What is Pinterest?
Introduction To Pinterest Traffic Secrets
If you are not using Social media to promote your blog these days, then you are losing a lot. For the past few years, online users have been using more social media of all kinds.
Recently social media sites like Pinterest, it has been transformed almost entirely into a visual format.
Gone are the times when social media was only text-based. Now, it’s all about visual stimulation and engagement through engaging pictures and videos. Pinterest is one of the best sites for growing your traffic through beautiful images.
What Is Pinterest For?
With Pinterest, you can share photos and other media by “pinning” them to Pinterest boards. (More about this later)
According to SimilarWeb.com, Pinterest is currently 27th within us and 23thin the world in terms of traffic volume. Pinterest gets an incredible amount of traffic and there are really a lot of people who just love this site.
As of 2021, Pinterest users are 2.5 more than Twitter! where Pinterest has approximately 459 million active users and Twitter has only 187 million.
240 billion pins have been saved by users since Pinterest started.
In this guide, you’re getting to find out how to get the best out of this social media powerhouse, and the proper way to use it effectively as a marketing tool. Thus only you can explode your blog traffic.
So let’s dive in.
Quick & Easy Setup
Just like setting up new websites can be confusing and time-consuming for anyone, at first it can take you a bit of time to get used to Pinterest. Unless you’ve been using Pinterest for a short time; you will surely need some help before getting started.
Even if you’ve got been using Pinterest for a short time, it could be possible that there are some
features that you haven’t used or don’t even know exist. The latter could really boost your efforts considerably!
Before you start, I will help you familiarize yourself with the Pinterest interface so that you know exactly what to do so as to perform the essential functions related to managing your Pinterest account fast.
First, let’s have a look at some of the most important menus when you go personal Pinterest profile after sign-up:
This menu contains several options:
• Your Pins – This will take you directly to a page that shows you everything you’ve got
already pinned.
• Your Boards – This, as the name states will take you to a page that shows you all of the boards
you have created.
• Add Pin – this function allows you to upload a unique pin from your computer.
• Settings – Getting to familiarize yourself with this page is a very good idea, because this is often
where you can update and make changes to your profile!
• Help Center – Contact the Pinterest help center if you’ve got questions or need some kind of help.
• Log Out – To sign off on your Pinterest account.
Alternatively for Business accounts, you will have tabs such as :
*Create-To create pins, ads, and story pins.
*Analytics-To view audience, video, and conversion insights as well as Pinterest trends
*Ads-Everything relayed to ads
Creating an Optimized Profile
The first thing that you really need to focus on is creating an outstanding Pinterest profile page. This page should be able to grab the attention of your target audience and bring them to your profile.
It also helps keep them engaged with your high-quality and information about yourself and your business.
If you’ve got a Facebook profile, you need to connect it to your Pinterest account here as well for an additional boost. When you do this, your pins will automatically be shared on your connected account.
This automatic sharing on Facebook may be a huge part of what made Pinterest such an overnight success.
About 75% of Pinterest prefer to integrate at least one other social platform, which greatly increases the visibility of their pins.
The About Section
The “About” section is really an important part of your profile. It should contain a paragraph or two about you and your company. You should also ensure that you include basic information like your website or blog URLs and a few keywords for Pinterest SEO optimization.
Adding Value to your Profile
It’s a really important thing to include a photo of yourself on your Pinterest profile rather than a logo or other image. If you don’t want to put your photo on your profile or if you’re employing a pseudonym, you can find a really realistic-looking stock photo.
Alternately, you can use an image of a very close-up feature of yourself, for example, an eye fixed or your lips. This will make it look more personal and human.
Also always try to incorporate other important URLs on your profile like Facebook, Twitter, or any other relevant URLs.
Social Connect
As explained earlier, it is really important to connect your Pinterest account to Facebook, Etsy, Instagram, and Youtube accounts. This will allow Pinterest to automatically post to those sites.
