5 Reasons I Had 4 Viral Pins on Pinterest in One Month
5 Reasons I Had 4 Viral Pins on Pinterest in One Month
After 4 of my pins went viral in one month, I took a step back to analyze why and I came up with 5 reasons I had 4 viral pins on Pinterest. In this post, I go into detail with each pin and explain why I feel each pin did so well. I also share a few pins that didn’t do so well and why.
As you continue to grow your blog and share your blog posts you will find that certain topics do better than others. That doesn’t mean that you have to only write about those topics but you can count on them bringing in new traffic.
For example, I share blogging tips for new bloggers and when I write about making money or getting traffic to my blog those topics do better than others.
I still share other tips because you never know who is in need of that specific tip. Once I wrote a blog post on how to set up your sidebar. It received a very kind comment from a reader stating how thankful she was for that post because it helped her.
I love those comments! Even though it isn’t a super popular topic it still helped someone!
By always writing about all the tips I can share and not just sticking to the popular topics it helps me find new popular topics. That is what happened when I wrote a blog post on something I found that I thought was better than the bullet journal.
New Topic
This was a new topic for me. I haven’t written any blog posts on note taking but it is a popular topic because everyone is always looking for better ways to organize their lives. So I wrote this blog post one day just sharing how I found something that (in my opinion) is better than the bullet journal.
First, in case you don’t know what a bullet journal is, it is a journal full of empty pages and each page has dots for guides on it.
There are a million different things you can use a bullet journal for. If you check out my bullet journal board on Pinterest you will see some amazing ideas and ways to use one.
I had first heard of them through another blogger. She shared some of the ways she uses hers to organize her days and keep on task with her blog.
I ended up getting one to try for myself. There were some flaws for someone like myself. Such as I have horrible handwriting and I am not the most artistic person. Yet I am a perfectionist so each page I felt like I was constantly trying to fix it.
If you look at some of the amazing ways bullet journals can be used you can see the appeal but that only works if you have a steady hand. For me, it was more work than fun and I didn’t end up using it.
Another reason is I would always forget it or decide not to bring it because it didn’t fit in my purse and I didn’t want to carry around 50 different colored pens.
If you check out my post I share that I had just recently purchased an iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil and used the free notes app to create my own bullet journal. This improved the handwriting issue because I could easily erase any mistakes. I go more into detail about why I like it better in that blog post so I will skip all of that for now.
Hot Topic
Little did I know while writing that post that it would end up being a very hot topic. I shared the post on Pinterest and with the help of Tailwind the pin took off!
I had over 24k impressions on that pin in 24 hours. Today after being pinned a little over 30 days ago it has over 201k impressions. My blog traffic for the month of June 2019 was over 20k page views. Which let’s just say that is MUCH higher than normal.
I had no idea that it was going to be such a hot topic.
How I got so many page views
As I said it was definitely thanks to Tailwind and Pinterest for sending all of that traffic to my blog. I usually create several images for each blog post and pin them to Pinterest at different times.
With this particular blog post I originally only created one pin and that is the pin that took off. To test it out and see if it was the content (topic) of the pin or the visual look of the pin that made it go viral, I created others to put to the test.
What I found out is there are 5 main reasons this pin took off compared to my other test run pins.
- Hot topic
- Visually appealing pin
- Enticing Title
- Keywords in the pin description
- Scheduled to pin to all group and personal boards and Tailwind Tribes
While I was creating the test pins I also scheduled out the first pin to all of my group boards, personal boards and added it to all my Tailwind Tribes. I knew that I needed to get this pin out there since it was doing so well from just one pin to one of my personal boards.
Then I created several other pins for my test run. A few did very well and a couple did not. I noticed there was a trend on the ones that did well and the ones that didn’t.
Test Run Results
The main difference was the enticing title. Take a look at these results to see for yourself.
Enticing Title – Pin 1
This pin has a very enticing headline. It creates curiosity and I feel like that was why this pin had the best click-through rate compared to the others.
Visually it is a pretty pin so it was easy to save but I believe the curiosity is what made this pin do so well. It had the most impressions and saves of them all. It was also the first one I pinned so that could be why because the next one did very well too.
This is the stats after a little over 30 days of being pinned.
Enticing Title – Pin 2
These two pins I did the same enticing title because my test on these was to see if it was the pin image or the content that made the first pin so popular.
This one did fairly well. It didn’t receive as many impressions or saves but it came very close and still did very well. What is interesting is this pin had fewer impressions and saves but yet had more link clicks than the first pin.
I’m not quite sure why on that. They were both pinned to all the same boards and all within the same time frame.
Here are the stats after a little over 30 days for this pin.
Enticing Title – Pin 3
However, this one didn’t do well at all. I am not sure why this one didn’t do as well as the first two because it has the same catchy title with similar colors and fonts but for some reason, this one was not a winner.
