Pinterest Growth Marketing on Autopilot
I’m a lifelong learner.
When I’m not working, I’m learning.
And one of my big learning goals is expanding my acquisition skillset beyond search.
And I’m currently running micro-projects & tests on three platforms:
- Organic Pinterest
- Organic YouTube
- Facebook Groups
If the platforms above are linked, it means I have some action growth strategies to share – you should check it out.
Back to Pinterest, a few months ago, I saw a post from Vadim Rozov on how he was building a massive Pinterest audience using a super simple growth hack.
The fact that it was so simple drew me in immediately. I could implement this in an hour or two, then forget about it.
At the time, I was using Tailwind to automate Pinterest, and it worked *OK*.
My account was growing, but not fast enough, and even though Tailwind does add automation to your workflow, there was still a lot of work to do filling up your queue.
To be fair to Tailwind, I did get a massive spike in impressions/engagement.
Before the spike, I was averaging 2,000 – 3,000 impressions per day, and after the spike died down, impressions/engagement continued 7,000 – 8,000 per day, but like I said, not quick enough.
Tailwind pro-tip: If you buy an annual subscription, Tailwind won’t throttle you on # of pins per month.
Vadim’s Pinterest Growth Hack
This Pinterest growth hack is so easy, it wouldn’t surprise me if Pinterest shuts it down.
The post from Vadim is in a private Facebook Group, and you won’t be able to see it until you’re accepted, so I’m including it below.
Side note – highly recommend you join the group, it’s one of my favorites.
I immediately began implementing Vadim’s technique to see if I could get it to work for me and it didn’t.
Shutterstock doesn’t have great images related to the project I was working on.
So, I improvised.
Instead of sourcing images from Shutterstock, I sourced pictures from Reddit.
If Reddit and Shutterstock don’t have awesome images for your vertical, improvise further.
Implementation Guide
Sign up for a Zapier account.
A free account allows you to push 100 images per month to Pinterest, this isn’t enough to get the results you want. Get a Starter or Professional plan allowing for 1,000 / 3,000 images per month.
After creating your account, click the big red ‘Make a Zap’ button in the right-hand corner.
The first app you’re going to connect is where you’re sourcing your images from.
Select New Hot Post In Subreddit
Click ‘Next’ and verify your Reddit account
Then pick the subreddit you want to pull pics from.
Verify this aspect of your Zap works, then set up the next Action Step
Go through the same process, I won’t screenshot each step because the Zap workflow is super easy and intuitive.
- Select Pinterest
- Authenticate your account
If you’re pushing different types of images, or you want to appeal to multiple sub-audiences, you’ll want to make dedicated Zaps & Pinboards for each image type. For this project, I have 5 different Zaps that push images into 5 different Pinboards that appeal to slightly different audiences.
- Select a Pinboard to push images into. If you haven’t already created the Pinboard, do that now and refresh the Pinboards to see the new one.
- In the ‘Image’ form, choose ‘URL’ of the Reddit post
- In the ‘Note’ form choose ‘Title’ of the Reddit post
- Often the titles you’re pulling from Reddit won’t mention the keywords you want to target on Pinterest, so hardcode in a hashtag to ensure Pinterest understands what each image is about
- Select the URL you want click-throughs from Pinterest to go to.
If you’ve set up Pinterest Rich Pins, you’re going to have to disable this to get this Pinterest growth hack to work.
You can do this by inserting ‘<meta name=”pinterest-rich-pin” content=”false” />’ into the footer of your website.
If you’re on WordPress there is a good chance your theme has an area to insert code into the Footer of every page, but if it doesn’t, or you can’t find it, use the Insert Headers and Footers plugin.
Once the plugin is installed you can access the page to add the footer code in your ‘settings’ on the right-hand side of your admin dashboard.
Head back to Zapier and test your Zap.
You’re done!
Don’t forget to name the Zap and turn it on.
Pro tip – name the Zap ‘Reddit to Pinterest – ImageType’ so you know precisely what the Zap does 3 months from now.
If you’re targeting multiple sub-audiences, now is the time to create new Pinboards & Zaps to target these sub-audiences using the exact same process above.
The only thing left to do is wait.
It took me 3-4 months until things really started to take off.
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