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.
Note: For this article, I recommend viewing my Pinterest account as an example of how these tips on how to organize your Pinterest boards come into play. And while you’re there, you might as well follow me!By now, I’m sure you’ve heard all about how amazing Pinterest is. How it can drive gazillions of page views to your blog. How it’s the key to earning six-figures as a blogger.
So you sign up for Pinterest. You struggle to claim your website and create a business account. Then you start pinning and pinning, waiting for the waves of blog traffic to hit you like a tsunami.
What happens when they don’t come. Are all those bloggers just lying to you? Or are you just not approaching Pinterest the right way?
I’ve looked through tons of Pinterest accounts by bloggers, and it amazes me how many of them just up and skip the basics of setting up a Pinterest account. While strategy, amazing content and eye-catching pins are extremely important, many people forget to look at the boring little details like how to organize your Pinterest boards.
Yet, it’s the simple things, like how you organize your Pinterest boards, that set some people apart. When you can master the strategy AND have a solid foundation, you are setting yourself up for success.
Learn how to organize your Pinterest boards and give your account a quick audit. Set up that solid foundation so that when the tsunami hits, your house doesn’t wash away.
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.
Probably because people love book recommendations from me. At least that’s my hope.
If your brand boards aren’t pulling their own weight, another way to organize is to make sections inside your Best of board. Thus, inside your Best Of board, you’d have your life and travel folders. This method keeps the board itself internally organized instead of having excess boards that no one cares to view.
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.
If it’s important enough, just create another topic board instead. If your followers are going to go through your board, they are going to go through your board. People generally just want to follow you and have your new pins pop up in their feed.
Prioritizing How You Organize Your Pinterest Boards
Level 1 – Organize by Type
Now let’s get down to the details of how you organize your Pinterest boards. It all comes down to one rule: Prioritize. You want to logically order things by importance so that everything is easy for your followers to find.
Where do you start? With you of course. I can’t stress enough how that your Best Of board needs to be the very first thing any follower sees. Your brand boards always trump anything else.
Next up are your topic boards. Since these are boards you own, they get higher priority over the group boards. Group all your topic boards and then trail all your group boards in at the bottom of your profile.
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.
Last of all, do the same thing for your group boards. The best method to organize your Pinterest boards will take advantage of our natural love of symmetry.
Repeat the category organization you used on your topic boards on your group boards. Notice that I have all my book group boards first, then our blogging, then mom life and lastly travel. Exactly matching how I organized our topic boards.
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.
Don’t worry, it’s an easy fix. All you have to do is on your mobile device, got to Edit Profile. At the very bottom of your profile, you can choose how to sort your boards. Simply select Custom, and voila! Your layout stays just how you want it.
I hope you have a better grasp of how to organize your Pinterest boards. I have plenty more to say, but this post is long enough already.
What do you struggle with most when it comes to using Pinterest for your blog?
Hi Rachael!
Besides having my nose in a book, I’ve been reading all your great Pinterest posts recently and have some questions! I’m not a blogger, but thought I could pick up a few pointers anyway. I sell retail goods. So for example, let’s pretend I sell dolls. For your “Group by Type/Brand boards” would I set up boards for American Girl dolls, Barbie dolls, Cabbage Patch dolls, and so on? One board per manufacturer’s brand, grouped one after another at the top of the page? Then have “Topic boards” set up after those, for things like Doll Hair Tips, Build a Dollhouse for Cheap, etc? Is it ok to repin from websites having content pertaining to my subject matter? Like repinning different website and blogger’s articles on how to wash and style doll hair? Next, Group boards. I don’t think having Group boards is possible? Being grouped with retail competitors doesn’t make much sense. Also, I crave order and organization, so is it bad to have the boards alphabetical in each of the 3 groups? Thanks for any help!
I think you are spot on with your group and topic boards. American Girl Dolls and Doll Hair Tips are just what your audience would be looking for. This post is really out of date. Group boards have gone out of fashion, so don’t worry about them at all. And Pinterest is more focused on you being a creator of pins rather than repinning other people’s content. But I think having a slew of doll related articles would help settle you as an expert. Hope that helps!
I don’t know if “creating” pins is the same as pulling them in from our catalog, but at least it’s our own content, right? Thanks so much for your reply!
Hi, in September 2021 the sorting options don’t work for visitors to your public profile.
If you view your account in a private tab where you’re not logged in, or from another account, boards are sorted in the order they were last added to.
I tried going to the different Edit Profile tabs on both mobile and desktop, but can’t find any way to force an order for visitors. There’s no “custom”.
On a desktop or laptop, if you sign in to your profile and go into your saved folders section, there is a symbol on the top right next to the plus sign that looks like adjustable dials. If you click that, you can choose to sort your boards by A to Z, Drag and drop or Last Saved to. Switch it to Drag and drop and then sort your boards how you want them to appear.