember how I said you don’t have to have a lot of pageviews to make good money, right? Every blogger makes money differently. Let me give you and example of what this could look like in terms of how someone could make money.

Blogger #1: Gets 200,000 pageviews a month and is a part of a premium ad company like AdThrive. They make $8 per 1000 pageviews. They make $1600 a month.

Blogger #2: Gets 20,000 pageviews a month. They can’t be a part of a premium ad company (since they haven’t met the pageview requirement) so they go with a company like Media.net and are making about $2 per 1000 pageviews. They make $40 a month in ad revenue. BUT….they sell a product, ebook, or course. They sell their course for $49 a piece. Let’s just say they only sell 50 courses per month. They are making $2,450 a month from that. They are making more than Blogger #1 with way less traffic.

See the difference? Now, there’s nothing wrong with making money from ads, but it is certainly not the best way to make money with a blog. You could also make a couple hundred extra dollars a month from writing sponsored posts. Diversity is key. I’m currently in the process of putting together a product to sell because I made the mistake of relying heavily on ad income. Some months you simply won’t make as much money with ads.

If you fix these 8 things on your Pinterest page, your blog will grow very quickly. Pinterest really isn’t as complicated as it seems to you right now. I know how bad it sucks to feel like your putting in so much effort but getting no results. These things have helped me to make a modest income very quickly (I have only been blogging for 10 months now) and I know they will help you too!

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