How I Reached 20k Views on Pinterest in 1 Month

It’s all about nailing the basic setup to then grow on autopilot

Are you struggling to get your content seen? Do you want to reach more people, but Instagram just doesn't cut it for you? Would you like to get views on autopilot?

If your answer is yes to any of the above, then Pinterest might be your answer.

My Results

I started with Pinterest for the first time on December 23, 2019, and stopped posting on January 1, 2020, to test how it works on autopilot. As you can see, it worked. But before going into why, let’s see what Pinterest is.

What’s Pinterest?

Ben Silbermann, CEO and co-founder of Pinterest, describes the platform as a catalog of ideas” that inspires users to “go out and do that thing,” rather than an image-based social network. (We can, however, use it this way.)

In Pinterest, shared images are called pins. Pins feature an image plus a title and description.

Unlike Instagram, users are directed to your website with the simple click of an image.

This means that with Pinterest you can actually get people redirected to your website and start creating traffic on autopilot, as your links stay there and you don’t have to change them constantly. To get a complete guide on how to get started on Pinterest read the article below:

Now that we know why Pinterest is interesting, let’s take a look at three different ways to increase viewership.

1. Join Boards

A concept that many people don’t use is shared boards. They’re places where you can add your pins and get them viewed by all the people who follow that board, which is usually a lot more than the people following you when you start.

In the images below, you can see the results of putting images on my own board (Image 1.), and putting it in a group board (Image 2.).

As you can see, the image on the shared board has better numbers. Although the difference can be slight, it also means that it can compound as you get enough content on the platform.

So share as much content as you can on shared boards, and be patient.

2. Pin Consistently

Since I wasn’t sure how Pinterest worked, I tried to see what would happen if I stopped posting content after putting around 200 images on the first week. The answer is that the number of views started declining.

Around January 1, I stopped posting and this is what happened.

As you can see, the numbers started plummeting. Although they didn’t reach zero, they didn’t continue growing, either — at least, not until January 9, when one of my posts managed to go viral.

As mentioned above, one of my pins went viral and managed to net a spike of 1,000 views a day on its own. This is the pin:

What is interesting is that this pin didn’t have a single hashtag and there wasn’t much about it that was really special compared to other pins.

I started testing with other pins and still didn’t manage the same numbers. But what I saw was that descriptions in the pins helped way more than using hashtags.

For now, I can’t say much about how to get it viral, other than if you post enough, you should be able to get a similar effect. Remember that I only added 200 pins to get around 20,000 views on autopilot.

So if you want to get exposure, it’s way better to post at least a few pins every day. Also, be sure to repin content from other people. This way you’ll start getting noticed and people will follow you.

3. Get Followers

As with all the other social media, a strategy that works is following other people. In the case of Pinterest, this method still works. A way to optimize it is to find users who are following more people than they are followed by.

By doing this, you’ll find users who are willing to follow other people in the same niche. If you do this, you should be able to increase the ratio of people who follow you while keeping your ratio of followed/follows low.

I did this for around two weeks to get it to around 120 followers. After that, I started getting followers organically without doing anything, until I reached 60.

While we might argue that followers are just a vanity metric if they aren’t engaging, I think that Pinterest is different. The objective here is to get people to see your work, and the number of followers can help accomplish that.

I’ve also seen that it isn’t too common for people to interact much with the content on Pinterest — although if someone has some tips on that, I would really like to learn more.

Basically, don’t dismiss Pinterest. It can be a source of traffic, however small. And the numbers of even small traffic and viewers depend mainly on the platform and how many pins you have.

Long story short, Pinterest still works, and you can manage to get pretty good numbers on autopilot.