How to Get Your First 1000 Followers on Pinterest (Quickly!)

When I first heard about how effective Pinterest could be for my business in December 2016, I had a very small following… it wasn’t zero, but it was great either:

I’d heard the statistics from people with a large following about how Pinterest was the highest source of traffic to their websites and how it had changed their whole approach to marketing. I decided that I wanted a piece of that pie!

But the problem was I knew nothing about Pinterest…

So, I did a tonne of research on Pinterest marketing strategies that worked for different bloggers, and came up with my own plan for my account, which is what I’ve used to compile the Pinterest marketing series  that you’re reading now.

In less than two months, I grew my following on Pinterest to over 1000 people (I took two weeks off during that time too), and it has been growing at an increasing rate ever since.

In this post, I will walk you through the steps I took to quickly build a Pinterest following. It’s important to note that I didn’t do all of this straight away (as the whole process has been a learning experience for me too) so even implementing only a few of these strategies will help you to grow your audience and start benefiting from increased traffic to your blog, repins on your posts and sales of your products.

Here’s a summary of what’s included in this post. Click on a section to jump ahead:

How to get your first 1000 Pinterest followers (quickly!)

1. Create an attractive Pinterest profile
2. Optimize your website for Pinterest
3. Create quality content to Pin
4. Share content from other people
5. Join Pinterest group boards (or start your own)
6. Join a Tailwind Tribe (or start your own)
7. Follow other Pinners in your niche
8. Follow other boards in your niche
9. Save Pins regularly
10. Schedule your Pins with Tailwind
11. Invite followers from other platforms

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links and I may earn a commission if you click them and make a purchase. This is at no cost to you and I only recommend products that I love.

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An attractive Pinterest profile is one of the first and most important things you can do to build your brand on Pinterest. A well-planned Pinterest profile will help you to gain followers, get repins and organically grow your blog traffic.

This includes using clear branding, relevant keywords, and creating boards that appeal to your audience’s interests, not your own.

I’ve written a how-to guide that will teach you how to set up your account (as a business account) and set up a Pinterest profile and boards that represent your brand. You can read the full blog post here.

If your goal with Pinterest is to direct traffic back to your website, you’ll want to make sure your website is optimized for Pinterest.

I’ve written a detailed blog post that will show you:

• How to verify your website on Pinterest
• How to activate “Rich Pins”
• How to set up social share icons on your pages and blog posts
• How to install and use the Pinterest widgets on your website
• How to create hidden Pinterest images on your blog posts
• How to add Pinterest descriptions to your website pictures
• The benefits of setting up an email newsletter to capture traffic

You can check out the blog post now here.

When I first started pinning, I assumed that a higher quantity of pins would result in more exposure, so I filled my boards with hundreds of Pins from Pinterest, my website and around the web. And to be honest… it worked for me for my first 1000 followers… sort of.

Now that I’ve been using Pinterest a little longer, I understand that Pinterest looks at the quality of your Pins and will show your content to more people if you regularly save popular content… So my whole strategy had to change.

I spent the next few weeks going through old boards, cleaning up bad descriptions, removing unpopular Pins or Pins with broken links… and to be honest, I wish I had done it correctly the first time. Quality always beats quantity.

Instead of repeating my mistakes, read my guide on how to find and create quality Pins to fill your account that will result in higher repins and more exposure.

I’ve also covered this in more detail in my post about how to find and create great Pins, but I thought it was worth a mention here too.

This part is easy: Make sure approximately 80% of your Pins are other people’s content. Nobody will be interested in following an account that’s all about you (sorry!) and so you need to create a useful resource for your audience using content from other people.

This will help you build your Pinterest following quicker for a few reasons:

1. You can fill your boards quicker
2. You can Pin content that has already been proven to be popular and so you’re more likely to get repins
3. You will show up in the “also pinned by” results at the bottom of those Pins elsewhere, which may attract more followers
4. You will become a more valuable resource and so people will want to follow you

You’re probably asking “What is a Pinterest group board and why should I join one?”

I didn’t really understand the power of group boards until I joined one that helped one of my Pins gain thousands of saves and shares.

