This post contains a comprehensive guide about how you can boost organic traffic using Pinterest in 2019. If you have just started your blog this year and looking for bringing organic traffic to it then this post may prove very useful to you. As no one knows about your blog at the initial stage so, naturally there is no visitor on your website. To get noticed quickly promotion of your blog plays a vital role. And, what can be a better medium than social media to promote your blog?
All popular social network platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. are very effective to interact with your audience and fellow bloggers. But in this article, I am going to focus on the most effective social platform amongst these which is Pinterest.
Why Pinterest?
You can use your Pinterest account as a traffic magnet. Why Pinterest is the best option and so much effective to boost organic traffic to your blog?….
The following infographic will give you the answer…
So, you must be convinced that if you have to promote your blog, Pinterest is the most effective platform you have. So my suggestion will be as you work on your blog, put some time to promote it also; otherwise it will be like a shop without a signboard, no one will neither know about it nor ever visit.
Need for a comprehensive article
Now if you search in Google typing the search phrase “ How to increase traffic using Pinterest”, you will get 5,53,00,000 search results. I have also searched typing the same keyword in Google, as I have no idea about using Pinterest itself, leave alone using it for increasing traffic.
I have a facebook account and this was the only social platform I have ever used. So, I was keen to gather knowledge about using Pinterest to boost traffic to my blog theblogpassion.com. So, after scouring the results from the first search page even next 2-3 pages I found really some good helpful tips.
I searched youtube too for help. There are some really helpful videos that guided me quite well. One such video from Caffeinated Blogger with millions of views was really awesome. I could not resist myself but to share it here.
But the problem was with the tips are completely scattered on the internet. I need to visit a number of pages to get the complete picture of how can I best manage my Pinterest account to drive maximum traffic. So, I planned to compile all those tips at one place which I can refer to any time.
So here is that compilation I am sharing with you so that you get the comprehensive guide on how to boost organic traffic using Pinterest in one place and save you lots of time.
Boost organic traffic using Pinterest: Pinterest traffic strategy
1. Research your pins in context to your niche
The first step of using Pinterest to drive organic traffic to your blog is to start creating well-researched pins that are in line with your niche. These pins must qualify the following parameters:
- Process well described: The pins should focus on a particular keyword and contain a detailed description of the process.
- Interesting: The pins should arise interest among the visitors. The image or texts must be eye-catching.
- Emotion evoking: If any pin is able to touch visitors’ emotional chord then it is highly likely that they will want to read the complete post linked to the pin.
- Informative with data and statistics: Present some very relevant and insightful statistics which will give a glimpse of the topic you are going to discuss in your post.
You should visit the boards of your domain and observe minutely the highest repinned posts. From them you will get a good ides about how and ideal pin should be. See the above image; as my niche is blogging and earning from it, so I have presented here some popular pins of this niche.
2. Always go for a business account
While opening an account with Pinterest, choose the account type as a business account; or if you have already had a normal account on Pinterest, you can convert it to a business account.
A business account has some special features helpful for business promotion and analysis which a normal account does not. For example, you can not create a rich pin without a business account and the analytics part is also exclusively for business account holders.
For a Pinterest Business account, either you can open a fresh account of business type or can change a personal account to a business account from account settings option, see the image below.
This is the screenshot of my Pinterest account settings. As my account is a business account already, so it is showing the option to convert to a personal account.
3. Create pins linking valuable resources
It is very important that your pin in Pinterest directs the visitors to some engaging content resource. Any pin with only a beautiful image and without any content is less shown by Pinterest.
You have to keep in mind that Pinterest is different than Flickr which is solely based on images without any content. After an algorithmic change during 2016 Pinterest puts priority to all those pins leading to good, useful resources.
4. Describe your pin appropriately
Your Pin’s description is very important. This description is what makes your visitors decide whether to read the complete post or not.
To create a good description, focus on four essential components of a very effective pin. These four components have been identified by Pinterest by analyzing over 10,000 pins:
- Your pin should contain some actionable tips, which ensure an immediate result when any user implements them. An actionable tip can improve your Pin’s viewer engagement as high as 80%.
- The one or two sentences (generally, only the first 50 characters of any Pin description are visible to any visitor) of the Pin description should contain a crisp but detailed purpose of your pin. This should entice the reader to click on the pin for reading the whole article.
- The copy description should be interesting and create positive sentiments.
