In case you haven’t heard, Pinterest is pretty good for bloggers. With the right strategy in place, you can turn Pinterest into a steady display of interest and traffic from readers and prospective clients, not to mention an invaluable resource of content and curated content that you can share.
The key is in understanding that a strategy is needed, along with some specific techniques. Just pinning all of your content isn’t going to do the trick. That’s where this article can help you. If you follow these suggestions, you’ll see renewed and increased traffic and leads from Pinterest.
1. Share Your Blog Posts to Carefully Organized and Curated Pinterest Boards
This is one of the most important aspects of a successful Pinterest strategy. You must take the time to consider what would make the most logical division in your Pinterest Boards.
Boards are typically categories of posts, but they can also be used to highlight specific issues that your business might address, pain points for clients, hot topics, and so on.
It’s also important to keep in mind that followers and potential clients can follow specific boards, rather than all of your boards. Creating a Board that really catches someone’s interest will help keep them returning to you and your blog as you continue to add more and more pins.
For instance, I have a Board specific for Agorapulse Resources. Those interested in learning more about Agorapulse and keeping up with new developments can simply check out that board and follow it. Anna Bennett, one of my favorite Pinterest experts, has five boards on Pinterest specifically, including one devoted to Case Studies and News. If you were interested in keeping up with Pinterest developments and seeing how other businesses are leveraging the platform, that would be a great board to follow (not to mention an excellent person to follow as well).
2. Use Great Blog Images
No article on Pinterest advice would be complete without mentioning the absolute importance that images play in determining the success of your Pinterest presence. But it’s not enough to simply have interesting images. I did that for months and got very little interest and engagement from other Pinterest users.
Great blog images means using images that:
- Are Gorgeous – you’d think this would go without saying, but too often I see bloggers using clip art or grainy images, when it would take just a few minutes to find something far better.
- Are Large – small images aren’t going to cut it here. You need to use a large image so that it doesn’t get overwhelmed and swallowed up by all the other large images around it. The current consensus is that portrait style images approximately 600 x 900 work best (and are also awesome for Google+).
- Have Text – this might be the most important aspect for bloggers. You really must add text to your images to give them depth and context. It might be the title of your post or a quote from the article or something else related, but keep in mind that Pinterest is a visual network. Most people simply glance at the images in their stream and if your image doesn’t GRAB their attention it WON’T GRAB their attention. Got it?
Fortunately, you don’t have to be a graphic designer to use great images. I am horrible at graphic design so I generally look for great looking photographs (that are free and legal to use) and use basic editing tools to crop and enhance them. But if you’re looking for inspiration, Rebekah Radice regularly creates gorgeous imagery that always does a fabulous job of communicating exactly what her pin and post is about:
With the latest iteration of this blog – Blogging Brute – I happen to be taking a different tact with my blog post imagery. Instead of stock images or branded graphics, I have been using featured images that are 100% my own photography. They’re selected more for aesthetic reasons than any connection to the content. It remains to be seen whether this approach will help or harm my traffic.
3. Use Multiple Images and Pin Several of them
Within your blog post itself, whenever possible, include multiple images and pin those as well.
If you know in advance that you will be pinning these secondary images, take advantage of that fact and add some text overlay and great descriptions.
Of course, you’re not going to want to immediately pin all of these images. I’d suggest waiting 4 – 12 hours between subsequent pins so that your pins are spaced out.
4. Blog About Your Pinterest Presence
As you develop richer and richer Boards and collections of pins, blog about them! Direct readers and potential customers to specific boards that can help them.
You might create a board for a specific topic or question, pinning several of your own articles along with infographs and posts from other authors, and then blog about how other people can use the board and pins to get their questions answered.
5. Embed Pins and Boards into Blog Posts
One of the really fun features of Pinterest is the ability to embed both individual pins and entire boards! Use that to your full advantage whenever possible as it will help new readers discover your Pinterest presence and follow you.
And this helps support the previous idea regarding blogging about a specific pin or resource. If you create a board for a topic and then blog about it, embed the board into the blog!
For instance, Jeff Sieh did some amazing work recently in helping men to realize the value and uses of Pinterest. He started by publishing some basic tips and ideas, and that evolved into a series of 5 very successful Hangouts On Air. He has a single board on Pinterest where all the tips and video are pinned, and can embed that into a summary blog post:
By making your Pinterest profile a valuable resource, and making sure that your blog and Pinterest are helping each other, both platforms will benefit and your traffic and following will continue to grow month after month.
BONUS TIP! If you’ve made it this far, I’ve got a bonus tip for you. Check out how I’ve doubled my Pinterest traffic, month after month, using Tailwind. It’s a great tool for helping to promote specific pins and expand your Pinterest reach through reciprocal repinning.
How To Revive Old Blog Content
