15 Best Pinterest Tips For Bloggers
BONUS MATERIAL: 50 Of The Best Pinterest Tips To Help You Grow On Pinterest
This blog post is for any blogger or small business who wants to achieve organic traffic from Pinterest.
Introduction
Pinterest can be an incredible platform to use to drive organic traffic to your small business.
But like any other platform in the online space, in order to maximise your results on Pinterest, you have to understand great and current Pinterest strategy.
Many Pinterest users are inside the platform pinning pins to pinterest boards to achieve organic blog traffic.
Whilst this blog post offers the 15 Best Pinterest Tips For Bloggers, these tips can also apply no matter where you want to drive your Pinterest traffic to.
15 BEST PINTEREST TIPS FOR BLOGGERS
1. Create A Pinterest Business Account
It goes without saying that you should have a Pinterest Business Account, not a personal one.
It’s easy to convert a personal account to a business one in your account settings area inside Pinterest.
Having a Business Account gives you access to a wide range of metrics that you can use to identify which of your pins are driving the most traffic to your blog posts, so that you can;
a. pin more of those pins (as fresh pins – you should not be re-pinning the same pin designs).
b. so that you can write more blog posts about the topics of your top performing pins for outbound clicks.
2. Optimize Your Profile
Pinterest by it’s nature is a keyword optimised platform.
This means that you need to ensure your Pinterest account is keyword optimized right the way through.
That includes having relevant keywords in your pinterest profile, having keyword optimized boards, and having keyword optimised pinterest pins, pin titles and pin descriptions that lead to connected keyword blog posts.
When you take time to keyword optimise your Pinterest account, Pinterest is then able to crawl your account/board/pins/blog posts, and start to learn what you’re pinning about.
Pinterest can then put your pins in front of the right people in Pinterest’s search results that show up in the Pinterest feed, when people are inside the platform searching for the keywords you’re using on your account.
This is a hugely important part of your Pinterest strategy, so that you can get your pins in front of your target audience, to help drive volume traffic to your blog.
The Pinterest algorithm exists to crawl everything you do on Pinterest, to help put your content in front of the right people.
So one of the first things you should do with your Pinterest strategy, is to be in the platform doing research to find keywords relevant to your niche, and the searches people are making in Pinterest.
You can then create content on your blog that matches the needs of those audience searches. This should be a fundamental part of your Pinterest marketing strategy.
The power of Pinterest to drive organic traffic to your blog can be incredible when you use Pinterest the right way, with good, up to date Pinterest strategy.
3. Design Eye Catching Pins
Pinterest is like a visual version of Google.
As a result it’s important to make sure you’re creating eye-catching Pinterest pins, to help you stand out in Pinterest’s home feed.
Using the right size Pin is important. I see way too many pins that are cut off top and/or bottom. I see pins that are far too small. I see pins that have no text overlay to encourage click throughs.
Your Pinterest pins should be a ratio of 2:3 and I normally use the size 1000 pixels wide by 1500 pixels in length. All of my pins are created in Canva.
You can use platforms like Canva or PicMonkey to create great looking Pinterest pins.
I would highly recommend that no matter what niche you’re in, you always add some keyword optimised text overlays to your pin images, to let people know what the pin is about.
This can encourage people to click through to the actual pin.
Each of the pinnable images you see in this blog post are examples of keyword optimised pinterest pins that are perfect for pinning on Pinterest. They have all been designed in Canva.
4. Use Pinterest SEO
I’ve already mentioned how important good Pinterest SEO is by way of the keywords you use throughout your account and for all your Pinterest strategy.
Finding Pinterest-friendly keywords that are suitable for your niche, is vitally important to your Pinterest success.
I spend a significant amount of time inside Pinterest, always searching for longer-tail keywords that I can use for blog posts that I can then pin to Pinterest.
It’s also important to consider using longer-tail keywords that are more niche, rather than using shorter more generic keywords. Your pins will have more chance of being found with more targeted longer-tail keywords.
For example, I could have called this blog post “Pinterest Tips”, because that’s a keyword on Pinterest.
However, it’s more likely that keyword has much greater competition than if I niche down a little.
So I could have created a blog post with a longer-tail keyword around any of these titles:
- Pinterest Tips For Business.
- Pinterest Tips For Beginners.
- Pinterest Tips For Bloggers.
Each of these are longer-tail keywords inside Pinterest, and indeed I’ll likely create a blog post for EACH of these longer-tail keywords – including this post which is more geared towards bloggers.
