Finances – Page 2 – Habitat for Mom

How I Got Over 40k Sessions of Organic Blog Traffic From Pinterest in My First Month of Blogging Hello friends! Today I am going to talk to you about how I generated over 40,000 sessions of organic traffic from Pinterest to my blog in my first month! Many people starting out with their blog may become discouraged when they see no traffic at first. Most people think in order to get the traffic you want, you need to learn SEO for Google. This is the reason I never wanted to start a blog honestly. But then I came across Create and Go's YouTube channel with Alex and Lauren, and EVERYTHING changed. I not only learned that you can start a blog and get traffic immediately through Pinterest, but I also learned how to make money doing it! At the time I was working on other online businesses and to tell you the truth I wasn't happy with them, so I made the tough decision to ditch everything I was currently working on (Amazon FBA and eBay) and started blogging ASAP! So I went ham on research and learning everything I needed to know to make this blogging thing work. I figured in order for me to start making money ASAP was to get traffic and a lot of it, FAST. So I can apply for a premium ad company like Mediavine. I know some of you may think it is too good to be true, so here's the proof for ya... In this picture: Habitat for Mom blog traffic from 2/1/18 - 3/1/18 As you can see, I had a couple of pins go viral and set a good foundation for my Pinterest account from the very beginning. Here is my Pinterest Traffic Method... I MADE THE QUICK DECISION TO GO FOR IT! No questions asked, if you see an opportunity you just go for it! I have no time to waste and I was trying to stay home with my beautiful son. Using the YOLO approach, knowing the time is going to pass by anyways (no matter how long it took to reach my goals), I quit everything else I was doing and started my blogging Journey IMMEDIATELY. I knew this was the perfect thing for me to do - for myself and my family. There was no time to waste. CREATED A PLAN OF ATTACK I bought a handy dandy notebook and a pen from the Dollar Tree and started writing a list of things that I needed to do step by step. So I already had my domain name at this point, a decent hosting company, and a theme. I wrote down every blog post I wanted to write, and what steps I needed to take to get to the magic traffic generating blog I wanted. Content + Pins = Traffic. TOOK A HIGH-QUALITY PINTEREST COURSE I knew I had to (from the very beginning) take Create and Go's Pinterest Traffic Avalanche course if I was going to tackle Pinterest full time. So I did just that! It may be pricey but trust me its worth it, if it wasn't for this course I would have never been able to get approved to Mediavine (a premium ad company) in less than a month of owning my blog. Pinterest Traffic Avalanche is an intense and in depth course on Pinterest for bloggers. Alex and Lauren who created the course literally make over $100,000 every single MONTH all thanks to their Pinterest strategies that they so graciously are willing to explain in detail (with videos!) in their Pinterest course. Taking that course before launching my blog to the world has allowed me the confidence to know I am ranking on Pinterest, my pins are on point, and my content is what Pinterest users want to read. This course is not for the faint of heart, you must be willing to follow directions and implement strategies as presented, if you don't want to do the work, don't even bother. For all my go-getters... Get more info here. I took this course and implemented every strategy for my blog and Pinterest account. SET UP MY PINTEREST BUSINESS ACCOUNT, CLAIMED MY WEBSITE, & SETUP RICH PINS You are going to need to set up a Pinterest business account for your blog. Do not worry, it's absolutely FREE. I created a brand new Pinterest account but if you have a personal one you can convert it. You will just need to clean it up after converting it to make it specific to your blog niche. You can create a Pinterest business account here. Once you create your business account you are going to need to claim your website. Learn how to claim your website on Pinterest here. This step is important because you want to look like a professional (because you are right?!) to Pinterest users AND Pinterest. After you claim your website on Pinterest there's one more crucial thing to do so that Pinterest knows you mean business... Set up rich pins! What is a rich pin? Rich pins are something every blogger should be utilizing to help get their content out there to more people. The way it works is simple. When you have Rich pins set up on your Pinterest account essentially your pins will stand out among the rest! Which is super amazing. When you or someone else pins your pin it will have the title of your blog post in BOLD, the meta description pulled from your post and the pin will also display your logo (Pinterest picture) and your Pinterest Name. Here is what a rich pin looks like: This information is all pulled straight from my article! Once your rich pins are validated you never have to worry about it again! This was a major key to my Pinterest success from the beginning. I didn't pin anything until I validated my rich pins, although if yours are not validated yet don't fret! just go do it ASAP. You can easily validate rich pins for your website here. USED PROPER KEYWORDS ON MY PROFILE, BOARDS, & PIN DESCRIPTIONS Pinterest is a visual search engine, not a social media platform. Thats something alot of people get confused about. Users go to Pinterest to search for ideas and inspiration for their life. So if you want to end up in the search query on Pinterest proper keyword placement is very important to your success from the beginning. I learned proper Pinterest SEO in major detail from the Pinterest Traffic Avalanche course I talk about above. In a nutshell though, I optimized 7 key things to get organic search traffic on Pinterest: My ProfileThe individual boardsMy board descriptionsThe blog post titlesMy blog post meta descriptionText on the pin itselfThe pin description A quick tip for figuring out what keywords to use is to just start typing your subject into the Pinterest search bar. Pinterest will autofill the most searched for keywords. Write them down and plan accordingly. SIGNED UP FOR TAILWIND PLUS Manual pinning is crucial for Pinterest success, but Tailwind is manual pinnings BFF. They go hand in hand and I believe you can't have one without the other. Having a Pinterest approved scheduler like Tailwind will ensure that you are pinning during times your audience is actually ON the platform. So I got a Tailwind Plus account from the