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What to Blog About in Q2 (If You Actually Want Traffic From Pinterest)
I started my whole journey as a blogger and have worked with 100’s of bloggers over the last 8+ years, and quarter 2 is a big month for people trying to get more blog traffic especially if you’re hoping that blog traffic is going to come from Pinterest. That can either leave your feeling paralyzed or energized when it comes to deciding what to blog about in q2, and I’m hoping this post will help you feel the latter!
Why Q2 Is a Critical Quarter for Pinterest Traffic
Q2 is a big quarter for bloggers especially in the lifestyle niche I work in (fashion, beauty, home decor, travel and food) because Pinners are planners. They start searching far in advance for the upcoming seasons which means bloggers have to be writing the content with enough time to rank on Pinterest and be found when the searches peak.
Summer travel, recipes, fashion and home decor are all highly-searched topics, but do you know when they’re beginning to searching them? Not Q3 when the actual season is happening… Q2 when they’re planning for the actual season!
If you’re planning on writing about “creating a summer travel capsule wardrobe,” for example, that search is starting to trend upwards at the end of march which is when you want to publish the content. That way you can share it on Pinterest and it has time both to rank and to be found before it peaks and then quickly drops off in June.
The other reason is because summer can be slower for traffic just due to people being out and about enjoying the season. Whether they’re traveling or spending more time with kids that are home from school, it’s common for internet behavior to slow down. When you’re expecting a slow season, it’s important to ramp up to have some margin in your revenue for when it slows down.
The Biggest Mistake Bloggers Make When Planning Q2 Content
When it comes to content creation, the biggest mistake I see is not coming up with blog post ideas strategically. Writing solely about what interests you when it interests you is not a good way to run a blogging business. It leaves way too much to chance which can lead to blog posts not giving you the results you were hoping for.
Instead of :
- building authority in your niche
- feeling confident about what you’re spending hours creating
- creating content you know your audience will want WHEN they want it
You end up:
- guessing what to write
- writing based on mood instead of data
- chasing trends when it’s too late
- feeling defeated by the lack of interest in something so time consuming
Using Pinterest data to create your content calendar can be a huge way to avoid these common blog writing mistakes.
Pinterest Strategy for Bloggers to Come up With Q2 Content
There are two different approaches that I recommend bloggers use when coming up with their quarter 2 content calendar:
- Use your top performing pins to build off the authority you already have on Pinterest
- Use Pinterest Trends to create content that is just starting to rise and will peak in Q3
How to Use Your Top Performing Pins to Come up With Content Ideas
Why do I recommend looking at content you already wrote to come up with new content to write? Pinterest wants to share more content that it think will be useful to it’s users. How does it know it will be useful? If similar content has already performed well by getting a lot of saves and outbound clicks. That tells Pinterest, this creator knows their stuff about x topic. So if they create more about x topic, Pinterest is likely to share that faster and to more people, because they know it will be useful.
We’re working smarter, not harder. So let’s use that topic and come up with similar topics. Whether it’s an expansion of the original idea, and update to the original idea or an adjacent topic to the original idea, it’s a great way to help guarantee blog traffic and interest.
Here’s an example:
You are doing well for a Barbecue Chicken Crockpot Recipe on Pinterest. You get 100’s of people to your site every month for this one blog post. Here’s what you might want to write about in Q2 to build off of this momentum:
- expansion of the original idea: 4 Recipes to Eat Your Barbecue Chicken Leftovers
- update to the original idea: Best Barbecue Chicken Marinade (a new one you discovered since your original post)
- adjacent topic to the original idea: 10 Barbecue Side Dishes
Pro tip: make sure to link the new blog post within the old blog post (and vice versa) to drive traffic back and forth!
How to Find Rising Trends in Your Niche Before They Peak
When it comes to blog trend research, Pinterest is an underutilized starting people. They have an incredible trends tool that you can use to come up with blog post ideas that can be written as people are starting to search for them rather than right when they peak. Doing the former will have you miles ahead of the majority of content creators that post about summer travel in summer which isn’t nearly as useful.
I cover the Pinterest trends tool in depth in a lot of blog posts already, including how to make an entire content calendar with it, but here is the gist:
- Head to trends.pinterest.com
- Click the “view search trends” button
- Head to either “seasonal trends” or “growing trends”
- Change the end date to the last Friday in July of last year
- Check out the individual trends further to see what makes sense in your niche
- Write down topic ideas based on those trends and also write when they START to trend upwards so you know when to publish the blog post.
While yes, these are trends that may only be high for a temporary amount of time this year (rather than evergreen content that can be found year round), you’re promoting them on Pinterest which means they won’t just peak this year.
They’ll peak next year and the year after that and the year after that… if you have a good plan for repurposing content onto Pinterest, you’ll be able to reap the benefits of this blog post for years. So it’s seasonal BUT still has a compounding traffic effect.
How to Combine Authority + Trends for High-Traffic Q2 Blog Post Ideas
When creating a Q2 content plan, you want the combination of blog posts that you already have expertise in, according to Pinterest, and the seasonal content ideas that are going to do well. This will lead to the fastest blog traffic from Pinterest because it’s hitting Pinterest from both angles and really utilizing the platform well in a way that also serves its pinners well.
This is exactly why I created my Q2 Content Creation Cheat Sheet. It’s a formula I’ve helped many bloggers utilize to see results faster and feel more confident in their content planning strategy. Every quarter, I find 10 blog post ideas for my clients so they can put this into action.
- 5 are based on high-performing pins and
- 5 are based on what’s going to be trending in their niche
P.S. if it’s not currently for sale, it will be back for the next quarter, so just make sure you’re subscribed to Pinterest for Bloggers to find out when it’s back!
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