Let me guess. You have a blog but not that many people read it. How do I know? Because you’re reading this guide on how to drive traffic to your blog from Pinterest. So many bloggers swear by Pinterest and say it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to their site traffic, but you haven’t quite cracked the magic spell yet. We’re here to help you do that.
If you’re completely new to Pinterest, read this beginners guide first.
I used to be the same. I had never used Pinterest for personal uses so I not only had to learn how to use the platform, but also how to use it to drive traffic to my blog. I started from complete scratch 1.5 years ago and after a lot of trial and error, today my Pinterest account receives 1.4 MILLION monthly views, which translates to around 30,000 clicks and views to my site. See the screenshots below if you don’t believe me.
It took me a while to get to the results I am seeing today, because I didn’t know what I was doing. You have an advantage over me. You have 1.5 years worth of reading every Pinterest guide out there and of personal experience. In this guide, I share with you my top 10 tips you have to follow if you want to drive tons of traffic to your blog from Pinterest.
10 top tips to follow to drive traffic to your blog from Pinterest
1.Create eye-catching pins
This might seem like such an obvious thing to say that I can just imagine you rolling your eyes at your laptop and thinking “Gosh Greta, I already knew THAT” but hear me out. Pinterest is a visual search engine. As such, you have to make sure that when someone searches on Pinterest for “vegan recipes” your pins are the ones with the most beautiful photos and eye-catching writing that will get people drooling just by looking at them and make them want to click on your pin.
Now we all like to think we have good design sense. Unfortunately, the truth is that a lot of us don’t, myself included. Just look at these screenshots of the first pins I created when I first started using Pinterest (what was I even thinking?)
Instead of just jumping into Canva and playing around with all the templates you can get your hands on, do some research first. Swallow your pride and select 5-10 bloggers in your niche that are doing well on Pinterest. Look at the pins in their “best of blog” board and see if they have a specific design they repeat a lot (hint; that’s probably one that converts well), what kind of fonts they use, layout of the font, writing to photo ratio etc. I’m not saying you should copy their designs, but there is nothing wrong with getting a bit of inspiration from what is out there and already working.
2. Use stock photography
When it comes to photos on Pinterest you might sometimes want to use free stock photos instead of your own. I have a number of old articles from when I first started blogging where the photos are, let’s be honest, not that great. While it might be fine to have them on the blog, they won’t work on Pinterest. If you want to beat the competition and have the most eye-catching pins out there, your photos need to be better than the others. There are a number of free stock photography websites that you can sign up for like Pixabay or Unsplash, or Canva also has a big free photo resource library that you can use. Simply research what you would like a photo of and lots of options will come up.
3. Use a consistent pin design, site branding, font or colour scheme
You should try to keep your pins consistent. Whether it’s with your choice of colours, with the positioning of your site logo or name, with the font or the photo layout, make sure you always have one, or more, elements that repeat themselves. This enables people to recognise your pins at first glance. Say you have an itinerary about Italy that someone found on Pinterest and they found it useful. The next time when they go to research the best things to do in Rome and they recognise your Rome pin amongst all the photos that come up, they know they can trust your website and are more likely to click on it.
4. Create more than one design pin per post
One of the easiest Pinterest growth techniques that is often overlooked is creating more than one pin per post. While you should aim for all of your pins to be eye-catching and super pinnable, the reality is that different people have different styles and preferences. What attracts my attention might not be the same things that attracts someone else’s. If for every post you create four pins, that means that that article is four times more likely to get clicked on.
One thing you can do is also to have not only different designs on the pins but also slightly different text written on them. For example if an article is about “The 10 best things to do in London in a weekend” you could have two pins with the following different writing: “10 best things to do in London” and “how to spend a weekend in London”. That way if someone is searching on Pinterest for “London travel tips” both those pins will appear and you have more chances to get clicked on since you target more than one topic.
