The Perfect Pinterest Ploy

I have been fiddling around Pinterest for the past year. I started out knowing exactly nothing and really came to enjoy the platform. I have only been focusing on one account (though I accidently created two more, which lay dormant for a year now; currently reactivating them. yay) and only been pining manually.

In the past year I learned a lot, though I really still got a lot of blank spots. I never did any black hat tricks so far, no mass following, no scraping no nothing. All the worked really payed off, though. My organic reach is phenomenal now (considering how little effort I really put into it; each day ~15min). My own pins frequently get 1k repins. Actually some of my repins are sorta going viral as well (a fact I "hate" *lol*).
I usually got like active "viral" 10 pins that each, on average, send 200 visits to a niche site per day ? on good days it's 500. Some of them die off, while others actually seem evergreen. Overall referral traffic is about 10k.
There is a lot of organic pining and repining going on. So I actually got three pins with 10k+ repins.

99 Percent of my pins are repins. Only about 1 in hundred pins point towards my own site. (I get roughly 200 repins per day)
Now as for the bad part: My account currently only has 600 followers and I really can?t seem to figure out how to increase that. I am active in 3 group boards, though my best boards are my own. I got some influencers following and repining me (know them from twitter, etc).

So how do I actually increase my follower count? I really tried everything save mass following (it would destroy my feed and I need that for quality repins).
For a lot of popular keywords in my niche my pins are in the top (if not THE top) result.

Here is my plan: I was thinking on getting a VPS, some proxies and start a couple of accounts. (Say 20ish).
I would want to grow these 20 through autofollowing, and manually pining well curated pins from my niche (using an automation tool ? not sure which yet. Maybe FL?). In the start I would repin absolutely nothing from my authority account. Once these accounts got a decent following (say 1k) I would selectively repin my own pins, whenever I pin something new (like once a week). (with a delay so not all accounts repin the same pin at the same time)

The idea behind it would be to help these pins to get a good initial like/repin count and facilitate them to get viral (currently takes about 1-3 months for pins to lift off). (Guess it depends on what my influencers are pining and if my pins show up in their smart feed after that.)

It won?t really help the follower count on my authority account, though. I am still clueless about that.
I tried crosspromoting from other social media ? but that really yields no big gains. Any ideas?

My goal would be to have 10k followers on my authority account by the end of the year. And 1k followers on each of the sidekicks.

I followed pretty much the same strategy as you did with a Pinterest account for about one year and a half, except the fact I was active on about 30 group boards, not just a few and my pins were driving about 3k visitors a day to my site (legit, no spam and whatnot). Despite my pins going viral I only gathered about 1500 followers which is very little for an 18 month period.

You can repin quality pins even if you have a crappy home feed (which right now shows about 50% 'picked for you' pins so you don't see just what those you're following are pinning). Just find some great accounts and boards (not necessarily group boards) from your niche, bookmark them and when you need to pin, open then in multiple tabs. That's it.

The best strategy to get followers is by following other people and getting follow backs. What you're trying to do is way to complicated just to keep your home feed clean and you won't get the same results. Viral pins just don't give enough organic followers and neither does commenting.

Well they way my smart feed works now for me is very good though. It litterally shows me just quality pins. I found that the follow/unfollow strategy really only leads to crap interaction. Follow 100 and 10 follow you back. Follow more than you are currently got followers and your organic following drops to almost zero.
I am not sure if it's worth follow 1k users to get 1 that actually. In a way I am glad tht it doesn't work, because this is the very reason Pinterest actually is a good place to do legit marketing. I roughly put the same effort into twitter & instagram and they send a tiny fraction of traffic (and shit traffic on top of that) to my site despite having loads of more followers/likes/retweets...


as for group boards. I used to be active in more - but my niche only has 3 with decent interaction (meaning 5 to 100 repins depending on pin quality). I stopped contributing on the others cuz the ROI was way too low.


the only thing i noticed - ever since i scored a couple of semi-viral pins that are not pointing towards my own site, i am getting more followers (say 15 per day instead of 5). Still at this rate i'll probably be at about the 1.500 followers you got.


I am aware that a few old accounts got 1 million followers. I think that happened because pinterest decided these are authority pinners for their niche. So whenever one follows, say "luxury", these pinners get suggestd. Just got no clue how to get there...

