It’s been a little less than a month since I started optimizing my Pinterest account, but I’ve already seen some results that I think are worth documenting.

I clocked in at 387 followers at the end of December. Approximately one month later, while I’m writing this post on the last day of January, I hit 400 followers. That’s a net gain of +13 new followers with very little time investment.

Want to know what I’ve done so far? Keep reading below!

Added descriptions to every board

This one is still a work in progress, mainly because it’s so tedious.

Board descriptions appear at the top of every board, between the title and where your pins appear. Let’s be real: nobody reads this information, at least in the area it is displayed.

To take advantage of this real estate, I decided to put my inner search optimization expert to the test. I opened an incognito window in Chrome, and began to search for keywords specific to each board, like so:

After getting a better idea of what people were looking for in relation to my board topic, I then created a list of keyword rich terms to enter into my board description. It isn’t pretty, but it works:

You can see what this looks like in action on my blogging board.

Click here to check out the rest of the Pinterest Magic bonus video series!

Started a Tailwind trial account

I wasn’t going to start using a pin scheduler until I had a better handle on my shit, but after stumbling across a few different blog posts, I decided to try one out.

Buffer, BoardBooster and Tailwind seemed to be the big three. After doing a little research on each, including reading this case study on BoardBooster, I decided to go with Tailwind.

So far Tailwind has been an actual treat, and I can’t wait to continue using it in the future.

Fought with graphics optimization

After moving this blog from Blogger back to WordPress, I decided to delete the posts I previously pinned, and create fresh graphics to go with my pretty and newly formatted posts.

Which seemed like a good idea, in theory, until this was the result:

After some Googling and tinkering around in Photoshop, I learned that Pinterest does a shitty job of optimizing graphics, and there’s no real way to get around it.

Instead, Pinterest “friendly” images are the way to go – and I put “friendly” in quotes because honestly, they still look like garbage once pinned.

To keep it “friendly,” make sure you:

1. Stay away from graphics that are highly vectorized
2. Don’t use a lot of shadowed text
3. Take advantage of light, bright backgrounds that are also a solid color
4. Use photos that are already textured, so the graininess blends in a bit

In the end, I pinned this post with an alternate image 🤕

Enabled rich pins

So I’m a dummy and thought I enabled rich pins a thousand years ago, but it turns out all I actually did was verify my site.

After enabling rich pins, all of the content pinned from my domain now looks very fancy and official, like this:

Created a board just for my blog

I’m honestly not sure how much of a difference this will make, but I created a board just for my blog posts, and set it as the first board you see on my profile.

So, that’s it for January! In the time it’s taken me to write this post (aka one episode of The Simpsons), I’ve also gained one new follower, bringing my total for this installment of the Pinterest Project up to +14 new followers!

In March I’m going to continue concentrating on pinning new content (instead of re-pinning things other Pinterest users have pinned), and try a few other optimization techniques that I will (obviously) document.