What Can You Do To Maximize Your Chances Of Getting a Viral Pin?

Even Though Creating a Viral Pin Seems to be a BIG Black hole of mystery, there are certain things you can do to initiate it.

What does it really require to get a viral pin?

It is the quality of the content? Is it the pin image? Is it the repin number or how massive is the account who repinned it?

Some of the concepts about getting a viral pin is a total lie and most of the bloggers still believe it. 

In one of my previous blogs, I’ve explained how getting repinned by other huge and massive Pinterest account is NOT a requirement to gain massive traffic from Pinterest. There are basic steps and strategies that you can use to be massive in Pinterest without the help of big accounts. 

So…How to create a viral pin?

To answer this question let me tell you one thing Pinterest isn’t just about mindless spam pinning, with some strategic pinning you too might bag some viral pins.

Given below are some important points to remember while creating, pinning and growing your pins.

Here we go!

1: Eyeball-Grabbing Titles Are Everything

Here’s some harsh truth,

• If your blog titles are whack, it will get less traffic even if the blog content is outstanding.
• Even if your content is not that great but has a title that really stands out in the crowd, blog views are more consistent.

You may have written some awesome content but if I don’t feel like clicking the pin, you’ve already lost the game. Now more than ever, generic titles fail to bring a decent amount of traffic because Pinterest is already saturated with these generic pins. You can ruin a beautifully written, well-crafted blog post by NOT using a good headline.

For example – If your pin has a title “7 Ways To Make Money”, unfortunately, most users will not click it (including me).

You will have to grab the eyeballs of the reader within the normal attention span (i.e. 2-3 seconds). A pin titled “7 Unique Ways To Earn $5000 Per Month”, has higher engagement potential than the previous title. You can get creative and write a few titles and analyze which one gets more views. It has been seen that a good titles increases click rates. So don’t get lousy while crafting a catchy headline!

2: Paid images OR Free Images?

Over the past few months, I’ve heard so much from other big accounts users about the benefits of using Paid images instead of free stock images as they tend to perform better. 

I am gonna be REALLY honest here, Stock images are used by most of the pinners, which is why Pinterest is filled with these images. The platform is overly saturated with free stock images, which might hinder with the performance your “New” pin that has a free image in it.

For Example – One visual search using Pinterest’s “Visual search” Feature shows tons of other pins in which the same image is used

I don’t use Paid images JUST because it performs better than free stock images. Free images have limited options to choose from, I have many pins in which I’ve used the same image ( lack of options Y’all, what can I say? ).

Well, you get what you pay for right?

And that’s why I buy paid images from Shutterstock and Deposit photos. Why? Because a lot of my pin topics requires certain images which I could not find in the pile of free images.  I guess that’s why the pins look more relevant and get more traction. 

Sites like Shutterstock and Deposit photos provides a wide range of images of all niches and topics with over 1.3 million images added every week.

 Shutterstock has a requirement based subscription selection, depending upon the no. of images you need every month your subscription value is determined rather than a set constant fee. While Deposit photos have as cheap as $9.99 per month subscription offer.

3: Overall Aesthetics Of a Pin

Pinterest acts almost like a search engine (just like Google), but its more of a Visual Search Engine. And that is why the pin needs to look amazing because a good looking pin increases the urgency of the viewer to save, click and interact with it. 

Which in turn increases you pin engagement, and good pin engagement is crucial for a pin to go viral. For my pins, I use canva, where it is so much easier to create quality pins that stand out

(P.S- It’s totally Free to use).

Try to make vertical pins where the written stuff must be clear and legible. People will surely be turned off if the image is blurry or the written stuff in it is too small or both.

4: Telling Pinterest That Your Pins Are Awesome

Just like any other search engine, you need to tell the platform what your pin is actually about. Meaning, you have to specify in the pin itself that your pin is about a certain topic.

How can someone do it? How to tell Pinterest your pins are relevant to a specific audience?

The answer: Pin Description!

Pay attention to the Pin Description. A well-crafted pin description lets the Pinterest algorithm know what topic your pin is related to (say, Money )and then takes the pin and shows it to users who are interested in the topic Money. 

The description part is very important in pin popularity. A keyword rich pin description is like giving a GPS and a digital map to a total stranger and tell them to go to a specific destination. Here, the destination is the right audience. And if the pin reaches the right audience,

Voila! Hello, Blog Traffic!

I’ve witnessed so many new bloggers often ignore this part and don’t pay much attention to it and just leave the description part blank or write some irrelevant sentences, hoping that it’ll get traffic from right people. 

A keyword rich description + Good looking pin = Viral ready!

