I spent most of an entire year working on one of my other businesses. Here’s how I skyrocketed that lifestyle blog’s page views each month with Pinterest and a whole lot of blog posts.
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There was always positive feedback about it from the few people who did see it, but after almost a year of working on it, we still had barely any visitors to our website. I was starting to get discouraged when I came up with the random idea to start a blog for it (previously it was a Pinterest-like inspirational app) after I’d seen some Pinterest posts about the power of blogging, especially when combined with using Pinterest for marketing (I’ve done blogging for other businesses before this but never really harnessed its full power).
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How I Grew a Lifestyle Blog’s Pageviews- The Numbers
So in June 2015 we were getting about 100 page views a day or 3,500 total for the month.
And in one span of 30 days (from around December 2015 to January 2016) we got more than 70,000 page views. Update: in 2017, we had a single month when we reached over 100,000 page views!
Basically I started learning as much as I could about growing your blog traffic, especially with Pinterest, and put all of that knowledge into practice straight away. Around this time I also took a blogging course that really helped me take my blogging game to the next level. And the biggest thing I focused on was VOLUME. My mantra at the end of last year was EXTREME VOLUME haha.
Now, if you like to focus on quality over quantity than that probably sounds like a terrible, terrible idea. 🙂 It actually sounded like a terrible idea to me too, at first. But I went into it thinking that I wanted to make up for the last year of basically not growing at all (but still working on it every day anyway). I wanted to see some serious traction before the end of 2015 so I wouldn’t just feel like I had spent a whole year working on a project that was only reaching a few people.
What I Actually Did to Grow My Blog
Anyway, I started writing more blog posts (I had a few that I had posted on the app before but finally created a dedicated WordPress blog on a subdomain). Without marketing them, this really didn’t make a difference though. Pinterest was the game-changer for me.
But then I was reading some ebooks about Pinterest and doing this blogging course and I discovered two tools that are seriously amazing called Tailwind and Pin Groupie. Basically once you have some pins up on Pinterest, you can use Tailwind to repin those pins out to your followers AND also pin your own pins to group boards every day. Pinning to group boards is the key ingredient here.
How Many Times a Day Should You Be Pinning?
One thing I learned in one of the courses that was a game changer was that this super popular frugal mom blogger teaching the course was pinning up to 70-100 times PER DAY. And MOST of those pins were going out to group boards. I was used to pinning just a few things here and there and maybe doing a binge once in a while of pinning a ton and annoying all my followers, but nothing I did was regular or scheduled.
When you pin to relevant group boards, your followers don’t see it and so you aren’t annoying them. That’s how you can get away with pinning like 100 times a day. 🙂 (I don’t actually pin that much anymore but closer to 15-30 pins per day).
Writing the Blog Posts
Once your marketing systems are in place (and preferably you have some opt-in forms and an email autoresponder set up ready to welcome in your new readers long-term), you just have to start writing blog posts. The more posts you do, the faster you’ll grow, OR if you do a few super high-quality posts, you’ll probably still grow really fast. The important thing is that your posts actually help people and give your readers at least once piece of actionable advice to take away.
For my blog I decided to do one whole month of extreme blogging and ended up writing 5 blog posts a day (yes, five separate, unique blog posts) for 30 days, or 150 new blog posts by the end of it. In total we have about 200 blog posts now. I spent maybe 3-5 hours a day writing the posts, and that was pretty much the only thing I did. (Also, make sure you have awesome vertical graphics with your post name and related photo to promote them in a pin!).
It may take a few months for your posts to actually start getting traction on Pinterest and for you to see a major increase in readers.
How Long Should Your Blog Posts Be?
These blog posts were pretty short actually, about 300-500 words each. I realized that for my audience, reading a 2,000 word post about everything they need to know would just be too overwhelming. So I wrote short posts with usually one key takeaway or action that they could take.
The length of your blog posts depends completely on your audience. Meet your readers where they are. Your audience might LOVE super long, in-depth guides as blog posts. You can also test out posts of different lengths to see what your readers prefer. Also, this whole strategy depends on whether your people even use Pinterest and there are relevant group boards for your topic (which you can search for using PinGroupie and then message or tag the board owner to politely ask for an invitation to pin to that board).
So, a quick recap:
1. Start with a few helpful blog posts on your site with nice Pinterest-style graphics (like at the top of this post)
2. Join group boards on Pinterest related to your blog niche with Pin Groupie (5-10 is good)
3. Use Tailwind to pin your blog posts and other related pins every day to group boards and your own boards (I recommend about 10-30 pins per day total now; make sure you follow the rules for each group board though. Each board might allow only 3 pins per day)
4. Write a whole bunch of good blog posts now that your basic system is set up
5. Keep promoting them with Pinterest
6. Use opt-in forms on your site to get your new readers on your email list where you can continue a relationship with them 🙂
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Where to from Here?
I’m currently trying this strategy of how to grow a blog in different industries to see how it does.
It’s worth giving this a try since Tailwind is low-priced to start and Pinterest and Pin Groupie are completely free. 🙂 All it takes is a lot of hard work and writing (I estimate that I wrote more than 50,000 words in that one month of mass blogging… obviously you don’t have to condense the blog posts into that short of a time frame. Also if I had done more keyword research I probably could have just made a handful of blog posts that I KNEW would be popular instead of a ton of random posts).