Just make sure the text on the pin is always related to the content of your article, you don’t want to false advertise and have people clicking on your pin, realising it’s not what they’re looking for and then clicking away (that increases your bounce rate and lowers your time on page, which is bad!) Furthermore Pinterest has recently announced that you shouldn’t be sharing the same pin design to the same board more than once in three months, so if you have multiple pin designs for the same post you can keep re-sharing it without hitting this new limit by Pinterest.
While there is no such thing as too many pins per post, I would aim to create three to four per post, depending on how well you think that post can perform on Pinterest. I have some posts with way more than that, up to nine or ten pins, because over time I have changed style and design multiple times, testing out what worked and what didn’t. Every time I come up with a new design I go back and add it to my old posts.
5. Write detailed and keyword rich Pinterest captions
Pinterest is a search engine, which means that the same way you optimise your articles to be found by Google, you need to optimise your pin descriptions to be found by Pinterest. I often see a lot of Pinterest descriptions written like this:
“Best things to do in London in a weekend | London in a weekend | weekend in London | best of London | London weekend guide | what to do in London in a weekend | London in a weekend, the best things to do | …” and so on, you get where I’m going with this.
I personally dislike it and would not recommend this. It’s not natural and keyword stuffing has been proved to not be effective. Write your content for humans, not for algorithms and bots. Pinterest and Google are smart enough to understand what your article is about, you don’t need to stuff it with keywords for them to know. If anything, they can penalise you if they think you are aimlessly keyword stuffing without any content to back it up. Instead, I would usually write a Pinterest description like the following:
“Looking for the best things to do in London in a weekend? You’ve just found them! From museums to pubs, from parks to restaurants, this ultimate London weekend guide has it all. Click here to discover what to do in London in a weekend!”
It’s written so that it includes my target keywords more than once but also in a way that, while it might be slightly repetitive, it still makes sense for a human to read.
6. Use WP Tasty Pins to add a Pinterest description to vertical photos
On top of creating eye-catching pins with text written on them, for every article you publish you should be pinning also a number of portrait photos. We’ve already said that Pinterest is a visual search engine and everybody has different tastes and styles. While someone may prefer a pin with writing over it explaining the post, others might prefer a simply stunning photo. When I visit a destination I know I will be blogging about I always try to take vertical “Instagrammable” photos both for my Instagram account, but also because I know they have potential to perform well on Pinterest.
You might be wondering what is WP Tasty Pins and how does it fit in here? WP Tasty Pins is a paid plugin (It costs 29 USD – you can purchase it here), which amongst other things adds a “Pinterest description box” to your “adding media” function on WordPress. This means that whenever you upload a new photo you would fill the title, caption, alt text and description fields as normal and then add your pin description in that field. If you don’t add a Pinterest description (either through this plugin or at all) when you pin a photo Pinterest will automatically pull the alt text as pin description.
I know that your next question will be; well why can’t I just add the pin description to the alt text field then? Because it can negatively impact your SEO. The alt text is supposed to be a written description of the photo. It’s what appears on your site if the photo isn’t loading or what gets read out loud to visually impaired visitors. If you have a photo of a sunset from Sky Garden in London and the alt text reads:
“Looking for the best things to do in London in a weekend? You’ve just found them! From museums to pubs, from parks to restaurants, this ultimate London weekend guide has it all. Click here to discover what to do in London in a weekend!”
That’s not a very accurate description of what the photo is showing.
Click here to purchase WP Tasty Pins!
Which is where the Pinterest description box steps in. That way you can have both a SEO optimised alt text and a Pinterest optimised description. There are ways to add the pin description without purchasing WP Tasty Pins, but these require a bit of basic coding. I chose to invest in the plugin and save myself the hassle but if you want to try the coding route check this guide (it also includes additional advice on crafting epic Pinterest descriptions).
