Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social media platforms. With its rich interlay of attractive images and easy to use interface, Pinterest is rapidly overtaking other established platforms such as Facebook & Twitter in terms of driving traffic to blogs.
As per the latest offical stats, Pinterest has over 322 million monthly users. It is a great place for people to find inspiring ideas and provides a hassle free way to navigate through interesting content.
Pinterest makes it really easy for people to save the pins they like and come back to them whenever they want. Not only that, it also gives rich social engagement options to its users. Most people use Pinterest to plan various aspects of their day, ranging from food to travel to shopping and decoration tips.
With its large, diverse and highly engaged user base, Pinterest has a lot to offer to bloggers. No matter what kind of blog you are running, you are missing out on a huge chunk of quality traffic if Pinterest is not a part of your promotion strategy.
Well the good news is, it’s a really intuitive and easy to use platform. You can easily build a large devoted following on Pinterest with the right strategy and just a few minutes of your time everyday.
Here are some strategies to drive more traffic to your blog from Pinterest, including tips to create catchy pins, get more followers as well as to improve your SEO.
1. Make your pins pop!
Pinterest is a scrollable collage of images. To make people click on your Pins, you need to attract their attention by making your pins stand out among the others. There are various ways you can do that!
- Use a descriptive title for your pin. It should tell people what your pin is all about, but at the same time be catchy enough so that they would want to read more.
- Use beautiful high-quality images for your pins. The better looking image you post, the more appealing people will find it.
- You can also enhance your pin by adding some text in the image. Images with some text will capture people’s attention more easily.
- Post long images. Vertical images occupy more space on the Pinterest feed and will be visible for a longer time while scrolling, thus increasing the chances of them being noticed.
- But do not make your images too tall. The ideal aspect ratio for Pinterest images is between 2:3 and 4:5. Update: Pinterest has updated its best practices guidelines and now recommends that all images should be in a 2:3 ratio.
There are many online tools like Canva which allow you to create beautiful & eye-catching Pinterest images. See our list of free tools for creating amazing Pinterest pins for more details about using canva as well as other available image editing options.
2. Create a posting schedule for Pinterest
In order to build up your brand you need to increase its visibility in front of people. The more the user comes across your content, the more likely they are to remember it and interact with your content.
Here are a few things to keep in mind while creating a Pinterest posting schedule.
- Post multiple times a day to ensure that your pins are seen by a larger audience and not lost in the huge jumble of pins posted on Pinterest.
- Schedule your pins to post at regular intervals instead of all at once to ensure more exposure for your pins.
- Post your content at optimal times for maximum user engagement. For most niches in general, weekends, evenings and lunch breaks are the best time to post. You can find out the optimal times for you content, based on looking at your analytics data or the behavior of your targeted demographic in general.
There are various Pinterest scheduling tools like Tailwind that take most of the hard work out of social media management by letting you schedule an unlimited number of pins in optimal time slots.
3. Create boards for your pins the right way!
Pinterest Boards provide a great way to organize all your Pins. More importantly, they allow people to find & follow you! Follow these tips to create well organized Boards for your pins.
- Choose a descriptive name for your board. This will help people quickly understand what kind of content you will be posting in the board.
- Create multiple boards to categorize your content and add your pins to relevant boards. For eg. if you run a food blog, you can have various boards like Baking, Desserts, Healthy Salads etc. People can then easily follow the boards which seem most interesting to them.
- You can re-pin your pin to multiple boards if it is relevant to more than one of them. However, make sure to add pins to different boards at different times. Posting them together will clutter the feed of your followers with the same image and the same pins would also show up together when someone visits your profile. Scheduling them at separate times will help your pins get more visibility, and it will make your profile look nicer to visitors.
- You can also add sections to your board if you don’t want to add multiple boards or if you just want to organize them further.
4. Increase your Pinterest followers
One of the most obvious ways to increase traffic to your blog is to get a large number of followers and engage with them efficiently. The best way to do this is to use Pinterest like a social media and not just a place to promote your content.
- Spend some time on Pinterest everyday and try to re-pin atleast 5 pins everyday that you like.
- Follow back your followers. This not only helps engage your followers more, but also gives you an insight into what kind of content they are pinning. In the future, you can tailor your Pins to appeal to them more.
- Make sure that you respond to all comments left by people on your pins.
- Follow boards similar to yours which have a large number of followers and frequently re-pin their great content. Since their pins are already popular, you can be sure that your followers will also like them. You might also get the added benefit of being noticed by the creator and getting a follow back, or at the very least just getting some inspiration.
- Follow your competitor’s followers to help them find you fast instead of waiting to be noticed. To find your competitors, just search for the topic you blog about and click on the people tab. Look through their profile’s to find their followers and follow them back.
5. Make it easy for people to follow you outside Pinterest
You website is the best place to promote your Pinterest profile and encourage your regular readers to follow you. You can also leverage other platforms where you already have followers to get more followers on Pinterest. See how!
- Include Follow links to your Pinterest profile on your website so people can follow you easily. You can place these buttons in the top header of your website, or in your desktop sidebar if you have one.
- Place Pinterest sharing buttons on your site and make them easy to find. The best places are just before or after your content.
- Add a ‘PinIt’ button to all your images. If you use wordpress, you can install the official Pinterest Hover Pint It Button plugin by Pinterest. As the name suggests, this will add a PinIt Button to all your images when someone hovers over them. You can also use Pinterest’s Widget Builder to manually add buttons.
- If you have a mailing list, you can add Pinterest Follow link to all your emails.
6. Improve your SEO
Although most people pay a lot of attention to the SEO of their content to optimize it for search engines like google, they often tend to forget about optimizing their pins for Pinterest. However with a little bit of extra attention you can make sure that your pins rank high in Pinterest search.
- Pinterest now lets you add title for your pins. Use a catchy & descriptive title to increase user engagement. Make sure the name uses words that describe the content, so that its more searchable on google, improves SEO, makes it easy to find it by searching.
- In addition to adding an eye catching image, you also need to add an attractive description containing the keywords that you want to rank for. A good description will also give more information to the users and increase engagement for your pins.
- Enable rich pins for your account. Rich pins show metadata along with the pin giving a richer user experience and increasing engagement. Pinterest offers 4 types of Rich Pins: app, article, product and recipe Pins. Enable rich pins for a recipe pin for example can allow you to show information like cooking time, cuisine, ingredients nutrition info etc. along with the pin.
- Add good names and descriptions for all your boards which will be helpful for both people and search engines to understand the content of your board.
- Sign up for a free Pinterest business account, which lets you analyze your traffic. You can see which of your boards and pins perform better and which ones may need some improvement.
To sum up
Pinterest is very rapidly growing as a social network and is a major driver of traffic to blogs. With the ever increasing number of websites using Pinterest to share and promote their content, it is now more important than ever to make your pins stand out from all others by following these well tested out tips and tricks. Posting great content regularly will improve the discoverability of your pins help you keep your users engaged. We would love to hear your thoughts about Pinterest promotion strategies that have worked well for your blog. Please let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
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