How 'bout starting group boards of your own. Those have been my best ways of getting followers. I have a many boards in the same niche across 10+ accounts that are over 8k followers (a handful with over 12k) and they're getting decent engagements (4-10+ repins). If I recall correctly, crossing 5k followers seem to be the threshold of when things picked up. Getting to 5k was incredibly long, at least 4 months.

xinga said:

I am aware that a few old accounts got 1 million followers. I think that happened because pinterest decided these are authority pinners for their niche. So whenever one follows, say "luxury", these pinners get suggestd. Just got no clue how to get there...

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Don't even take those accounts into consideration.....even when you work very had to curate great content.....most of us have practically zero chances of getting there. It's true the followers you get from follow backs will give you less engagement compared to organic followers. Come to think of it, those 1.5k followers I earned organically are probably worth about 5-6k follow backs in engagement.

From where I see it you have two options. 1) follow the strategy you presented to get organic followers (I honestly wouldn't be able to tell you if it's going to work or not)

2) Take the follow/unfollow route. It's not as bad as it seems and it can give you a hell of a lot more than 10k followers in a year. At least five times that. Even if not all of them are interested in your content you will get a decent amount of repins if you target users from your niche, and organic followers will grow in time as well.

Bookmarked this to share with someone I know that does pinterest. Seems like this worked very well for you.

Regarding automation tools:
You might want to check out PinDominator and Healzer.

I havent used FL for Pinterest though, so I cant tell wether PD / Healzer are better or worse than it.

Don't get me wrong: I am quite happy with the way things worked out. The traffic i get from pinterest is good and steadily picking up. Just felt like looking for things to improve my pinterest. All i find on the web are useless e-books and e-courses by "bossy business ladies" who scam desperates housewifes trying to earn some extra dime with their self crafted crochet earings (whatever happened to live cams? >.<)

Group Boards: I was considering this. But I guess it also is a lot of work? Like removing spammers and stuff? Also I guess you do need a sizeable account to start from

Follow/Unfollow-Game: I just tried manually follow/unfollowing on my second account in the past two days. Followed 277, 73 followed back. That is actually half decent - 1 out of 4. Not sure if they are worth anything. (It isn't a business account yet, lol). I checked out some major accounts in my niche and some of them play along. These accounts got good engagement, but they are also rather old so hard to tell what's organic and what not. Also I want quality traffic (right now pinterest users stay an average 1:19" on my site with a bounce rate of 8,53%, which is quite okay imo).

The main issue I got with the following stuff might sound a bit weird. From my point of view pinterest is heading straight towards a search engine. Or call it content discovery engine. They are probably constantly adjusting the smart feed and a lot of crappy followers might have (like facebook) bad effects in the near future. And then i'd had to get rid off them somehow.

I think I will try a few things out with some proxy accounts and see where it gets me. Got 4 specific different strategies on my mind so far. Not sure if i got the willpower to get through with this - after all I really got no objective. My niche site is little else than a hobby (not even making 4 figures...)

xinga said:

Group Boards: I was considering this. But I guess it also is a lot of work? Like removing spammers and stuff?

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I know what you mean. I just spent over 30 minutes cleaning up one board. It's not something I do everyday. But I hope Pinterest algo gives me positive points for clean up. I read in a few blogs that Pinterest rewards pin deletions. Otherwise I'm just wasting time keeping group boards spam-free.

xinga said:

Also I guess you do need a sizeable account to start from

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If you have any boards with 300-500 followers, that's a good start for converting into group board. I assume that by that time, you already have 100+ pins on it. You don't have to start with a completely new board.

So i have been continuing to test with my second pinterest account. The rate on auto follow remains roughly at 1 out of 4 follows back. That is with manually pining quality content. The followers are, however, pure crap. I am currently at 213 followers after 5 days.

As for pin delation. Pinterest does not reward pin delatation like a lot of people will tell you. They do reward pining quality pins from quality websites. So if you delete pins poining towards spamy sites or bad links, they will sorta reward that. Most guides, however, tell you that you should delete old pins, and that is pure bullcrap.

