A few months ago my bloggy friend Elena, over at Elena Peters: Midlife Blogger surprised me by doing an analysis of my Pinterest activity. I’d had an account for quite a while, but did little with it, and she very kindly decided to help me out as she has achieved great success with hers in a very short amount of time. Not only that, she created a series of posts, effectively a ‘How To’ guide on developing and growing a readership.

After reading her advice, this is what I did

• Added my blog link and key words to the description of each of my boards.
• Changed my account to a ‘business’ account.
• Created a group board and invited other bloggers to share their posts. I’ve participated in one of Elena’s shared boards and it has been a great way to see more blog posts, so I’ve started my own.
• Joined several other group boards.
• Created different boards of things I am interested in: running, hair and beauty (ie, things that I could do myself without looking like a panda), photography, food, motivational quotes, Birmingham… I’ve gone pin crazy adding things that have inspired me.
• Put the boards into an order that made sense – my blog board first, followed by my group board, followed by my interest boards, with my group boards at the end.

After a little while, I started to develop it even further.

• I made my pins into ‘rich pins.’ This was quite a complicated process as I am a .com site and not a self-hosted .org like Elena, so I will give more details on this in a later post.
• I started to created pin-worthy images. For this, I use Canva on my iPad – it’s a free app, extremely easy to use and I have had lots of fun trying out new ideas and styles with it.

Some of the images I have created with Canva

• I have also started putting keywords into the ‘Alt’ section of my images before I publish the post.

And the results? For one, my following has more than doubled, although it has admittedly slowed down recently due to my lack of activity on there at the end of September.

Since Elena’s advice I have seen a steady, but noticeable increase of an extra 100+ views, and my October views are set to be sizeably higher. In fact, they will have tripled in just a few months, which is amazing considering the small amount of time and attention I actually put into the account.

Want to know more? You can find mine and Elena’s amazing set of offers for setting your blog for success in 2017, with brilliant advertising opportunities and a KILLER Pinterest and Twitter course bundle…

Simply click on the image below