Case Study: How To Grow Your Pinterest Following By 400%
Chrissa Benson has been passionate about fitness and wellness for as long as she can remember. She’s been a dancer for nearly fourteen years and became fascinated with cooking and creating meals with real-food ingredients from the time she had her own kitchen. Now a wife and mother, she shares her secrets for a healthy and whole lifestyle on her wildly successful blog, Physical Kitchness.
“It wasn’t until I got married and had my first baby that overall healthy living became a huge priority for me. That’s when I dove headfirst into creating Physical Kitchness - to show others that living well doesn’t have to be complicated, expensive, or time-consuming!”
Benson was drawn to the idea of launching a wellness-minded blog for nearly five years. Although she had already been helping friends and family with meal planning and sharing self-created recipes, she lacked prior blogging or design experience. These roadblocks and the typical fear of the unknown, coupled with the security of an office job, made starting a blog seem like a daunting task. But after her first baby was born, Benson became a stay-at-home mother and the idea of blogging started to look like it could become a reality. With the help of a blogging coach, she officially launched Physical Kitchness in August of 2015.
“My biggest fear was not knowing all the technical things that required starting and running a blog. I was really unsure where to start. All the to-do’s seemed daunting (creating a logo, building a site, creating an opt-in, categorizing, SEO, etc). That is the single biggest reason why I didn’t start my blog sooner. I couldn’t put in half the effort - if I was going to do it, it needed to be ALL IN - 110%.”
Benson’s all-in effort yielded astounding results. Although she had no prior design experience, Benson developed a plan for the branding of Physical Kitchness before it launched, including the colors, visuals, and fonts. After her blogging coach told her about BeFunky Graphic Designer, Benson started using the text and graphic tools to design Pins for her blog posts and scheduling them with Tailwind at optimal times. In just one year, her Pinterest following grew from 500 to a whopping 22,300 and she noted that Pinterest accounts for 50% of her blog traffic.
“I was previously using more complicated online design software to create Pins and found it limiting. I chose BeFunky because it was user-friendly, has a great selection of free tools, and allowed me to really customize my visuals in a way that other platforms couldn’t. In my opinion, it’s one of the best online options there is for editing and creating graphics.”
With the help of BeFunky Designer, Benson is able to easily add text to photos, add watermarks to her Pins, and keep all of her visuals for social media consistent and impactful. She anticipated that branding would play a huge role in the success of her blog, especially since the blogging world is so saturated. Surely, great content of blog posts plays an integral role as well, but in order to market that content, the visuals have to be recognizable and appealing to your audience. Since making BeFunky part of her social media workflow, Benson has found it easy to keep her visuals on-brand.
“I love that I can upload my own blog fonts into BeFunky and use them for designing Pins and adding to blog photos. I absolutely believe that my Pin designs have helped me to grow my account because they are so clean, consistent, and branded.”
To date, Physical Kitchness has been featured on BuzzFeed, Today Food Club, My Fitness Pal, Self Magazine and more. It’s become a one-stop shop for healthy, real-food recipes and home workout tutorials designed for mothers with busy schedules. At the end of the day, Benson’s favorite part about blogging is about helping the people who read it.
“My favorite part is receiving emails from readers telling me they love my recipes, that their kids devoured the dinner I posted, that they couldn’t have completed a Whole30 challenge without my help, or that they love watching my Instagram stories because I’m all about keepin’ in real! Things like that give me motivation to keep doing what I’m doing!”
Get inspired by Chrissa’s healthy recipes and fitness tutorials here, and if you’re itching to create some standout Pins and other visuals for your blog or social media, follow the link below and get started today!
