The Secret to Making your Pins Viral on Pinterest
Table of Contents
Making pins go viral on Pinterest is the only way to succeed on Pinterest. If you’re reading this post, I’m sure you’re wanting to get more monthly views on Pinterest, more Pinterest impressions, and most importantly more clicks to your Pins!
After using Pinterest consistently for more than 6 months now, I’ve finally seemed to crack the code for making Pins go viral on Pinterest.
P.S Affiliate disclosure: Some of these links are affiliate links, which means that if you make a purchase, I will earn a small commission at no extra cost to you, which will help me run this blog 🙂
Last month in December, 2021 (my 6th month of blogging seriously) I got 89,792 pageviews and 69,617 sessions to my blog all from going Viral on Pinterest.
This made me officially reach my blog goal of 50k sessions in order to apply for Mediavine!!
This month January 2022 is also going great so far and in just 7 days, I’ve already crossed 50,000 pageviews. I am consistently getting 3000-8000 pageviews in a single day from Pinterest.
All this is happening…
- Without having even started properly with Google SEO
- No backlinks
- No Guest posting
- No link posting
The reason behind it?
All these viral Pins…
But here, I would also like to mention the Only Pinterest course that made this possible for me, and that is Carly’s Pinteresting Strategies.
Carly’s Pinning strategies helped me see vast results in just one month after taking and applying the tactics from the course.
While all others keep saying that Pinterest algorithm just isn’t working for many bloggers in 2021, just after 6 months of taking this course, these were my results.
Now the course is turned into Pinteresting strategies 2.0 and within it includes everything you need to know to succeed on Pinterest with easy to use methods.
This is The ONLY Pinterest course I would recommend you to take that IS working for 2022, and I can vouch for it from my own experience.
Now, without delaying further let me share the tips to get viral on Pinterest.
But first of all….
What is a viral pin?
Any Pin that gets lots of saves, thousands of Pin impressions and hundreds and thousands of Pin clicks than other pins in your profile is considered a viral pin.
For example if otherwise your pins hardly get even 1k impressions or only a few hundred pin clicks then getting 5k pin impressions and 500-1k+ pin clicks is a viral pin.
What happens when you go viral on Pinterest
As bloggers or anyone, we all aim to go viral on Pinterest.
Based on what type of pins go viral on Pinterest, these are the things that can happen for you when you go viral on Pinterest
- More blog traffic
- More income
- More affiliate sales
- More sales to your courses/shop
- More subscription to your email list
All of these basically happens only when more people visit your site, because more traffic=more possibilities
Now, finally, lets dive in to the main topic-
How to go viral on Pinterest AKA how to make your Pins go viral!
13 tips that will make your Pins Viral on Pinterest
Pin for later
1. Always make vertical Pins
Pinterest Pins should be strictly Vertical Images. I use pins with the size 1080*1920 from Canva for almost all of my pins and they do well.
Square images or short images don’t do well at all, so don’t make that mistake.
2. Large and Easy to read Fonts
After using Pinterest consistently to get traffic from my blog- one thing is certain- The only way to make your pins clickable and getting viral on Pinterest is to first have LARGE AND EASY TO READ FONTS!
Your pins must be eye catching. Nobody asks the reader to click on the pin. The users click on it with their own motive, but you must make such a pin that easily gets noticed when they scroll through.
This is so important, and I can’t stress it enough.
Just look at all the pins that do well in Pinterest. All of them have one thing in common- Large and easy to read fonts.
Just look at these pins. You need not copy, but this is how your pins should be too.
Now I make all my pins with large texts in clean background.
3. Bright, Colourful and Pretty Image
Another thing that really helps my pins go viral are my Pin images which are from Ivorymix stock photos.
My best advice is that If you’re serious about blogging and getting viral on Pinterest, you simply cannot do without premium stock photos.
For all the while that I used free stock images from pexels, Pixabay, I hardly ever got my pins viral, and also it cost me so much time searching for images that I liked.
But ever since I started using premium images from first Styled stock society, and now Ivorymix, 80% of all the pins I post go viral.
Like every new blogger I too was hesitant to invest in my blog, but I decided to try anyway. I subscribed for the 3 months subscription plan to Styled stock society.
I then got my first viral pin and many more after that.
Once I got to see the results, I then decided to switch to Ivory Mix, and got the one year Subscription. This was really one of the best investment I made and I am really loving Ivory Mix. It totally paid off.
Ivory Mix has thousands of pretty images for any niche for a reasonable price. It fits Pinterest and my blog perfectly.
If you have to choose between Styled Stock society and Ivory Mix, I would say go for Ivory Mix, since its relatively cheaper, but provides the same value, or maybe even more. There is really not much difference.
4. Good use of Pinterest Keywords
Making your pins eye catching is only half of the secret to going viral on Pinterest.
The other important half for succeeding on Pinterest is all about the use of the right keywords and in the right places.
Your pins must have SOLID keywords in pin descriptions. Other than Pin descriptions, the keywords must also be in many other places like:
- Pin Image
- Your board title
- Board description
- Pinterest Alt text
- Image name
I’ve written a detailed post on how to do Pinterest keyword research and all the best places to use Pinterest keywords in this post: How to do keyword research for Pinterest and get traffic.
5. Manual Pinning to make your Pins viral
Yes, I have found that Manual Pinning is extremely important if you want to succeed and go viral on Pinterest.
I started manual pinning from the start and never got subscription to tailwind. Plus Carly’s Pinteresting Strategy is only about manual pinning.
For a month or so I did use Pinterest scheduler too for automatic pinning, and I saw that my traffic was down and I didn’t get any viral pins.
