How to Make a Pinterest Board People Follow and Love

Did you know that setting up your boards properly on Pinterest can actually help you get more Pinterest followers? Learning how to make a Pinterest board that people will love and follow all starts with Pinterest SEO.

If you’re trying to really master Pinterest for business or blogging, all the pieces have to be set up in the right order.

Here is an overview of the steps we’re going to take:

• PINTEREST SEARCH
• BOARD TITLES
• BOARD DESCRIPTIONS
• BOARD COVERS
• ADDING PINS TO BOARDS
• PIN DESCRIPTIONS
• CONSISTENT PINNING

There are a lot of ways you can be lazy about setting up Pinterest boards…

This is a big mistake because someone who is not lazy (like Lauren and myself) will come through and blow right past you 😉

Just saying!

Here is an example of one of our Pinterest boards that has over ­­­73,000 followers and drives crazy amounts of traffic to our health and wellness website, Avocadu.com.

Note that the photo is linked to the actual board on Pinterest and opens up in a new tab if you’d like to click it and check it out.

A properly set up Pinterest board will:

• Bring lots of traffic to your website
• Get you lots of Pinterest followers
• Can even be a great way to collab with other pinners

Let’s get started with the step-by-step process to make a Pinterest board that people follow and love!

1. Figure out what people are searching for on Pinterest.

If you want to create a board that people will follow and love, you must figure out what they need and are searching for.

Don’t assume you know.  Actually, do the research and find out. The good news? Finding this on Pinterest is rather easy… Start by using the search engine and type one of the topics your blog is covering (we used “yoga” in this example).

Next, I see that “for weight loss” is a popular search term and click on it.  This adds to my search terms. Next, I will click on “

Next, I will click on “boards” to see if there are any other boards like this and how many followers they have. Looks like there are a ton of them (look who’s board is # 😉 )

So what we know from the research so far is:

• Yoga for Weight Loss is a popular keyword.
• Yoga for Weight Loss is a popular board title because over 30+ boards have that exact keyword.
• A lot of users follow boards like this.  

Seems like a pretty good topic to me! Oh, and if you’re worried about the competition, don’t fret. 90% of board users DON’T follow the next steps, which are the most important parts of being a good board owner.

You can get to the top of search for almost any board with the right amount of time and effort.

Note* You can also use Repinned.net (http://repinned.net/boards/) to check out the most popular boards in each Pinterest category. This is a great way to get ideas for what boards are popular in your niche! 

2. Name your board the damned keyword! 

It seems painfully obvious from a marketer standpoint, but I’m still amazed at all the boards titled “Skillz That Pay The Billz” and “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”

Listen, I get it… Pinterest is a really cute and adorable place.  You want to be unique. Your boards are also never going to be seen by anyone unless you were one of those lucky few that was an early adopter to Pinterest and has a few hundred thousand followers.

Ain’t nobody searching for “Skillz That Pay The Billz” anytime soon.

Once you have a big following, creating boards with clever titles would be a good way to become more engaging with your audience. That being said, if you’re reading this, you ain’t there!  Stick to the keyword, homegirl.

3. Create a description using that keyword and maybe a few others.

Pinterest is a visually beautiful, and sometimes dumb, Google.

The keywords used in your profile and in board names is a crucial part to getting free organic search traffic and followers to your board.

You will want to write a simple, unique description on each board cover using the keyword.

We not only use the yoga for weight loss keyword, but we threw in a couple other yoga keywords as well.

The key is to get some good keywords in there without being spammy and “keyword stuffing.”

Make sure that you at least form a complete sentence that actually makes sense! That is optional but something you can do.

4. Create a killer board cover!

Hey, everyone! Lauren here… These articles often have a little bit of both Alex and I in them, because he does most of the writing, and I do most of the editing and design work. So designing board covers is my area of expertise!

Note that you have 2 options here:

• Use existing pins on your boards as board covers
• Create your own board covers

Whichever option you choose, make sure to check it on both desktop AND mobile to make sure that it looks good on both. It’s really up to you which option you’d like to go for, and you can always do a combination of both.  I had that on our Avocadu account for a while, because I liked the mixup.