Looking back I think I forgot to schedule this pin out to all the group boards like the other two did. I just looked back through my pins and I don’t see it mixed in like the other two are. I only pinned it once and must not have scheduled it out. It will be interesting to see what happens after I add it to the schedule!
Freebie – Pin 1
These next two were to test and see if the freebie inside the blog post was popular. Once readers click through and read the blog post many of them signed up for the freebie I put into it after it started taking off.
Originally, I had the normal freebie that I always offer in the post and it always does well because it teaches readers how to start a blog. That freebie always gets sign ups but none of these readers were signing up.
This told me that the people reading were bullet journal folks and not blogger folks. I created a freebie from my other blog that I am starting up because I felt like it fit with that niche better. My other blog is going to be about planning and productivity tips. I created a freebie that was a digital bullet journal which ties into that.
Around 30-50 people a day were signing up for that freebie after I added it. Once I realized the amount of traffic going to the post and yet no email subscribers were coming out of it I knew I needed to switch freebies and it worked.
Like I said I could tell the readers were not interested in my other freebie about blogging. So, I was happy to see they wanted the free digital bullet journal. I did learn though with these two pins that it still was the curiosity the first pins had that was bringing readers in.
These pins did not do well, however, once in the blog post they did sign up for the freebie. But the freebie alone was not bringing in readers.
Freebie – Pin 2
The first freebie pin looks like the second popular pin. I made another that looked similar to the first popular pin to again see if it was the look of the pins that made them do so well.
Neither of these pins did that great. So this told me it was bullet journal folks curious about what I had found that was better than the bullet journal. Not people excited about a freebie and not people that only saved the pins based on their looks.
Safe Title – Pin 1
The other clue was the backlash I received on the two popular pins. I received about 6 comments and most of them were mean.
They were from personal accounts of people who clearly were die-hard bullet journal lovers. They did not like my opinion of the notes app as being a solution that could be better than the bullet journal.
They also did not like my idea of a digital bullet journal also being a solution. Apparently, the curiosity pins made it sound like there was some new amazing thing that was better than the bullet journal that they did not find after reading the post. I personally love the idea of going digital. It works so much better for me. I have found so many amazing fun resources too that solve all of my personal issues with a physical journal.
These were just folks that mean and grumpy and taught me a valuable lesson on how to handle mean comments. One told me my freebie was ugly. There is no reason other than being mean for that to be commented. I had to remind myself that over 300 people had signed up for that ugly freebie so one person’s opinion shouldn’t matter.
However, to make the pin less “deceiving” because I was also told I was fake advertising pretty much. I made this pin to explain a little bit more without giving away all of the info or I wouldn’t get click-throughs.
It seemed to have worked. I stopped receiving very mean and hurtful comments and still was able to have a pin that had good numbers. This is about 30 days of the pin being up. I don’t have as many click-throughs (because of the less enticing title I’m sure) but I still reached a good amount of impressions off of this pin.
Safe Title – Pin 2
I created this pin with the same theory in mind. Again, I just wanted to test out the different titles and see what was working and what wasn’t. This pin is still going so I don’t have a full 30 day stat on it but so far it is doing okay but not a crazy good as some of the others.
It doesn’t have as catchy of a title but I feel like it is less likely to make any readers feel tricked as well.
Here are the stats so far on this pin. I know that is says published May 31, 2019, but this pin was definitely not. The first pin I created (which would have the same URL) was. This one has only been on maybe 2 weeks.
What this has done for me
By continuing to write blog posts on other topics other than just my main popular ones, I have come across a great topic that ties right into my new blog that I just started. I was nervous about branching out but this helped show me there is an audience out there for my new blog.
I have heard other bloggers say this but I didn’t understand until now but they say you never know what blog post is going to just take off! That is so true! I had no idea when I first wrote it that it would bring all of this. This is what this one blog post has done for me.
- Gained 378 email subscribers in 30 days thanks to this hot topic and my viral pins.
- Made 6 Amazon affiliate sales and my Amazon affiliate account was officially approved! (most of my affiliate links in my blog posts are for blogging resources so I don’t have many with Amazon affiliate links so I always had to reapply since it wasn’t my target products. Thanks to the bullet journal Amazon affiliate links in this blog post I was finally approved!)
- Made $30.13 with Google Adsense which is the most I have made in one month from ads.
- Broke two records of blog traffic to my blog. Not only did I hit 10k page views for the first time but I broke through and had over 20k pageviews!
- I was only 7,000 sessions away from being able to apply for Mediavine!
- Gained over 100 Pinterest followers.
- My monthly views on my Pinterest account went up from around 75k to over 400k!
- I had not 1, not 2, not 3, but 4 viral pins in one month!
It was definitely a crazy and amazing month for my blog and all because of one post on a completely different topic than I normally write about!
Happy blogging!
Vanessa