This was the month of October and November. Then in December when I again started pinning manually, my traffic went up from 30k to 89k pageviews because of the many viral pins.
It must really be the result of manual pinning. Now I trust Carly who always said in her course that, Pinterest actually wants you to pin manually.
And it is actually not that hard at all.
I pin few pins in the morning and few pins in the evening. It hardly takes even 2 minutes to pin, and I do it after finishing each of my morning rituals with ease.
Plus, I have made pin descriptions on my iPad notes so I can easily copy paste it.
6. Focus on making your boards strong
What many people miss out while trying to make their pins go viral is that they don’t focus on their boards enough and try to pin in all their different number of boards.
I too used to do the same, but after using Pinterest closely for a while now, I’ve come to understand one thing clearly- you can’t ever have a viral pin on a weak board.
I would say a weak board is a board where you don’t have many pins, and where you pin to it (including yours and others) only sometimes.
If you want your pins to go viral on Pinterest, then you have to first make 3-4 of your boards strong.
Just having 3-4 boards but strong boards can also bring you a LOT of traffic.
You can ditch others safely with no hard feelings. Then later you can focus on making other boards strong.
But how should you make your Pinterest Board strong?
Well by doing these 3 things:
- Pinning at least 2 pins(your pins) to your focus boards everyday or every other day.
- Pinning others strong relevant pins to these boards
- Having a good board title and board descriptions.
Once your board is strong, this makes it easy for your pins to go viral on Pinterest.
For now I have 4 strong boards and it is just these 4 boards that make my pins viral. I am working on making the rest of the boards strong too.
7. Catchy headlines with keywords
Most people think that having Pin clicks is more important than having saves.
But here’s the thing- when more people save your pin, the more your pin goes out to other people’s feed and more it gets clicked, thus making your pins viral.
Hence, Saves are also as important as getting clicks.
To get more saves and clicks to your Pins, along with all the things mentioned above are your headlines.
Along with making your headlines catchy, it should also have the right keywords for pinterest to CLEARLY understand what your Pin image is about.
If you take Carly’s Pinteresting strategies course, Pinterest Title Traffic hacks is included in the course too and you can get all her secrets to getting 200k page views all from Pinterest!
Other Important things to go Viral on Pinterest
1. Enable Rich Pins to make your pins viral
Rich pins are pins that have a description underneath the pin image. It gives users additional information on what the Pin is about. All viral pins are mostly only rich pins, so enabling rich pins is very important.
To enable rich pins is very easy. Follow this article on how to enable rich pins easily.
2. Optimise Pinterest Profile
Optimise your Pinterest profile by writing a short and crisp keyword rich bio, and what your main keywords in your user name itself, like my pinterest profile name is Vishaka Blone- simple living, Self Improvement, Self care.
3. Pin on the most relevant board first
Whenever you pin, don’t do it randomly, but always pin on the most relevant board first which is closest to what your pin is about. This makes the board strong. And remember, it is the overall strength of the board that makes a pin go viral.
4. Pin at the right time
Also another important thing is to pin at the right time. I always pin only in the morning and in the evening following the US time zone because the majority of my readers are from the US.
Read this article on the best time to pin on Pinterest if you’d like to know more.
5. Keep Pinning consistently to go viral on Pinterest
Sometimes a pin goes viral immediately after you post it for the first time. But that rarely happens.
For most of the time, a pin almost never goes viral the first time you pin it. Only when you keep pinning about that particular post with different fresh pins consistently to your strong boards, only then after some time- maybe even 2-3 months later, the pin starts to go viral.
For example, I kept pinning about ‘How to organize life’ but it wasn’t doing well. Still I made different pins for it, and kept pinning it to my strong boards.
I had thought the post just didn’t do well, but after almost 2 months of consistently pinning about it, finally it became the second highest post that brought me 8725 page views last month and continues to bring me traffic.
This was all because 2-3 pins about this post went viral after 2 months of consistently pinning about it.
So I would say, to go viral on Pinterest, you have to keep pinning fresh pins about the post every now and then. After sometime, boom- it goes viral!
It really works like that. You just need to be consistent.
6. Include Pins in your Blog Post
I hope you already do this. Always include at least 2 pins to your blog post and pin to your board from your blog post. This is important too.
How long does it take to go Viral on Pinterest?
If you’re completely new to Pinterest and have just set up your boards and are pinning to it, you will start to get traffic, but it might take more than 2 months of consistent pinning to go viral on Pinterest.
And even after that you need to pin consistently to keep going viral.
For other bloggers who have been to pinterest for some while, but have just not got any viral pins, I would say, keep pinning the same post with different fresh pins to your strongest boards and you will definitely go viral in a few weeks to a few months time.
Just focus on making your boards strong, and make your pins with big and easy to read fonts
So this was all I know about going viral on Pinterest and on how to create viral pins.
Pin for later 🙂
I hope you found it useful. If things are going over your head for now, do not worry. Simply note them down in a paper, and slowly make points on what you need to do.
You will slowly figure out your pinterest strategy as you get consistent. I have finally found mine after a year! So go on, and keep pinning.
Pinterest is really the wonderful medium to help your blog succeed!
All the best!
Hi, congratulations on your blog success. May I ask how many if your own pins you pin each day and how many post you had to reach the 50K mark
Hi, thank you! I pin at least 2 pins that are mine to 5 of my boards each day, so it means I pin around 10-15 pins that are only mine. And I have had 98 posts published on my blog till now, but it’s not that I have all of them shared on Pinterest.