Wouldn’t it be lovely to get into Mediavine or Raptive in just a month, instead of waiting half a year for organic traffic?
Go from making $100 per month to making $10,000 per month?
Without sounding like another click-bait youtube creator, with Pinterest, it’s totally possible.
How do I know?
I’ve done it myself!
Before you tap yourself on the back for hitting the marketing jackpot, let me tell you the bad news: it takes time and work.
Two words most people don’t like very much, and will rather jump on the next bandwagon promising them a quick get rich scheme with shady affiliate links on Pinterest.
Don’t be one of them.
Read on to find out how to rock Pinterest in 2024 and beyond!
No Time to Read? Save it for Later.
Save these to your Pinterest account or skip to the end of the article to read the key takeaways!


The ‘Secret’ Of Explosive Growth on Pinterest
Secrets and hacks are the easiest products to sell because people believe that only a chosen circle of creators knows how the Pinterest algorithm works and has cracked its secrets.
That’s not true at all.
Unlike Google, Pinterest openly and publicly documented the inner workings of its algorithm in its Engineering blog pages, but it’s not a fun read, so I won’t bore you with the details (I link to all of them in my free mini course you can check below).
Before I dive into the strategies, I wanted to warn you about being very picky about what you read and whose advice you follow.
Most marketers will use shady tactics, like showing your Pinterest ‘views’ instead of actual traffic, and other methods to mislead you into trusting them.
Not only that, but their methods are based on personal anecdotes and very limited experience, which might not be easy to replicate in another niche or are completely out of date.
So how is this guide different?
I’ve been active on Pinterest for nearly 10 years, growing my oldest website to 500,000 sessions thanks to Pinterest, and now I share my expertise as a Pinterest Manager with my client.
What I do is based on the algorithm and Pinterest guidelines, not guesswork.
Let me share what I learned with you!


7 Pinterest Marketing Hacks That Will Skyrocket Your Blog Traffic
So, how do you actually get a black belt in Pinterest Marketing?
Here are seven bullet proof hacks which should be part of your overall marketing strategy, and used consistently over a period of many months.
As I said before, don’t just poke around and leave it, you need to stick with it and be consistent to see results!
1. Fresh Pins over Repins
Pinterest as a platform evolves over time, and so do the preferences of its algorithm.
A few years ago, it was perfectly acceptable not to add new content and only to repin existing content, but today that will not get you very far.
Pinterest is a platform built on discovering new ideas. It actively encourages creators to upload new content.
The importance of fresh pins is stressed a number of times on Pinterest’s own engineering blogs, and I’ve seen first-hand what a huge different it makes for increasing impressions on an account.
Here is one example where they stressed the importance of showing new content to users on Pinterest:
‘Related Pins is a feed of content relevant to the closeup Pin and accounts for 40 percent of engagement on Pinterest. With such high usage, it’s critical these recommendations are as personal, relevant and useful as possible. We dug a bit further and found an opportunity to make Related Pins as fresh as possible, and ensure newer Pins — seven days old or less — were being shown more prominently when relevant.’ (source)
To sum it up:
New pins get preferential treatment in the suggested pins section, which accounts for 40% of Pinterest engagement!


So what does that mean for you?
It doesn’t mean that you have to take 20 different photos of your dish for your recipe article.
It means that whatever content you have, has to be ‘fresh’ in the eyes of Pinterest.
Fresh PIN = new image + new title + new description
As you can see, you can only tweak the image or description to make the pin fresh and brand new!
You can make the process of creating multiple fresh pins by using AI to help you craft original keyword optimized title and descriptions.
Sign up for my free mini course, and in lesson 5, you will get access to the AI tool I created, which you can use for free!
2. Stay on Topic
One day you pin your Broccoli soup recipe, and next day you are repinning a DIY project for your garden. In the evening, you also wanted to repin the viral makeup tutorial you saw on your Pinterest homefeed.
How is Pinterest supposed to determine your niche if your content is all over the place?
I’ve seen hundreds of accounts that were meant to be driving traffic to a blog or a small business, but they were used as personal social accounts, pinning completely unrelated content to a huge mix of boards.
That’s a recipe for disaster.
You want to make it EASY for Pinterest to understand your content, by staying CONSISTENT with what you pin and add to your account.
How do you do that?
By having well defined topic clusters, or categories, for your content, and only adding content to these categories.
If you want to save some fun personal stuff, open a new personal account and use that one instead (sorry!).
Below are two screenshots with examples.
First one – all food related boards, all around the same topic.
Second one – random home and design board that has nothing to do with recipes.
BONUS TIP: What if your account is a huge mess already?
You should do an audit and archive all unrelated content. Alternatively, I also offer Pinterest Account Audits, so I can create the roadmap for you to follow.


