How Pinterest Became My Blogs Top Referrer

For the second month in a row, Pinterest is one of my blogs top traffic sources (slightly because of this post.) Second to people typing in my domain and before BlogLovin, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram! I've always heard how major Pinterest is for bloggers but it wasn't until I began to see the results that I started to really believe it.

At the beginning of this year I spent some time planning out my social media and figuring out different ways to gain more followers and get traffic back to this site. So what did I do differently with Pinterest so that it now brings in the majority of my blogs traffic?

1. Created large vertical pictures with the blog post title on them (like the one above). I've always been pretty good at adding a graphic to each of my blog posts but I would often created horizontal graphics instead of vertical ones. If you scan through your Pinterest feed, I'm sure you will notice that larger vertical photos tend to stand out a lot more!

2. Updated old blog posts with new images and pinned them. Don't sleep on your old content! I wen't back through and updated old blog posts with fresher content, a new image and pinned them like crazy! Surprisingly a few of them led to some good traffic!

3. Created specific boards according to my sites content or relevant content. Because I talk a lot about business and blogging over here it was only right that I create a board for each. I also have a social media, branding and web design/fonts board. All things that show up on this board from time to time. Every time I write a new post, I make sure I pin the image to the specific boards. Some posts I'm even able to pin to multiple boards. Like this post can be pinned to both my social media board and my blogging board.

4. Properly named photos. This is probably more of an SEO thing but I've noticed naming my photos according to the specific post has helped a ton on Pinterest as well. For example, if I write a post about 5 Amazing Design Blogs i'll name my picture five-amazing-design-blogs-the-alisha-nicole. I also make sure my caption on my pins is the blog title plus the name of my blog.

5. I pinned obsessively. No lie, I'm on Pinterest A LOT. But so are my followers, so in order to make sure they are seeing my content, I pin multiple times per day. (It helps a ton to know around the times your audience are normally online)

I cant stress enough how important it is to utilize Pinterest for both your blog and business! And like any other social network, it's not always all about you! So make sure you are pinning posts from other bloggers and re-pinning content that you think your followers would love!

HOW DO YOU USE PINTEREST FOR YOUR BLOG?