Pinning Perfect is one of the few courses I recommend. It is the only Pinterest course I consider 100% reliable and always up to date.
The thing about Pinterest
Before you start thinking about getting tons of traffic from Pinterest, there are some things you should know. First, Pinterest has a long history of making very big changes without warning.
They have also been incredibly disorganized over the years. For example, I’ve seen one department from Pinterest tell bloggers one thing, another department tell us another, and the truth ends up being something else entirely.
Pinterest sometimes rolls out untested software changes that break thousands of accounts. And then they take a couple of weeks scrambling to fix their mistakes.
More worrying, they frequently suspend accounts of honest pinners who did nothing obviously wrong. At the same time, they pretty much ignore the problem of “stolen” or “hijacked” pins on their site.
And they’ve changed their minds about their “best practices” so many times. How often to repin – if ever. How many boards to pin it to.
How much of your own stuff to pin versus other people’s. Are group boards good or bad?
Remember when they announced pins longer than a certain length would start ranking lower, but that never seemed to happen?
It’s confusing and frustrating. And there have been times I decided it wasn’t worth it and just stopped bothering with my accounts.
But Pinterest can bring serious traffic. While I would never recommend you rely on them as your main source of traffic, they are my second best source next to Google.
So when you look for a course, learning how to get lots of traffic from Pinterest isn’t the whole story. You need to learn how to navigate the constant changes at Pinterest.
How do you keep growing that traffic when the algorithm and spam filters seem to change every couple of weeks?
Enter Pinning Perfect
The Pinning Perfect course is by Anna Luther of MyLifeAndKids and Melissa Culbertson of BlogClarity.
The idea of this course was that their Pinterest strategy would give you more traffic with less work. That’s huge, right?
I’ve taken courses that gave me hours of daily work to do to grow my Pinteres. Who knows if they worked or not? I couldn’t keep up with that and all my other work.
As I kept hearing how great and different Pinning Perfect was, I decided to learn more about the creators.
Anna is a blogger, like the rest of us, using Pinterest to drive traffic. Her Pinterest account numbers looked good. (I’ve seen self-proclaimed “experts” have lousy numbers, so I always check this.)
I learned that Melissa works for brands and actually talks to Pinterest reps frequently. People told me she was always right on top of changes at Pinterest.
I thought about what I’d pay to have somebody warn me about Pinterest changes before or as they happen, and decided the course was worth a try. I signed up.
It’s All True
It’s been a year or so since I first took the course and joined the private Facebook group for Pinning Perfect users. And I can tell you: this course is absolutely worth it.
There are two things you’re paying for with Pinning Perfect: the strategy and the inside info. And you get lifetime access to both.
The strategy gets updated every 6 months, or more often as needed. The inside info comes whenever there are important changes at Pinterest that we need to know about.
The Original Strategy
Have you ever taken a course that has an outdated strategy? For example, a lot of the courses that recommended group boards in 2014 are still out there, unchanged, even though group boards don’t work nearly as well as they used to.
There are still plenty of courses out there promoting questionable strategies. Tactics that used to be fine with Pinterest, but now are not.
It doesn’t matter how much a course increases your numbers if the advice it gives you gets you suspended.
This is why Pinning Perfect’s updates are so important.
The original Pinning Perfect strategy worked very well for me and a lot of other pinners. A few people struggled to make it work, and a few people reported huge immediate growth.
Now, this course doesn’t promise huge immediate growth. They warn you before you sign up that Pinterest is a search engine and it could take as much as 6 months to start seeing real increases.
I tested it on two of my sites. Within a few weeks, my numbers started increasing faster than they ever had before. My monthly pageviews and the actual click throughs (my favorite metric to track) kept increasing steadily.
I’d tried a lot of Pinterest course strategies and never seen growth like this. A lot of courses promise dramatic growth, but they can really only deliver it to accounts that are very new or that aren’t doing well already.
I’ve been doing reasonably well with Pinterest for years, and Pinning Perfect was the first course to help me get over that plateau and start growing consistently.
The other thing about this strategy is that it’s reasonably quick and easy. The creators don’t believe in having a complicated strategy that takes hours a day to maintain.
And neither do I. I’ve done the complicated strategies that take up your whole morning. They didn’t give me the growth they promised. and they put me way behind on content creation.
