Whether you're a new blogger, or whether you've been around for a while, increasing traffic to your website is most likely a constant challenge. But don't fret, my friend, because there's one amazing tool that can help you get your blog posts in front of your ideal audience, and drive insane amounts of traffic to your website, and that is Pinterest!
Here's the thing, though there is sooo much information about Pinterest out there, it can be a little difficult to know what tips to follow without wasting time implementing outdated strategies (that's the thing with social media, things change constantly!).
But, there are so many amazing bloggers out there who've walked the walk and who are willing to share their experience and strategies, so I've compiled my favorite 33 tips for you in this post to help you double your Pinterest traffic in no time! Enjoy ;)
The Basics
1. Have a complete bio. You need to fill out all the descriptions, titles, and links on your account. Since you will be using a Pinterest business account, you are now allowed to fill up the name of your blog or business instead of your personal name. In your Pinterest bio include keywords your targeted reader would be searching for. - Mckinzie, Moms Make Cents
2. Your description. You want your followers to know who you are, so make sure you put a nice description describing who you are and what kind of things you’ll be pinning. This helps people decide if who you are and what you pin will be in line with them and what they want to re-pin, and you definitely want the right kind of followers re-pinning your content. This description is short, so don’t be too lengthy, but give a good taste of who you are and what you’re about. - Angie, My So-Called Chaos
3. Make your site mobile responsive. Over 80% of Pinterest traffic comes from mobile devices. If your site is not mobile responsive once the reader gets there, they probably won’t stick around for long. Mobile responsiveness is when a site automatically adjusts its sizing, layout, and proportions to display better on a mobile device. Try viewing your site on a phone to see how user-friendly it is. There are many WordPress themes that are mobile responsive and SquareSpace templates are automatically mobile responsive. - Mckinzie, Moms Make Cents
4. Switch to a Business Account. You want to use Pinterest to grow your traffic, right? Well, if you really want to get a handle on Pinterest you should have a business account so you can view your Pinterest analytics. This will tell you what’s popular, which is helpful for repinning and promoting pins. - Nikki, It’s All Blogsense
5. Ensure all your boards are relevant to your brand. This is a common mistake I made in the beginning–I had random boards that had nothing to do with my brand. For example, if you’re a fashion blogger and cover nothing but style, your Pinterest boards should only cover style. If you’re a food blogger, your boards should be things like “breakfast,” “lunch,” “dinner,” “vegan,” “gluten free” “appetizers,” “quick meal ideas,” “meal prep,” etc. NOT “breakfast,” “lunch,” “dinner,” “what’s in my closet,” “beauty routine,” and “travel.” Make sense? You want to ensure you’re attracting an audience that will love all of your content, not just a tiny portion of it! - Jess & Blair, Blogging For Keeps
6. Create boards that your target audience wants to follow. On your blog, you probably have “categories” to organize your content. If you’re a travel blogger, would you have a category on your blog for “gluten-free recipes”? Probably not.
Same goes with Pinterest.