I do recommend using text though and here’s why.

Text stands out in a sea of images and it makes it immediately clear to the user what your board is about.

Like all Pinterest images, I recommend designing board covers in Canva.  It’s free and a really great tool to use for designing custom images. As of the time that we are writing this article, the best size to use for creating board covers seems to be: 500 px by 500 px (recently updated* any square dimensions will work).

Take a look at some of your competitors (especially the power pinners in your niche) to get some ideas on how other people’s boards look and find a style that works for you.

Keep in mind that when you are designing them that only the top half of the image will be displayed on desktop, and only the center of the image will be displayed on mobile.  This means that your text must be centered and near the top of the image.

Update: Current board covers follow the same guidelines but are also somewhat cropped on the sides on mobile and on desktop for some users.  Pinterest is making some changes, so keep this in mind when designing. Take a look at our boards to see what I’m talking about.

Okay, I’m handing you back over to Alex’s somewhat capable hands! 😉

5. Pin a few pins to get the board started.

Have you ever visited a blog and saw that they only had like 10 posts total? Makes you feel a little uneasy, right??

A similar psychological problem is in effect when you find a group board and there are no pins there… You think “why is nothing here?”  And “if nothing if here, I guess it’s not active or any good.”

Even if the content is good, there’s a psychological heuristic of length-implies-strength that tells us the more content there is, the better something probably is.

This is also why long sales pages and video sales pages work GREAT for getting customers.

The more content there is, the more strength people assumes it has.

When people see a board with very few pins, they associate it with being a weak board and having no value.

When we got started with ours, we very quickly pinned at least 10 pins to each board. Make sure to post the content of others as well as your own, especially because other people’s content has a higher chance of getting repinned at the beginning when Pinterest is still feeling out your blog.

6. Use the keyword in the pin descriptions as well.

Let’s pretend that on our Yoga for Weight Loss board, we started pinning lots pins about Pugs (god bless that goofy animal). When Pinterest is calculating what content to serve up to people, it not only takes into account the board, but also the pins themselves.

So a board that is supposed to be about yoga for weight loss is not going to get served up as the #1 spot when you have a bunch of cute but irrelevant pug content on there.

So in order to REALLY get your board seen, you want to do two things:

1. Pin only content that truly applies to the keyword.
2. Write your keyword in the descriptions as well when you can.

Confession: We are not perfect at this.  Not every pin gets the perfect description with the exact keyword in it.

However, you will want to get this right 80% of the time.  This will make your boards stronger and stronger over time!

7. Pin, pin, pin. 

Another calculation into the Pinterest algorithm is activity on your account, # of pins, and the amount of repins those pins have.  So you want to pin high-quality content consistently to your boards and do it often.

Pinterest, like every social media in existence, loves fresh, new, and high-quality content.

Be like Dory, folks: Just keep pinning. Just keep pinning. Pinning, pinning, pinning…

Additional Resources:

• Pinterest for Business: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide from Actual Power Pinners
• How to Set Up Your Account and Drive Traffic Via Pinterest
• 10 Pinterest Tips and Tricks for Beginners
• Optimize your Website for Pinterest Pins and Traffic

If you are ready to get serious about growing your blog or business on Pinterest, make sure to sign up for our FREE 4-Day Pinterest Marketing eCourse for beginners.

We discuss topics like WHY Pinterest matters so much, how to get started, how to make your content go viral, and SO much more!

Pinterest is the largest source of traffic for both of our blogs, and it is the reason that we have been able to bring both of our blogs to six figures within just a year!

Click here to sign up for our FREE 4-Day Pinterest eCourse!

Create something awesome today.

Cheers,
Alex Nerney
Co-Founder, Create and Go
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P.S. Did we miss anything? Feel free to leave us a comment below if we did or if you enjoyed the article.

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Alex & Lauren

Alex and Lauren are the creators of two separate six-figure blogs and have been featured on Forbes, Yahoo! Finance, and others. Last year, more than 5 million people read their blogs. Read their inspiring story on how they went from broke and frustrated to $100,000/month blogging in 3 years.

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