How Many Pins Should You Make Per Blog Post?

This is probably the most-asked question I get from bloggers, and the reason it’s hard to answer is that everyone wants a number when what actually matters is a definition. Five to ten pins per post is the number. But five to ten genuinely different pins, not five to ten versions of the same pin, and that distinction is where nearly everyone goes wrong.

Think of it like this. Each pin is a lottery ticket in a different draw. Ten tickets in the same draw is one ticket with extra steps. Ten tickets across ten draws is ten real chances. When you make six colourways of one headline, Pinterest sees near-duplicates aimed at the same phrase — you haven’t multiplied your chances, you’ve just made more work for yourself.

So let’s do this properly: how many, what makes them different, how to space them out, and how to tell when you’ve hit the point of diminishing returns for a given post.

Start with five, earn your way to ten

Five pins per post is a sensible floor for anything you actually care about ranking. That gives you enough angles to find out which framing resonates without spending your whole week on one article. If a post is a genuine cornerstone — the one you’d point a stranger to — then ten is reasonable, built up over a couple of months rather than in one sitting.

For quick, minor posts, one or two is fine. Not everything deserves the full treatment, and pretending otherwise is how people burn out. The rule I use: does this post have real search demand behind it and does it lead somewhere useful for me? If yes, it earns the full set. If no, give it a pin and move on.

What actually makes two pins “different”

A different pin means a different promise, aimed at a different searcher. Same post, different door in. The image can change, the layout can change, but the thing that must change is what the headline is offering — because that’s what maps to a different search phrase, and different search phrases are the entire point of the exercise.

The six angles I rotate through: the straight benefit, the numbered list, the question the reader is actually asking, the mistake to avoid, the specific audience, and the before-and-after result. Take any post and you can usually pull four or five of those out of it without stretching. That’s your set, and each one naturally uses different keywords, which is exactly what you want.

Spread them out — this part is not optional

Uploading eight pins to the same URL in one afternoon looks, from Pinterest’s side, quite a lot like spam. It also wastes your own data: if all eight go out together you can’t tell which angle worked, because they all got tested under the same conditions on the same day.

Drip them instead. Two in week one, two in week two, then one every week or two after that. You get cleaner signals about which angle lands, you look like a normal publisher rather than a bot, and you keep a steady supply of fresh content going out — which the algorithm likes anyway. More on that rhythm in how often to post and your pinning schedule.

Where the pins should point

Every pin goes to the specific post it’s about. Not your homepage, not a category page, not a general landing page. This sounds obvious and yet homepage-pinning is one of the most common leaks I find in blogger accounts — usually because someone set it up once and never revisited it.

The reason it matters is trust and relevance. Pinterest is checking whether the destination delivers what the pin promised, and a homepage never does. It also tanks your own conversion: someone who wanted your sourdough troubleshooting guide and landed on your homepage is gone. Send them exactly where they expected to go.

How to make five pins without losing your afternoon

Build one solid template with a headline area, an image area and your logo, then swap the headline and the photo. That’s it. Once the template exists, five variations is a twenty-minute job rather than a five-hour one, and the consistency actually helps people recognise your pins in a busy feed.

1. Pull five phrases people actually search that your post answers.
2. Write five headlines, one per phrase — different promises, not synonyms.
3. Drop each into your template with a different image or crop.
4. Write a real description for each, using that pin’s phrase naturally.
5. Queue them across the next four weeks and leave them alone.

The design side is covered properly in pin design and templates that convert, and the batching workflow that makes this sustainable is in a weekly workflow for bloggers.

What about pinning the same pin to several boards?

This used to be standard advice and it has aged badly. Years ago you’d make one pin and repin it to eight boards over a month, and it worked well enough. Pinterest has since made it very clear that it wants fresh content — new images pointing at your URLs — rather than the same image circulated repeatedly, and behaviour that looks like recycling gets quietly throttled.

The modern version is simple: pin each new pin once, to the single most relevant board, and put your energy into making genuinely new pins instead of redistributing old ones. If a pin fits two boards equally well, that usually means your boards overlap too much and the fix is a tidier board structure rather than a second upload. There’s more on how Pinterest reads repetition in duplicate pins and on structure in how many boards.

Judging which angles worked

After a month you’ll have enough data to see it: one or two of your angles will be quietly outperforming the rest. That’s genuinely valuable information, because it tells you how your audience frames the problem — and you can use that framing on every future post in that topic area.

Tracking that by eye across dozens of pins gets impossible fast, which is where PinPinterest helps: it shows which pins are ranking for which phrases and whether they’re climbing or fading, so “which angle worked” becomes a thing you can read rather than a thing you have to remember. Same idea as pin descriptions that rank — measure, then repeat what worked.

So: five to ten, genuinely different, spread over weeks, each pointing at the exact post. Do that consistently for a few months and you’ll have built something no single viral pin can match — a library of search results all quietly pointing home.

Next: Pinterest for bloggers, blog images that double as pins and reviving old posts.