Pinterest Manual Pinning Strategy: The Ultimate Way To Increase Traffic

I pin a maximum of 2 pins a day. And yet, I bring thousands of Pinterest traffic every day.

In this post, you’ll discover my simple manual pinning strategy that brings me tens of thousands of Pinterest traffic without using any third-party scheduler, whatsoever.

I’m going to share in this post:

• Manual pinning vs scheduling on Tailwind
• My manual pinning strategy
• How many pins should you pin/dayHow to schedule pins on Pinterest
• When to pin
• Manual pinning spreadsheet template to keep track of your pins.

Manual pinning vs scheduling on Tailwind

Recently, I shared my honest review of Tailwind, and why I decided to stop using it.

It was mainly due to the recent new Pinterest changes favoring fresh new pins and flagging many accounts because of their high repin rate.

I decided I no longer needed it.

Since then, my traffic not only did not go down, but it improved immensely.

In addition, I since have gained so much knowledge about Pinterest, and how it works for the user since I’m on it every week.

When you’re using the app yourself, you’ll be able to see so many little details, new changes, how your pins are doing, what’s showing up in the feed.

You don’t get these first-hand experience when you’re constantly just scheduling on any third party scheduler like Tailwind.

 I hope you’re excited because I am. I see so many bloggers online struggle with this and post on different groups.

I don’t know if you notice this too, but so many of these groups are created by other bloggers who blog about blogging, so they make an affiliate commission from these third-party schedulers and tend to keep pushing them on their members.

I have a feeling that so many of these admins benefit from manual pinning and may not always share everything that works for them so they’re always ahead of the competition.

My main blog business has nothing to do with blogging so I don’t care. And I’ll always share what has worked for me here.

Manual Pinning Strategy

Manual pinning has one big advantage. It’s super simple and it’s also focused on the long-term.

I’m sure you started your blog to eventually turn it into a business, not relying on you working every day.

Your vision for your blog should be focused on time freedom, not to turn it into another job where you’re forced to make 50 pins every day and spend hours scheduling and pinning.

You also don’t want your traffic to constantly rely on your actively pinning. You want to set it and forget it. 

What if your pins could bring you a ton of traffic without you ever having to pin for days?

It’s all possible with the manual pinning strategy. Because you’re going to be using SEO as part of your manual pinning strategy.

Here’s the thing. Because Pinterest is a search engine. People are going to be searching for certain topics this month, next month, next year, etc.

Unless you create seasonal content, specifically for holidays, evergreen topics never expire.

And so why should a pin expire or lose traction?

It shouldn’t if you use manual pinning as part of your search engine optimization.

Every time I make a fresh new pin for Pinterest, it’s like I’m writing a small blog post.

I do keyword research!

So many bloggers just create pins so quickly, upload them, pin them, and move along to the next one.

I spend some time for each pin, optimize it for keywords I want to rank for (both on Pinterest and Google).

When I upload that pin to Pinterest, it starts to rank for those keywords in the Pinterest search results for months and even years! 

And by the way, I also saw many of my pins show up in Google search results as well!

This way I’m not just focused on the short-term traffic boosts, but on long-term consistent traffic.

Yes, once in a while, I’ll make a pin for short-term boosts, but I rarely do it and only do it for seasonal content…If I make a thanksgiving or Christmas post.

And even then, I still do some optimization because I still want those pins to show up in the upcoming years

How Many Pins To Pin Per Day

I pin a maximum of 1-2 pins per day. Yes, you read that right.

Again, I see so many bloggers pin 20-30-50 pins per day. Pinterest right now recommends a maximum of 25 pins per day because they want fresh new pins.

They are discouraging repins.

I haven’t seen any increase in traffic when I pin more than 3-5 pins. In fact, sometimes I see a decline. 

My Simple Manual Pinning Strategy

• Every once or twice a week, I go through my Pinterest pinning spreadsheet (I’ll share with you below), and I check which pins are due for re-pinning.

These are usually blog posts that I haven’t pinned in a long time (more than a month).

Then I go to check the pins I’ve already made for that blog post (I usually make about 3-5 pins per blog post) and see if I can make a new fresh pin to promote the post from a different angle.

