How I Made My Pin Go Viral In One Week

Are you using Pinterest to promote your blog or business? Want to know how to increase your traffic and have a pin go viral? Here’s what I did to have one pin go from 0-8000 engagements in less than one week. Note: I am no longer an affiliate for Pinteresting Strategies, the ebook that helped me finally “hack” Pinterest. 

My focus of this blog is primarily fitness and wellness for moms, but as you know, I have been treating this blog like a business.

I had zero plans to write a post like this, but a few days ago I had a big blogging win that left me feeling pretty dang good. Then, one of my readers emailed me asking me a ton of questions about how I use my fitness blog to make money and how she can promote herself online.

It confirmed what I already knew – there is still a huge market for health and fitness bloggers.

And most of them still have no clue what they’re doing online. They especially don’t know how to make a Pin go viral!

Part of why I started this blog was to help other personal trainers and health coaches make money online, but I had no idea that I’d be the one complete strangers would come to asking for help.

I have been blogging for over three years now, and I have experienced a lot of trial-and-error when it comes to making money online.

But the number one indisputable fact I’ve learned is: without traffic, your website or blog CANNOT be successful. Anyone who says differently is in denial. Traffic is important. More is ALWAYS better.

My Blog Growth Story

On my previous blogs (mommy blogs and a blog about blogging), I figured out how to go from zero to over 30,000 page views in just over three months. I did this primarily with the use of Tailwind and Pinterest.

But in 2017 I took almost a year off from blogging to really figure out what path I wanted to take and become a personal trainer. (Read about becoming a trainer here.) During that time, Pinterest went through some major changes and I was away from the blogging world.

When I came back, I learned that many of my old strategies just didn’t work.

I started this blog thinking I was going to use all of my old tricks – and while many of them are still important – others just flopped.

I didn’t have a single pin go viral in the several months I’d been working on my blog.

Anyway, I was struggling to see any major growth with my blog traffic here on Ironwild.

I was seeing growth month after month, but big traffic days were all a fluke. I’d have one or two small spikes each month, but otherwise I was having really inconsistent traffic.

I was stuck around 100-300 page views daily. What did a girl have to do to get a pin go viral every now and then? The worst part was that I was trading a lot of my time for those views.

I was really fighting for them each day. I was participating in Pin/traffic reciprocation groups every single day and it was taking away from other things. Truthfully, I was beating my head against the wall and not understanding the new Pinterest at all.

If you read my last income/business report, you’ll see that I made the goal of busting through to at least 10,000 page views for the month of February 2018. It was a goal I was determined to crush, but halfway though the month, I just knew that I’d have to make some big changes in order to make it.

Something had to happen.

I needed a Pin to go viral. At least semi-viral. I found myself LITERALLY praying at night. Please help me have a breakthrough. Show me that I can do this. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE!

I also found myself visiting Carly’s Pinteresting Strategies sales page time and time again. I’d heard about manual pinning, but I had my doubts.

I was already using Tailwind (a Pinterest scheduler you can read about here) and was seeing steady but SLOW results from it. I was getting impatient and knew I needed to make some changes but I was hesitant to make any more investments for my blog.

I started reading a bunch of blog posts about manual pinning and they ALL lead me back to Pinteresting Strategies.

I’ll admit, I was really doubtful, so I just kept leaving the sales page. I thought I knew everything about Pinterest. I thought I knew how to make my own pin go viral. (Clearly I needed to get over myself!) But eventually I was so curious and admittedly, so desperate, that I finally just bought the book.

I Bought the Dang Ebook & Things Have Taken a BIG Turn

I’m just going to show you the analytics with a few details. First, let me show you what I’d been dealing with as far as page views for the first half of the month.

I had under 2000 page views total for the first twelve days of the month. Know that I bought the Pinteresting Strategies Ebook on February 9th, 2018. I started implementing the strategies a few days later, on the same day I published my breastfeeding post. That was February 13th.

Now, here’s what happened in the next several days…

I played around with implementing just A COUPLE of Carly’s strategies and saw my pin take off within two days!

My traffic continued to climb and though it’s tapered off for this particular pin, my page views have been consistently higher ever since. It’s also worth mentioning that a few of my other pins went semi-viral during this time, too. Here are the Pinterest stats for that one pin though:

That’s a lot of engagement on a brand new pin!

I don’t know what you consider viral, but a pin that takes off like that in just a few days is viral to me. (I do still miss when Pinterest told you how many repins ALL pins in your feed had, but whatever.)

If you’re a small-time blogger, having a pin go viral, even by small standards, this is great.

Now let’s take a look at the whole month so far so you can really understand how big this change was: 

Beneficial for Every Blogger

Admittedly, if you’re proficient in Pinterest basics (like how to make a pin and understanding it’s importance for marketing), a chunk of this book will sound like something you’ve already heard.

I confess that I am still experimenting with Carly’s strategies (fingers crossed that I can sustain growth) and learning a lot.

Even though I thought I was some blogging veteran who had read everything there is to read about Pinterest!

Here’s the big thing:

It’s the small, seemingly insignificant strategies that pack the most punch. Carly’s ebook isn’t going to work if you don’t. Don’t be dumb like me and skim it the first time- it’s the little stuff you’d otherwise miss that you need to read.

My Suggestion for Making a Pin Go Viral with Carly’s Help

She talks about it in the book, but I think that the most important thing to do after reading Carly’s book is tracking your every move for awhile.

She details her exact strategies, and I think it’s important to do for awhile. I simply kept a Word document and noted everything. Every day I tried a new strategy, I wrote it down – and that’s when I started to see results.

But now I am realizing that her exact methods might help me take things a step further and offer me sustainable results. Because I am SO down for consistently high page views. Aren’t you?

As you can see, I’m now a big believer in Carly’s strategies. I even became an affiliate with ZERO hesitation because of the results I have seen so far. So what are you waiting for?