7 Tips on Using Pinterest to Grow your Blog!

7  tips on using Pinterest to grow your blog; a definitive guide on using Pinterest to grow your blog or online business, using this colourful and creative search engine to increase your reach, traffic and income!

I’m taking a little break from the food writing today to provide a little help to growing blog bosses like myself. So many of us are producing great content that isn’t getting the traffic, readership or love that it deserves. I want to give you a hand today in understanding using Pinterest to grow your blog or business.

Pinterest is an enormous and extremely useful tool for bloggers, influencers, boss ladies, and other online entrepreneurs. However, so often it is used ineffectively or not at all!

You may think of Pinterest as just another social media platform, something to click on every week or so to scroll through a few ideas before closing it to head to another app. Well, dear, I’m afraid you’re WRONG.

Instead, think of Pinterest as a search engine. There’s no way in hell you’d shrug off being found on the first page of a Google search, and there’s no way you’d completely exclude yourself from its reach, right? Exactly. This is how you need to view Pinterest too.

Pinterest is a MAJOR player in online content marketing. You can share your posts, products and ideas with thousands of users in just a few clicks. Most social media platforms charge big bucks for this feature, Pinterest however, allows you to do it without spending a penny. In having an active account, you’ll pop up as a recommended user for other Pinners and you’re also increasingly your likelihood of appearing on other major search engines like Google and Bing.

Basically, if you’re not already using Pinterest for personal pinning or for blog or business promotion, you REALLY should. Trust me, I’m speaking from experience. I have literally DOUBLED my daily blog traffic since I began taking Pinterest seriously, seeing major spikes in my most popular posts. I also tend to gain at least 5-10 new Pinterest followers every single day, which is more than I can say for Twitter or the dying platform of Instagram.

It’s time to get serious. Here are my 7 tips on using Pinterest to grow your blog.

 

1. Business Account

First things first, you need to set up an account. If you don’t have an account or you currently run a personal account, it’s time to switch to a Pinterest Business Account. This will cost you absolutely nothing but can be hugely helpful in promoting your blog.

Once you’ve set up a business account, you can link your account to your blog. In doing this, you can track referral traffic from Pinterest to your blog posts, and see how each pin performs on a daily basis. You can begin using Rich Pins once this account is set up (more on this below). You can also begin running adverts or sponsored posts if you want to, meaning Pinterest will help you reach an EVEN WIDER audience, though I must admit I haven’t had to do this yet.

In short, a business account gives you access to more features to promote your content and to grow your blog.

Find out more about Business Accounts here.

 

2. Rich Pins

Rich Pins are just like regular pins that you see on Pinterest, only better. They allow other users to read the pin’s description, and click on it to view further content information such as recipe ingredients or instruction. Regular pins show only the title, meaning people might not be able to see what exactly it is that you’re promoting, and may be less tempted to re-pin or click through to your website.

To activate Rich Pins, you will need to link your blog to your account. Most hosts have a “Pinterest Verify” page somewhere within the dashboard, if not you should be able to locate it with a bit of searching. Once you find it, you simply paste in a verification code copied from your Pinterest business account and you should be able to use Rich Pins with built-in metadata very soon!

You will need a business account in order to start using Rich Pins, but as soon as you have them set up, all of your previous pins from your blog will be converted. This means all your posts will contain trackable links to your site, as well as extra information and tempting descriptions for other Pinterest users!

Find out more about Rich Pins here.

 

3. Create Attractive Images

Pinterest is a lot like everyday life, everyone judges everyone else based on appearance first. You could have incredible content, useful information that everyone would love, but it could be represented by a tiny dull pin that no one wants to click on. Guess what? That’s not getting boosted traffic any time soon, no matter how great the post or product is.

Think about what you click on when you use Pinterest. What attracts you to click on a pin?

Pinterest works best when users pin long, colourful images, with a catchy or intriguing title and some great photos to support it. These larger and more attractive images will guarantee more engagement, meaning people will re-pin them, follow you and click through to your blog more often. I promise.

I use Canva to create my images.

Canva is a free site you can use to make Pinterest optimised images using free layouts and ideas to download for personal or business use. This site has been invaluable in helping me produce beautiful images for my pins, and helping me grow my blog!

See below for some examples of my pins when I first started using Pinterest, when I enjoyed a maximum of 90 blog visitors each day.

See below for recent examples of my pins, which have improved images, now that I enjoy over 200 visitors each day!

Get the idea?