• I always use a different image. If I reuse an image, I try my best to make it look different either by using just a corner of the image, or put a layer on top so the pins don’t look very similar.

I write a brand new description and I heavily optimize it for the focus keyword of the blog post. Don’t write the same description for all your pins.

You want to be ranking for similar keywords so that whichever keyword the user searches for, one of your pins is guaranteed to show up.

• Either upload your pin to the blog post and pin it to the related board from there or upload the pin to Pinterest directly.

• Make sure your pin has a keyword optimized title that’ll also encourage people to click.

A title that starts with a numbered list or how to work great:

How to (keyword)

9 Best (keyword)

10 Amazing Ways (keyword)

Discover…

Learn How…

• Pin when your audience is online (I’ll show you how to find this out below).

• Share your pin on social media (If you have large followers, this can help increase pin impressions and clicks to give it a boost)

• Be patient and enjoy long-lasting traffic!

How to schedule pins on Pinterest

I repeat this process for other blog posts also due for pinning.

Because I keep my daily pinning to 1-2 pins/day, any additional pins I make are scheduled on Pinterest!

Pinterest has a scheduler you can use. And it works really well. The only disadvantage I experienced is I can’t pin for more than a month.

So if you’re going on a long break and you want to schedule a lot of fresh new pins, you’re going to want to use another scheduler. However, I never needed to schedule that long ahead with fresh new pins.

I can only see this being an issue when you schedule a pin to be re-pinned every 3-6 weeks.

Overall, I make new fresh pins every week (it takes me about 1 hour to make a bunch for the whole month!) and I’m okay with that.

You simply click on Create New Pin. You choose the day/time. Optimize your pin description and title, and click on publish.

You can see all your scheduled pins on Pinterest as well.

When To Publish Your Pins

Before I get to the spreadsheet, I want to share an important element first.

While your pin is designed for long-term traffic success. It doesn’t hurt to also get some short-term traffic boost form it.

I achieve this by publishing my pins when my audience tends to be online.

You can find out about that in Google Analytics.

Login to GA and click on Home, scroll down to the bottom right where you can see “How do your users visit?

If the majority of your traffic comes from Pinterest right now, you can clearly see that the majority of your visitors are online and visit your website at certain specific times each day.

Whichever are these high traffic hours, schedule your pins to go out during those times.

That means those are the times the majority of your audience is online on Pinterest browsing.

Your pin goes live and has the opportunity to be seen by as many people as possible. This leads to higher impressions and clicks.

Pinning Spreadsheet Template

Manual pinning gave me a sense of control over my Pinterest traffic strategy.

I love checking the spreadsheet and seeing where I’m at, which posts have been pinned a lot, which ones I neglected for weeks or months, and which ones need to be reworked.

My spreadsheet consists of 5 columns

• Date published
• A post title column
• Post link column
• Published pins descriptions
• Board

Date published: This column contains the date of each pin I create and publish/schedule (of each blog post)

The post title column: This column contains the title of each blog post

Post link column: This column contains the URL of the blog post on my website

Published pins description column: I write the pin title in this column or any details about that pin here.

This keeps track of all the pins created for each blog post, images I used (so I don’t duplicate the pin sometime in the future), and the pin headline so I don’t duplicate that too.

Any detail about that pin so you know which pin you scheduled on that date.

Every time I create a fresh new pin, I simply add a new row underneath the last one.

I fill out the date that Pin was published, I leave the blog title and blog URL empty (since it’s for the same blog post), and I jump to the pin description and fill out the title or text on the pin I used.

Board column: Since I’m making fresh new pins for each board. I started to write down which boards I pin them to.

I haven’t done this for the longest time and it was fine.

I just added this column recently because it helps me see which boards I’m highly active on and which ones I may need to make new pins for.

It’s mainly for data collection and helping me keep all my boards as active as possible.

As you can see, the bulk of the work as part of your manual pinning strategy will be to create the master spreadsheet.

If you already have a master spreadsheet where you keep track of your blog posts (which I highly recommend you do), simply duplicate it, and add specific columns for pinterest manual pinning dates, and details.

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