How I Got My First Viral Pin: The Unique Manual Pinning Method

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Everyone aspires to go viral. I’m going to fill you in on the exact steps that I took to get my first viral pin after only my first month of blogging!

How To Quickly Get A Viral Pin with Manual Pinning

viral pin

 

There a  million posts and pins covering the internet promising to give you the tools, tricks, and tips to go viral. I cannot honestly tell you exactly how YOU will go viral. It happens for everyone in time. The trick is to learn how you did it, and learn how to be able to recreate that magic.

I Will Tell You Exactly How I Went Viral.

This post does contain affiliate links. Please read our full disclosure here.

I can and will however tell you in all transparency the exact steps that I took to create my first and second viral pins, and then of course leading to my first viral post which you should really check out.

Tweet: Getting a viral pin is the key to traffic.

As most brand new bloggers, my page views started out at about 20 per day. With daily pinning and networking on Facebook and promoting on Instagram (which I honestly don’t think is sending over any page views yet STILL) I was slowly driving the traffic up each week. To 50 a day, then somewhere around 70 – 100 per day at about the 1 month blogging mark.

I was happy with these numbers. I was meeting all my goals on the high end which were completely realistic. 1,000 k views in my first month for instance. But of course I was setting my goals higher and higher.

The day before my second month of blogging ended I got 4,285 views on one page in one day. I log on after the kids are asleep and I was flabbergasted.

That is double all my page views so far at that time combined! This one post had thousands of people on it, and had been repinned equally as many times that day.

viral pin

The views slowed down a little after that first day but not much.

(See that spike? That is my first viral pin! And it was epic viral!) Sending thousands of visitors to my blog this month. The pin went viral less than a month ago and has over 12,000 views at this point. The “Bomb Diggity Slow Cooker Soups” spread like a disease and is still sending me at least 100 views a day.

I didn’t just luck into getting a viral pin. I worked hard, I improved my game, and I bought the Pinteresting Strategies ebook from Carly at Mommy on Purpose that I credit with getting me a viral pin so quickly.

It is so affordable  (only about $47 now after a recent total overhaul in Oct 2018 to reflect the changes in Pinterest) and worth every penny! Carly gives you clear directions of her unique manual pinning strategy so you can recreate her success for yourself.

AND I now have a second viral pin!

And I haven’t even been blogging for 3 months yet. You can do this too. You can quickly start a blog like a rock star and get your posts to spread like a disease!

RELATED: Do you wish that you really understood what pinners were looking for on Pinterest? And exactly what to pin and where and how to keep track of it all?

Pinterest marketing Strategy Book Bundle for bloggers for the pin cycle strategy

Check out The Pin Cycle Strategy book series to have all your questions answered!

 

Exactly How I Went Viral: (twice so far)

viral pin

Step 1: Create Killer Pins

I create pins for Pinterest (where I get 99% of my traffic at this time) using Canva. Canva is a great user friendly and free program to use. If you want to use additional photos from their library or layouts you can purchase them usually for $1 each. Canva is my favorite program for creating pins thus far. PicMonkey is another wonderful free program that you can upgrade for a very low fee. The advantage to PicMonkey is that you don’t have to pay per additional image you’d like to use, you pay once and have access to their full library.

My first pins sucked. I mean they totally sucked. They looked like a third grader made them in the 90’s. But I saved them anyways, and kept creating. AND they took me forever to make in the beginning. Lots of time, unimpressive product.

But I kept creating and I quickly got faster and better. I am still improving in speed and quality of my pins and I’ve been creating them for months.

Tweet: Don’t give up and don’t get stuck. Create, save, do it again.

You’ll get better and faster I promise. Remember these tips:

  • make you pins vertical
  • make the writing legible even when the image is tiny
  • use great clear and bright images

RELATED: How to Quickly Increase Pinterest Page Views

Step 2: Create A Pinterest Business Account

You are either going to want to start a new Pinterest business account or convert your personal to a business account.  I started from scratch. The only reason to convert your personal account is if you already have a substantial following.

The business account comes with awesome free analytics you’ll definitely want to be using in your Pinterest strategy.

 

Step 3: Enable Rich Pins

A rich pin is a pin linked to a website that’s been approved by Pinterest. You can tell a rich pin by the bold title and professional look it gives it.

People take your pin more seriously if it’s a rich pin. You only have to apply for it once through Pinterest and once accepted all your pins linked to your site will then be rich pins.

 

Step 4: Join Pinterest Group Boards

Pinterest group boards are the holy grail of extending your reach in Pinterest. A group board is one board with multiple people pinning on the same board.

Group boards are awesome. By letting you onto their group board, a person is essentially lending you their followers. They say followers don’t really matter that much on Pinterest. They do matter, but not as much as you’d think because of the amazing ability to extend your reach through group boards.

Figure by joining another pinner’s group board with thousands of followers, you now have the potential to get your pins in from of their thousands of followers.

I am super psyched to have reached 300 followers on Pinterest today! So small for a blogger. BUT I just created the account.

YET with only 300 followers my reach is currently 1.7 million viewers a month:

and growing every few days! All because of being on so many group boards. Learn How to Join Pinterest Group Boards Like a Boss!

 

Step 5: Get a Solid Pinterest Strategy

There are multiple effective strategies for using Pinterest. I’ve tried Boardbooster and Tailwind for pinning on auto pilot and just wasn’t having the success I strive for and saw others having. (Update, there is no longer Boardbooster, only Tailwind for scheduling pins.)

