How to Gain Pinterest Followers Without Wasting Your Time

The number one question that I get asked by the thousands of people in my Easy Pinterest Traffic Group is…

“How can I get more Pinterest followers?”

• Spend hours following people in the hope that they’ll follow you back?
• Join one of those “I’ll follow you if you follow me” threads? In the hope you’ll get some interested followers.
• Spend hours and hours pinning other people’s content so that your account will get shown to people and fingers crossed you’ll get a few more followers?

Forget about Hope Pinning!

To me that sounds like a whole lot of time spent hoping that your luck is going to come through and not enough time doing something that you KNOW will bring results.

I know that it’s tempting to just click, click, click (especially when you’re starting out) but I have a better use for your time.

Why do you Want Pinterest Followers?

But first let have a think about WHY we want lots of Pinterest followers.

I know that we all look at those huge accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers and think:

“If only I had that account, I would be raking in the cash”.

After all, if you run a blog or a small business, your ultimate goal IS money isn’t it? Rather than actual followers.

I have good news for you.

Getting traffic from Pinterest is not all about the followers!

I know of accounts who have literally millions of followers and get very little traffic. I know that I get more traffic to my site with less that 15K followers. (Of course the giant accounts are earning money in different ways but not by getting direct traffic to their site.)

Equally I know of plenty of people who have smaller numbers of Pinterest followers and are getting good traffic to their site and more importantly getting the RIGHT traffic to their site so that they can earn money.

If I asked you what ONE thing you wanted, what would you reply? Money? Traffic? Or Followers?

Instead of asking the question “how do I get more Pinterest followers?” I want you to rethink that question into what you DO actually want.

How Do I Earn Money from Pinterest?

There are many ways of earning money from an online business. This is what we call your business plan.

You might want to break the question down even further.

Let’s start by asking another question.

How do You Make Money from Your Online Business?

Sponsored posts? You want page views AND people to sign up to your newsletter.

Ads on site? You want page views AND people to sign up to your newsletter.

Selling your own products? You want people to sign up to your newsletter.

Selling affiliate products? You’re looking at both page views and newsletter again.

See what I’m getting at? Out of all the different ways of making money, none of them are directly related to the number of your followers. (Unless you want to advise brands on how to get good reach on Pinterest.)

The bottom line is that most people REALLY want to use Pinterest to get either page views or newsletter subscribers. (Perhaps in an ideal world you’d like both but for now pick one or the other!)

SO the REAL questions you want to be asking are not

“How do I gain more Pinterest followers?”

but

either:

How do I get page views from Pinterest?

(Aka How do I get Easy Pinterest Traffic?)

or

"How do I use Pinterest to get people to sign up to my newsletter?"

This is great news because suddenly your life has become SO much more simple.

How NOT to Gain Pinterest Followers.

You don’t have to follow people in the hope that they’ll follow you back (chances are they won’t and even if they do, they probably won’t ever look at your pins unless you’re creating AMAZING pins.)

You can STOP tracking that followers number.

You can stop getting despondent when it only goes up 2 a day.

You can start to track what ACTUALLY matters. Your income. Your page views and your email subscriber number.

You can forget about Pinterest followers and concentrate on THE question that really matters.

 

How do You use Pinterest to get Traffic to Your Site?

KNOW YOUR READER!

Getting traffic to your site is ALL about creating an amazing pin that entices your reader with a compelling message and a compelling image. (Not my words. That’s what Pinterest says!)

How do you entice your reader with a compelling message and a compelling image?

You get to know your reader and what they want.

However you make money from your business, you are selling something. (If you’re not, you’re not making money.)

You are giving your reader or customer a service.

Most likely you’re solving a problem but you might also be helping them buy a pleasure.

I write about “healthy eating for toddlers and picky eating”. Problem? Kids won’t eat anything and parents get frustrated and worried.

Food blogger? Problem? Busy mom needs easy and healthy recipes that her kids will actually eat.

Sell designer leather bags? Perhaps helping with the pleasure of buying a luxury item, perhaps solving the pain of what to buy your spouse for their birthday.

Once you’ve worked out WHO you’re talking to and started to create content that they LOVE, content that they want to CONSUME and REPIN, they will do all the hard work for you.

You’ll suddenly find yourself the owner of Viral Pins that bring you consistent traffic without you having to spend hours hoping it will take off.

The Pinterest Followers will Follow

And as an added bonus, you’ll see your follower number rise!

Not necessarily super quickly, but it will rise gradually and the best bit is that you’ll be building an audience of people who actually LOVE your content rather than an audience of people who only followed you in the hope that you’d pin THEIR content.

Let’s go back to the original question…

How do You Gain More Pinterest Followers?

I know that this ISN'T the answer that lots of you want. I know you want to think that you can just go and follow people and the money will come trickling in but it's not as simple as that.

Forget about wasting your time on the “follow me follow you” threads. They MAY buy you one or two interested followers (but they’re also going to buy you FAR more not-interested followers.)

Your time is MUCH better spent getting to know WHO you are selling to and what they are looking for so that YOU can give it to them.

Your time is MUCH better spent working out how to design amazing pins with a compelling message and a compelling image that attract your reader or customer.

Your time is MUCH better spent adding to YOUR business and then taking time off to do the important things in life like enjoying it and being with your family so that when you sit down to work you’re rested and ready to go.

Next time you hear someone ask “how do I get more Pinterest followers?”

Your answer will be…

“I don’t care how many Pinterest followers I have, I care about how much targeted traffic it brings to my site instead!”

To gain Pinterest followers, spend your time creating the content that your target reader is looking for, create amazing pins that will entice them to read your content and then go off and relax.