How to Conquer Pinterest & Harness it for Major Traffic to your Blog

Pinterest has many great functions, and one of those is helping you to grow your blog. 

Pinterest is one of the most powerful social media platforms for driving traffic.  Take a look at these simple steps to utilize to use Pinterest as a tool to help your blog grow in ways you never thought about before. 

It is almost a guarantee you will be able to at least triple your pinterest traffic in just a few months using these methods!

 

How to Conquer Pinterest & Harness it for Major Traffic to your Blog

Create a Blog Board

Create a board that exclusively features pins from your own blog and nothing else.  This way you can highlight your own content without it being diluted by other people’s pins. 

Play this right and you will soon find it is your most popular board!

Write Compelling Descriptions

Optimize your pin and board descriptions by including keywords to not only get pinners interested enough to click on your content but to also help surface your pins in search. 

Do not over-optimize your descriptions by keyword stuffing as it will deter people from repinning.  Hashtags are also a big no and may negatively impact your ranking in pinterest search

It is important that you go through and ensure that each and every one of your boards has an optimized description and is set for the best fitting category (try to avoid using the “other” category.)

When creating your blog posts be sure to use the optimized description as not only your blog post meta description but also as your images alt and description tags so when others pin directly from your blog the pins will be properly optimized for pinterest search.

Optimize your Profile

While you are working on your pin and board descriptions it is a good idea to take a look at your pinterest profile. 

Your bio is searchable by pinterest and a great way to be found by new pinners is through pinterest search.  It is important to use relevant keywords that will also interest others to take a look around and hopefully follow you.  You are limited to 160 characters so you may need to get creative.

As an example, our current bio is “Follow us for great food and recipes, health and fitness tips, Craft and DIY projects, Fashion and Beauty and more!”.

A personal photo always works better in your profile than a logo so if possible go with a photo of yourself.

Optimize your Pins

Great pin descriptions are only half the battle.  You need to get really picky about what you will pin. 

High quality and beautiful long vertical pins do the best on pinterest so pin those types of pin and delete the rest.  You will feel much better after you’ve cleansed your boards of the pins that just don’t work such as time sensitive pins, horizontal pins, and poor quality photography.

Creating and pinning attractive, big and clear vertical images will help make your boards look more attractive to follow.  More followers will gain you more traffic to your blog so you need to think about that the next time you consider repinning a coupon pin or an almost unrecognizable bowl of slop.

If you are pinning to keep track of something that may not be of interest to your readers or is not really an attractive pin just pin them to a secret board.

Pin Often but Pin Smart

Scheduling your pins is a great way to be active throughout the day without actually being active throughout the day. 

Currently the best way to schedule is directly on pinterest itself.

Repin older content according to what is trending. 

Find a good pinterest content calendar and reference it to figure out when you should start pinning seasonally relevant content and pushing it hard. 

It starts earlier than you think!  Christmas starts trending in July!

 

Setup Rich Pins

If your blog is on the Genesis platform you are set to go as long as you have a Pinterest business account  (which you should already have as a blogger!)  Simply apply for rich pins through the validator.

If you are not on the Genesis platform it is still a simple process.  Simply install the Yoast SEO plugin and follow these steps.

Follow to be Followed

Find other pinners who pin content related to your own.  The more successful the pinner the better.  They may follow you back and they may even repin your content but the real benefit here is being able to follow along and see what other successful pinners are doing.

Add a Pin it Button

Make it as easy as possible for your readers to pin your content.  We use a sharing plugin as well as a hovering pin it over our images.  Add it and they will use.  The more your content is pinned the more it will be viewed so make it cinch for anyone to pin.

Track your Success

By tracking your success on Pinterest via Pinterest Analytics, you can continue to do what works, and change the things that don’t work.  This is another good reason to have a Pinterest Business account vs. a Personal account.   

Use analytics to see which posts of your posts get repinned the most, which get the most click throughs etc.  It is also a good way to determine which group boards are worth pinning to and which are worth leaving.

 

The next two are niice to do but not a must when pinning, this is old advice that is no longer really relevant. Think of pinterest as a search engine, and not as social media.

Good Housekeeping is Key

Organize your boards so that the most popular and active boards are at the top.  The very first spot though?  That is reserved for you Blog Board.  The next one or two should be seasonally relevant boards.    This way when people click into your profile you look active and feature pins they are most likely interested in. 

Place group boards at the bottom of your boards.

First Impressions Matter

Use attractive cover images and crop them so there is no text included.  Try and go with a colour theme to create an atmosphere or use bright images for a cleaner look. 

A clean and uniform look is much more compelling to follow than the look of random boards and covers.