By now, I’m sure you’ve heard about the amazing results bloggers are getting from Pinterest.
It wasn’t until the beginning of last year that I began to try my hand at growing my blog using Pinterest. Let me tell you; it was the best thing I could have done for my blog and business.
The tips I’m sharing with you will show you exactly what I’ve done to increase my traffic with Pinterest. For even more Pinterest tips, make sure you read my post How to Get Your First 100,000 Pageviews from Pinterest.
Helpful Resource: I used the MiloTree pop-up to increase my Pinterest profile to over 10,000 followers.
1. I Wrote About Topics People Cared About
There are certain categories on Pinterest that are more popular than others. Those categories are food and drink, DIY and crafts, and home decor. If your niche falls into any of those categories, you’re one step ahead of the game because you’re most likely already writing about what people want to read.
I tend to write about blogging tips and tutorials. While this isn’t one of the most popular categories on Pinterest, there is a growing number of bloggers who want to learn more about ways to improve their blog.
Knowing this, I try to write about topics that the average blogger would be interested in. Give the people what they want, and you’ll notice your content getting pinned and repinned a lot more.
How to Find Your Top Repins
To find your top repins (make sure you have a business account) go to “Analytics > Profile” and click on the “Repins” tab. Pinterest will show you the pins people have repinned the most in the past 30 days.
2. I Always Included a Pinnable Image in my Posts
One of the best ways to get your pins repinned is to create attractive pinnable graphics. Every single one of your blogs posts should include at least one pin worthy graphic. Here are some tips for creating a pinnable image:
- The image should include the post title and your blogs URL.
- The image should be vertical. Vertical images stand out better than horizontal images on Pinterest. I typically size my images at 700px in width by 1050px in height (feel free to increase the height of your image. I wouldn’t go any lower than 1050 pixels though).
- Use catchy titles when you can. Which pin are you more likely to repin? “How I Increased My Email Subscribers” or “How I Doubled my Email Subscribers in 60 days.” I know I’m more likely to pin the latter. People are drawn to catchy titles, so try to make yours catchy.
- Use phrases like “How To…” or “5 Ways To…” or “The Ultimate List of…”
Here’s an example of Pinterest friendly images:
When I started focusing on increasing my traffic with Pinterest, I decided to go through a lot of my older posts and rework the images to make them Pinterest friendly. If you have older posts that you think need more pins, try going back and creating new graphics for those posts.
You can use a free online photo editor such as PicMonkey to edit your images. Check out our tutorial How to Make Pinterest Graphics using PicMonkey for assistance creating your Pinterest friendly images.
3. I Added a Pinterest Share Button to My Blog
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read a blog post that I wanted to share on Pinterest only to discover that the blogger did not have a Pinterest share button on their blog. Do yourself and your readers a favor and make pinning your content easy by including a Pinterest share button on your blog.
To make sharing my content on Pinterest easy, I include social share buttons above and below each blog post.
I use the Grow by Mediavine plugin for my share buttons, and love it!
4. I Converted my Personal Account to a Business Account
Having a Pinterest business account allows you to take advantage of some really awesome features such as promoted pins, rich pins, analytics, and more. If you don’t have a business account, I recommend converting to one now. It doesn’t cost you anything, and your pinning experience won’t change.
If I didn’t convert my personal account to a Pinterest business account, I definitely wouldn’t have received the results I did with Pinterest.
Click here to find out how to convert your personal account to a business account.
5. I Set Up Rich Pins
At this point, rich pins is a must-have for every Pinterest user. If you haven’t set up rich pins, it’s something I highly recommend you do. With rich pins, whenever something is pinned from your blog, Pinterest pulls additional information from your site and adds that information to the pin.
To learn more about rich pins, and how to enable rich pins, read my blog post How to Set Up Rich Pins on Pinterest.
6. I Pinned to Active Group Boards
For the most part, group boards work the same way regular boards work on Pinterest. The only difference is that multiple pinners are allowed to pin to the same board. Group boards are an excellent way to share your pins with a larger audience and have them repinned.
When joining group boards, you want to make sure you’re joining boards that are (1) related to your niche and (2) have a good number of followers. There’s no point in pinning to boards that aren’t related to your blogging niche, or that don’t have very many people following the board. That would be a waste of your time, and your time is valuable.
I know some people recommend pinning a combination of your pins, plus pins from others to group boards, however, I only pin my own content to group boards. I’m receiving very satisfactory results with this technique.
7. I Used Promoted Pins
Promoted pins are paid ads on Pinterest. With promoted pins, you choose the pin(s) you want to promote. Pinterest then allows you to target certain locations, languages, devices, and genders. Depending on your campaign goal, you either pay when someone clicks to your website, or when someone engages with your pin close-ups, repins, clicks).
I used promoted pins to jump-start the traffic and repins I received for my new blog posts.
Update: Promoted Pins can get a little pricey, so I rarely promote my pins now. If it’s not within your budget, I recommend allowing your pin to gain traction organically. If you want to learn more about Promoted Pins, I highly recommend reading Maximizing Promoted Pins by Simple Pin Media. This post helped me out a lot when it comes to using Promoted Pins.
8. I Scheduled my Pins
Last year I began using Tailwind to schedule my pins on Pinterest. After giving the free account a try, I was really impressed and decided to upgrade to a paid account.
One thing I love about Tailwind is that it allows you to create a pinning a schedule based on when your audience is most engaged.
If you find scheduling pins to be time-consuming, a trick is to find popular pinners in your niche and pin straight from their boards.
How Much I Pin
For a long time, when it came to pinning, I followed the 80/20 rule of pinning 80% of other people’s content and 20% of my own. I really don’t think you’re pinning enough of your own content by doing this. I was barely getting any repins of my own stuff using this recommendation.
I now pin 90% of my own content and 10% of other people’s content. Yes, you read that correctly. So far, this technique has worked very well for increasing my traffic.
With my current schedule, I pin 25 pins per day. If I pin more than 50 pins a day, I notice that my Pinterest stats drop pretty significantly. I’ve heard a lot of people say they have great results pinning 50+ pins a day. I recommend testing out different numbers until you find your sweet spot.
Even More Pinterest Tips!