7.Pin to your relevant personal board first
This is a relatively new Pinterest strategy. Back in the day they used to say that you had to have a “Best of your blog” board, where you pinned your own blog posts as soon as you published them. Then from there you would share it to relevant personal and group boards. This is no longer the case.
The first board you should be pinning a post to is your personal board that is most relevant to that post. For example in the travel niche that means pinning a city weekend getaway guide to the relevant country board (eg. 3 days in Miami to a USA board) or in the food niche pinning a type of recipe to the relevant type of cooking board (eg. a brownie recipe to a baking board). This because that first save is how Pinterest indexes your pins and how it knows what the article is about. If you pin a Miami itinerary to your USA board Pinterest will understand much faster what your article is about and will start showing it when people search for relevant queries.
8.Join relevant group boards & regularly evaluate them
While Pinterest group boards have been on the decline recently, if done properly they can still be a valuable source of re-pins, exposure and potentially traffic. The issue with group boards is that a lot of bloggers were using them as “pin dumps”; pinning their own content to them in the hope of getting them in front of a larger audience without ever bothering to go on the group board and pinning other people’s content themselves. If too many people do this you can see how it can defy the usefulness of group boards.
How do you find group boards? Similarly to my first tip about creating eye-catching pins, a bit of market research will go a long way here. Select 5 bloggers in your niche that do well on Pinterest and look at the group boards they are a part of. Every group board has different rules for joining but these will usually be outlined in the board description. Request to join as many group boards as possible, realistically a lot of them won’t respond (unfortunately these notifications are easy to get lost, especially if the owner has a huge Pinterest) and you can always leave under performing boards so better to get more requests in now while you’re at it.
I know that your next question will be; “Ok now that I’m in tons of group boards how do I know if they’re good or not?” To find that out you need to wait. Regularly pin to them for 1-2 months then evaluate your re-pin rate and decide whether it’s worth staying in the board or not.
The re-pin rate is how often a specific pin gets pinned again and reshared on Pinterest. If a pin gets re-pinned loads of times, it sends good signals to Pinterest that it’s a quality pin. If your re-pin rate is low, Pinterest will assume it’s not a good resource. If you’re continuously pinning your content to under-performing group boards and not receiving re-pins, Pinterest will see it as a signal that your content isn’t very good. Needless to say if Pinterest thinks your content isn’t very good, they won’t show it when people search for relevant queries.
9.Pin regularly
There are differing theories as to just how regularly you should be pinning on Pinterest, however one thing everyone agrees on is that you should be pinning something every day.
Start slow by pinning 5 to 10 pins a day and then work your way up, all the time monitoring how this affects your Pinterest analytics and traffic to blog. Every niche and account is different so you might hit your effectiveness threshold before or after other people. I’m currently pinning around 60 pins a day.
10. Invest in Tailwind
Since now you’re probably sat there thinking “Geez I need to sit on Pinterest every day and pin 60 pins?” this leads on to my final Pinterest tip; which is to invest in Tailwind.
Tailwind is a Pinterest-approved scheduling tool, which allows you to schedule your pins ahead of time so that they are constantly getting reshared without you having to do so manually. You can sit down for an hour or less once a week and schedule out all your pins for the following week, then not worry about it again until next week. There are lots of different plans available on Tailwind, how much it costs will vary depending on what type of plan you sign up for.
Sign up to Tailwind here and get your first month free!
Tailwind also has a lot of useful analytics features that allow you to see the virality or re-pin rate of specific pins and boards, track your follower and engagement growth and more. It’s an essential tool for anyone serious about growing their blog traffic from Pinterest.
Tailwind also has a useful feature called Tailwind Tribes. This is similar to group boards but more accountable, so that it’s easier to check if your content is really being re-pinned and to track the results.
I hope you found this Pinterest guide useful! If you have any specific questions please let me know in the comments, I’m more than happy to answer them. These are the ten techniques I used that have really pushed my Pinterest growth and brought me to 1.4 million monthly views.
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