How to Organize Your Pinterest Boards The Right Way

While it might not be glamorous, making sure you organize your Pinterest boards the correctly can lay a solid foundation to set your blog up for success.

Set Up Your Pinterest Account

First, let’s go over some basics before I go into how to organize your Pinterest boards. If you haven’t set up a business account yet, you really should. Not only are the analytics helpful, but the bonus features like the profile header are important. Your account will instantly look more professional if you have a business account.

Once you have your business account, now it’s time to set up your boards. There are three types of Pinterest boards: brand, topic, and group. For full explanations of each, you really should read my post all about them (and the awesome fourth type of Pinterest board). For now, here’s a quick overview.

Brand Boards – Boards dedicated to only your pins. You need at least at Best of board.

Topic Boards – Boards dedicated to the various topics you pin about.

Group Boards – Boards that are a collaborative effort between multiple pinners.

Got it? Let’s move on to the first steps to organize your Pinterest boards.

You Should Be Front and Center

Now that you understand the different types of Pinterest boards, it’s time to organize your Pinterest boards. I just went over how you must have brand boards, topic boards, and group boards. But how do you organize them?

You always want your brand boards to go first because you want to be front and center. It’s all about you. You want to drive traffic to your blog, not to other people’s websites. If you want to drive traffic to your brand, that’s the first thing your viewers should see when they look at your profile.

Of all the boards your most important board is your Best Of board. However, if you want, you can have multiple brand boards for the different categories on your blog. For example, when I started my first blog, I had four categories: Live, Work, Travel and Read. Thus, I had boards: Pingel Sisters – Travel, Pingel Sisters – Books, Pingel Sisters – Life, and Pingel Sisters – Work.

Even though I started with brand boards for each of my categories, I have found that those boards don’t do as well as my other boards. Looking at my analytics in Tailwind, I can see that they have the lowest engagement of any of my boards.

Still, I would advocate for creating a brand board for each category just to see how they perform. Although most of my brand boards didn’t perform well, for us, my Pingel Sisters – Books board did well. Therefore, it got its own board because it’s driving its own traffic.

Keep Topic Boards Relevant

Next up when you organize your Pinterest boards, you need to cover your topic boards, the different topics that your blog is covering.

Remember, you only want topics related to your blog. You don’t need to have Little Sally’s Nursery Decor ideas for your public boards. Those are for your personal use, so they need to be secret boards.

Your topic boards should be relevant to your blog and should cover the different topics you post about. Even though I have switched to a heavier focus on books, I still occasionally write about blogging, so I kept a few boards on related topics.

If I decide topics aren’t pertinent to my blog anymore, I will drop them. The goal is to focus on the needs of my viewers, not just on my interests.

Since I talked about sections earlier, you are probably wondering if you should create sections inside your topic boards. In my opinion, you should not create sections. I don’t see any advantage to having subfolders.

Prioritizing How You Organize Your Pinterest Boards

Level 1 – Organize by Type

Level 2 – Organize by Category

Now, take it a step further. For each type of board, organize by priority. If you have multiple brand boards, then rank them by importance and order them that way. Then group your topic boards into categories.

For example, our main topic is books, so I have multiple boards about books. I have children’s books and young adult books and book reviews, etc. For superior Pinterest board organization, I group all of these and then list them immediately after our brand boards. Taken one step further, I even prioritize all our book boards, so that my most important one with all of my book lists always appears first.

After books, logically the natural progress is to bookstagram and book blogging.

Notice, I’ve covered all the different topics I write about. If I wrote a lot about babies, I would have boards about babies and pregnancy, and I would group it in with the mom section. Your goal is for everything to be nice and neat making it easy for your reader to find exactly what they want.

One Last Crucial Trick

Wait, there’s just one more thing!

Now that you have your boards sorted exactly how you want them, you need to change one more setting, or all your work will be for naught!

While your Pinterest board organization might look gorgeous on a desktop computer, did you know that it can look completely different on a mobile device! On your phone, Pinterest likes to order your pins by the boards most recently pinned to. Out the window goes all your hard work and meticulous planning.