How-to-use-Pinterest-to-drive-traffic-to-your-blog

A few months back, I was just like you. I was eager to know how I can use Pinterest to drive traffic to my new blog.

So I did a quick google search on Google and BOOM. In 0.69 seconds, Google gave me about 578 000 000 results. 

So, I said to myself, ‘ok, let me read the results on page 1‘. After I completed page one, I saw myself browsing page 2 and even page 3. What I noticed is that some essential tips were similar in all those web pages.

I was so excited and decided to give Pinterest a try in the hope of getting massive traffic to my blog in a few weeks.

Boy, I was so wrong.

I finally understood that to become successful on the platform and build a long term sustainable Pinterest traffic, I would have to invest time.

Therefore, I tried it for a few months to see if it really works.

What I have found is that when you invest time on the platform, it definitely works. But you should apply the right strategy from the beginning to get the maximum out of your Pinterest account.

So, if you are new to blogging, Pinterest is the best option to drive traffic to your new blog.

Why Pinterest and not Google, you must be wondering!

We hear about SEO and how we should wait for 6-12 months to get a fair amount of traffic from Google. 

Let me ask you a simple question.

Can you wait for 6-12 months to get traffic to your website?

I am sure you can’t. Right?

For me, Twitter and Pinterest are working just fine. So I am focusing on these two platforms for the time being.

Let me share what I had learned when I tried Pinterest so that you can use it to drive more traffic to your blog.

I don’t want you to make the same mistakes I made previously. If you want to have the upper hand with your Pinterest traffic, I will suggest you go through the below article.

Related:

Let’s get started!

1. Update Your Pinterest Profile

You will need to optimize your profile if you want to grow your visibility on Pinterest.

When people are searching for keywords, they will find your profile in their search results. To appear on their search results, you must include one or two keywords in your description.

Let me give you an example:

2. Convert Your Account Into A Business Account And Claim It

It seems that personal and business profile on Pinterest have different terms of services. Commercial use of Pinterest is only allowed to Business profiles. So, you will need to convert your personal account into a business account.

By converting your account, you will have the following benefits:

  • You will be able to use Rich pins.
  • You will be able to promote your pins.
  • You will have access to Pinterest analytics.

Also, you will need to claim your website with Pinterest. When you are new to Pinterest marketing, you will have to claim your website with Pinterest asap. It’s the only way to verify the authenticity of your account.

Head over to the article below to convert and claim your account.

Step by step guide to convert and claim your account with Pinterest.

Now that you have claimed and converted your account, the next step is to follow some people who are interested in your niche.

3. Follow People Who Are Interested In Your Niche

The best way to reach people interested in your niche is to go to your competitor’s profile and start to follow their followers. This is because you and your competitors will have a similar audience.

Once these people are starting to follow you and your followers start to increase, Pinterest will begin to understand your profile better.

This will result in your pins and profile to start to appear on search results.

Please note that the number of followers doesn’t directly affect the amount of traffic to your website. 

If you want to connect with people who have shared your content previously, then you can put the below line into your browser and replace your domain in the end.

https://www.pinterest.com/source/yourdomain

After you have followed them, you can send a message and asking them to follow you back.

For example: ‘Hello. Hope you are fine. This is Girish from ViableBlog. I just added you to my network and followed you. Requesting you to follow back and connect further. Thank you’.

Tip: Do give it a try because usually, people who interacted with your pins are more likely to follow you.

4. Follow Relevant Group Boards

If you want to grow fast with Pinterest, you must follow group boards. In a nutshell, a group board is a Pinterest board where more than one person can pin. 

The best thing with the group board is that every pinner in the board will add their own followers to the total number of the board’s following. Every time you pin to the board, you will have a massive audience who can potentially engage with your pins.

How Can You Find Out Which Board To Follow?

Finding group boards is relatively easy. You can head over to PinGroupie to help you with that.

Enter your niche, and you will be given a list of all boards related to that niche. Since this blog is about blogging, I will use the term ‘blogging.’

I enter blogging in the search tab, and in extras, I will select the ‘request to join button,‘ and I will select the order by ‘followers.’ It will automatically give me a list of boards that I can follow.

Click on any one of them, and you will get this screen.

Click on ‘visit the board on Pinterest‘ where you can request to join the board.

Simple and easy. Now you can wait a few hours till you get accepted on the boards you have requested.

Speaking of boards, you will need to have your own personal brand board.

5.Create Your Brand Board

A brand board is your anchor board that only contains pins from your website. Your brand board should have a good description, and it should contain at least one keyword.

For example, mine is ‘Best of Viable Blog.’ You can put your best-performing pins on this board. It will help people to find your best content. 

Please don’t forget that this board should be the first one people see when they go to your profile. So, an easy way to do this is by using Pinterest’s drag-and-drop feature.

Related article: How to name your Pinterest boards to get more clicks

6. Create Multiple Boards And Add Keywords To Them

Do you create new boards for your profile? If your answer is no, then what are you waiting for?

I will suggest that you create 10 boards first. Try to fill them with your pins and pins from other related profiles. The general rule when you are just getting started is to use the 80/20 rule.

If you are not familiar with the 80/20 rule, then let me give you a short description.

According to Pareto’s Principle: 80 % of results come from 20 % of the effort.

So, when you are adding pins to your boards, add 20% of your pins and 80% of pins from other accounts. Please pin content that is only related to your niche. This way, you can let Pinterest know what your account is all about, which will help you get more exposure for your pins.

Once you have filled all your boards with relevant pins, you can now shift to 80 % of your own pins and 20 % of pins from other people.

Now that you have created your boards and filled them with pins, let see how you can find keywords that you can use for your board’s description.

How To Find Keywords For Your Boards

There is a simple yet effective method. Go to your Pinterest profile and enter a keyword in the search tab.