 

4. Categorise

Ok, so you’ve got yourself a business account, you’ve looked into activating Rich Pins and you’ve started creating good quality images for your pins. Now what?

Categorise, baby!

Everyone likes a good spring clean now and again, so try and use this clean up on Pinterest too. When you pin something on Pinterest, you will be asked to save it to a board. You can have as many boards as you like, and these are the best way to categorise your pins. See below for some examples of my categories.

Pinterest accounts ALWAYS look better when their boards are sorted into distinguished categories, it makes it appear more organised and people will be able to find things more easily. If you are just starting out, create a few boards based on things you are interested in, such as “lipsticks” or “outfit inspiration” or “favourite recipes.” Once you have created these, simply search for some pins based on these topics and pin them to their respective boards. This will help begin to fill out your profile, making it look like more of an active account for people to follow. People won’t want to follow you if you only have 3 boards with less than 20 pins in each, it’s not worth their time!

So get those sleeves rolled up and start organising and categorising your Pinterest boards, it’s a great way to start using Pinterest to grow your blog.

 

5. Blog Board

Now, once you’ve created some pretty new boards to save ideas and posts that you’ve seen and enjoyed, it’s time to start saving your own content to these boards.

First of all, create a board specifically for your own blog posts. You want to keep this board just for your own blog pins, no one else’s! Give it a name that reflects that of your blog’s or business’s. For example, mine is called “Maverick Baking,” see below.

You’ll want to pick out your best (or even all) blog posts and create images for each one using a website like Canva. Pin these images along with a link to each respective post. This will help fill out your blog’s board. This way, when people click into your profile, they can find a whole list of your great blog posts neatly organised into one board. Handy, huh?

All the biggest and best bloggers who use Pinterest have a board specifically for their blog posts, and it is often the first one on their profile, I’d really recommend doing this!

Also, if you have blog post pins that are relatable to your other board categories, pin them in there too! That way if someone takes an interest in your “lipsticks” board on your profile or through a recommendation pop-up, they’ll find your lipstick-related blog content in there too. Win win!

Are you beginning to see how using Pinterest to grow your blog is a great idea yet??

 

6. Group Boards

Ah, group boards, arguably the ultimate tool in using Pinterest to grow your blog.

A group board is a board moderated by a group of Pinterest users, where they can share their favourite ideas or more importantly THEIR CONTENT in a shared board. The more users involved, the more followers a board will have, meaning more people will see the pins that are saved there. See the idea?

By creating a group board, and inviting your fellow blogger friends or favourite bloggers to collaborate on it, you can collectively widen your reach. This will gain you some new followers on Pinterest AND many more click-throughs to your blog!

You can also search for group boards on websites like PinGroupie, which can help you find boards with topics relevant to your content. Many moderators will be happy to let you join the boards if you contact them, meaning you can SERIOUSLY widen your reach to other Pinterest users. Most successful bloggers are active users of group boards, and there are thousands out there that you can join start pinning your content to.

Using group boards has been a major help in growing my blog and gaining a steadily increasing Pinterest following. I cannot recommend this enough. See below for examples of group boards I am a contributor to.

 

 

7. Pin pin pin!

This last tip may be obvious, but it’s certainly important!

No one is going to be interested in your Pinterest profile if you only pin your own posts, or you just feel like pinning every other week. Like every other social media platform, if you’re not an active user, you won’t see the growth you want.

Try logging on to Pinterest for like 5-10 minutes every day, or twice a day. When you do, save a couple of your blog post pins to your group boards, pin a few new ideas to your relevant boards from pins you see on these boards or just in your home feed. Once you’ve done this, feel free to leave it until tomorrow to open the app/site again.

Just like Twitter, or Facebook or Instagram, you want to try and be as active as you can be. Engagement tends to increase in relation to your social media activity, even if only for a few minutes a day. If you really don’t have time or energy for this, try looking into Tailwind. I don’t use it personally, but I know many bloggers who do!

That’s really all there is to it! Pinterest can seem daunting and sometimes even useless, but it can (and will) prove itself to be an invaluable tool for blog and business promotion. Not all your pins will go viral, but some might earn you a surprise boost in traffic that other platforms would not have allowed.

 

So that about completes my 7 tips on using Pinterest to grow your blog. I really hope this has been helpful. I saw a decent amount of interest in this post through a poll on Twitter so I knew that I should write it for all my blogger pals, and I’m glad I have!

If you want any more tips and tricks on using Pinterest, leave a comment below or email me at maverickbaking.com.

Thanks as always for reading and until next time, find and follow me on Pinterest!