So, remove any boards that are irrelevant to your ideal audience and add new boards that your target peeps would be searching for. Overall, I recommend having at least 20 boards on your profile. - Melyssa, Melyssa Griffin
7. Arrange your Pinterest page so it makes sense for your followers! The order that works the best for me are first Board/boards that link back to your site. second boards that are about topics that interest your readers. Then last group boards. - Karissa - A Fresh Start On A Budget
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Your Pins
8. Make sure you have rich pins enabled. There are tons of “how to” posts to teach you how. Rich pins automatically link each pin to your site – giving you credit! …And who doesn’t want credit for their hard work? - Making Mrs. M
9. Create VERTICAL pins for each blog post. For the longest time, I was just pinning my ‘hero’ image from my blog posts.. which was a square. This past year, I started using a more rectangular shaped hero image (1000px by 1200px) and those looked much better once pinned. However, after a little trial and error I found that the ‘infographic’ template from Canva (800px by 2000px) gets me the most repins. I now try to update one old pin a week to make it more pinworthy! - Lauren, Working Mom Magic
10. Make beautiful images People don’t pin boring stuff. They pin beautiful images with bright colors (red, orange, and yellow tones, actually!). The best size for a Pinnable image is at least 400 pixels wide and 700 pixels long, and images that contain text telling what the linked post is about are repinned more often than images with no text. - Karen, Desert Chica
11. Your image should include at least a few vibrant colors – yellow, pink, red, etc. Images with red, pink tones get on average twice more repins than images with blue tones! - Anastasia, Anastasia Blogger
12. Keep a balance with branding elements. When your logo or site domain occupies too much space on the picture, it looks like a direct advertisement and users avoid sharing such content. - Anastasia, Anastasia Blogger
Improving your Pinning strategy:
13. Share other people’s content. Want to get in good with Pinterest? Sharing other people’s content is the way to do it. You should be thinking of your profile as of big resource for the topics you blog about – like a library where your audience can go to find anything and everything they want to learn, get inspired, and be entertained. Plus, sharing lots of content on a daily basis helps to boost your boards’ value and drive more traffic to YOUR pins and to YOUR site. - Sarah, xo Sarah
14. Search for targeted Pinterest Boards. The other thing I did was search for blogging boards to follow. In the Pinterest search field, I would type in targeted keywords like “How to blog” “Blog Monetization” or “Mommy Blogging” all keywords related to my niche. This would bring up a list of boards with those keywords in the title. From there I would follow these boards. - Chrystie, Living For Naptime
15. Pinterest’s Popular Home Feed – About once a day, I visit the “Popular” section of Pinterest and select some of the more popular pins that fit my board. This is a great strategy because ahem…these pins are already popular, which means Pinterest is giving them priority in your feed. - Chrystie, Living For Naptime
16. Pin content more than once. When you are pinning your own content, don’t just pin it once and be done with it. If there are multiple images, pin a few of them to your personal blog board, but make sure you spread them out so you can catch people at different times of the day. You can also pin old posts again down the road, or pin to other boards, etc. This keeps your older content fresh, and brings more attention to your posts. - Angie, My So-Called Chaos
17. Follow pinners in your niche. When you follow someone on Pinterest they get a notification. Most people will click to see what you’re all about and then decide if they want to follow you back. It is proven that people feel inclined to return the favor but only if it benefits them as well.
You only have a few seconds to make an impression and get that follow, so make them count.
Make sure your bio is complete and describes what you do.
Make sure your top boards are in the first row.
Make sure you have a nice profile picture or logo. - Kyla, Dish It Out Social
18. Check out your home feed and repin and like a few gems. Pinterest does like to see that you use the platform organically. That means using features native to the system, including liking and repinning (saving). Note that you should always check the links on a pin before your repin it. You don’t want to be sharing pins with broken links or those that lead to shady sites! - Alisa, Alisa Meredith
19. Check out people who have followed you. Follow any accounts that are relevant or appealing to you. Just go to your profile and click on the number of people following you. The most recent will be at the top. - Alisa, Alisa Meredith
20. You need to be consistent in your pinning. It includes how you design your blog images, how you use your relevant keywords in photo alt tags, pin descriptions, board descriptions and your profile description (not to forget your Pinterest account name!), how often you pin, what colors and designs are you using, what mood and lifestyle your pins and boards are telling, how you are responding to comments and who are you following on Pinterest. - Petra, Nellaino
21. Put keywords in is your board titles and descriptions. If your board is about blogging then your board should simply be called blogging tips.There is no need to fluff it up by making it a fun title. No one will be able to find your boards that way so it's important to keep it simple. - Jenny, Confettisocial.com
22. Add Keywords to Your Bio. People use Pinterest like Google. They search for keywords to find what they’re looking for. You want to be found when it comes to keywords related to your niche. My bio reads “I teach busy moms how to blog and make money blogging even as a newbie. - Nikki, It’s All Blogsense
Group Boards
23. Pin to group boards. Ask to join some Pinterest group boards. Usually, directions for being added to that board are in the description but ask your friends too–they might be able to add you to some! Group Pinterest boards are awesome because they multiply the eyes on each pin you add to it. If you can’t find any boards to join, create your own! The general rule for a group board is that you can pin again after it has been repinned 50 times (but some boards have their own rules, so keep an eye out!). - Karen, Desert Chica
24. A Pinterest group board can grow your followers, repins, and traffic like gang-busters. The key to gaining leverage with group boards is having a strategy.