As you can see, Pinterest gives me a list of keywords I can choose from. A general rule for these keywords is that the keywords on the left have more search volumes than those on the right.

Example: Blogging for beginners( Left) has much more search volume than Blogging Travel (Right).

If your niche is blogging, these are the keywords that you can use:

Usually, these keywords have high search volumes ( I will show you the search volumes next). Given the massive number of search volumes for those keywords, blog posts with these keywords will do well on Pinterest. 

Now, if you want to know the number of monthly searches for some of those keywords, head over to Pinterest ads and do a keyword search.

As you can see, if I use the term blogging, there are more than 5 million monthly searches for the below keywords:

  • Blogging tips
  • Blog ideas
  • Making a blog
  • How to blog
  • How to start blogging

Pro Tip: You can try to create 1 or 2 blog posts with these keywords and see how well it performs on Pinterest.

7. Apply For Rich Pins

Rich pins are special pins that include extra information on the pin itself. 

There are 6 kinds of Rich pins that Pinterest offers:

  • Product pins
  • Recipe pins
  • Movie pins
  • Article pins
  • Place pins
  • App pins

You will need to use article rich pins because it is optimized for your blog posts. When the Rich pin is set up, Pinterest will be able to pull dates from your website via Open Graph and Schema.org formats for marking up.

If you have the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, it will be easy for you.

You can learn how to set up Rich pins here.

8. Find Your Top Performing Pins And Boards

Tracking your performance is very important if you want to drive massive traffic to your website. You will have to know which pins are performing well and create similar pins to reach more people.

Pinterest analytics will give you all the details you need to find your best-performing pins and boards.

So let’s head over to Pinterest analytics and analyze the information.

By default, you can see that Pinterest gives you data from the last 30 days. The screenshot shows which pins are receiving the most clicks.

My top performing pin has 75 link clicks, which implies that I must create similar pins with slight variation in wording and colors.

So next time I when I will create a new pin, I will pay attention to the following points:

  • Colors and design of the pin
  • Text overlay content
  • Photos and graphics used.
  • Call to action used

I will take these key points into consideration because these are the pins that people are liking on Pinterest. This is the best way to maximize your number of clicks.

Pro Tip: Try using different pin sizes to see which one is working best for you.

Now, let’s have a look at the top-performing boards.

As you can see my top 3 boards are Group boards. These 3 boards are all generating around 80 clicks per month.

Therefore, when you publish new pins, make sure to prioritize these boards. 

Whenever you are creating a new blog post, make sure you pin it on your top-performing boards first. Of course, your content has to be relevant to the board’s title and description.

9. Use Engaging And Catchy Images For Your Pins

Pinterest is all about visuals. So your pins should be able to stand out from all those pins out there. 

Pinterest loves new fresh pins. I know that you won’t be able to publish a new blog post everyday. Even I can’t do that. So how can you stay active on Pinterest and maximize your efforts?

The answer is simple: Create 2-3 pins for every blog post.

I use Canva for all my pins. It just takes 2-3 minutes to design a new pin. As mentioned above, once you know which pins are performing better, all you have to do is create pins for all your blog posts with the same design.

So how can you do that without getting overwhelmed?

The trick is that you have to create and use pin templates in batches.

If you haven’t already created templates for your blog post, I will highly recommend that you create around 5-10 templates for your pins.

Whenever you have to create a new pin, you will have a ready-made template, and all you have to do is change the color, wordings, and picture for each new pin.

Here are some templates that I have created for this blog.

Create your free Canva account here

10. Pin Regularly And Pin A Lot

When you are just starting out, it’s quite evident that you should pin a lot. But how much should you pin?

To get the best results, you should pin anywhere between 5-20 pins per day. 

The best way is to save pins at suitable intervals to the most relevant boards in your account. This way, you will have maximum exposure, and your audience will be able to see your pins when they login to the platform.

The best way to do schedule pinning is by using a Pinterest scheduler such as Tailwind.

If you are not familiar with Tailwind, it’s a tool that will allow you to schedule your pins and analyze your board performance on Pinterest.

The great thing about Tailwind is that it analyzes the performance of your pins and will suggest optimal times to pin.

As you can clearly see, Tailwind is telling me that some of the optimum times when my audiences are on Pinterest are:12.12 a.m, 1.07 am,11.00 pm.

Logically I cannot add new pins at these optimum times. This is where Tailwind is helping me.

When you are scheduling with Tailwind you can set the minimum time between each pin using the interval feature. Usually, it’s best to wait for 2 days before you can pin the same link to another board. You can do this manually if you want to. But if you don’t have time, Tailwind will automate that for you.

Another cool feature I love about Tailwind is the “Shuffle Queue” button. It actually saves me a lot of time. I don’t have to spend time moving pins in my schedule so that my pinning sequence looks natural.

If you don’t have Tailwind, you can sign up to schedule 100 pins for free. You can get started for free, and you don’t need to provide any credit card information.

The best way to get the most out of your Pinterest account is by using a combination of both a scheduling tool and manual pinning.

If ever you don’t have money to invest in a Scheduling tool, then you can add your pins manually.

Remember, it’s not absolutely necessary to use a paid tool. The most important thing is to add pins to your boards daily.

I have a detailed post on the Manual pinning strategy to help you if you are interested in adding your pins manually.

Related article: Manual pinning strategy for more traffic.

Final Thoughts: How To Use Pinterest To Drive An Avalanche Of Traffic To Your Blog

So here we are. These Pinterest tips will help you grow your blog traffic when you are new to blogging.

To be able to achieve success, you must work smartly by using your time effectively. I am always trying to find out ways to make my workflow more effective to get maximum traffic for my blog.

Speaking of blog traffic, these free resources will help you get the most out of your new blog.

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