very beginning because I knew I wouldn't have time to manually pin every single day. Once you connect your Pinterest account to Tailwind, it analyzes your Pinterest account and creates a schedule for your profile that pins out your content at the right time, every time. The analytics on Tailwind are hands down, in my opinion, worth the price even if you don't use it as a scheduler. Since first signing up for Tailwind they have come out with Tribes which is so beneficial to your Tailwind strategy and makes Tailwind that much more of a MUST HAVE for new bloggers. Tribes are basically like group boards on Pinterest. (but better in my opinion) If you sign up for Tailwind through my referral link: by clicking here - you will receive 1 month of Tailwind for free to try out! I APPLIED FOR GROUP BOARDS IN MY NICHE Applying for group boards can be daunting and I was a little intimidated asking pro bloggers to hop on their boards with them. I did it anyways. I took a whole day (a couple of days really) to apply to as many boards as Pinterest would allow me to and the approvals started rolling in. After getting approved to these group boards they would pop up on my tailwind account and I immediately schedule my pins to them. Being on group boards is a great advantage for newbie bloggers. It allows you to get in front of other peoples audiences and maximise your reach on Pinterest. To do this, I wrote up an email template to mass email a ton of group board owners, remember to make it personal for each owner so it is not so robotic looking. (use their name and the board name in the email) Nowadays they have a handy dandy Request to Join button, so you can choose to join that way as well. (some board owners don't have this option and you will still have to email or message them for approval) Just remember to do what the board owner tells you to do to be approved and your golden. But also remember some board owners will just flat our ignore you, so think of it as a numbers game. The more you apply to, the more boards you have the chance of getting onto. After doing this, I had joined 20+ group boards in a matter of weeks! 2020 change for my group board strategy: Since starting my blog 2 years ago I left a ton of group boards based on my tailwind analytics and the virality score of each group board. I generally don't stick around if a group board has a virality score of less than a 1:1 ratio. With that being said though, I still believe as a beginner to take advantage of the group boards until you feel you're ready to ditch some later on when your Pinterest game is stronger. MASS PRODUCED PINTEREST POPULAR CONTENT IN MY NICHE I started off strong. 10 articles every 2 weeks strong. I was publishing 1 article per day Monday-Friday. With that kind of fresh content on the platform Pinterest quickly realized I was a solid player in the Pinterest game. Once I had 10 to 20 articles on my blog I started scheduling them out on Tailwind. MASS PRODUCED GOOD LOOKING PINS WITH CLICK WORTHY TITLES With the amount of content I was producing on my blog itself, I did not disappoint with the number of pins I produced either. I created 10 pins for every article on my blog. (YES 10 whole pins for one whole URL!) Pinterest LOVES LOVES LOVES fresh content and every new pin image is considered fresh. (so fresh and so clean clean) I looked at websites like Buzzfeed and other popular sites to get a feel for great click-worthy titles for my blog posts and pins. (click WORTHY not click BAITY) I wrote out 10 different titles for every article to put on each PIN I made for that article. I rotated through images for each pin as well to make it look different. I even switched up the styles. The BEST software that is completely FREE for pin creation (and everything else creation) and the only one I use is Canva.com. I USE STOCK PHOTOS FOR ALL MY PINS Stock photo ^ Now, I know some of you may not want to pay for stock photos right off the bat and I completely understand. You can get free images on the internet no problem. But I needed to do this right the first time and honestly, stock photos are super key to Pinterest success. I personally use bigstock.com from the beginning and I do like the amount of photos they provide. But they are pretty pricey... With Pinterest you have to understand they are a visual search engine, they take into consideration your photos on the pin. Within my mom niche I just wasn't seeing great free photos for specific topics I was blogging about. I felt it was necessary to pay for quality images in the grand scheme of things. I truly believe the images you use on your pins play a major role in user interaction on Pinterest. (and even in search results) Canva has a paid membership where they provide high-quality images for a fraction of the price a platform like Bigstock charges. As a matter of fact, I will be canceling my Bigstock account soon because I already get Canva images with my Canva for work account. (sorry Bigstock, it's over) I MANUALLY PIN OFTEN As I said previously, Tailwind is a MUST HAVE. BUT... You cannot go wrong with manually pinning as well! I suggest pinning other people's content manually and schedule your own with tailwind. I also love manually pinning my brand new pins straight to Pinterest from my newly published blog post. Those pins always do super well! Depending on where you live (I live in the USA) I would suggest pinning at the optimal times your audience is clicking through to your website... You can see that with your google analytics account in your dashboard. (or you can go off of what times tailwind is publishing your content) Manual pinning is super important because Pinterest likes to see that you are active on their platform and not just setting a scheduler and forgetting it. TRUST ME the algorithm KNOWS. CONCLUSION I hope I explained everything that helps you make sense of how to get traffic super-fast to your blog using Pinterest. This is literary exactly what I did. To recap: How I Got Over 40k Sessions of Organic Traffic From Pinterest in My First Month of Blogging I made the quick decision to go for it!Created a plan of attackTook a high-quality Pinterest courseSet up my Pinterest account, claimed my website, and set up rich pinsUsed proper keywords on my profile, boards, & pin descriptionsSigned up for tailwind plusI applied for group boards in my nicheMass-produced Pinterest popular content in my nicheMass-produced good looking pins with click-worthy titlesI use stock photos for all my pinsI manually pin often Let me know if you have any questions in the comments below! If you found this article helpful share it with a friend :) Pin for later: How To Use Pinterest To Drive Traffic To Your Blog