7 Pinterest Hacks (2024) – Best Pinterest Tips to Grow Traffic Organically

Like everything on the Internet, Pinterest is changing very fast. The platform evolves, and algorithms become more sophisticated day by day, which makes it harder to game it. But we are going to try anyway, right? 🙂

I started my blog in the middle of February 2017, I created a brand-new Pinterest account associated with my blog, so I had 0 traffic and 0 followers for starters. In 10 months, I reached over 170,000 monthly pageviews and was able to quit my 9-5 job to start working as a blogger full time!

And you can see on this screenshot as well that I’ve got a day with over 13,000 users on my site!

I am now getting over 300,000/mo pageviews to the same blog.

And guess where does my traffic comes from? Pinterest! About 90% of my audience comes from Pinterest! Is this good or bad? Well, keeping all eggs in the same basket is never a good idea. But having mostly Pinterest traffic is way better than having no audience at all! And if you are just starting out online, Pinterest is the best platform to see the fast traffic results!

Let’s look at the things that I believe were the biggest factors that contributed to my rapid Pinterest traffic growth.

1.  Pinterest Hack – Fill New Boards with Popular Pins from Other Sites

When you have a completely new account and start creating boards for it, what is the best way to go about them? Should you start saving your own relevant pins to these new boards right away?

Nope! Here is my first Pinterest hack for this video. Before you save any of your own pins to the boards, make sure to have at least 20-30 popular pins from OTHER sites.

If you want to know why you should use this strategy, and also learn how to find the best third-party pins for your new boards, you definitely need to get a deeper dive into Pinterest hacks in my Pinterest SEO Traffic Secrets course. You’ll find a link to it in the description under this video.

Now let’s move on to the next Pinterest hack.

2. Pinterest Hack – Enable “RICH PINS”

If you haven’t heard of these, you probably are new to Pinterest marketing. Enable Rich pins ASAP because they help you get better rankings in Pinterest search results. So you get more likes, repins and traffic to your site. Why do Rich pins work so great?

To make it simple, Rich Pins add more content from your site associated with the image.

The easiest way to enable Rich pins is using Yoast SEO plugin. I have a detailed guide on how to set up a Pinterest business account, verify your site and then enable Rich pins. 

3. Create Images that Stand Out and Generate Click-Throughs

I made a very detailed video on my channel which explains who to make perfect images for Pinterest.

Never miss an opportunity to add a call-to-action to your pin, invite users to make a click with graphic elements on your pin.

4. Remember The 80/20 Rule? Forget About It!

This is a standard recommendation of many Pinterest gurus – publish about 80% of pins of other bloggers and only 20% of our own if you don’t want to look spammy.

Someone invented this rule, and after it was republished 20-100 times in various sources, we all just believed it. But Pinterest never said this. It is true that Pinterest values your account as a content creator AND a content curator. As a content curator, you, of course, can and should save some pins from other sites. But you don’t need to waste 80% of your time saving third-party pins!

Pinterest representatives made it clear that business accounts which are linked to verified websites, should make content creation their priority. So if you really want me to give you a number, probably 80% of your own pins should be the right ratio. And it doesn’t mean you are being spammy on Pinterest if you save mostly pins from your own site. It actually means that you are a great content creator who can produce a lot of quality images for the platform.

But I need to make a note here. If you are just a beginner, and your site doesn’t have a great variety of content, repinning the same 10 images or pages in a loop will look very spammy. Plus, with a new Pinterest business account, you will need to build lots of new boards. Remember what the first hack I showed you today? It was about saving popular pins from other sites. So, with a new Pinterest account, you will definitely have to save lots of third-party pins, and the share of your own pins will hardly reach the 80% I just mentioned.

5. Pinterest Hack – Ask Users to Save your Pins to Relevant Boards 

Try your best to help users save your pins to the boards that will actually help your pins rank higher.

I use a simple little trick for this on every blog post. Before the main pin image on the page, I add a line of text asking users to save the pin to a specific board, I suggest the board title. And I know that most of the times when a user is saving a pin and doesn’t have any board for it, and also can’t think of a good board title, they will save it with some completely random board name.

Which is not the destiny you want for your pins. You want them to be saved to relevant boards so they can start ranking on Pinterest.

So, suggest the board title and many users will find it a good idea and create a new board.

It doesn’t take you much time to add this line of text next to your pin – and it helps with Pinterest SEO immensely!  

If you want to understand Pinterest SEO better, you probably would love my Pinterest SEO Checklist – get this free PDF file here.

Pinterest SEO is very closely related to the next Pinterest hack.

6. Pinterest Hack – Add Pre-Filled Pin descriptions on your site

Do you know when pins get really viral? It’s when a lot of people save images from your site to relevant boards, with relevant keywords in the pin description.

These pins created by users are called original pins. They are different from SAVES (also called repins) because they were not just re-shared inside the platform. These were pins created by someone from your site, and it’s an indicator for Pinterest that people really like your content.

The only problem with original pins is that normally, users don’t bother adding a keyword-rich description when they save your pins. I wouldn’t bother either when I’m just saving something to my personal board, especially on a mobile device.

This is what happens when a user clicks on the Save button while on your webpage. That’s using the Save Pinterest Chrome extension.

By default, Pinterest may suggest the post title as a pin description. So, you will have just a short description. By the way, you don’t need to add any hashtags on Pinterest, they don’t work on this platform.

But ideally, you’d want to have a much longer description (up to 500 characters), to include lots of related keywords.

So how do we solve this problem?

You can set Pinterest-specific descriptions for all images on your page. This is another step to make sure users save it with relevant keywords and your pins can start ranking. 

The Pinterest-specific description needs to be added by data-pin-description attribute to your image.

But if you don’t want to do this manually, you can add a pin description using the Social Pug plugin (now called Grow by Mediavine). If you set the pin description under the post, the plugin will automatically apply the same description to all the images you have in the content of your page.

7. Pinterest Hack – Take Advantage Of Trends And Seasons

Your Pinterest traffic is highly related to seasons, holidays, public events and trends. This means that you can grow your traffic by following these trends and planning your content ahead of time. You need to post your content a little bit in advance; so by the peak time, your pin already is getting traction and repins.

It’s quite easy to see the search trends on Pinterest. First, the platform sends you emails with these trends about 2-3 times a month. If you didn’t disable all the notifications from Pinterest, just search in your inbox for “pinbot search trends” because all similar emails come from Pinterest’s email pinbot@explore.pinterest.com and you’ll see something like this:

See here we go, valentines day décor, easy dinner recipes.

Or another email – St Patricks’ day crafts and decorations. They even show you how many were made this week only!

Or this email – look at the date when I received it – 5^th  of November! It’s almost two months before Christmas and look at the holiday trends: they are all christmas tree ideas got 45,000 searches on Pinterest that week, christmas decor diy got 121k searches!

You can also get here my full Pinterest Trends Planner for the entire year, with all trending keywords and holidays.  

Here’s another tip for you: If you struggle to understand the basics of search engine optimization for Google, check this free training by Mike Pearson who has his Google SEO figured out and making over $10,000/mo with each of the two niche blogs he runs.

Did you find this post usefull? Then save THIS PIN below to your Pinterest Marketing board for later! 

Anastasia Blogger

I’m Anastasia and I’m a full-time blogger, online entrepreneur, and Pinterest marketing strategist. I help digital entrepreneurs and bloggers drive targeted traffic from Pinterest either through my online courses or through Pinterest consultancy.

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