Pinterest is still a popular social media platform, with 518 million monthly active users. That’s a lot of potential eyeballs to get on your quality content, and as a coach, this is really key.
Creating viral pieces of content can feel like a mystery. However, if you approach creating pins on Pinterest similar to how you approach creating a social media marketing plan for YouTube, you can create popular content consistently. This starts by using keyword research software to build keyword bubbles or a bank of keywords. Then, prioritize the highest volume searches to give yourself the best chance of finding viral idea pins.
In this post, we’ll explore the exact strategy and provide specific tips to help you with everything from detailed keyword research to consistently creating viral-rich pins on Pinterest.
Table of Contents
Concentrate on Curation
Pinterest is designed for users to collect and curate content that they find appealing or useful. While content creation is obviously important, with Pinterest, you’re kind of missing the point if you’re just creating your own viral content.
For one thing, collaboration is a great thing. You can boost other people’s pins, and that benefits both of you. It drives traffic to them, but it also drives traffic to your own relevant boards, pins, affiliate links, and profiles. And if you have good boards, people are more likely to find your content from the search bar. So keep an eye on Pinterest trends and start curating.
Take Miranda Meyers, a marketing coach and owner of the agency Wildroot Marketing. The Wildroot Marketing boards are stuffed with original content, but they also gather relevant content from other places, like in this board about Instagram marketing.
They’ve pinned anything that might be useful to people looking to grow on Instagram, which will direct a flow of traffic to their boards, gain new followers, and also cut down on the amount of time they need to spend making pins themselves. They’re more likely to go viral if they have a good amount of followers and traffic to begin with.
You can also focus on creating boards around seasonal content, which is always popular, and include your own relevant content, too.
Key Takeaway: To get a decent flow of traffic on Pinterest, you need to be pinning a lot. And you just won’t be able to create that much good-quality content without it taking over your whole life. So, don’t be afraid to boost your own boards with content from across the platform.
Create a Recognizable Theme
If you want to create brand cohesion, you should build your own design process and focus on using similar fonts, colors, templates, and filters for your pins.
Many Pinterest marketers even create holiday content month campaigns or idea pin templates. It’s important that followers can instantly recognize when something is from you, and it also helps to reinforce a certain look: are you going for something soft and natural, for example if you’re a herbalist, or are you focusing on something strong and business-like?
Take the example of personal development coach Sofia Success:
This is a constant flow of content, and if you have followers that have found your pins useful before, if they recognise a new pin from you, they’re more likely to quickly save and repin on their own boards. If you can then hit on a really useful or attractive pin, your loyal followers will boost it for you and share it to their relevant boards, increasing your chances of going viral.
It’s a good idea to keep in mind that Pinterest is like a visual search engine. This also means your pin design on mobile should look as good as on laptops and tablets.
Key Takeaway: These pin design tips can help more people find and come back to your pins. Keep a consistent theme for your pins in terms of fonts, colors, and filters. Your followers will keep boosting quality content they recognise as reliable and useful, and they will help to boost your pins, increasing your chance of viral success.
Focus on Photography
Photography is key on Pinterest. It’s such a visual platform; you’ll already be ahead of yourself if you have beautiful images to work with. If you’re not a photographer, you can use stock photography from websites like Unsplash or Pexels. If you feel like a challenge, however, you can take pictures yourself.
Photos on Pinterest should be clear, bright, with good exposure, and crisp. They should also make a good backdrop to text; people should be able to see what your pin is about from a glance, so you’ll probably want to overlay some text with a few words over the top. This is unless you’re curating a board around a very visual theme (for example, crafts or interiors).
Take the example of Pinterest influencer and coach Oh Joy, who uses only the best photos for her boards:
A lot of these are repins, but the key thing is that Joy has chosen only the clearest, sharpest, most beautiful photographs. People want to follow high-quality accounts on Pinterest, and with over 518 million active monthly users, it’s easy to get lost in the crowd. Joy’s curation skills have earned 3.3 million followers on Pinterest – this means her original pins are way more likely to go viral.
Script fonts and pretty images do really well on Pinterest, so it’s worth keeping that in mind, too if you want to create viral content.
Key Takeaway: Choose the highest-quality images you can get for your pin design. Pinterest is obviously a super visual platform, so if you want a lot of followers, go for the best images. The more followers you have, the more likely it is that your pins will go viral.
Try Infographics
Pinterest is perfect for infographics, and thanks to services like Canva, they’re easier to make in the right Pinterest image size formats than ever. Even if you’re a total beginner, you can make hundreds of pins with infographics in board lists that are both useful and visually appealing.
Say you’re a fitness coach, and you know that a lot of your clients want to know how they can fit healthy habits into their day. You can get across so much information in an infographic, way more than just a photograph and your followers will know to follow you for more relevant viral content.
