Pinterest – An effective way to Drive More Traffic to Your Blog

Many of us think Pinterest is only a place for women to share their latest recipe or DIY project and showcasing their hobbies?

So, it’s easy to push this visual platform under the rug because you think this forum isn’t for you.

But now days, Pinterest is emerging as an effective visual search engine for start-ups, entrepreneurs, technical, food, fashion, design, and wedding bloggers, it’s safe to say it’s a scrapbooking paradise for women.

Some of the biggest brands like Wal-Mart, Apple, and Vodafone – are staking Pinterest ground for their marketing efforts, it seems there’s enough room for the bloggers, start-ups, and entrepreneurs to give pins, repins and group boards a try.

There is an influence behind using Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog. Just take a look at these remarkable facts

• A pin is 100 times more spreadable than your average tweet.
• Each pin can drive up to 3 page visits and 7 page views.
• Ecommerce sites benefit from pinning as each pin can generate 76 cents
• The life of a pin is one week! Compare that to 24 minutes for Twitter and 90 minutes for Facebook.

·         And don’t think because you’re in the blogging, tech or marketing industry you can’t make an impact on Pinterest.

NOW HERE IS THE BIG QUESTION – How to create more traction from Pinterest?

After time of research we have figured these five tactics you can use to elevate your pinning strategy and bring on the traffic.  

1.       Sign up for a business account

To really see an effect in your pinning efforts, go ahead and just sign up for a free Pinterest for business account or convert your existing account.

After signing up, you’ll have access to Pinterest analytics – important information about your pins’ behavior – once you verify your website with Pinterest.

You can also apply for Rich Pins, which are pins with more information than your standard pin. There are five different types – movie, article, product, app, recipe, and place – each with their own pin upgrades such as real-time pricing and a direct link to your site.

Article pins are valuable for bloggers since you can promote your latest blog post with your logo, bigger headline and a link back to your site. And it’s easy to set up with WordPress plugins like Yoast SEO, All SEO Tool since Pinterest uses the Facebook Open Graph metadata.

There are some additional features that can help you with your pinning strategy are:

Pinterest Guides – Pinterest offers guides to help you get started with pinning, analytics and optimizing your boards.

Marketing Blog – learn specific marketing tips for this platform and stay up-to-date with the latest Pinterest news.

Video Library – catch mini tutorial videos about creating click-worthy Pins or how to optimize your campaign, plus much more.

Tools – in addition to Rich Pins, you have an arsenal of pin tools to help reach more people. From Promoted Pins to the Pin It button, you can make it easy for visitors to find you and pin your content.

2.       Focus on your copy description

Each and every pin has a description below it telling the reader what your pin is about. Typically, for bloggers, your blog title and a little description of your post should be enough.

But, to really maximize your pin’s potential, you have to do more than that. According to Pinterest’s data of over 10,000 pins, they discovered what makes a great pin.

For high engagement your pin needs to be:

Helpful – make it easy for pinners to find your pin with a spot-on description. According to Pinterest, helpful pins receive 30% more engagement.

Detailed – Provide an in-depth explanation of what your pin is about. Give enough information to entice a pinner to click through to your blog.

Interesting – draw on the emotions of the pinner by using sensory-related words and positive sentiments.

Actionable – include a call-to-action in your description. Using phrases like, “check out…” or “click to find out more” can generate an 80% increase in engagement.

3.       Pin at the right time

This is all a numbers game. Hundreds of pins are shown on Pinterest every hour of every day. How can you get your pins to shine the brightest? What you want in your Pinterest marketing strategy is to have the most repins. You want as many people as possible to repin your material so that it’s shown more frequently to new users.

The most effective and successful strategy is to find the best time and day to pin. Logically, you’d want to pin when your target audience is on Pinterest.

From analyzing the data, it looks like the best time to start pinning is on Saturday morning. The best and peak time – for fashion and retail – is Friday after 3 pm.

And the worst time to pin is during normal working hours – which makes sense.

But, if you want to target your audience you may want to go a step further and look at where your audience comes from and how they spend their time on Pinterest.

Pinterest analytics helps to get demographics and interests of the target audiences.

This can help you frame a better picture on what time to pin to reach your target audience.

To see how often pinners are actually engaging on Pinterest, according to a recent study by PewReserachCenter, up to 17% of users visit the site daily. Close to 9% of users visit Pinterest several times a day.