What I want from a Pinterest strategy, in this order:
- Not to get my account suspended or banned.
- Not to have to spend all day on it.
- To see my numbers increase constantly, even if it’s not super fast.
Pinning Perfect wins on all three counts. And bonus points because it’s designed so you could do this strategy with Tailwind or with manual pinning. You didn’t have to fork out for a scheduler just to test the strategy.
For my goals, this was just what I wanted. But imagine the sound of someone ripping a needle across a record here, because suddenly Pinterest changed everything – again.
The Inside Info – and the Updated Strategy
Now you’re going to see the second big benefit with Pinning Perfect: having the ability to navigate even the most sweeping Pinterest changes.
In the fall of 2019, a Pinterest rep told some bloggers that from now on, no pin should be pinned more than once, ever, because that was spammy.
Another Pinterest rep supposedly confirmed it, but other reps said it wasn’t true. Maybe it was that you should pin it no more than 10 times. Or to no more than 10 boards.
Did this mean TailWind’s SmartLoop was dead? The feature they’d spent over a year developing with input from Pinterest?
And what exactly constituted a new pin? New image? New description? How different did they need to be?
Or did it need to be a whole new URL? Was Pinterest really saying we couldn’t repin a good evergreen article ever?
The blogosphere blew up. People were upset and threatening to quit Pinterest. All we wanted to do was give Pinterest what it wanted, but what was that? Did they even know?
As everybody scrambled to get a reliable answer, Melissa and Anna talked to their contacts and got the real scoop. She gave it to us in the private Facebook group.
The real scoop was kind of muddled at first. It seemed to me Pinterest had decided on a change without really thinking through how content creators were expected to comply with it.
And now that someone was asking them how to comply, they were changing their minds on some of it. Maybe.
But it seemed there were suddenly a lot of new ways you could do something perfectly natural and get labeled a spammer. I figured that was it – the end of promoting our stuff on Pinterest.
The Pinning Perfect strategy wouldn’t work anymore, and it was going to be tons of work to comply with the new requirements.
Maybe I’d just quit with Pinterest. Just pin new pins manually. But it looked like even that could get you labeled a spammer, if you didn’t do it exactly the “right” way according to Pinterest.
Anna announced she was working on a new strategy and they’d be updating the Pinning Perfect course. I was skeptical that she could do it.
But she did. They sent out an incredibly long email describing what had changed (I printed it out and it was something like 8 pages front and back). And they must have gone back and forth with the Pinterest reps many times.
When I read the new strategy, I couldn’t believe it. The two of them had found a way to comply with the new rules without spending all day at it.
This was absolute gold.
Keeping Up With Chaos
This marked some very big changes from the original strategy. And knowing Pinterest, we may see some major revisions again in a year or two.
And that’s the beauty of Pinning Perfect. If Pinterest’s ever changing best practices blows up their old strategy, they’re going to revise it however much they have to.
No matter how many changes they have to make, Anna and Melissa always make sure Pinning Perfect is using current best practices. And that’s one of the biggest benefits of this course.
Will You Need Extra Tools?
Short answer: no.
Pinning Perfect always gives you a way to follow their strategy with nothing but a spreadsheet and other free tools.
They do currently recommend TailWind, and so do I. It will save you a ton of time compared to pinning manually each day and marking everything on a spreadsheet to keep up.
But if you have more time than money right now, you can work the strategy without it. We’ve all been there, especially when starting out.
They also recommend Canva. While I love and recommend Canva Pro, you absolutely can do everything they recommend using the free version.
Those are the only tools I pay for from the course, and it’s all working well for me.
Format
The format of the course is mostly text with pictures. They make videos to show you things that you kind of need to see moving on your screen to understand.
I have actually seen people say they wish there was more video, not because it’s necessary but because they are better at learning from video than text.
I think this is a learning style issue and there’s no way to please everyone. I personally prefer text and strongly dislike videos of people telling me information they could have typed, which is what most courses do.
What Are You Waiting For?
If you want to crush it on Pinterest without getting your account banned or suspended, take the Pinning Perfect course. There is a 30-day refund period if you check out the course and decide it’s not for you.
I believe you’re going to want to keep it, even if just for the special access you get through the Facebook group and email updates.
You’ll be the first to get the real facts about sudden big changes at Pinterest. And you’ll get the updated strategy to help you keep thriving.
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