Pinterest is often considered a social media platform, but actually this tool is a search engine. It offers you the potential to reach new audiences using keywords, images and communities. It can be tricky to navigate, but here are the tips I put in place to double the traffic from Pinterest on my blog.
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In December 2019 I received 201 sessions from Pinterest on my blog. This means that 201 people were taken to my blog because of something they clicked on Pinterest. This could have been a link on my Pinterest, in one of my Pins or in a Pin someone else had pinned directly from my blog. In January I more than doubled this number, hitting 569 sessions from Pinterest. We’re not talking the massive numbers I’ve seen some people achieve on Pinterest here, but I think this is a good start. So I’m going to show you how I did it.
Please remember I am far from a pro in this, I’ve done a lot of research from different sources and this is my attempt at telling you what I think worked best. Some of this may not be in the expert’s advice, but it’s what I have personally found works well for me.
Establish yourself on Pinterest and link your blog
When setting up your Pinterest image, treat it as you would the about you page of your blog. Use keywords, a good quality profile image and make sure it says what you do. Once you’ve done this, you will need to claim your blog. Go to your settings on Pinterest and enter in your blog link and follow the steps to claim your blog.
The reason behind doing this means that if anyone else shares a blog post of yours on Pinterest, it will count towards your analytics.
Create relevant Pinterest Boards
Of course, Pinterest is all about the boards so create boards relevant to your content. Include keywords in your titles and descriptions. Some of mine are called:
Instagram Tips | Content Creation
Social Media and Blogging Tips | Marketing Advice
Mental Health | Self Care | Brain
Productivity | Motivation | Workspace
The idea behind boards is to give you dedicated spaces to categorise your content and make it easier for users to find it. I would also suggest creating title images for each board, if you check out my Pinterest you’ll see a graphic I have created on all boards I own.
I would suggest creating a board called ‘All Pins’ which you can add categories to, this will come in handy later.
Join a few Group Boards
On top of creating your own boards, it never hurts to join some group boards. Group boards are places for multiple users to share their content into, usually in exchange for pinning another user’s post for each post you yourself share into the board. It’s a way to increase your reach and potential audience. You can search directly in Pinterest relevant keywords and then ‘group board’ to find these boards.
I have a few here too if you’d like to request to join directly in the platform.
YA book bloggers Group Board
General blogging Group Board
Social media and Pinterest tips Group Board
Create multiple pins for each of your blog posts
This is where it starts to get more important. Every time you create a blog post, you should also be creating 5-10 Pinterest graphics for this post. Scroll through Pinterest for a little bit to get the idea of what exactly a Pinterest graphic looks like, you can also look at the one I have inserted in this post. You can easily create these designs for free using a tool called Canva.
The reason you should be creating multiple images for each blog post is to try and appeal to multiple audiences. Most group boards don’t like you posting the same content multiple times, so this enables you to continue to share the same post with different visuals. It also allows you to test different designs and see what performs better. Generally, as soon as I started creating multiple images for one blog post to share, I saw a huge increase in sessions from Pinterest on my blog.
If you listen to anything from this post, listen to this.
Use keywords in your titles and descriptions
Pinterest is a search engine, which means it utilises keywords to provide the best/most relevant content for the search. Hopefully you’ll have already worked on the SEO of your blog and your posts will be readily optimised. I will copy the same title as is on your blog, then I will either reword my meta data or intro paragraph to form my description. This may include the addition of relevant hashtags such as #PinterestTips #PinterestAdvice.
Make sure you’re still wording this like a human though and not sounding robotic by adding in keywords every other word. You are targeting humans as well as Pinterest’s search algorithm.
Pin each pin to an ‘all pins’ board
Once you have your 5-10 pins, pin them all into an ‘All Pins’ board. I use this board as my hub, the place I share each pin in to first to then repin it onto other boards. You can add different categories to this board to make it easier to navigate.
I would suggest dedicating time after publishing a blog post to add all of your created pins to Pinterest. Make sure to include the same title as your blog post, a carefully thought out description using both keywords and a few relevant hashtags and don’ forget to add the destination link back to your blog!
Share these pins out to all of your relevant boards
Ideally, you want to be sharing between 20-40 pins a day to really start to increase your sessions from Pinterest. Once you’ve done the above step you can do one of two things.
- Manually share each of these pins to your relevant group boards. Try to only share each pin to each board once, but do pin all pins into every board. Depending on how many boards you have created/joined, this could be a big job. I would suggest not doing it all at once, as you don’t want to look spammy in the eyes of Pinterest.
- If you don’t want to spend a while sat doing this, there are means to schedule this. Using Tailwind will help you massively. Tailwind is a Pinterest scheduling tool that helps you add your pins to all of your boards within minutes. You can download a PlugIn for your browser that allows you to schedule directly within Pinterest. You can get a free trial of 100 pins here, I would advise taking a look at this trial because this tool is incredibly useful. I find it a very worthwhile investment for anyone really wanting to increase sessions from Pinterest.
Share other user’s content
Pinterest isn’t all about your own content, as much as this is great. But you also need to be making sure to share other user’s content too. You can add other pins to your boards, queue them in via Tailwind or set a reminder every few days to go through the platform and share some varied content.
If you’re a member of Tailwind you will have access to Tribes, which are sort of like engagement pods on Instagram. You can join a few relevant Tribes and share your pins in exchange for adding other user’s pins to your posting schedule. It’s a good way to reach a new and wider audience on Pinterest.
And finally, share new pins regularly
Pinterest is a busy platform with hundreds of thousands of new pins being shared each day. To stay on top of your niche and producing relevant content, you must make sure to be regularly creating new pins for old blog posts. Use your analytics to see what works well and what pins people seem to respond to and make more that are similar to this. Also be sure to mix up your designs occasionally in the hope of capturing an all new audience.
I personally share new pins at least twice a week, but I know increasing this would send me even more traffic. Pinterest is all about trying to create the most appealing content to encourage other users to share and click on your pins. It’s a guessing game, but using analytics and persistence, you can get a handle on it and utilise it for your blog!
I’ve been trying to read up a lot about Pinterest recently because I’m trying to up my game there (yup, at the same time as trying to improve Instagram too!) this is hands down the best post I’ve read on it and actually feel like there are loads of action points I can do straightaway. Thank you so much!
I’m really glad you’ve found it a helpful guide and that it was easy stuff to apply right away. I hope it helps!
This is such a great post. I have been trying to figure out pinterest for a while and reading this has been very very helpful, thank you so much