Using Pinterest To Grow Your Blog Part Two

Driving Traffic To Your Blog

On Monday I spoke about how you can create a killer Pinterest profile which will attract your ideal audience. Today for part two of Using Pinterest to grow your blog I’m going to talk about how you can use Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog.

Before you can start to use Pinterest effectively you need to change the way you view the platform. Pinterest is not another social media platform or just somewhere to find recipes and pictures of puppies. Pinterest is a powerful search engine just like Google. Think of it as Google images on steroids. So like Google use have to use SEO techniques to drive traffic from Pinterest.

Stop thinking of Pinterest as Social Media Platform, Instead think of it as a Search Engine

Creating Pinterest Graphics

The first step to driving traffic to your blog from Pinterest is to create engaging pins. You should create a Pinterest graphic to go alongside every blog post. It’s these pins and graphics which will encourage your audience to click through to your blog.

You should be able to create Pinterest graphics in your photo editing software. One of the easiest ways is to add a transparent layer of colour and add text over an image from your blog post. If you want to get a little more creative and don’t have access to Photoshop, Canva is a great tool for creating graphics. They have so many pre-made designs for Pinterest which are all easy to edit to suit your style and brand. I would stick to the free options and play around until you find something which works for you.

The Perfect Pin

• Should be vertical – vertical pins appear larger and are more likely to stand out on the Pinterest feed
• Be on brand – try to create a consistent look and style to your pins. Colours and fonts should be on brands. You want people to recognise pins as part of your brand
• Easy to read text – Large easy to read text will tell people why they should click on your pin. The takeaway should be immediately obvious
• Link to your site – Having your link or site name on your pin shows straight away where it’s from and will help with brand recognition
• Keyword-rich descriptions – think about the terms people are searching when writing your pin descriptions
• Evergreen Content – try to create content which will be just as relevant in 3 months as it is today.

Once you have created a pin add it to your post. I like to hide my Pinterest graphics within my blog posts. Especially if the post is already picture heavy as the graphics are large images which can sometimes be difficult to fit into a post. To hide an image you just have to add the following code:

<div style=”display:none;”><img src=”IMAGE LINK”></div>

To make things easier for anyone pinning your image use the alt tag as your description. Remember to add a keyword rich description and a call to action, such as click through to read more. This is telling readers what you want them to do next.

Getting Your Pins Onto Pinterest

Once you have a blog post with a Pinterest graphic you have to now get that graphic onto Pinterest as a pin. The easiest way to do add the Pinterest extension to your browser. You will then have a little ‘P’ in the corner of your screen. You can press this to pin images from whatever site you are on.

To pin images from your own site go to your latest post and press the ‘P’. All of the images on the page will appear. Including any hidden images. Just pick which image you want to pin and choose which board to pin it to.

You should have a separate board for all your blog posts and pin everything to there first. However, this is often your least followed board so you need to re-pin images to your more popular boards. Remember to think of your boards like blog categories and re-pin images to the most relevant category.

Once you have pinned your graphics to your popular boards, your followers will then be able to see them on their feed. Hopefully, they will love your pins, click through to read and re-pin them. The more people who re-pin your images the better as this means more people will then see them.

It can take a while for pins to gain traction so don’t expect a big increase in traffic on the day you pin. However, the best thing about Pinterest is that unlike social media you pin remains active. People could be pinning your images for years which will continue to drive traffic back to your site.

*Part three of Using Pinterest to grow your blog will be up on Monday and we will be looking at how to use Pinterest Analytics.