I do research like this all the time inside Pinterest, and I keep a spreadsheet of all the longer-tail keywords I find, so that I can then decide whether they will be blog worthy posts.
Here are a few more long-tail keywords that I have found in Pinterest:
- Pinterest Traffic Tips For Bloggers.
- Pinterest Marketing Tips For Bloggers.
- How To Use Pinterest For Business Tips.
All of these will go on my spreadsheet, and I will consider whether they will at some point become individual blog posts.
I think that it’s really important to start your blogging journey with keywords from Pinterest, rather than thinking about a subject, writing about that subject, and then hoping people are searching for that subject in Pinterest.
This was a mistake I made early on in my blogging journey.
These days, I start with Pinterest keyword research – and then I create blogs around the subjects I know people are inside Pinterest’s platform searching for.
5. Pin Consistently
Pinterest, like any other platform in the online space, wants you to be in the platform consistently.
This is a really important part of your strategy, especially if you have a younger Pinterest account and you’re just starting out on the platform.
You should be pinning fresh pins to your blog posts no less than every 5-10 days. That means if I pin a pin on Pinterest for this blog post today, I will not put another fresh pin out (fresh pin is a new pin design – never the same pin already pinned), at some point after 5-10 days. I will never pin to the same url (blog post) less than 5 days before I previously pinned to that same url.
I have a Google spreadsheet with a list of all my blog posts on it.
On that spreadsheet I keep a note of the date I put a fresh pin out to each blog post.
I make sure the next fresh pin goes out some time after 5-10 days, never less than that.
Because I have a good number of blogs, I simply work my way down my spreadsheet list of blog posts, putting a fresh pin out for each, based at the moment on pinning two fresh pins a day.
That means each day I put out one fresh pin for two blog posts, then the next day I move on to the next two blog posts and do the same.
By the time I’ve got all the way through my spreadsheet, at least 10 days have passed and I can start from the top of the spreadsheet and work my way through it again.
6. Use Fresh Pins Every Time
As already mentioned, you should not pin the exact same pin more than once.
Every pin you put out on Pinterest should be a fresh pin with a fresh pin design.
Pinterest favours fresh pins.
This didn’t used to be the case, and pinners would use platforms like Tailwind to schedule the same pin to roll out time and time again.
However, Pinterest (at the time of writing this blog post), has changed its strategy, and it now likes fresh pins with a new pin design.
Be mindful of doing this as it can help to get you best results on the platform.
Churning out the same pin design over and over could be seen as spammy by Pinterest. It’s best to avoid this.
7. Create And Organise Boards
Your Pinterest pins should be organised properly, so that you are pinning those pins to keyword relevant boards.
For example, I have the following five boards on my Pinterest account:
- Small Business Success
- Pinterest Tips And Tricks
- Etsy Success Tips For Small Businesses
- Canva Tips And Tricks
- Mailing List Ideas For Small Businesses
I would not send this particular blog post live, name it “15 Best Pinterest Tips For Bloggers” and then create a Pinterest pin that I post to any of my boards other than my Pinterest Tips and Tricks Board.
Pinterest needs to be able to make the connection between my pins and the board they go on.
The very fact that the word “Pinterest” appears both on the pins I create for this blog, and on my Pinterest Tips and Tricks Board, enables Pinterest to make the connection, learn what the pin is about, and start to show it in the Pinterest feed to people who are searching for Pinterest tips.
Organise your pins so that they appear on keyword optimised boards, that are relevant to the pins you are posting.
8. Collaborate With Group Boards
Once upon a time Pinterest Group Boards had their hey-day, and then they seemed to die a silent death.
However, at the time of writing this blog, Group Boards are having somewhat of a revival.
If you can find good group boards to join and pin to – you should test this.
- Make sure the group boards you join are topic relevant to your niche.
- Make sure the group boards are active (not dead).
- Make sure that the groups boards have a higher level of monthly impressions than your own Pinterest Account.
I’d also add that it’s a good idea to make sure there are a good number of group members in those group boards so that the board is active with regular pins being added.
Group boards, when you join the right ones, can be a great place to increase organic traffic to your pins.
9. Engage With Your Audience In Comments
Not a lot of Pinterest experts talk about this, or give any indication that this is an important part of your strategy, but I’ll say it, and it’s true.
Pinterest LIKES comments on your account AND they like followers on your account.
Pinterest sees this as an indication that your account is of interest – and that can help with your growth and visibility on the platform.
Likewise, if people leave comments on your pins – trust me – Pinterest is noting that.
Make any comments you do receive work for you with your strategy by commenting back. It can all help with the health of your Pinterest account.
10. Analyse Pinterest Analytics
Use Pinterest analytics to track the performance of your pins. There are plenty of metrics available to you with a Pinterest Business Account, including:-
– Impressions (the number of times your pins were on screen).
– Engagements (the total number of engagements with your pins including clicks and saves).
– Outbound clicks (the number of clicks to the url attached to your pin).
– Saves (the number of times your pins were saved to a board).
– Total audience (the total number of pinners who have seen or engaged with your pins).
– Engaged audience (the number of pinners who engaged with your pins).
– Followers (how many people are following your Pinterest account).
Your most important metrics are:
- Outbound clicks – so that you can see how much traffic is reaching your blog posts from Pinterest.
- Saves – because anyone saving your pins means that pin is then represented more in Pinterest’s home feed, and that that account’s followers may see the pin too.
- Followers – because as already mentioned, Pinterest counts these as a reflection of the popularity of your account.
Use your Pinterest metrics to identify which pins and blog post subjects you need to create more of – to keep giving people on Pinterest what it is that they’re indicating they already like, want and need.
11. Promote Your Blog Content
Whilst Pinterest is a brilliant platform to drive organic traffic to your blog, you should not put all your eggs in one basket and rely on Pinterest alone.
You need to consider different ways to promote your blog content outside of Pinterest.
This should include making sure that whenever you send a blog live, as well as pinning about it on Pinterest, you share information about the blog post on your social networks, you share information about your blog to your mailing list, you make sure your blog is indexed on Google, and share information about your blog anywhere else that makes sense.
This is especially important if you have ad revenue on your blog, becsause the more traffic you can send to each blog post, the more ad revenue you’ll earn.
12. Create Compelling Call-To-Action Pins
With all the pins you post on Pinterest, you should have a Call To Action somewhere in that pin.
Sometimes you might do this on the actual pin design itself, but for sure inside the pin description you should have a call to action to encourage people to take the next step, and click through your pin to read your blog post.
People need to be told what to do, because often they will not make decisions for themselves without a prompt.
13. Stay Updated With Pinterest Trends
You should stay up to date with Pinterest Trends, to see what different types of content are popular on the platform.
Pinterest is very good at giving you more information in your metrics, and under your pins showing you other relevant content and other content that is working on Pinterest.
You can also go to https://trends.pinterest.com/ to hear direct from the horse’s mouth what’s popular/trending on Pinterest.
14. Monitor Pinterest’s Policies And Best Practices
It’s essential to stay up to date with good Pinterest strategy.
I share up to date Pinterest tips inside my 40k Community.
Pinterest, like any platform is always changing.
You need to stay abreast of the changes, or get left behind.
I spend many, many hours staying on top of latest strategy that Pinterest likes, and I feed that information to ladies inside my 40k Club.
As a result, their Pinterest accounts continue to grow, and they get organic traffic to their small businesses through Pinterest.
Your account on Pinterest can be marked down for visibility if you break good Pinterest strategy.
Having pins with broken urls, having lots of the same pin design going to the same url can both be seen as spammy.
Keyword dumping anywhere in your Pinterest account can also be seen as spammy.
Not spending enough time in Pinterest pinning with good strategy, can impact your account growth.
15. Drive Traffic To Pinterest From Outside
In the same way you should be driving traffic to your blog posts from anywhere you can, I would also recommend you give people the option to follow you on Pinterest anywhere you can.
Followers on Pinterest are good.
Promote your Pinterest account on all your social media channels through the links you have available.
Make sure you have your Pinterest account access available on your website or in your ecommerce store.
Have your Pinterest account accessible in the emails you send out, use QR codes on your product stationery, and on banners online (on your Etsy store for example), to encourage people to come and join you over on your Pinterest account.
Conclusion
There has never been a better time to make sure your Pinterest to blog strategy is on point.
At the time of writing this post, many bloggers have seen monumental drops in their blog traffic from Google, following Google’s healthy content update in 2023.
Bloggers have seen their entire businesses impacted, because they relied almost solely on Google for traffic.
Many of those bloggers are now bringing Pinterest back in to their strategy, to continue to drive organic traffic to their blogs.
Pinterest can work exceptionally well for you if you use the right strategy, stay up to date with platform changes, have a keyword optimised account, and stay consistent with your pinning strategy.
BONUS MATERIAL: 50 OF THE BEST PINTEREST TIPS FOR ORGANIC TRAFFIC
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