Granny Geek’s Guide to Manual Pinning on Pinterest

How to Leverage Pinterest without Paying Money

In case you missed the other posts in this series, I’ll give a brief recap. You can learn how Pinterest works and why you need good graphics. You’ll also learn where to put your copy on the graphics in your media library and why you need to tidy up your Pinterest boards. Last week we talked about creating a pinning strategy and the purpose of community boards. This week, we’ll talk about manual pinning.

If you’re at all like me, you may have thought that in order to make Pinterest really work for you, you’d need to fork over some money. I have blogging friends with HUGE Pinterest followings and Pinterest acts as the major referer to their blogs. They also use automated services like Tailwind and BoardBooster.

Since I don’t make thousands, or hundreds (or even tens) of dollars each month on my blog (because living off my blog is not my end game), I didn’t want to invest in paid services. Which means I have to rely on manual pinning.

Don’t freak out. Manual pinning doesn’t take a lot of time out of your day. Remember that Pinterest likes generous people and consistent people. I have a tiny Pinterest following, but a decent number of monthly views (21 followers/132K monthly views). My simple secrets? Generosity and consistency.

Every weekday morning, I pin at least one thing to each of my boards. I try to pin at around the same time each day, too. Simple, right? That’s called manual pinning. As Pinterest gets to know me (through algorithms, not creepy stalking), more of the things I’d want to pin show up on my feed. Which makes it super simple to pin relevant things to my boards!

Timing Tips

According to Pinterest, your first five pins of the day will receive top priority in getting sent out to other pinners’ feeds. So, make sure the first five things you pin are from YOUR blog. I just learned from the Pinterest blog that most people pin on weekends, so that means I’ll need to tweak my pinning strategy in order to take advantage of this fact.

They also suggest that more people use Pinterest in the evenings, so I’ll conduct an experiment to see if that makes a difference in referrals from Pinterest to my blog.

Geeky Proof That Manual Pinning Works

Although it didn’t seem as if my Pinterest referrals to my blog had increased by thousands overnight (they haven’t), I thought I’d check and see if they had at all. Since I started manual pinning three months ago, I’ve had 93 referrals from Pinterest. I have had a grand total of 94 Pinterest referrals for all time for AnitaOjeda.com. Math and I have tenuous relationship, but I’d say that my strategy has started to pay off!

Compare that to how many Pinterest referrals I’ve had to my other site with my Blessed (but Stressed) Pinterest account—in six years, I’ve had a whopping 143 people click on one of my pins. Mind you, I have 691 followers, but only 143 referrals.

I won’t promise instant growth, but I know you can experience steady growth with less than 10 minutes of your time invested in manual pinning each day. In February, 13 people visited my blog from Pinterest. Nine people dropped by in March. In April, 55 people came to visit. If I continue this trajectory, blog traffic should continue to increase—a lot (code word for I can’t remember how to do the math).

Come back next week and we’ll talk about rich pins (no, it’s not a promise that you’ll get rich from pinning).

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