6 Excellent Tips: Pinterest For Bloggers to Increase Blog Traffic

Pinterest for Bloggers

This blog post is going to explain how I grew my Pinterest monthly views from 100 to 84K in just 1 month! This strategy is so easy that ANYONE can do it, I promise.

I started dedicating my time to this blog on Jan 1. At that time, my Pinterest following and views were non-existent. Using recommendations from other bloggers and a lot of trial and error, I developed my own Pinterest strategy that worked for me. My goal for this post is to give you tips and let you customize your own strategy.

What is Pinterest?

I'm sure you have heard so much about Pinterest. But what is Pinterest? Pinterest is a social media platform where users can save and discover information in the form of images, or pins. More recently, Pinterest has enabled the sharing of information through videos and GIFs as well. The amount of information on this site is incredible and the users on this platform are looking for information. Pinterest for bloggers is so successful because we specialize in sharing information making Pinterest a great source of traffic and income for our blogs.

1. Pinterest for Bloggers

When I first started all I wanted to do was log into my Pinterest, repin a few pins, and watch my stats exponentially increase. Although that would have been great, it doesn't work that way. I had to go back to square one and make that square as perfect as I could.

I'm assuming that your Pinterest is already converted to a business account. If you have not done that yet, I strongly suggest you do. The analytics that the business account provides will be extremely beneficial to you. This article by the blog Socially Sorted explains step by step what you should do. So do that and proceed with the next step.

To gain followers, it is extremely important that your profile looks professional. Pinterest for bloggers is much more specific than personal accounts. You may not realize it, but if your profile does not look put together no one is going to take you seriously, follow you, or use your links (I learned this the hard way). I cleaned up my profile and immediately noticed a difference in my followers and views.

Have A Professional Profile Picture

The most important is your profile picture and your profile name. Although your logo may be beautiful, I strongly suggest you use an actual picture. Your profile will be so much more inviting if you use a picture of your beautiful smiling face. Let's not get this confused, although I'm sure your selfies are POPPIN', don't use a picture of you out at the bar or in the car on your way to the mall. Get some headshots taken, or take them yourself (I went with this route, I'm all about saving a few dollars).

Make Your Profile Name Perfect

I bet you're like my profile name is the name of my blog, isn't that perfect enough? While I'm sure your blog name is amazing, it is necessary to add a little more to that on Pinterest.

For example, my profile name used to be “The Impulse Traveler,” but to ensure that I attracted the correct audience I changed it to “The Impulse Traveler | Blogger| Travel + Lifestyle Blog.” Now people know when they click on my profile that I am a blogger and I blog about travel and lifestyle. I will not only attract the correct audience, but now I can attract people who may not have even considered clicking on my profile if it was just “The Impulse Traveler.”

Profile Description

I sorta touched on this with the profile picture BUT make sure that your profile description is just as on point as your profile picture. When I look at a profile I look at these things in this order: Profile name, profile picture, then profile description. They are all equally important and all of them should be in

Pinterest Board Covers

This may go against what everyone has said about THEIR Pinterest strategy, but I don't use board covers. I understand if you are a perfectionist and you want everything to look cohesive, BUT I feel that it takes the spotlight off of the pins. When I look at a Pinterest profile, I love the look of the different pins. It lets people know that you are an active pinner and that you like to share the content of others.

2. ACTIVE Pinning

The easiest and guaranteed way to increase your monthly views and following is active pinning. When I say active pinning I mean, pinning throughout the day. When I did not have any content to promote, I would repin relevant content from others and my monthly views would still increase by 2K monthly viewers every day!

I pin 70+ pins a day!!!! I know that seems like a lot, but with the automated pinning tool, Tailwind, I schedule all of my pins for the week during the weekend and my pinning is on autopilot. I schedule 70 pins per day on tailwind and I manually pin when I get a break as well. PIN, PIN, PIN! Pinterest for bloggers is all about activity.

3. Group Boards

Group boards is the key to being successful on Pinterest! They are basically an alliance between a group of people that guarantees that everyone in the group succeeds. I have found that most of my traffic comes from re-pins that I get from being a part of group boards. I was so inspired that I decided to create my own group boards. You can follow them here. Although group boards do help accelerate your success on Pinterest, be sure to follow the rules so you don't get kicked out of the group. That's not a good look. These are a few group boards that I am a part of:

1. Mastering Pinterest
2. Bloggers Unite
3. Blog + Biz Babes
4. Your Travel Blog
5. We Travel We Blog

I suggest you join as many group boards as you can. Especially if you are trying to gain exposure to as many people as possible.

4. “Pinnable” Pins

People like me wish that there was a formula for the perfect pin. Although there is not a definite recipe, there are a few guidelines that I always use. I make sure that the graphics I use are the optimal size for pins (735 px X 1102 px). These are the guidelines I follow:

1. I always try to put the text on top of the pin so that visitors will always see the important part of the pin just in case the end gets cut off in the feed.
2. Make sure that the text is big enough to read clearly and that the text is easy to read. I find that pairing a script and a serif font work best. 
3. Pins with bold and contrasting colors tend to stand out more and get more clicks (in my experience). It is important to remember that Pinterest is not your blog, you do not have to brand your pins!!!!! Pick a color, any color your heart desires!
4. Just because you think it’s ugly does not mean that it will not be aesthetically pleasing to others. I learned this on accident. I created a pin that I was not exactly crazy about but I used it anyway because I was on a time crunch. I eventually made more pins for that post but the pin that I hated turned out to be the most popular pin that I have EVER made. Make many pins with many different color and font combinations, the extra time you use will pay off.

My advice would be to just start making pins. You will learn what works best by trial and error. Take a look at pins that are popular and adapt your future pins by using characteristics from those pins. 

5. Rich Pins

Rich pins are kinda new to the Pinterest world. I would explain it as an “enhanced” pin. They are designed to increase engagement by showing the metadata on the pin. The metadata is imported directly from your site so if you do not have a business account and if you have not linked your website, rich pins will not be available for you. I ALWAYS make sure that my pins are rich pins. After converting to rich pins, I immediately noticed a difference in my engagement. Enabling rich pins is a 2 step process:

1. Make sure all of the content on your website has metadata. To make it as easy as possible, I use Yoast SEO. Not only does it allow me to incorporate metadata in all of my posts, it also makes sure that my SEO is optimized so that I will rank on search engine searches (2 birds, 1 stone).
2. Apply for rich pins. All you have to do is choose a page on your website (any page) and validate the URL via the Pinterest website validator. Once that is done, you will have rich pins and you never have to think about it again!

6. Be Adaptable

It is possible that you could do everything in my “strategy” and it not work for you. The MOST IMPORTANT part of developing your own, customized strategy is to notice what works for you and curate your pins and posts to what is working.

I also want to remind you how important it is to stick with it. When I started working on my Pinterest a month ago, I had no idea what I was doing. Even though I felt lost and overwhelmed, I stuck with it and now I have developed a strategy that has shown me promising results. It won't be easy but when you look back on this moment, you will be thankful for the journey.

Conclusion

Pinterest for bloggers can be very beneficial if it is being used correctly and to its fullest extent.