4 tips to increase Pinterest traffic
Today’s post is sponsored by HP and inspired by the four modes (laptop, tent, tablet, and stand) of the HP x360 laptop! See how HP and Meghan Trainor are documenting her That Bass Tour and “bending the rules” HERE. All ideas and opinions mentioned below are my own! #BendTheRules
If you have made the decision to invest time, money, and work into growing your blog, you have undoubtedly come across many resources that explain the power of Pinterest. While it can be difficult to begin really mastering Pinterest and using it as a real tool for increasing page views to your blog, bringing new followers, and helping you reach blogging goals, it is such a great tool that you need to be using!
Why is it important to use Pinterest to grow your blog? Why focus on ways to increase Pinterest traffic at all?
In the three years that I have been blogging, I have heard a million things about the wonders of what a consistent Pinterest strategy can do for your blog. Unfortunately, until this past fall, I never made real steps to create something that worked for me, my blog, my schedule, while also incorporating all of the things that would really make Pinterest work for me! Since I have been using the four things listed below in this post, my referrals from Pinterest have increased ten fold. Yes, you read that correctly–my traffic from Pinterest alone is now ten times more than it was just four months ago! So, I am now a firm believer in all of the other statistics out there claiming that Pinterest is one of the most valuable tools for bloggers. Still not convinced it’s worth your time and effort?
Here are a few reasons why Pinterest is great for growing your blog:
- It’s free: We all love free, am I right? The great thing about using Pinterest to it’s full potential is that it’s completely free, but just requires a good bit of work and effort. Even still, free is free, which is great especially when you are just starting to grow your blog and don’t have very much of an expendable blog budget yet! Pinterest has also recently introduced an option for promoted pins, for those of you that do have a little extra cash to spend, but if you’re looking for a free way to grow your blog, Pinterest is great even without that added cost!
Are you looking for more ways to grow your blog without spending money? Check out this post!
- It’s effective: This is pretty self explanatory. In addition to my story, there are a million others out there that praise the effectiveness of Pinterest when used in the correct way!
- It’s useful: With 70 million users on Pinterest (and tons of them making searches each day), Pinterest is an incredibly useful resource for both creators and users alike. While I love creating content that can help out a visitor from Pinterest, I also use Pinterest almost daily for finding easy recipes, tips and tricks, or random resources about things I am interested in! I am not the only one, so go ahead and capitalize on the obsession usefulness of Pinterest!
- It’s fun: Let’s be honest, we have all admitted to browsing on Pinterest a little more than we should from time to time! We all love to find fun facts and helpful things on Pinterest, so go ahead and create some of that fun, interesting content for Pinterest users!
Create good images
It’s no secret that Pinterest relies heavily on images, so obviously that is a huge part to building up your following and referrals! There are quite a few factors that really change the effectiveness of an image on Pinterest, but if you mainly focus on the small list below and go with what is aesthetically appealing, you’ll be able to draw in the eye of the user which will hopefully translate into a click and visit to your site!
With the two images above, I saw a huge increase in re-pins and visits to that post via Pinterest when I made the changes! I knew that the images I used were really important, but never made it a priority to go back and fix old posts as my skills (and I use that term lightly) grew when it came to creating good images for my blog! With the left image (that follows the rules below), I have seen a steady flow of traffic and re-pins, while re-pins and traffic from the image on the right were very low despite the title and content!
Here is your check list for creating Pinterest images that will rock:
- Be sure that the image is at least 735×1102. This will create an image
- No more than 3 fonts
- Clean and bright
- Make sure your image is named
- VERTICAL
Pin frequently
This tip is the part of successfully growing your Pinterest that will be the most time consuming, especially if you don’t already make a habit of doing this each day already. For me, personally, it took some adjusting (and hiring of a bit of help) to fully get a routine in that worked for me, so don’t be frustrated if it takes a few weeks for you to find your groove as well! As you find what works for you, be sure to follow the quick list below so that you are re-pinning relevant pins and those that will encourage re-pinning (both of your content and the content of others)!
Here is your check list for pinning in a strategic way as to increase Pinterest traffic:
- Pin at least 20 times a day
- 10 of these pins should be recipes with 5 being other relevant topics for your followers and the remaining five being of your content
- Only pin images that meet the guidelines outlined above. You want to re-pin bright, well-staged, vertical pins that have the highest chance of being shared again!
- Change the description where it is needed. Often times we will re-pin something that has a description like “be sure to share this with Grandma June” or something totally random and completely unrelated to our life or Pinterest boards. It’s so easy to do when you are on a pinning spree, but as we will talk more about below, be sure to change the description of your pins to something that is helpful to followers and pinners. Don’t worry about coming up with some elaborate description, but remember to use a natural-feeling sentence that contains a few key words that go along with the pin!
Use keywords
Just like when you use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) generally for posts, you want to take similar steps for searches made within Pinterest! As I mentioned above, you should always name your images (even those that aren’t your “rockstar Pinterest images”), but you also need to use those same keywords in the descriptions of your boards and pins. You can feel free to keep these descriptions as “normal” sentences, but include as many key words as possible among each.
For example, in the image above, you will see a screenshot of my “Blogging” board on Pinterest. Rather than simple leaving the title as an overarching word, I have added in a description that will pull in many different searches made within the blogging topic, such as “tips for increasing blog traffic” and “social media tips.” By doing this, I can draw in people searching within those specific points to my entire board, which contains many articles helpful to bloggers and is speckled with some of my own content! Then, visitors can browse through my board and hopefully make the decision to follow me on Pinterest so that they can receive more content of a similar nature in their feeds!
Embed boards in relevant places
Just like with any other social media outlet, you want to include your link wherever you can without being too “in your face.” The same is true with Pinterest, but with their option to so easily embed interactive boards wherever there is a place that accepts HTML, you are given a unique way to showcase the type of pins you share on a daily basis, as well as highlight boards that might have a heavy concentration of your own pins. Want to see an example? Head on down to the bottom of this post to check out my Pinterest board full of blogging tips!
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Follow Hayley of A Beautiful Exchange Blog’s board Blogging on Pinterest.
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