As for group boards. I will start inviting people to boards on my second account and see where it goes. I can scrape quality users from my main account, which is still steadily growing by 5-20 followers a day. I might actually start another couple of accounts on a proxy to deceive people into thinking this group board actually was worth joining. Let's see what happens if I inflate the repin rates *lol*

Not sure what you expected to happen in 5 days. Even with follow/unfollow your account won't grow overnight and getting to the first 1k followers is a journey by itself. Deleting pins works but you shouldn't delete just any old pin, only those that didn't manage to get engagement (likes, repins, comments) and no it doesn't work on a new account that has just a few hundreds of pins. It's not called the smart feed for nothing.

Whatever strategy you choose, don't expect miracles in one week or less, this is not how Pinterest works. Give it at least one month to see how it goes. And be careful with those new accounts, Pinterest has super strict filters for them. You can even get banned on a new account for joining or pinning on a group board too soon.

What size are your boards ?

Several large boards inter-niche related is what started getting me a big following.

akaalexa said:

Not sure what you expected to happen in 5 days. Even with follow/unfollow your account won't grow overnight and getting to the first 1k followers is a journey by itself. Deleting pins works but you shouldn't delete just any old pin, only those that didn't manage to get engagement (likes, repins, comments) and no it doesn't work on a new account that has just a few hundreds of pins. It's not called the smart feed for nothing.

Whatever strategy you choose, don't expect miracles in one week or less, this is not how Pinterest works. Give it at least one month to see how it goes. And be careful with those new accounts, Pinterest has super strict filters for them. You can even get banned on a new account for joining or pinning on a group board too soon.

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- The account is not new but one year old ;-)
- Pinterest does absolutly not factor in the deletion of pins with low engagement (there has been an offical statement); though there might be other sideeffects
- i didn't expect any results whatsoever after 5 days. I just noted that the 200 followers I did get, were pure and utter crap.
- i know pinterest takes time.


Still I shall continue the automation test on a few accounts. Still got one dormant accounts some 12 months old and I already created another of backup accounts to be used later.
Right now i am under the impression that optimizing my pins for search and smart feed has a high roi than follow/unfollow, but let's see

Duffers5000 said:

What size are your boards ?

Several large boards inter-niche related is what started getting me a big following.

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Hm...well like i said. I will grow my spare account a bit and try to see if it shows any results. I really don't want to mess around with my major account because the traffic it sends each day is very much welcome

I would sure like to see that official statement regarding pin deletion if you still have the source. Haven't been able to find it myself. And even if they denied the impact of deleting Pins consider what it would mean if they actually admitted it's factored in the smart feed algorithm. The crowd just might start to delete like crazy, possibly even pins that are of good quality and leave a big crater in the network. There's also a possibility the technique could be abused in this situation.

I have found that "interest" and activity are the foundations for groups to follow. For instance you will have to do a mix of both activity and consistency on the groups on a regular basis will yield good results in hard to grow groups. Because you are dealing with interest a 'human' concern, then it also has ebb and flow like waves at the beach, times of planting and harvest, high and low tides of interest so you must understand high activity and low activity when it comes to interest. If you want to look deeper into targeting interest then may want to look into facebooks graph and tools like insight hero and interest architect.

akaalexa said:

I would sure like to see that official statement regarding pin deletion if you still have the source. Haven't been able to find it myself. And even if they denied the impact of deleting Pins consider what it would mean if they actually admitted it's factored in the smart feed algorithm. The crowd just might start to delete like crazy, possibly even pins that are of good quality and leave a big crater in the network. There's also a possibility the technique could be abused in this situation.

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i will try to find it again. Was an interview from a major blogger with a guy from pinterest.
Then again you might be right about your assumption.
But: From a logic point of perspective it wouldn't make any sense. It would only improve the follower count on your boards, but only if pinterest would measure the relative and not absolute engagement.

The way I see it is that they are building a visual content discovery machine and from that perspective..well its hard to believe they'd factor in board activity in their pin-index. I, at least, found little to no evidence. In 9 out of 10 cases i am in the top 5 spots on direct keyword search for my pins. If there was such a factor I'd have no chance of scoring these kind of rankings with my little account.

I did, however, read a lot of guides that recommended the deletion strategy. These guys mostly automated their pining and pin a lot of crap. I still believe this is why it is working.

Did you search from your own account/ip, or an isolated machine?

phatzilla said:

Did you search from your own account/ip, or an isolated machine?

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yes i always search with my own machine. Same procedure for google. I preferably like to check rankings logged on to my google account. My mum said only whores check their rankings with professional software. And i don't want to be a whore. :chinese: