December 26, 2019
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So you spend all this time researching and creating the most amazing blog post.
1 week later you check your Google Analytics and you see this...
Where is all of this traffic everyone raves about?
Is there any point in writing this stuff if nobody is reading it?
But getting a lot of traffic to your blog doesn't have to be this hard. There are some ways that are better at driving traffic than others. And one of them happens to be using Pinterest for bloggers.
This post will show you exactly how to use Pinterest for blogging to traffic to your website on tap.
There are 3 main sections:
Listen on Apple Podcasts/ Google Podcasts
Feel free to click the play button above which helps to explain this article...
This is part of the Pinterest podcast series:
Did you know Pinterest is pretty different from most forms of social media?
It sounds strange but hopefully, this will help explain why:
Basically... most social media platforms try to keep you on their own platform (if you're like me you've probably seen 3 hours disappear scrolling down Insta!)
However, Pinterest works differently.
The sole purpose of Pinterest is to help users find the content they are looking for and send them off to the best place (aka your blog!)
There's even a "search bar" at the top of Pinterest for people to look for something...
Funny enough, this is actually very similar to Google and you may know a thing or two about the beauty of getting ranked using SEO.
But... Google can be a tough beast to crack and can take months or sometimes years to rank for certain keywords.
And this is where Pinterest for bloggers comes into its own...
Pinterest does not care how old your blog is or how many people link to it. All it wants to do is send its users to the content that they are looking for!
So now it's your job to make sure you are providing the "pins" and content people are looking for on Pinterest.
So now you understand how Pinterest works a bit more.
But who is using Pinterest and why?
This may not seem relevant but it can impact a lot of decisions for your blog when you understand this a bit more.
Pinterest is still mainly used by women (around 80%) but 40% of new sign-ups are men.
As you can see in the infographic above most users are older than 25 and 50% of Pinterest users have children.
This means there are 4 categories that do very well on Pinterest:
If you have a blog that relates to any of these categories, it can really help to get more traffic from Pinterest.
Now I can almost hear your mind saying... "but I have a personal finance blog, that's not possible".
Well, amigo, there is no such thing as "not possible"! You could potentially write about:
Do you see how...
Just knowing what people on Pinterest are interested in can help you plan what to blog about
Last awesome tip...
Pinterest users LOVE "how to" posts and "listicles" (see examples above).
So shall we find out how to use Pinterest for blogging?
Step one is to make sure your Pinterest profile is set up in the best way to help you get your pins seen.
There are 4 sub-steps to getting this done...
If the goal is to get traffic from Pinterest to your blog, then this is a crucial step.
It's far better to use a Pinterest business account vs personal account.
There are a few reasons for this:
It's pretty straight forward to get this stage done but here are a couple of links that can help...
Step one for using Pinterest for bloggers is done!
So you may think this step is pretty straight forward.
But many people get this step wrong when using Pinterest for blogging!
First of all, many people suggest you use a picture of your face to help people relate to you as a person. Personally, I don't think you need to worry too much about this, but the profile picture is important!
As Pinterest is still mainly used by women it's a good idea to use a happy picture of yourself if you're a woman, or a couples picture if you're a man.
There are plenty of accounts that do great by using a logo. The important thing is that the picture is clear and easy to see on a mobile device.
Here are two examples of accounts I have...
You should also make sure your name includes some keywords that relate to your blog too!
Sneaky tip- type into the search bar and use the autosuggestion to find what people are already searching for!
Now we're really going to learn how to use Pinterest for business!
These next two steps can seem quite boring, but they are mighty important!
Make sure your bio includes some keywords that relate to your blog.
But avoid "keyword stuffing" (listing keywords).
Make sure you use full sentences to add in your keywords naturally.
For example...
You can also use a freebie offer in here, but it's certainly not necessary as your profile is not the main place that people will look at. They just want to see your pretty pins!
Remember the sneaky tip- type into the search bar and use the autosuggestion to find what people are already searching for to find keywords to use!
That sneaky tip already mentioned comes in super handy here.
You want at least 10-15 boards relating to your content.
Obviously the more niche your website, the better it will do at ranking for certain keywords in the long run. But that's a whole other decision for you when you choose your niche originally.
Once you have those boards set up, your aim is to get 50 good quality pins into these boards.
How do you find good quality pins?
Well, knowing a few "leaders" in your niche will certainly help.
You can find out about who some of these may be in this blog income report study that looks into 57 blogs in 7 different niches.
Here is your second sneaky tip...
These probably matter more than anything else you will learn on this page on how to use Pinterest for blogging.
They are crucial for your Pinterest SEO, which we will get onto later.
Just remember to make sure you are not "keyword stuffing" by listing a load of keywords. Write in full sentences and naturally place them in...
If you have already tried using Pinterest marketing before, then I would bet my bottom dollar this is where you are going wrong.
Why?
Because it's what I was doing wrong when I wasn't seeing any traffic from Pinterest!
Simply put, if people do not stop and look at your pins, you won't get any saves or anybody clicking on your pins.
That means no Pinterest traffic!
If you have ever used Pinterest before you probably know that some pins catch your eye.
Some pins stand out and make you want to find out more.
For example, if you type in "Pinterest for bloggers" on Pinterest, these are the results that come up...
You can see there is a clear design and colour scheme that people are using for this keyword. The idea is to make something that stands out from the crowd...
But some stand out in a bad way that makes you scroll right on past.
The difference is that the pins that stand out and make you want to click are "Pinterest pretty".
Typically that means the pins will have the following elements:
These are just generic Pinterest tips, but you will have to play around and use trial and error to figure out what works best.
If you're like me, you would like to know the easiest design tips to make the biggest positive impact on your pins.
Here are 5 killer tips, from a professional graphic designer, that will make your pins go from zero to hero quickly:
The good news is you don't need to be a professional graphic designer to understand the basics and make great pins.
Using the example above it's possible to make this pin "pop" and stand out even more in a "graphic design beautiful" way...
Typically this is where a lot of bloggers go wrong (myself included when I started using Pinterest!)
If your pins are not pretty enough or don't stand out, you will never make people click on your pins...
You can learn more detail about the best graphic design tips here.
There are so many tools that exist to help you design your pins.
I know people that use PicMonkey, PowerPoint, Snappa or Photoshop.
However, if you are new to graphic design the only tool you need is:
It's free, easy to use and you can create templates to save so much time.
Here is Kristin (the professional graphic designer on a previous podcast) to walk you through how you can use Canva to create pins...
There are different ways you can actually get your pins for your blog post on Pinterest.
You probably already know a few ways but there may be a sneaky time-saving way that you could learn here:
You can learn more about these ways in how to create a pin for Pinterest.
But here is a quick video to show you the amazing Tailwind Chrome extension method that can help you pin hundreds of pins in a few minutes.
It's a massive time saver!
If you really want to increase your traffic from Pinterest, then Tailwind can really help to automate and be more deliberate with your pinning strategy.
So this leads on nicely to...
So you're probably starting to wonder how you can get traffic to your blog from Pinterest.
This is often the part that most people get hung up on and think...
"Maybe there's some secret strategy that I'm not using?
And this person says they only pin manually and they get loads of traffic!
Ah, maybe I need to use Tailwind Tribes way more!!"
However, there is a reason why your pinning strategy is part 3...
It's probably the least important!
If your account is not set up correctly, or you are not designing beautiful pins, then nothing you do in this section will help.
STOP!
Now, re-read that last sentence.
Did you know there are 2 ways that people find content on Pinterest?
This is the most important "strategy" that you can use on Pinterest. Using Pinterest SEO means you can go from having a few people clicking on your pins to having tens of thousands of Pageviews every month.
The idea is very similar to Google SEO.
Your pins can "rank" near the top of a certain keyword search on Pinterest. Just like this...
Every time you pin something to Pinterest you can use "keywords" to help people find your content.
Here are the main places you need to make sure you have your keywords:
Pinterest's algorithms are becoming smarter all the time.
Just help them understand what your pin is about like this...
If you can make it clear to Pinterest what your pin is about and make them Pinterest pretty, then Pinterest will eventually reward you by placing your pins near the top of the search results.
And that means traffic every month... for free!
This is one of the most common questions.
The simple answer is as much as possible without spamming the same pins to the same boards.
The answer you are probably looking for is at least 15 pins a day.
Why 15?
Because Pinterest loves content!
More specifically, Pinterest loves NEW content.
If you are not putting pins out there with a new Pinterest account, you will find it hard to get anyone to see your pins.
It's especially important to pin good quality pins and content that is not your own at the beginning. Find the leaders in your niche and check out their accounts as a good place to start.
Rather than getting hung up on how many times to pin focus on only pinning great pins to relevant boards. If you only have 3 yoga boards then only pin a yoga pin to those boards.
Less is sometimes more!
Note I have spoken to some people who only pin a few times a day and still get traffic. But these accounts are much more established and have loads of pins "out there" already.
This is actually a pretty important one.
You can use data to help decide the best times to pin to Pinterest.
It's so much better to pin at times that people are actually on Pinterest. Typically that means do not pin during American working hours!
The most active time on Pinterest is from 8-11 pm in the USA, due to the most popular demographics of the users on Pinterest.
There are tools that you can use to find out when your audience is most engaged with your own pins.
This leads on nicely to...
There's really only one tool to recommend as a Pinterest scheduler any more:
Here are a few reasons why using Tailwind is so beneficial:
There are too many benefits of using Tailwind to get into them all right now. All you need to know is that if you'd rather not spend all of your time on Pinterest and grow your traffic, Tailwind will help you do that.
It really isn't better either way!
There has long been this debate but it has been proven that there really is no difference.
Some people swear by manual pinning.
Others don't understand why anyone wouldn't use a scheduler.
Here are the main differences though:
If you do manually pin, you will most likely need to create a spreadsheet with what pins you want to pin to what boards and tick it off as you go.
It is possible and some people love to have control of exactly what is being pinned and when.
However, I've personally tried it and it becomes super time consuming and confusing (especially when you live in another time zone!)
When you have numerous pins for each blog post it can become tricky to stay on top of it.
Using Tailwind means you can set up exactly what you want to be pinned at the exact time. The best thing is, you can be asleep or on a flight and your pins still go out at the best times.
Yes.
But not how they once did.
If you read anything about Pinterest from before 2019, chances are you would have heard the advice...
Get on as many group boards as possible and pin to them like crazy.
The truth is... this can actually hurt your account now.
However, if you have a brand new account and you want to reach more people quickly, then good group boards are crucial.
Here are a few tips to find these great group boards:
Find out more about this in the 5 Pinterest hacks.
Once you find them, it's worth trying to actually reach out to the person who owns these boards. Check out their website, comment, share and message them to see if you can help them in any way.
If you connect with them personally it's much easier and more effective to join their boards eventually.
Is this as easy to do?
No.
Is it worth it?
It depends on how seriously you take your blog!
Check out the short video below to check if you are on good group boards or if they may be harming your account...
So there you have it.
Everything you need to know on how to use Pinterest for blogging to drive traffic to your website for free!
If you've just skipped to the end to find the main points summarised, I won't disappoint you:
You can spend years down some rabbit hole looking for the perfect pinning tactic.
But if you focus on these 3 steps you will get more traffic to your blog than most people could dream of.
Be sure to pin this page so you can come back to it any time...
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