In order to connect your Pinterest account to your Facebook account easily; simply navigate to your Settings page. Then Under Login options, toggle the switch next to Facebook. When prompted, allow Pinterest to access your account.
Click Done
Note that you can only link a personal Facebook profile to a Pinterest account and not a Facebook business page.
Then click the “Save Profile” button.
Unfortunately, Pinterest doesn’t allow Syncing Twitter as a Social Network as of June 2018. Thus you can no longer sync new profiles to share to Twitter while scheduling with tools like Tailwind For example.
If you already synced your Twitter before June 2018, the functionality will still work for you!
Sending your pins to other social networks is a great and easy way to sprinkle a touch of you or your brand and thus increase your reach across your audiences!; while using cross-promoting strategies on social media.
Pinning Content
There are three main ways to pin content to your boards:
- you can upload a picture directly from your computer.
- or alternatively, you can use the “Pin it” button to save high-quality images online.
- you can as well re-pin content people have pinned.
Uploading a picture or Pinning from a URL
In order to upload a picture from your computer, you will have to first click on the “Add Pin” link
from the dropdown box at the highest right.
Then all you have to do is to choose from upload from your disk drive or otherwise click “Choose File” and choose the image. To find an image on an internet page, enter the page’s URL and click on “Find images”.
Pinning with a Browser Add-On
You can also pin any content that you want, directly by using a browser add-on. For instance, there is a Google Chrome extension that will allow you to pin content by putting a Pin It” button in your bookmarks bar at the top of the page just under the URL window.
If you put in the add-on, all you’ve got to do when you visit any website;is to click the “Pin It”
button in your bookmarks bar. This will offer you a choice of images that you can then selectively pin.
Images can also be easily pinned directly by hovering over an image and clicking the “Pin it” button which appears on the top left corner of the image.
Re-Pinning Content
In Blogging, it is really important that you build a community and collaborate with each other.. Even the most popular bloggers never hesitate 1 min to collaborate with other bloggers.
This is a proven and effective strategy.
Similarly, Pinterest will love you if you share other people’s content as well. You can, for example,
post 80% of your own content, and repin 20% of other pinner’s content. Never forget to make sure that
the pins you’re repinning are relevant to the board you’re saving it to.
Whenever you find some pins that you are interested in and that you’d like to share with your audience;
you can re-pin it to your own board to increase user engagement.
How To Drive Traffic To Your Blog From Pinterest
SEO Strategies
Here are some important things to stay in mind as you pin items:
- You need to create ‘fresh’ pins always.’ Fresh’ here means a pin with a brand new background image. This image should not have been used before and should be unused in Pinterest databases. The New Pinterest algorithm wants pinners to provide unique content to increase their user experience.
- This could be one of the most important aspects of your Pinterest marketing strategy. You need to avoid free photo stock websites as these have been used a lot by other pioneers and online marketers.
- A good idea is to use a great tool like Canva to create high-quality (optimal image size of 1000×1500 )pins. Also, avoid using their free photos like these as well have been used a gazillion times by other users.
- You can easily create a couple of pins for a blog post within mins by changing the fonts, graphics, and colors that Canva provides. In total Canva provides 75+million photos, videos, and audio content.
- Activity on Pinterest peaks around 2-4 pM and again from 8 pm-1 AM Eastern time. Always plan most of your pinning for those time periods so as to get a maximum number of people to view your content.
- Avoid pinning content when people are at work. You can use a tool like Tailwind to schedule your pins as manual pinning could demand a lot of work and engagement.
- You can schedule multiple pins in advance to multiple boards with Tailwind; with additional peace of mind as it is Pinterest’s official partner.
If you are serious about blogging and increasing your blog traffic, then always optimize all your Pinterest Board covers with a beautiful relevant image .need to optimize its description as well by adding relevant keyword-rich text.
This will also help and motivate your audience to find out a bit more about your business.
Keyword optimizes your pin description as part of your Pinterest SEO strategy.
You will need to find relevant keywords by typing a keyword on the Pinterest search bar and looking for associated keywords just like LSI-related keywords on Google when you type in Google’s search bar. Include a couple of these keywords in your pin description
You can ideally use 4 hashtags to increase your SEO strategies as hashtags help your pins to perform better on Pinterest by improving their visibility.
Engage for max Traffic
There are some ways that you can use to engage your audience and enhance your Pinterest marketing strategy. This contributes to making this relationship personal which in turn will increase the level of trust they have in you considerably.
The following are a number of ways you can use to keep your followers engaged and thus boost your traffic and sales.
Contests
There are many sorts of contests you can hold to extend to gain even more loyal followers and boost up your traffic. For instance, you can hold an easy-to-enter contest for the most repins of your content.
Your contests must be visually appealing,mobile-friendly, and easy to enter as stated above.
Additionally, your sweepstakes should be prize-appealing. Your prize could be a guest blog post, a gift card, or an Ebook for example. The prize should of course connect with the tour audience.
Your ultimate goal is to get your pins seen by as many people as possible, get the most possible entrants, and thus more followers.
So focus your contest rules on getting people to assist you to achieve that.
Commenting on your Own Pins
Interaction is really important on social sites like Pinterest. When somebody comments on your pins, always reply back and engage the conversation. Once they see you as a real person, they will re-pin your content more often and respond better to your pins as their confidence and trust in you will increase
Cross Promoting on Facebook and Twitter
Unless you connect your Pinterest account directly up to your Facebook and have your pins shared automatically on that platform; you can still cross-promote effectively on several social media platforms.
You just need to make sure to share your most relevant pins to your Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and any other social media accounts that you want, to have max exposure.
Follow Relevant Users
Another good way to have maximum exposure for your pins, as well as more followers, is to follow people who are in the same ‘niche’ as you. Look for people who have similar content as yours.
Don’t worry about the “competition” factor as it is not really that difficult to get a ‘piece of the pie’ as well.
For example, if you’re within the Blogging niche; Follow reputed bloggers with a big number of followers. Not only they might re-pin your content if it’s worth it and you are repinning their content regularly but also if you comment on their pins, this will create engagement and eventually drive more traffic to your blog post.
Post Pins to Blogs, Forums, Newsletters, Etc.
Make sure to post links to your pins to important places like relevant blogs (in the comments and on your own blog), Facebook groups, relevant forums, email newsletters, as your email signature, and other locations.
Use Video for More Exposure
YouTube is an extremely effective traffic source nowadays, so you need to absolutely use this medium to get more views to your pins. All you have to do is to create and post a video relevant to your pin and place your pin Url within the description of your video. This will drive traffic to your blog rapidly.
Another way is to post your pin Url in the comments section of other relevant videos in your niche that have a big number of views. However, always make sure you bring value and not just spam your links all over Youtube
Ask for Re-pins on Important Pins
You will get re-pin without asking, but a great strategy is to ask people to repin your content once you post something really important. You’ll be surprised at the positive results, especially if you’ve engaged with your followers before asking.
Just remember not to use this technique for all pins. If you ask people to re-pin every post, life is such that, people will eventually get disinterested. Save this system for your most important pins which have the biggest chance of going viral.
Conclusion: What Is Pinterest Used For?
If you’re not using Pinterest for marketing, you are certainly missing some of the best quality traffic available online. Pinterest can be a goldmine for sales in social media;9 out of 10 Pinterest users come on this platform to plan purchases and find inspiration for what could be a good fit for their homes.
This tendency has even increased with the extended lockdown and pandemic in 2020, hence people are doing even more online shopping than before.
You have also a big chance of reaching an international audience as around 50% of Pinterest users(60% of them are women)live outside the US and are actively pinning and searching for quality content.
If you have not started yet, now is the best time to start your Pinterest marketing strategy and promote your business.
Related article: How to increase website traffic fast?

About Ross
Ross is the founder of Hostingwhich, a free resource site where you can learn about Starting your own Blog & also find out about Web Host Services. Click here to learn more if you want to start a blog.
