Do you want to know how I’m able to get over 13,000 pageviews from Pinterest in a day with viral pins?
Yes, you caught this right, I’ve got about 13,000 pageviews in one day thanks to one viral post on Pinterest. The secret sauce in most of the viral pins is that I saved them at the right time, and I chose some trending topics which people on Pinterest were looking for, in that particular month or season.
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Making Sense of Pinterest Trends and Viral Pins
Pinterest is a platform with high seasonal and trend-related fluctuations. It doesn’t work like other social media platforms. For example, if you are active on Facebook or Instagram and you want to include some posts for Thanksgiving to your content calendar, when will you publish those posts? Definitely around the Thanksgiving day, maximum a day before the holiday, right?
On Pinterest, you should save seasonal and holiday-related pins about 4-6 weeks in advance to give the platform enough time to pick up all the data about your new pins and start ranking them for relevant keywords. Don’t forget that Pinterest is a search engine!
If you follow me for a while now, you probably know that the majority of traffic comes to my blog from pins that went viral on Pinterest.
The first viral pin that created a spike in pageviews happened on my blog on a Saturday, Sept 16th, 2017.
Did I mention that traditionally my blog’s traffic is higher on weekends since Pinterest users are most active on these days? Anyway, now you know it!
So, I’ve got my first viral pin on Pinterest and the first 6,600/pageviews a day to my blog on Sept 16, 2017!
You can see from my Google Analytics stats until the first viral pin, my blog’s traffic was growing pretty slow and I had very small traffic spikes but they were not even close as big as this one in September.
Just to remind you, it was about 1.5 months before Halloween and I already had a viral pin about Halloween. You can see on this screenshot that I’ve got 6600 pageviews from Pinterest just to one post in a day!
So, on this page, you’re seeing that it was on September 16th and it was just mostly to one blog post I was getting pageviews.
And it was just the beginning. This post kept driving me crazy traffic until Nov 4th after which obviously Halloween as a topic was no more trending on Pinterest.
We can also check out my GA for the holiday season of 2018. What do you think happened last year?
My holiday-related posts (Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas) started taking off with the old viral pins and some new pins I created for the same old posts. On this screenshot you can see, that out of the top 10 posts on my blog, half were with holiday-related content.
But don’t get me wrong, trends and virality on Pinterest don’t always have to be related to holidays. You can see a crazy traffic spike in my Google Analytics in the middle of January for a weight loss related post.
I had 13,000 pageviews in a day mainly from one viral pin!
Why do you think this happened in January?
Because when the holiday season is over, with all the parties and family dinners, and the new year starts, a lot of people want to have a fresh start. So, they look for diets and weight loss meal plans a lot more in January than they do in December for example.
So, because I published my post with weight loss recipes about 4 weeks before January, my post was fully prepared for going viral on Pinterest when the season came.
Pinterest Content Plan
You need to think of all these details in advance if you want to leverage seasonal and holiday-related traffic on Pinterest month after month.
You might want to create a content plan for the entire year and this will probably take you quite a bit of time. So, if you want my help with this, I have a Pinterest Trends Content Planner.
With this 40-page document, you can plan your content ideas according to seasons, holidays, and trends in advance for the best traffic results.
I have some pages to help you track your Pinterest stats by month – follower growth, reach, saved from your site, traffic from Pinterest.
I don’t only focus on giving you ideas for organic traffic growth, but also give you the timeline for publishing some trending content which might want to promote with Pinterest ads. Usually, for promoted pins you don’t need to publish a month or two in advance, a couple of weeks before the holiday or season starts should be enough. So, I’ve got you covered for planning Pinterest ads too.
How To Go Viral On Pinterest
Well, if you haven’t posted any holiday-related content and plan to get Pinterest traffic, it’s time to act now! You can still get on this train and catch up on some extra traffic. Consider working on Thanksgiving and Christmas-related content at the beginning of October.
You can find a way to turn almost any topic around holidays, whether you are an eCommerce seller, a food blogger, a DIY, crafts, home decor blogger. If you are an eCommerce seller you can sell gift ideas and such. And if you’re a food blogger you can create recipes for a specific holiday. If you’re a DIY, then you can create seasonal-related crafts.
Listen, even if you are writing about sales and business, you can give some tips on how people could leverage the holiday season buyers activity. Kind of like my post today – I’m teaching you guys how to leverage holiday traffic and Trends on Pinterest, right?
And I want you to know something important about holiday content. People often think they should focus on evergreen topics because they can get traffic from holiday topics only for a short time.
But what people don’t realize is that when the holiday season comes, on Pinterest a huge portion of all traffic is distributed among holiday-related pins. Users search and see a lot more pins that are relevant to that season, and the evergreen topics are kind of left behind and start getting fewer clicks.
Pinterest reconfigures its platform and the whole experience of the users during this holiday season is completely different from the other months. Pinterest will definitely show some pins related to holidays even if people didn’t search for them.
So you need to understand that the evergreen content might actually get fewer clicks and viewers and impressions on Pinterest in the holiday season just because it’s not related to holidays in any way.
Another thing people don’t realize is that once you’ve created some seasonal content, it will continue bringing you Pinterest traffic for many years. It’s not gonna just work for you for three days and then you don’t get any traffic from it anymore. You will start seeing those same patterns and viral pins coming to your Google Analytics year after year on the same season.
Now, what should you do to attract even more traffic to your old holiday-related posts?
- Find in Google Analytics your old most popular pins and repin them to all relevant boards (better if you do it with intervals using Tailwind scheduler). Pinterest doesn’t like duplicate content but Pinterest doesn’t mind if you save your content once a year. They actually say that you can save the same pin to the same board once in about four to six months because you want to show it to your new followers.
- Create 2-3 new pin versions for your old viral posts and also include them into your schedule so that the new pins can also compete for the same keywords in search results.
If you want to learn more about driving viral (free, organic) Pinterest traffic to your website, you can make a jump-start on Pinterest and grab the essence of all my Pinterest expertise in a week by taking my Pinterest SEO Traffic Secrets Course.
If you found this post useful, you might want to save THIS PIN below to your Pinterest Marketing board to check the post later when new updates are announced.
Pinterest Trends: How To Go Viral On Pinterest with Trending and Seasonal Content
Instructions
- Making Sense of Pinterest Trends and Viral Pins
- Pinterest Content Plan
- How To Go Viral On Pinterest
- Now, what should you do to attract even more traffic to your old holiday-related posts?
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.
