We LOVE Pinterest for our blog. It's how we get most of our monthly views so coming up with a manual pinning strategy that doubled our pin impressions was a major win in the blogging world.

For us, Pinterest has been one of the easiest ways to get more blog traffic as new bloggers. We started being consistent and trying new things until finally, everything started working and our Pinterest impressions just kept growing.

We're always working on diversifying our traffic but each month Pinterest is still the winner so this is where we put most of our energy. Both of us are still working full-time jobs so we needed a sure-fire way to increase our impressions on Pinterest with the limited time we were putting in.

One thing we have always liked about Pinterest is that the work you put in almost always seems to equal more views on the blog. But there were times where we were putting in A LOT of time on Pinterest without commensurate gains.

Like any blog trying to build their brand, we looked further into research. Not just research on what others are doing but research on our own Pinterest analytics.

We started to pinpoint what worked and more importantly what didn't work.  Now we have an easy strategy that we can do while working full-time and that has doubled our Pinterest impressions leading to more views on our site.

Disclosure: Links throughout the Mindful Nomadics site may make us a small commission at no additional cost to you. See our Affiliate Disclosure for more information.

Pin 15 Times a Day

If you did one thing to improve your Pinterest impressions it would be to pin every day and pin often. When we are pressed for time, this is the one step we try to never skip.

There are a lot of numbers circling the internet for HOW MANY TIMES to pin but we found for us, 15 is the magic number. If we can do 15 while still working 40 hours a week you can do 15, trust us.

We manually pin, it's what we prefer, so we try to make sure and pin throughout the day. By breaking up our day we are more consistent and can achieve our pinning strategy goal.

Our current daily pin set-up

• In the morning before work
• During the day when we get breaks
• At night before going to bed

Every morning we wake up at 5 am which gives us time before work to get some pins done. If we have enough time in the morning we schedule out pins every couple of hours to save us time later.

To ensure we get 15, during the day ANY break we get we make a pin. While laying in bed before winding down we knock out the rest to top it off at 15. Easy Peasy.

We only pin our own pins at this time because we feel with our limited amount of time we're devoting to the site, we need to make it all count. If we are on Pinterest and see a pin we like, we like that when we pin other pins.

Okay, time to come clean, we are not perfect and we would be lying if we said we ALWAYS pinned 15 times a day. Life happens and this is not always possible. But we have found even the days when we only get 10, or even 5, it still helps to keep our momentum going.

The way we see it is if you strive for 15 times a day, you will at least be pinning more often and more consistently. This increase in pinning will help you gain more impression, more link clicks, more blog views.

Delete Old Pins

Even before we started pinning daily this strategy would get our pins seen by more people OVERNIGHT. After taking 10 minutes to delete some old pins before going to bed we would wake up with more engagements from our pins compared to other mornings.

We used to spend hours each week going through each board and deleting pins. If your bored, feel free to do this but we found just deleting a few a day works great.

Instead of going through each board we just pick a board, then a section and do some spring cleaning. We have different things we look for when deleting pins but as long as you're not deleting high performing pins you're good to go.

Pins we delete

• Pins with broken links
• Hard to read pins
• Other people's pins we don't find helpful
• Our poor performing pins (no impressions, no re-pins)
• Pins we can improve

When it comes to deleting pins from other pinners we just delete and go on our way. When it comes to deleting our personal pins we try to give it a second life.

Before deleting one of our own pins we save the image to our camera roll. Then we go to work trying to spruce up the pin by adding different verbiage or giving it a new look.

We never delete a pin just to repin the same pin. Some bloggers use this trick but we feel if the pin didn't do well, there's a reason.

The most common type of pin we delete then spruce up is our photography pins. Since we are travel bloggers we sometimes pin a simple travel photo.  Sometimes a travel photo does not do well so we delete it, add words to it then voila a brand new pin.

Pin to All Boards

We love all of our kids the same and we should treat them equally. Okay, we're talking about our boards on Pinterest, we don't have kids just cats.

The idea still works, you should make sure all of your boards are important and getting some attemtion. At the end of every day, we change our board order from "drag and drop" to "last saved" and give the last boards some loving.

We make a pin for the two "boards" at the bottom of the list. This way we know every few days EVERY BOARD is getting a pin.

Pinterest seems to like this as once we started pinning more equally, our impressions for all of our boards went up. It also makes sure all of the pages on our blog are increasing their share count.

If you don't love all of your boards then it's time to get rid of them. This is a great way to see what boards you could do without.

Since we are minimalists we want to ensure every board serves a purpose and is needed. This isn't the time for random boards to be hanging around.

On a side note, f you have a long-running Pinterest account there is some conflicting information about what to do with unneeded boards. We say delete it to remove clutter but some say to archive it to prevent a drop in how Pinterest views your account.

Leave Group Boards

We saved this one for last because this is a very controversial opinion in the pinning world. But you know what, we stand by it...it's time to leave group boards behind.

For awhile we weren't getting the reach we used to. We kept thinking "why are my Pinterest impressions going down all of sudden when the daily strategy stayed the same".

After one of our group boards went rouge we left it, then the next day we seemed to get more impressions. This prompted us to look more into the analytics (by us we mean Phil) which revealed our group boards had the least impressions out of ALL OF OUR boards.

We were shook! Our best performing personal board was getting 361,865 impressions in 2 months and our best performing group board was getting 649. As a side note, our worst-performing personal board got 970 :/

Then we decided to at the very least leave group boards we didn't love but keep our favorites. Again there was a jump in impressions.

Changing the mindset that group boards aren't the golden ticket took time. We weren't ready to leave all of the boards at once but after a month we finally said goodbye to our last group board...then had the biggest jump in impressions yet.

If group boards mean a lot to you, don't fret about leaving all of them. At the very least look at downsizing.

It's time to leave group boards that aren't a great fit for your niche. Look at Pinterest analytics and remove group boards with small impression numbers.

What works for us might not work for everyone but our Pinterest strategy for bloggers might be what you need to ramp up your engagement. It took some time to perfect for our daily Pinterest routine but now it works wonders for us.

We talked about our change in impressions because it's an easy way to measure progress with Pinterest. What we started doing on Pinterest doubled our impressions and also increased the clicks to our site.