5 Common Pinning Mistakes You Want To Avoid As A Creator

For those who don't know, my wife and I rely heavily on traffic from Pinterest, (so much so that my wife is in the process of creating a course she can sell to teach people how to use it properly)

Recently however, my wife and I have been giving free Pinterest audits for people here at WA (and if you want one feel free to reach out via PM), and here are a few of the most common Pinterest mistakes that we've seen so far.

(NOTE: For the sake of this review, I pulled some pins from a number of Pinterest accounts specifically from members here at WA. It is not my intention to offend anyone by using them, but to help show common errors, and what you can do about it. If in the off chance that I don't actually provide solutions within this article, then please PM, and I'll gladly share in more detail what I would recommend doing)

1) Not Using Good Contrasting Colors On Your Pins

Whenever you are creating visually appealing graphics, you want to make sure that the colors you are using don't bleed into each other, and that the words (if you have them on the graphic) 'pop' out (to make it a little more attention grabbing).

Recommendations:

If you're like me, and you have no color coordination (though my wife says that I'm doing better, haha), then just turn to AI.

Share Link: https://chat.openai.com/share/84490a36-2af2-418e-aa5f-5295ab7b33c3

For the pin above on the left hand side, I quickly asked ChatGPT for color variations that would be good contrasting colors with the background color. It gave me four that I could use. I quickly created a Canva image of them all to show you the contrast of each of them.

I'm not going to say that those colors are perfect (someone else can, lol), but they're definitely a good starting point for a little more contrast. I would also recommend increasing the font (if possible), and even bolding the text to make it stand out better.

For the pin on the left handside, the main issue is that the text overlay is bleeding into the image. To fix that issue, just add a semi transparent block behind it, so that you create a contrast, but don't take away from the image (shown below):

As you can see in the middle pin, the block in the background is slightly transparent, so that it doesn't diminish the pin, but also creates enough of a contrast so that you're able to make the text overlay pop a little bit.

Pro Tip: What you really want to do (and this is a whole separate article) is actually see what colors Pinterest is ranking for the keyword you're targeting. if you don't have brand colors, or don't know what colors you should start with, just pop your browser in incognito mode, search your keyword on Pinterest, and use one of the ranking colors schemes.

2) Using One Pinterest Account For Two Different Sites

While the above pins could also use an update in their color contrasts, the point I want to make is that this one account is promoting two separate sites. Two separate niches on one single Pinterest account.

I've actually seen this multiple times, and not sure why people are doing this.

Recommendation:

Create two separate Pinterest accounts, and pin separate pins for each of those niches. Have one about getting rid of your belly fat, and another Pinterest account about promoting Wealthy Affiliate.

Think of Pinterest like you would with the Google Search Engine - you wouldn't have one site that talks about a bunch of different non-related things, would you? (In some very rare cases maybe you would).

Part of the reason why Wealthy Affiliate teaches you to make sure that you niche down your site is so that your audience (and more specifically Google) can see you're an authority in that specific niche.

It's the same with Pinterest.

You want your Pinterest account as niched down as it can be, so that Pinterest knows what you're an authority in, so that they rank you relevantly and correctly.

Pro Tip: Make sure each of your accounts are business accounts. A bunch more tools that help you target your audience open up, more settings, more, well, business stuff (lol) for you to use while your on Pinterest are at your disposal. Oh, and it's FREE to upgrade to a business account, so there really isn't a reason not to.

3) Spamming Your Audience

I'm not quite sure why people do this, but I've noticed it on multiple accounts, where the account owner will use the same pin text overlay and linking to the same URL on a lot of their pins - all back to back.

This is not only looks spammy, but it also IS spammy - Pinterest doesn't like it when you post the same link over and over and over again. More than likely if you do this long enough, Pinterest isn't going to rank you as well, will flag your account, and possibly will disable your account because of Spam.

Recommendation:

Okay, so you have to be really, really, really (and I mean, realllllllly) careful doing anything like this - where you're using the same pin graphic text or if you're linking to the same link in a ton of your pins (all in a short amount of time).

Think again just like Google - you don't create the same article with different images and then try to get all of them to rank, right?

(This next one is sort of a bad example, but...) You wouldn't create a bunch of similar articles in a short amount of time, and then have them all redirect to one of your pillar articles on your site, and try to get all of them to get ranked by Google, so that you would get a ton of traffic to that one pillar article, would you?

(The answer is that no, you wouldn't).

So, the easiest way to fix this mistake is just stop doing it. I personally recommend that you take your sitemap and just go down the list and create ONE pin per article. Once your done with the list, then go back to the top and do the same all over again.

If you don't have a lot of articles, then don't pin as frequently while you use your time to create more content (because content is going to always be better than pinning, if you're doing everything right).

Trust me - if you think that you can just upload a bunch of similar pins and they're going to magically rank really well on Pinterest, and you're going to get a ton of traffic, and a ton of money, well, keep dreaming...

4) Keyword Stuffing

I've also noticed that some people will try to stuff as many keywords into their profile or board descriptions so that they will somehow be seen as ranking for all those keywords.

Recommendation:

It's fine to have a bunch of keywords that you're trying to rank for, especially within your profile, but do it in a format that doesn't look like a spammer, and only choose like 3-5 for you to use.

For example, notice how the Pinterest account owner below incorporates several keywords into their profile:

As you can see, the owner is able to incorporate three different keywords around working out into their profile. (To be fair, it could be better, and the owner could target some better, more specific keywords that they want to rank for.... But this is definitely a good start, considering they're pushing 7 million impressions a month).

Here is another account as another example:

This is actually an account that my team and I manage - the profile description isn't perfect (well, not yet at least - we haven't trained our new Pinterest VA on how to optimize the profile descriptions yet, lol), but it shows the point.

We have four or so keywords that we've added naturally into our profile. That's what Pinterest is looking for.

Don't keyword stuff, just fit in what you can naturally, where you can.

Not Being Consistent With Your Pinning

Another common issue that I've seen is that people will pin only a few times, and then not see any traction, and stop pinning.

If that's you, well, you just have to be consistent, because that's what any search engine likes. (Wifey's Note: Pinterest has out right said that consistency in pinning will be rewarded).

Recommendation:

If you want to get traffic to your site via Google, what does everyone tell you to do? They (usually) tell you to just continue to publish content, but more specifically, to be consistent with publishing content - if you can only publish 1 article a week, then that is fine, but make sure that that's what your doing.

The same is true for Pinterest.

If you want to see your Pinterest account grow over time, and be successful, then you need to pin consistently. If it's only 1 pin a day, that's fine. If it's 15 a day, that's fine too.

What's not fine is when you publish 15 on one day, 7 pins the next, 1 the third day, and then none for a week, AND then wonder why you're not seeing any growth a month later (when you haven't pinned anything else since then). That isn't being consistent.

Now, one last thing - I only used Kyle's profile to make two points: to show the lack of pins on his account (i.e. his pinning strategy sucks! lol - just kidding!). But I also provided it to show that if you're not doing well with Pinterest, or don't care much about it (i.e. you really only have an account to link back to your site to be more branded), that is okay too. Not everyone on Pinterest needs to be there to be trying to pull traffic from it. Find whichever search engine you work well with, and utilize it to the best of your ability.

Thoughts?

What do you guys think? Are these some mistakes you've made in the past?

Comment below with your thoughts! And if you need specific help with your Pinterest account, don't hesitate to PM and I'll take a look.