Take, for example, Blogilates, one of the most popular fitness coaches on YouTube. She uses infographics to create workouts for her followers, like this:
Canva has a bunch of free graphics you can use, and you can drag and drop them where you need them to be. You can also use their premade templates, which include Pinterest pins, so they’ll be optimized for the platform perfectly. Infographics increase your brand authority and let your clients know that you understand what you’re talking about.
Key Takeaway: Learn to make infographics. People love infographics, especially if you can fill them with useful information, and super useful pins are more likely to go viral, as users tend to pin them to save for later.
Use Listicles
According to this article by the BBC, humans love lists for a whole bunch of reasons. So think about lists – how can you incorporate them into your Pins and get on top of Pinterest trends to create viral content?
Lists appeal to people, as they love easy-to-digest information, and the good thing about the promise of a list is that people will go ahead and click through to see what you have to say. So if you’re trying to point people to your newsletter, blog, or YouTube channel, this is the way to do it.
Plus, people like to save information to read through later. Take the example of Kate Wilkinson, business coach, on her Pinterest board Self Care for Busy Women:
She has several lists here, including her own pin ‘7 ways to practice self care when you don’t have any energy’. This pin is intriguing, useful, and creates an incentive for people to repin onto their own boards to save for later. You should also include the number of items on your list in your pin titles, so that people will know that this is a listicle from the title, too.
Key Takeaway: You can still use listicles on Pinterest, either by creating an infographic list, elaborating on your pin description, or advertising your blog posts. Listicles about seasonal content do really well, too. People like to save listicles to read for later, and you can also lead people to where you want them to go (for example, your website).
Keep it Simple
Whatever your niche is, you should be able to break down your wisdom into a tiny, bite-sized piece of content. You only have a limited amount of space to work with, so consider creating some tiny life hacks that will appeal to your potential clients and help your pins to go viral.
For example, people need basic information like the size of Pinterest images. Cotswold Create is a Pinterest expert, and they’ve created this basic pin, which is a good example of how simple information can become viral content:
This has cross-audience appeal, as tons of people are looking to get going on Pinterest, but you can make it specific to your niche if you want to. Make sure to use relevant keywords in your descriptions and titles, and people will be able to find your pins more easily.
You may get some new blog readers if you include a link, too. Just avoid keyword stuffing (which is the practice of unnaturally stuffing keywords in written content – this can do you more harm than good when it comes to visibility). A single blog post can create a ton of content.
Key Takeaway: You can break down your specialist knowledge into tiny, bite-sized bits of information that people will pin because it’s something they will refer to again and again. The more useful and simple to read, the better.
Repurpose Short Clips From Virtual Summits
Virtual summits are a fantastic way to find new clients. I myself have run several virtual summits, and I’ve seen great success from those summits, gaining 5,000-25,000 new leads every time. So if you want to build your client roster, this is how to do it: just transform your virtual summit into a new piece of content.
But the good thing about virtual summits is that you can use snippets of videos to share online. I would recommend chopping up a video into small segments for various platforms, and this also works really well on Pinterest. You can post videos of up to 15 minutes on Pinterest, and if you want to go viral, a short burst of useful information in your niche is a good way to do it.
You can also use Pinterest to drive traffic to your summit if you want to sell it as an evergreen product. For example, the Healthy Living Virtual Summit was advertised heavily on Pinterest in the run-up:
Then, after the summit was over, they used Pinterest to advertise the fact that you can get access to all the talks from the summit even if you missed the event itself.
Bonus tip: you can also lock some of your summit content behind your email list, and people may sign up to hear more if they like what they’ve heard so far.
Key Takeaway: Don’t be afraid to use a piece of content you’ve already created. Virtual summits are a great way to drive traffic to your site and giving Pinterest users a snippet of useful information is a great way to go viral, especially if you’re sharing a hidden tip or life hack.
Repurpose Short Clips From Virtual Workshops
If you’ve made quality content, use it. Repurposing it into various types of content is a great way to save lots of time, and virtual workshops are a good way to do this. You record once based on a topic with frequent searches. Then, you chop up that video into various content forms, like quality blog posts, pin collections, and maybe even Pinterest TV.
Take the example of craft coach MCreativeJ:
In this example, just the ad for virtual workshops is attractive: the clear photography makes it very tempting to pin even just for inspiration, and it clearly advertises the expertise of the person running the workshop.
So whether you just want to put up an ad for your workshop or you want to repurpose short clips for Pinterest, don’t be afraid to use the hard work you’ve already put in when it comes to creating quality content: you can get a ton of pins per piece when it comes to content like this.
Key Takeaway: If you’ve put the effort into making a workshop, don’t be scared to repurpose that content. Useful, practical, and beautiful content goes viral on Pinterest, so if you’ve got something to share from a workshop, it’s the perfect place for it.
Get Ahead of Trends
In marketing, it’s always good to get ahead of trends. For example, planning your Christmas content in advance is a good idea so you’re not overwhelmed with tasks at the moment. So, when you’re making pins, think about what’s currently on topic and what events are coming up in the calendar you could use to your advantage.
For example, fitness coach Lisa and her summer workout plan:
People are always looking for a relevant, useful piece of content. If you can have some infographics or short videos planned in advance, this is the way to go. Focus on seasonal content, and you’ll be more likely to go viral. Just make sure you’re using relevant keywords in your pin titles so people can find them, and include links to relevant blog posts if you have them.
You can tie this into your digital marketing strategy, too. For example, you can create seasonal content for your email list and advertise it on Pinterest. Thinking of future content can be really helpful and help to increase your email list and blog pageviews, and one single blog post can create half a dozen pins you can use.
Key Takeaway: Think about what’s relevant right now. Is there an election happening? Are the seasons changing? Is there a holiday coming up? Post content about topics that people are already talking about, and that will help your pin to go viral if you can time it just right.
Think About Vibrancy
Pinterest is such a visual platform, so it’s not enough just to have relevant content. To stand out, your images really need to pop. Think about color vibrancy – some of the most viral pins are the brightest and most eye-catching. Even if you use stock photography, you can choose the boldest and most vivid pin images. Think of Pinterest as a visual search engine: it’s important to get the aesthetics right.
Take this example by Pinterest influencer and interior designer Maryann Rizzo:
The pins she creates, and chooses to repost on her own boards, are super vibrant and eye-catching. When users are scrolling through Pinterest, the brightest images are going to catch their eye. So if you can, get creative and go for bold colors and sharp images. Combine a fantastic pin image with script fonts, which is one of the most popular Pinterest trends, and your pin should perform well.
Key Takeaways: Vibrant, pretty pictures are the epitome of viral content on Pinterest. So, when you’re choosing images or taking photos, think about how bright the colors are to create the most eye-catching pins. This goes for any kind of content, including seasonal content. Just make sure you combine this with a solid pin description with all the relevant long-tail keywords so people can find your pin from the search bar.
Time it Right
There are certain time periods that are worth keeping in mind when it comes to Pinterest. According to Pinterest analytics, people tend to browse on their days off, so posting on the weekend is a good call. You can also post in the evenings after 6 pm in the hope of catching some evening scrollers looking for new Pinterest trends.
The general consensus for Pinterest is to think about free time, and plan to post your pins during those time periods. According to Hubspot, you can also aim for 12pm to catch people on their lunch break: this is a good time period to focus on.
Key Takeaway: People won’t be able to find a piece of content by you if you post at the wrong time, so play around with the time period when you post, look at your Pinterest analytics to see the best timings, and hopefully, people will see your content as they browse or use the search bar.
Look at Your Analytics
There’s a lot of conflicting advice (as well as outdated advice) when it comes to producing viral pins. The truth is there is an element of luck with viral posts, of course. Sometimes you’ll post something you’ve put a lot of work into, and it just doesn’t perform well. Other times, you’ll post something off-the-cuff, and it will blow up. However, there are simple steps you can take like following Pinterest SEO best practices and reviewing your free Pinterest analytics regularly.
Pinterest has a free tool that allows you to look at your metrics, including saves, clicks, and pin clicks, and impressions. To give you a quick rundown of Pinterest analytics:
- Impressions / engagement – this is the number of times your pins have been viewed and is one of the most useful Pinterest analytics you can examine
- Saves – this is the number of people who have saved your pins
- Clicks – this is the number of people who have clicked on the link on your pin
- Pin clicks – this is the number of times people have clicked on your pin to open it, another key component you need to understand for Pinterest analytic.
Posting consistently for a month will give you a good amount of data to work with when it comes to Pinterest analytics, and you can observe which pins do well and try to replicate that to increase your chances of going viral. The more clicks you get, the more likely it is that you’ll get new clients in your high-ticket sales funnel.
You can see how this has worked for Pinterest coach Anastasia Blogger:
You don’t need to obsess over Pinterest analytics, but having a basic understanding can help you craft your images, pin titles, pin descriptions, and increase your chances of going viral, and help you understand more about your blog traffic and blog pageviews, too. It’s also a good way to try to understand why people might not be seeing your pins using the search bar.
Key Takeaway: Get to know your Pinterest analytics. This will help you to understand why your top-performing pins are doing well if people are finding you via the search bar and how to replicate that success for a greater chance of going viral.
Key Takeaways
While there is no silver bullet strategy for going viral on Pinterest, it can be a really great platform for coaches, no matter what niche they work in, to get a sustainable boost of blog traffic and leads.
However, the best pinteresting strategies always start and end with knowing your audience, conducting various keyword research methods, and posting consistently (in the form of new pins per day). Having a relevant mix of seed keywords can help your posts rank in search results and generate new conversions for your coaching business. In practice, this means creating pins in advance and then scheduling it out so there are always new pins users can find and consume.
Want to learn more? Watch our free training on how to get more coaching clients.