Almost 52% of people visit the site less than once a week. So, to reach most of your audience, you need to be pinning consistently, but don’t overdo it.

It’s an awful pinning policy to over-pin your material. The best strategy is to pin content you know your audience will like and find useful. Try to abide by Pareto’s 80/20 rule – share 80% of others’ material and only 20% of your own material.

4.       Create pin-worthy images

What makes Pinterest so enthralling and addicting is the images bloggers pin. It isn’t enough to just use any image. The best images are optimized for maximum engagement.

So, what makes a pintastic photo? Let’s look at three core areas to focus when creating a pinnable image.

1. It has to be the right size

Pinterest favors vertical image. As up to 80% of pinners view the Pinterest feeds on mobile devices, it just makes sense to use images that are more tall than wide. So, what is the perfect size for a pin? Generally you want an aspect ratio of 2:3 or 4:5. For example, if you have an image with a width of 650, your minimum height should be 975. For the best pin, though longer is better, overall.

Pins that are long are more favorable on Pinterest since they take up more room on the feed, making it hard to pass.

2. The image is fabulous

Blog post image has to be amazing and descriptive. Many studies have been done on what makes a great pin. Some of the effective ways to get an attractive image are

i)        There are no faces – images without a human face receive 23% more repins. Pinners enjoy looking at things more than they do at faces.

ii)       Vibrant colors – There should be multiple vibrant colors in her image – limes, pinks, reds – the attract pinners to share.

iii)     Contextual background – Background of any image matters a lot as we all wants stunning and beautiful background for selfies. Just like that beautiful background of the pins attracts more n more pinners and repins.

iv)     Includes red tones – Images with predominantly reds, oranges or pinks get up to twice as many repins than images with more blue tones in them.

v)      Lightness – images with more lightness to them perform 20 times better than darker images.

3. Include text in your Pin image

By adding spot-on-description text you can draw more attention and generate traffic to your blog.

 

5.       Join a Pinterest group board

Pinterest group boards are perfect for generating more traction to your blog. A group board – if popular – is a community board where other pinners can pin. They are extremely popular and can give you more exposure.

By joining a community board, you can quickly grow your follower base. If you regularly pin to a group board, other people who follow the board will see your pins and might be interested in your Pinterest board. If they like what they see, they will follow you.

So, how do you find group boards? The easiest way is to search on PinGroupie. Just search for a keyword – blogging for example – and see what’s out there.

6.       Create a Blog Think Tank

Are you constatly clipping articles, studies, posts and pictures and placing them in an idea folder—online or off? Pinterest is tailor-made for doing this quickly and easily online.

Create secret boards for your blog post ideas and use them as placeholders for images, videos, quotes, etc. that you want to blog about in the future. Curate boards for single posts, a series you’re working on, even potential guest bloggers.

7.       Increase your Pinterest traction with the Social Warfare Pro plugin

If you’re running WordPress you likely know of – and use – many helpful plugins to make your blogging life easier.

Easy is good of course, but when it comes down to it, aren’t we really after one main thing: more traffic?

By using the Social Warfare Pro plugin and a few of its unique Pinterest-specific features, you can grow your presence on Pinterest and in turn, increase your reach and traffic considerably.

Social Warfare at its core is a social sharing plugin, so if you’re running another social sharing plugin like Monarch or Shareaholic, you’ll first want to deactivate it from inside your WordPress backend.

Once you download, install and activate the Social Warfare Pro plugin, head over to the Display tab and be sure to include the Pinterest button in your active set. I like to include Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, but if you’re in a B2B niche, you might want to include LinkedIn as well. Keep it lean, though, as the last thing you want to do is overwhelm visitors with too many choices.

Next, when it comes to positioning, many people find placing the social share buttons at the bottom of each post, along with a floating bar along the side, works well to promote social sharing without being too intrusive.

In Short and snappy

Pinterest offers a robust path to help you build your blog. It is a great platform to experiment your image-making skills and marketing skills. To really see results from Pinterest – clicks back to your site – try using these steps:

1.       Sign up for a business account

2.       Pay attention to your description copy

3.       Learn the right time and day to pin

4.       Create sensational pin images

5.       Collaborate on a group board

6.       Create a Blog think tank.

7.       For WordPress sites, install Social Warfare Pro Plugin

Follow these Pinterest marketing tactics to develop your blog. On your blog, place striking images with your blog posts, add easy engagement mechanics like the Pinterest Pin It and Follow Me buttons