Then I read about a manual pinning method from Carly at Mommy on Purpose. I hadn’t yet bought an ebook to invest in my blog and it was time. The book Pinteresting Strategies, is really affordable and I figured if I found success with her strategy it’d quickly pay for itself! You can pick it up right here today for $47!

Seriously:

it’s a steal for all of the quality information in it.

I decided to give Carly’s strategy 100%. After all I spent hard earned money on this book! I’d be throwing it away if I didn’t take all her advice and give it a try.

She has such a detailed an unique way of looking at Pinterest. As the visual search engine with a mind of it’s own which it truly is. She has a great understanding of Pinterest SEO and it’s algorithms and how to use that to your advantage.

I found out my Pinterest page and pin descriptions needed A LOT of work and took me a while to catch them all up to where they should be.

Once I understood and implemented the tricks with Pinterest SEO and a totally genius and unique pinning strategy I had a viral pin with 3 weeks.

I recreated that success again in under 3 weeks! Who knows what the next 3 weeks will hold!

 

**UPDATE:** I am so passionate about Pinterest for blogging and have had such success with it:

  • a reach of 4.4 million on Pinterest
  • 170,000 page views from Pinterest last month

that I created a book series to share my knowledge. I was sharing tips with blog friends, selling services on fivver, and doing Pinterest coaching so I combined all that into a 3 part book series.

Pinterest Strategy Book how to pin and where

You can check it out now for s solid step-by-step guide to a successful pinning strategy!

Get The Pin Cycle Strategy NOW!

 

If you’re contemplating starting a blog the time is NOW!

And there you have it. A solid plan to build your Pinterest strategy, get that first viral pin quickly, and drive tons of traffic to YOUR blog! If you haven’t set up your blog just yet (or even if you’re new you should definitely read this post about how to set up your brand new blog for success!

I’ll be writing more posts soon about how to get onto Pinterest group boards as well as other tips for the new blogger! Join our email list below to stay up to date on all the great blogging tips, exercise routines, and phenomenal roundups

What are you struggling with in starting a blog? What would you love to know more about? If you’re all set to take the plunge NOW and buy really awesome hosting at an unbelievable price head on over to Bluehost and get set up today! They have great pricing, YOU own your domain, AND their customer support is wonderful. Can’t say enough good things about them so far!



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18 Comments

  1. Great blog! I’m pretty new to blogging and this is just what I needed. I didn’t know where to go from here now, I want to def expand on pintrest.

    1. Thanks so much Ilda! I’m really glad I was able to point you in the right direction with Pinterest. It’s the best way to drive traffic to your new blog.

    1. Your so welcome. Pinterest can really extend your reach and skyrocket your views more quickly than anything else.

    1. So glad you liked her book! I’m a mom of two littles and it took me three weeks to get everything updated to her awesome standards, after that implementing her techniques was magic! And the manual pinning gets easier the longer you’re doing it, even with adding additional group boards.

  2. I got Carly’s book and loved it! It did make me question my current strategy (which is mostly Tailwind/Tribe based). I’m joining group boards at the moment, which is the hardest part I think. A post about how you found your group boards to join would be amazing 🙂

    1. Thank you so much for your feedback! I found joining group boards really difficult at first too any now am on sooo many. I’m actually planning on posting about how to conquer that hurdle next week!

  3. Amazing. Pinterest can be so tricky, especially if you have never used it before! I just started blogging three days ago, and I had 444 views on my first post! So now I am looking for ways to expand on that number. I really think Pinterest is the way to GO! Thanks for the great article, and I will be getting that book ASAP!

    1. Wow what am amazing start Jacqui! I’m so glad I could be of help. Carly’s book is an amazing deal for boosting your Pinterest marketing strategy! You won’t be disappointed. I checked out your article today about your amazing launch and will be looking into promotion on Reddit now too. Thanks!

    1. Thank you so much John. I really appreciate your feedback and I love that your found the article thourough.I have an additional post coming out tomorrow detailing how I grew my Pinterest reach over 1 million more views in 30 days. You might find it helpful as well.

  4. Hi Allie,

    Great post and still floating around in the Pinterest feed which is how I found it! I have heard of Carly’s book from numerous sites now, there must be something to it to be this popular. One question about it, do you think all the techniques still apply? It sounds like so many things have changed about the Pinterest Algorithm in the last few months including the value of Group Boards. Hence, I have been hesitant to put a lot of effort into joining them. Do you think the same techniques are still holding up? I’d be curious to know this.

    Thanks!
    Elle

    1. Elle, thank you! Also it’s awesome to hear these pins are still circling! Pinterest HAS changed a lot and the power of group boards has been denounced as well. However I completely still believe that the methods in Carly’s book apply and that group boards are still highly important, no matter what anyone says. I know handfuls of bloggers that attempted no longer pinning to group boards and almost every one of their stats tanked. Also 2 amazing things 1. Carly is doing a major overhaul on her book right now to reflect all the recent changes in Pinterest and 2. I am actually releasing a Pinterest strategy book series in the next week or 2! Complete with a step by step guide to fulfill a successful pinning strategy called the “Pin Cycle Method.” I don’t have a specific email list created for it yet, just a word of mouth email list. So if you are interested please reach out via email at vigoritout@gmail.com and I’ll be sure to keep you updated!

    1. You’re so welcome! There is always more to learn and it is ever changing. Good luck with your new blog!

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