Pin Daily – Your own pins PLUS other pins that have a high repin rate on your own boards
Repin other members pins frequently to help maintain a high ranking board
The more times you can pin in a day the better. Space them out and always follow the board rules. - Kyla, Dish It Out Social
25. Repin other members' content. More of a courtesy than anything else, repinning content from other members will ensure you keep a good reputation among the board members and don’t make any enemies. Don’t be that person who just takes advantage of the board—the only way group boards work is if everyone contributes by both pinning and repinning. Besides, there’s probably some great content to repin! - Jessica, Jessica Slaughter
26. Put your group boards at the bottom! People don’t want to scroll through all your group boards. so group them together at the bottom.
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Scheduling your pins
27. Schedule your Pins throughout the day. When using a Pinterest scheduler you should schedule your pins throughout the day. That way you're "online" the whole day and you have better possibilities to be present to new followers. Your pins will also be seen more by your own followers. For example, on the day when you have written a blog post, you can schedule it to be pinned 6 times per day to different boards. - Petra, Nellaino
Tailwind
28. Bulk Scheduling. The ability to painlessly bulk schedule a bunch of pins at the same time was one of the top selling points of Tailwind. The Tailwind Chrome Extension makes scheduling pins from Pinterest and any website very convenient. I can easily schedule pins with just a simple click. Do you have photos on your computer? No problem! You can bulk upload images to your Tailwind account as well. - Louisa, La Passion Voutée
29. Best time to pin. Another amazing feature of Tailwind. Once you connect your Pinterest account to Tailwind, Tailwind automatically optimizes your pinning schedule so that you pin when your followers are most active. This feature takes out the guesswork of trying to figure out when to pin. - Louisa, La Passion Voutée
30. Board Lists. Board lists are another awesome feature of Tailwind! Many of the pins you pin can likely go on multiple boards. Let’s stay with the beauty example. Maybe you have a “Makeup Tips” board, a “Beauty Tips” board, a “Makeup DIY” board and a few beauty group boards. You can create a board list so all you have to do is click on the board list and it will schedule the pin out to all the boards on the list! - Kate, Layered Indulgence
BoardBooster
31. BoardBooster’s looping feature gives all your pins a “second chance” to make it big on Pinterest (and a third, fourth, and fifth chance too). You’ve spent all this time creating beautiful pins, so don’t let them go to waste! Use Looping to re-share your original pins every so often, giving them more chances to catch people’s eye and get re-pinned. - Krista, Blog Beautifully
32. Campaigns. Campaigns are the best way to share your original content to group boards, with basically zero effort. (...) Random campaigns ensure that all of your posts are being continuously shared to group boards, giving them more exposure – and without you having to lift a finger! Scheduled campaigns are the perfect way to add your newest blog post to all of your group boards without cluttering up anyone’s feed or “spamming” them. Both are MASSIVE timesavers, and basically allow you to “set it and forget it”! - Krista, Blog Beautifully
33. The Pin Doctor. The Pin Doctor helps clean up pins in your boards in minutes. If you try to do this manually it can take days or weeks depending on how many pins you have. It also helps to rank higher in Pinterest’s algorithms. This means the content you have pinned will show more in the smart feed. This leads to more followers and engagement and that’s what we’re all trying to achieve!! There is a fee for this service which is 1 cent per pin which isn’t a lot considering the time it’s going to save you if you have lots of pins to go through. - Erin, Sincerely Erin xoxo
What was your favourite tip from this post? Anything you'd like to add? Let me know in the comments below!
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