If you struggle to write a perfect pin description, you can go to the search bar on Pinterest and type your desired keyword ( money making, budget, baby products, vegan brunch etc). Look in the pin descriptions of the first few pins that appear, and take ideas how they are written. The description might be the reason why they’re on the top.

And of course, don’t copy everything that’s written. Learn, how they use the keyword? Is there any call to action statement? Are there any hashtags involves?

Here, you can definitely get the overall idea to write the perfect description.

5: Sibling Pin Popularity

A little bit of clarification – Sibling pins are those pins that have the same blog/website page target but is different looks wise. When I first started pinning I used to create only one image for one blog post and pinned it over and over even though it wasn’t bringing any traffic.

Once I had my first viral pin, I was obviously stoked but did nothing other than refreshing the analytics page to see the traffic flood my blog (We all do it).

But Within two days the viral pin was dead. 

After that, Every time I had a viral (or even a semi-viral pin), I followed the same routine, and every time the pin died within a few days. So one day one pin in particular (given below, the one with 20k impression) started getting more saves and clicks than usual (Viral Pin Alert!), so I created two more pins (one with 16k and 14k impressions) targeting the same blog.

And Surprise! surprise! The new pins started getting popular too (sort of) despite being new!

I thought it was just a coincidence or just a one-time thing, then it happened again! The second pin started getting more clicks than usual just after the first started getting popular. Below are two sibling pins that are different from the above ones, these pins too showed the same behavior.

How can this happen?

So here’s my analogy! Imagine if a person becomes famous, his/her siblings get somewhat famous (but not to a full extent), being a close family member. I guess that’s the case here! One pin which is starting to get viral creates some sort of bonus priority for other pins containing the same parent URL.

And that is why,

Every time I publish a new blog, I make sure to create multiple pins of those and pin them all together. Because if any of those gets any traction, it will drag all its siblings with itself.  And one more thing, even if the sibling pins are not as good looking as the primary viral pin, it will still be popular. 

And this time my popular sibling pins did not fully die, Even after two months from being viral, the pins bring at least 200 – 250 views every day! The sibling pins act as a viral influence for each other, preventing them to die too quickly. Proof?  

Yup! 112k Pinterest Views from a single pin. 

6: Manual & frequent Pinning

Manual pinning is one of the things I thought was really time-consuming and annoying to the point where I thought to give it up to a pin scheduler. Although it may seem a tedious job, believe me, manual pinning can never replace any scheduler.

Pinterest wants your time in the platform, the more you spend time on Pinterest – saving, following engaging with other pins, Pinterest will prioritize the account over the ones that keep spamming.

Currently using a scheduler?

If you’re using any scheduler that’s totally fine, you can use manual pinning strategy along with your scheduler. It won’t harm your statistics. Many bloggers use Tailwind to grew their pin reach along with consistent manual pinning. It Still Works!

Frequent pinning is also as important as creating a pin. If you want you to pin to be saved and clicked by buttloads of people then you have to share it buttloads of times. As simple as that!

Few tips on frequent pinning:

Try not to pin 95 pins at once and call it a day for the entire week. Pin consistently, find a time in the morning and pin 15 pins, and then maybe 7 in the afternoon and 14 in the evening (These are NOT an exact number of times you should be pinning, just giving a general idea).

Don’t abandon pins that are not getting traffic, pin them too but if you don’t see any kind of engagement associated with that particular pin for too long, create new good ones. 

7: Mind Your Popular Pins

Popular pins hold some past success points with themselves (just a theory). So Pinterest might favor those pins over new pins as they have proven to be high quality before. Kind of like applying for a job interview with a strong Letter Of Recommendation.

Here the “Letter Of Recommendation” can be taken as past popularity of the pin.

To know which pins are popular, Go to your WordPress statistics or google analytics and search for your top referrer, in the Pinterest area, see for the top pins that bring you the more traffic and repin those pin to other group boards.

Most of the times these pins will be not pinned by you but some other users. But sometimes I’ve found that pinning my pins to my own board bring a lot of traffic too. 

This means pinning from the first page of analytics, whichever pins are bringing the most traffic right now, to the boards that you have found that you are likely to get the most repins from. These type of pins usually gets more views more quickly compared to the ones that are fresh of the oven.

In conclusion,

Getting a viral pin is not very easy, you need to look into a lot of aspects to get it right and not every time it is in your control. But a few things that are in your control which are mentioned above are enough to make your pins much popular (if not full-blown viral), thus increases your chances to get viral.

Pin virality may be hard to get but sure is not any mystery anymore, tweaking some stuff may push your pins to perform better than ever.

Don’t get disheartened if you don’t see immediate results. For me, it takes at least One to Two months to get viral after the date of posting. Your pins might take less or more than my time. But with the strategies discussed above, Now your pins will be 5 steps ahead compared to others.