Hello, my friend and a very warm welcome back. Have you been wondering how Pinterest works? It can be a hard search engine to master, can’t it?
Making mistakes on Pinterest can leave you with very little traffic after all of your hard work and that sucks!
You Could be making These 5 Disastrous Pinterest Mistakes and not know that you’re doing it!
Pinterest has changed the way it works recently and that has made many long term pinners want to chuck in the towel.
I was one of them my traffic started tanking so badly that it was cut completely in half. (ouch! I hear you say)
But, I’m not a quitter. So I dug my heels in and went into investigation mode.
What I discovered was I was actually committing some of the 5 disastrous Pinterest mistakes myself!
Now I’m going to share the 5 Pinterest mistakes with you and show you how to make your traffic grow again in double-quick time.
This post may contain affiliate links. This means if you click a link and make a purchase I will receive a commission. The price you pay will not be affected.
1. Always Follow The Pinterest Guide Lines
Are you aware that Pinterest posts its community Guidelines and details its content safety policy?
To be honest not many take any notice but if you are in certain niche’s you must read them!
You will be shocked by what Pinterest deems as “harmful, misleading, or violent content.”
If you blog about parenting and using essential oils watch out!
These rules definitely apply to you.
Pinterest deems topics such as breastfeeding or essential oils as coming under adult or misleading content. Who knew eh?
Quote from Pinterest’s guidelines:
“[Y]ou can save content about sexual health, breastfeeding, mastectomies, art, education and well-being with adult nudity given the non-pornographic context, but we may limit its distribution so people don’t run into it accidentally.”
While it is totally natural to breastfeed your child Pinterest says not every one of its users wants to see images of it.
This can be a massive reason why your Pinterest traffic is taking a downward dive.
However, to be totally transparent this does not mean you cannot share pins on mastectomies, pregnancy, breastfeeding, and postpartum issues.
You can still share them they just won’t show up as much as other pins and those wanting information on these subjects will have to search harder to find them.
This is not my niche so I asked a few bloggers if their traffic had been affected? All of those that had been blogging and pinning for years said no. Those that had started less than a year ago said yes.
2. Not Using The New Features
Pinterest wants to keep up with the stiff competition coming from Instagram and Tik Tok so it brought out Story Pins, Now retitled to Idea pins.
The main purpose is to keep people on the platform for longer.
Which is great for Pinterest but not so great for bloggers who want eyes on their content.
The name of the game for every social media has always been the same keep people on it. Facebook has stories, Instagram has reels and Youtube has repeat content.
Our job as content creators is to keep up with the times as much as we may not want to.
I don’t use the other social media mentioned except for Facebook and I haven’t made any stories and I can’t see myself doing it either.
But, I did give in and make idea pins as an experiment for 3 months and my traffic catapulted past where it had been before the dramatic drop.
This happened by making just 2 pins a week, so don’t be afraid to give it a try!
Bonus Tip: Even though people cannot click on a link because you cannot include it on your pin in the traditional way just put the URL in the description and people will copy and paste it and still go to your blog post. Yay!
3. Stop Joining Low-Quality Group Boards
For many years group boards were the way forward to more engagement and traffic. Now though Pinterest suppresses what it shows from massive group boards.
It is virtually impossible now to get into well established and high-quality group boards.
New pinners are especially affected by the changes!
Instead of wasting a ton of time trying and applying for group boards, I would suggest that you concentrate on your own boards and maybe make your own group board.
That was how I got around this dilemma. People came to me and asked me to join my group board. I checked their pins to see what niche they were in and either accepted or rejected them accordingly.
4. Only Use 1 Pinning Method At A Time
I speak to many new bloggers and they say when they are trying a new social media platform, they try every possible strategy out there.
On Pinterest, you can find tons of different strategies and courses that you can buy.
Things like:
- Only make video pins or use idea pins.
- Manual pinning is the best way for traffic.
- Using Tailwind to schedule your pins saves time and gives you more exposure.
- Make 3-5 pins for every post.
Which advice do you follow?
Well, the one thing you don’t do is follow all of them! Otherwise, you will be very disappointed when none of them works.
Choose 1 method and do it for at least one month.
At the beginning of using Pinterest, I bought Pinteresting Strategies. Which is a manual pinning strategy course and I used it for the first 3 months of pinning.
After that, I wanted a Scheduled way of pinning because I had lots of blog posts to pin for so I got Scheduling Shortcuts and that is the method I still use.
It really is a massive time saver.
One thing to remember is you have to have a modicum of patience regardless of which strategy you choose!
5. Select The Right Fonts
There is nothing worse for getting traffic than using a difficult to read font!
A bit like the image above!
Most people use their mobile phones when searching the internet and what looks great on a desktop looks tiny on a mobile phone.
I learned this mistake pretty fast because of my love of using scripted fonts on the first 100 or so pins I made and not getting hardly any engagement.
As soon as I changed to using a bigger font the numbers started to go up dramatically!
If you still want to use the scripted fonts make sure you do so on the unimportant words and make the main keywords big and bold.
How My Traffic Changed?
I had been using Pinterest for about 5 months when things started to change. My traffic was ticking along and my impressions were starting to grow steadily week on week.
They got up to 30,000 monthly views. Then suddenly over a 2 week period, they dropped to less than 16,000 monthly views which is a disaster!
By implementing these strategies I’m happy to say my monthly views are rising every day and currently stand at 32.9K which I’m obviously ecstatic about.
My advice is don’t panic, don’t quit, take a step back and see what has changed and implement these tips if any apply to you.
You will thank me later!
That’s it for the 5 Disastrous Pinterest Mistakes you could be making!
Thanks for staying with me to the end which I truly appreciate.
How many of these mistakes are you making? Let me know in the comments.
If you have any questions feel free to leave them below. I’m here to help you.
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Lisa 🙂 Founder and CEO of mistakesbloggersmake.com