Basically, a group board operates the same as any other board, except that you can invite other people to contribute to the board as collaborators.The board will show up on both your profiles, and you will both be able to add new Pins. You can add collaborators to your current boards in the board settings to turn them into a group board. You can invite as may collaborators as you like.

You can add collaborators to your current boards in the board settings to turn them into a group board. You can invite as may collaborators as you like.

You can identify group boards on anyone’s account by the small people icon on the top. Some group boards will include information on how to become a collaborator in the board description. Other boards are strictly invitation-only.

Pinterest group boards can:

1. Increase your followers
2. Increase your exposure (to followers of your other contributors)
3. Increase the number of repins on your posts

The group boards you join will also show up on your own profile, so make sure you join boards that are relevant to your audience and add value.

If you start your own group board, you’ll have the authority to add or remove contributors and remove any Pins that do not meet the guidelines and purpose of the board.

I run a number of group boards on my Pinterest profile related specifically to adult coloring but have also joined other group boards relating to general printables, seasonal content and other topics that I think my audience will find valuable.

TIP: You may want to turn off notifications so you don’t get flooded with notifications every time someone adds a Pin to your group board.

Unfortunately Pinterest doesn’t currently offer any easy way to locate group boards or request invitations, so it can be a little bit of work to find a good fit. Here are some other websites where you can find lists of Pinterest group boards that you may be able to join:

• Pingroupie.com
• Facebook groups
• thepinjunkie.com
• Boardbooster

If you come across a group board you’d like to join, you can request an invitation by contacting the owner of the group board (usually the first collaborator) or by checking if there are any details in the board description on how to apply.

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Tailwind Tribes are another effective tool for collaborating with others in your niche. They allow you to share your content with a team of like-minded Pinners you know and trust who would be interested in sharing your content.

They act like a private Pinterest board for your Tribe, where you can recommend pins to your Tribe (following the rules set by the Tribe leader) and schedule each other’s content straight to your Tailwind queue.

A good Tribe can significantly increase the reach of your Pins. Here’s one of my Tribes I’ve been in for just over a month (these are my personal stats from my 18 Pins within the Tribe)

Tribes are free to use when you sign up to a free Tailwind trial (up to 100 pins free).

The best way to find Tribes at the moment is to join Facebook support groups or start a tribe with people you already know. Tailwind is currently working on new features that will allow you to search for other tribes within Tailwind.

I currently run a tribe called “Coloring for Adults” for other artists – if you’d like an invitation, send me an email!

Like most social media platforms, a good way to grow your following on Pinterest is to follow other people in your niche.

Don’t just follow random accounts or follow people with the intention of unfollowing later. This system is frowned upon by other Pinners and will come across as spammy. Instead, type your keywords into the Pinterest search bar and filter your results to show other Pinners that are interested in similar Pins to what you’re pinning on your profile.

Follow Pinners that you are genuinely interested in or that Pin about your topic. If you’ve made an attractive Pinterest profile, you’ll find that a number of them will follow you back.

The added bonus is that your home feed will include their content, which can help you to find valuable Pins for your own boards.

If you can, I’d recommend to try to find 10-20 Pinners in your niche each day (no need to go overboard with 100+ people a day), but don’t worry if you don’t find the time every day – in my first two months, I probably only did this for 1-2 weeks. Now, I try to set aside a few minutes every few weeks to find new accounts, but it’s not a huge priority on my list.

You can also follow specific Pinterest boards instead of following a whole account. This is a good way to narrow down on your niche further, especially if you’re following people who like to include a board about everything they are interested in.

You can find boards using the Pinterest search bar too, or you can also find the boards that your own content is pinned to (check your notifications), because those users have already shown an interest in your content and will be more likely to follow you back.

Your Pinterest notifications will tell you when other people have saved your content.

Break those Facebook habits… because while the recommended number of posts per day for most social media platforms is between one to three posts, many successful Pinterest marketers recommend pinning between 15-30 times a day.

Thanks to Pinterest’s Smart Feed, your followers won’t see all 30 posts on their home feed. They will only see the posts that Pinterest believes they will be most interested in, based on keywords and the popularity of your Pins.