3. Interest Targeting + Keyword Targeting
In 2024, it’s not enough just to stuff keywords into your pin description and hope for the best.
Yes, you will see some pins with stuffed keywords and hashtags doing well, but that doesn’t mean you should repeat the outdated strategy from years ago.
You also need to optimize for’ interests’ to give yourself the best chance to compete for the top-ranking spots for your keywords.
What are interests?
Interests are a categorization system that Pinterest uses to understand content, so it can serve the right content to the right audience much faster and more effectively.
Well, what are you supposed to do with that?
Why not give the algorithm a little helping hand and also optimize for interests?
All you need to do is research which interest is associated with your content, and make sure it’s part of your SEO optimization strategy for Pinterest (I expand on this a bit more in my free mini course).
Below is an example of what an interest page (or topic page) looks like for our example of Broccoli Soup Recipe, with the interest categorization highlighted.
On the same page, Pinterest also shows you other interests connected with this topic, which you can use to optimize your account.


4. Use a Variety of Boards
In the same way you use interests to optimize your account, you should be very selective about what boards you use to pin your content, as it’s part of the algorithm optimization.
The algorithm looks at the relationships between the topic of the pin, and the boards to which it has been added, to form an understanding of what the content is about.
Therefore, the boards you choose should be topically very relevant to your pin and match the interest classification by Pinterest.
While group boards were a huge hit a few years ago, and a guaranteed way to get a ton of traffic from Pinterest, today they are not as effective.
In fact, they might do more harm than good, especially if they are not relevant to your niche.
So what’s this hack all about?
Let’s say you have a pin about Broccoli soup recipes.
You want to make sure to pin this image to at least 5 to 6 different boards, which are optimized for the interest of soups – as we already established in step 1.
I recommend having a broader selection of boards, and then more narrow and laser focused boards, as long as you have enough content to keep adding there.
On top of that, it’s good to mix and match the boards to which you add the content to, to test which works better with the content.
In case of the Broccoli soup recipe, I would pin this one to:
- Broccoli Recipes
- Cream Soup Recipes
- Winter Soup Recipes
- Vegetarian Soup Recipes
5. Write For Pinterest, Not For Google
This is one of the most effective content strategies that nobody really talks about!
First – the content that you write for Google, will not necessarily do well on Pinterest, because people simply don’t always search for them the same way.
Second – why not use search terms from Pinterest to find untapped content opportunities?
In addition to tweaking your existing content and finding matching keywords on Pinterest, you can also research long tail keywords on Pinterest and write on topics where Pinterest doesn’t have a matching result to show, or the existing content is very easy to outrank!
Below are a couple of examples with long tail keywords and top search results that don’t always 100% satisfy the user intent.
I used home decor as an example, but you will find these almost in any niche.


BONUS TIP: In more competitive niches like Food, finding these untapped long tail keywords will be much harder. I recommend using Pin Inspector to do a keyword research at scale and find them super fast!
6. Seasonal Traffic Goldmines
The huge traffic spike I referenced in the headline came in Q4, in December 2023.
In November and December, most accounts on Pinterest experience huge traffic spikes, and if you want to tap into this goldmine, you need to plan in advance.
How much in advance?
I recommend adding Christmas and winter content at least 3 to 6 months ahead, ideally at the end of the summer.
I know it feels weird to share Christmas tips in summer, but it normally takes 3 to 6 months for Pinterest to rank your content.
The same is true if you want to take advantage of our seasonal events like Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Thanksgiving, Halloween and the list goes on.
You don’t always have to create fresh content for these holidays, you can always create ‘fresh pins’ with your existing images by adding different overlays with text, and optimizing your title and description to reflect teh seasonal event.
7. Use Ranking Colors
How does Pinterest know what content works the best and what the audience likes the most?
Well, they look for a number of things (as they explain in their engineering blogs), and among one of them is a term called ‘dominant color‘.
The main idea is that if your pin looks similar to the content that’s already ranking at the top, they’re more likely to serve it to the audience.
This is also related to the concept of optical recognition – if your pin is about Brocolli soup recipes, and your image doesn’t show broccoli or green soup, you are decreasing your chances of your content being served in the search results.
Here are two ways you can use this concept:
- use same style image in your pin (showing same food variety etc)
- use overlay color with the top ranking dominant color
How do you find dominant color for your search term? Check the source code of the page and search for ‘dominant_color’.


Key Takeaways
- focus on creating fresh new content (fresh pins) instead of adding a lot of repins
- plan your seasonal content well in advance, ideally 6 months ahead
- use the concept of dominant colors to your advantage
- don’t write just for Google, make sure you tap into long tail keywords also on Pinterest
- stay focused on your niche and create content around your main topic clusters
- use a variety of boards for your content that are tightly related to it
- do not optimize just for keywords, but focus on interest classification too
Love it? PIN it!
Save these pins to your Pinterest board so you can find them later! While you’re there, don’t by shy and say hi to my own profile too!

