Today I am going to show you some of the ways that I use PinClicks to improve my Pinterest marketing and social media game!
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Why I Wrote This Post
I have been doing Pinterest marketing for a LONG time and even have a class for how to do Pinterest for Ecommerce sellers!
The one thing that is hardest for my students and readers is doing research into what Pinterest wants and the best practices that they can use to ethically get more search traffic (I am SUPER white hat!)
I feel like Pinterest and I are a team! They provide a traffic source for me and I provide great content that their users love!
I have been following the owner of PinClicks for a while now and have chatted with him on email a couple of times, but I pay full price for the service and this review is totally my own thoughts!
Can You Find This Info Another Way?
While there are some cool things that this software does, functionally you can get most of this data by visiting Pinterest with an incognito window logged out of Pinterest.
By doing that you can see board and pin annotations (more about this later) and also see a less user-centric view of what the actual top pins and keywords are without Pinterest tailoring it to your follows and past search history.
You can also find some of this info by going into the developer view of your browser and looking at the code to see what the data is. I don't do this myself, but I have a friend who is great at this and gets such good info on a pin basis.
Who Is PinClicks Good For?
I am a Pinterest power user and power pinner! I love Pinterest as both a user and a creator so I am little biased about the power of getting clicks from Pinterest!
Here are the stats from the last 30 days showing that Pinterest is driving almost 2/3 of the traffic to my Artsy website!
Since I have a course, obviously I think that Pinterest is great for Ecommerce, but as an informational site owner hit by the Google updates, I also think it is great for any website owner who needs to generate traffic or grow an email list (that direct number is showing that I drive about 25% of my own traffic with my email list!)
I pin about 10 pins a day using Tailwind so I would say I am at the bottom end of being a HUGE pinner but way over what the gals who manually pin each day are doing.
If you are manually pinning one or two pins a day or even 10 pins a week, this probably is not a good investment for you.
But if you are looking to power up your Pinterest game and start pinning a bunch, then for sure take a peek and see if any of these things will help you get more traffic!
5 Ways I Am Using PinClicks Now
Here are a few ways I am using PinClicks currently, if they release more updates I will add to my list!
Researching Your Keywords
If you are going into a new area or just want to make sure you are on track with your keywords, you can filter down to the long tails super easy with pin clicks!
Let's take as an example that I was thinking about making a boho lampshade craft project to post on my site. The first search I do on the top pins tab is “boho lampshade”..
DOH, come to find out that Pinterest thinks that Boho lampshades are all made of jute and I was thinking fabric and ball puffs… back to the drawing board…
When I go back and do DIY lampshade there is a mix of all kinds of lampshades so, whew, dodged a bullet there by not writing a whole post or doing a whole project that would not get any views because Pinterest doesn't think what I want to do “boho”… there is no fighting the man, just figuring things out!
Now that I know that the keyword I want to start with is DIY lampshade I can go to the keyword research tab and start drilling down!
Doing this search DIY Lampshade Cover seems to be a good fit for what I am trying to do…
And when I click see top pins for this search there are LOTS of fabric lampshades that I can match with!
Some notes…
- There are SO many videos in this search with no title… I should take some video clips as I go to have to promote this post.
- NONE of the top pins have words so while I will do pins with titles, I maybe could get by with lots of pictures of the process…. I should take lots of different pictures to use as pins!
Pin Design For Your Niche
One of the things that will help your pin to get found in search or show up in the Pinterest feed is to look at best practices for pin design!
Let's go back to the Boho Lampshade and see what those pins look like…
Some notes…
- LOTS of beige
- For sure it is single colors, fringe, rattan, ivory (I wonder if this is something we could target “sad beige” moms with!
- The fonts used are thin and delicate in black on white
While there are some of this years pins in the mix, most of these look like old pins and that could be harder to compete with!
Checking What Pinterest Trend Pins Look Like
The other day I was cruising the Pinterest trends page and “pink aesthetic” was a trend… I thought, hmmmm what do I have that is pink and so I popped some pins up with my pink fudge!
But what if you want to lean into trends rather than just following along? Going back to our lampshade we see that “whimsical decor” is a search that is up 20% this month but 3,000% over the year… whoo whoo!
Not bad! Definitely something that I might already have on my site to make a roundup for so I can target that exact keyword phrase in my post!
But let's see what keyword research says….
Ohhhh, there are some good drilldown keywords for me… diy, goth, easy projects. Here are some notes I would make…
- Goth whimsical home decor could be Halloween too
- Easy DIY projects could be a roundup of some of my past projects
Now of course I am not going to change my whole site to be whimsical decor, but what if I could repurpose some of the content I already have to match a trend that is happening on Pinterest right now?
I would have a Fresh-Fresh pin with the new URL, fresh pins with post pins and new angle for the process photos that I already have to use!
Seeing Who Saved Your Pins To Which Boards
THIS is amazing to me! A while ago I stopped knowing how to see who was pinning my pins and which boards they were going to.
Pinterest just shows me my account and an aggregate of the pin and save numbers, not WHO was pinning my pins (I KNOW, I can kinda see this in the notifications but when you get good at Pinterest that data becomes a hot mess!)
So here is one of my pins that is in my top pin clicks results…
Now comes the cool bit… if I go to this gal's board I can see OTHER pins she has pinned that she thinks is relevant and do a little product development thinking!
Notes I would make:
- Organize and setup seem to be the same, make some pins using that keyword
- Lots of tips and schedule
- Could write a post about how I organize my planner supplies!
Knowing what else a “real” person is thinking is now possible with being able to see boards again, tra la, tra le!
Finding Out What Pinterest Thinks A Pin Is About – Keyword Annotations
I have been doing this manually up until now, I would pay the monthly price just for this ease of use! Pin annotations!
This is where you can see the keywords associated with a pin…
This is my pin so I can see that everything but Nail Art Design is right (I can guess that is in there because the original Canva templates I made are for nail art peeps so maybe she put this one on her board too?!?!)
What I do with these is make keyword separated lists and then have ChatGPT mix them up into nominally English sounding sentences to include in my descriptions!
Here is my prompt: can you please write two sets of these these keywords in 2 sentence form…
And here is what Chat wrote…
Before PinClicks and Chat this was my process for this….
Find a pin that was #1 for my search term, copy the URL, go to Safari in an incognito window, paste pin URL, copy annotations into a clipboard, write 10 different descriptions.
We have software now that can help us like PinClicks and Chat so why not make them help us to get our jobs done faster. Marketing is fun for me, but wracking my brain to write different pin descriptions is not my jam!
Pinclicks Review Wrapup
I KNOW there are people out there who are just finding the highest volume keywords and producing content to match those searches, but my blog is my business and I have to be happy and inspired to make things that I am interested in!
If I can do a few quick searches on PinClicks and find some keywords that will help me do a project AND have a chance to show up on Pinterest, then it is a win-win for me and Pinterest!
Here are some more Pinterest articles that you might like!
- 3 Advanced Pinterest Marketing Strategies For Bloggers
- 25 Super Pinnable Pinterest Pin Designs
- All my free Canva Pinterest templates!
- Get free Pinterest templates from my friend Carly!