So if you want to be seen, you need to save a LOT of Pins.

I’ve heard some people recommend to pin up to 100 times a day… wow! If you’ve got 100 quality Pins to share, then great! But don’t sacrifice quality for quantity.

It is definitely important to be pinning at least 10 times a day, and you can do this easily with Tailwind.

Scheduling your Pins can save you a lot of time and can help you to post on a consistent basis, regardless of what else happens during your week or what timezone you’re in.

I usually keep my schedule topped up about two weeks in advance, so it is regularly saving 15-30 Pins over a day for me… it’s like having a virtual assistant!

Setting up a schedule is the key to keeping your sanity and providing your audience with consistent, quality Pins on a regular basis. You can take a few days, a week or even a month off, and know that your Pinterest content will continue to get repins, gain new followers and send warm traffic to your website while you’re gone.

I’m based in Australia, so I also want to make sure I’m pinning content when my key audience in the United States are awake… which is often the middle of the night for me. Scheduling makes this easy.

My tool of choice for this is Tailwind. With Tailwind you can schedule your Pins to multiple boards over time (at times you choose), discover new content, measure your results through detailed analytics, and join Tailwind Tribes to expand your reach and collaborate with other Pinners within your niche.

I use Tailwind over other scheduling programs because it is specifically designed for Pinterest and has a number of features that aren’t available with other tools. I particularly like the ability to schedule a Pin at an interval – meaning it can be saved to multiple boards, spread out over time, to maximize the exposure of my content. Here’s an example of one of my schedules:

I also like that you can add Pins to Tailwind just as easily as you can save them to Pinterest, thanks to the free Tailwind browser plugin. I usually save a bulk of ideas into my “drafts” then come back and add the descriptions and scheduling later.

Tailwind also has useful analytics that provide more detail than Pinterest’s built-in analytics, including your new followers, Pins, repins and likes over the past week, plus some useful board insights to help you identify which boards are performing the best:

Tailwind offers a free trial with no time limit – click here to sign up and get your first 100 Pins free.

If you’ve already built a following on another social media platform, tell them about your Pinterest boards and invite them to follow you! You can also promote your Pinterest profile to your website visitors and email list.

Rather than just telling them to “Follow me on Pinterest”, I’ve found a very effective way to attract followers is to tell them about specific boards they may find interesting.

Here’s an example of one of my recent Facebook posts:

I spent a day loading posts about each of my Pinterest boards into a scheduling tool (Such as Buffer, Hootsuite, Edgar or SmarterQueue) that posts them to my other social networks automatically for me every 2-3 weeks.

I also send out email newsletters using MailChimp and include my Pinterest boards when I feel they will add value to my readers. Pinterest also provides some great tools in their Widget builder to include your profile and boards on your website.

You can add these buttons and widgets into your sidebars, footers or even in a blog post like this one… You might as well press “Follow” while you’re here 😛

If you try to implement as many of these Pinterest growth strategies as possible, you’ll find that your following grows at a rapid rate.

However, don’t let the size of your Pinterest fan-base be the measure of your success.

Building a following is a great way to increase your exposure, BUT it’s important to realize that the size of your Pinterest following isn’t the indication of whether or not you will succeed on Pinterest. In my own account, my Pins reached more than 2 million people each month, even when I only had 1000 followers. (It’s now over 5 million people with just over 3000 followers).

Things like group boards and Tailwind Tribes will expand your reach quickly, and a repin from the right person will give you far greater exposure than your own account.

As Pinterest moves further away from being a social media platform and towards being a visual search engine, this will continue to be the case even more.

This doesn’t mean you should disregard the steps we have covered in this post. All of the topics we have covered will help your Pins to be seen by the right people, resulting in greater repins and traffic to your content.

I’d love to hear how you go, so please save this post and come back in a month to tell me in the comments how much your following and website traffic has grown!

This concludes my free Pinterest marketing series. If you’ve found this series helpful, please share with your friends using the links below. If you’re ready to take your Pinterest marketing seriously, please also check out The Pinfluence Playbook that includes over 100 pages of actionable strategies to help you grow your business with Pinterest.

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