- Must be helpful which is a factor responsible for more than 30% viewers engagement.
5. Create pins with great images
Pins with great images easily catch viewers’ attention and have a high probability that the reader will also visit your blog. To get an idea you can visit any popular digital marketer’s Pinterest account and can experience the way they organize their accounts with beautiful and informative images.
Pinterest can be imagined as a very attractive, glossy digital magazine full of great visuals. To make yourself stand out from the crowd, you have to compete for those visuals and create pins more enticing than others.
Another important fact is that usually, the long format of photos gets more attention from the readers. That to say, images like infographics which generally have more height in pixels, generally get more number of pins and helps to boost organic traffic using Pinterest.
6. Use texts in images
Use appropriate texts that will help your reader to have a quick idea about your pin and its context.
See the above pins, when you know what the pins are about, and it is of your interest then you will click on the pin and read details about it.
Now see the below pins, they have nothing mentioned about them. When a visitor has no idea what are these pins about, there is a far lesser chance that anyone will click on it.
Nowadays, adding text in images is very easy. You can use online tools like PicMonkey or Canva to add beautiful and meaningful texts to your images.
7. Put efforts in networking, increasing followers
There is absolutely no doubt that as your network grows and followers increase, traffic to your blog also increases. But having said that, you can also find several boards in Pinterest with few thousand and with a few hundred thousand members having the same traffic to their website.
This fact made me believe that there is a threshold of traffic driven by followers on Pinterest. So, my suggestion will be beside increasing networking, you should be consistent to pin consistently linking quality content in your domain.
Reach to millions
Eventually, it will lead your pins to be labeled by Pinterest as “Picked for you”. This “picked for you” segment is generally displayed on the user’s home feed. Thus your pins set to reach now millions of Pinterest users who are not even following you.
Here the example of Etsy can be a good fit. You can learn how to keep your audience engaged and market your content through pins. Basically, it is an eCommerce site with a focus on vintage and handmade items and craft supplies.
To boost its online marketing, Etsy uses its Pinterest platform quite remarkably. It rules the Pinterest marketing arena with its 90 boards and more than 8,600 visually eye-catching pins.
8. Create board names, pin descriptions using focus and LSI keywords
As you now know that if your content qualifies to be displayed as “piked for you” or as a relevant topic on the user’s home feed, then you are already visible to millions of Pinterest users.
But another vital point to qualify as a relevant topic, your pin title or board title and description should contain the focus keyword or related or LSI keywords. Otherwise, Pinterest will not understand if your topic is a related one.
9. Use related keyword suggestions
As you log into the Pinterest account and search for some keywords in the search box. With the search result, Pinterest also displays some related keywords at the top of the window (please see the image below.)
These keywords are like Latent Semantic Keywords or LSI keywords provided by Google search console for any keyword search.
You should include these keywords also in your board title or pin description. This will help the Pinterest algorithm to understand the particular domain or niche your pins are related to.
For example, if I consider pinning this article then an ideal board name for that pin can be “blogging tips” which will clearly signal Pinterest that it is a blogging related pin.
10. Repins are important, try to increase them
In recent times any content becomes viral depending on how many users have shared it. As you know any twit becomes popular when a huge number of other twitter users retweet it.
Pinterest is also no exception. The quality of your pin is judged by the Pinterest algorithm using the number of repins. Any pin which gets 1000 repins in 2 days has a higher chance of ranking higher in Pinterest search engine result than the pin which gets the same number of repins in 7 days.
11. Group board: Old, but still an effective strategy
This is an old but still an effective Pinterest traffic strategy. If you have just started any blog and wish to have maximum traffic possible from Pinterest, then joining several group boards and interacting with board members is a good idea.
Earlier I have the idea about Facebook groups only, so I can’t help but compare Pinterest board to Facebook groups. And, I found lots of similarities between these two. Here also every Pinterest board is owned and moderated by someone and has some guidelines which every board members have to abide by.
If you manage to an appropriate board to be a member of, you can exhibit your pins to thousands of like-minded Pinterest users with a common interest.
12. Use rich pins
Rich pins are a feature of Pinterest which shows much more information on each pin to provide a detailed context about any idea. Such rich pins are mainly of four types, Recipe pins, product pins, article pins, and app pins.
Rich pins have several advantages over ordinary pins. Like your pins always stand out of ordinary pins by its appearance. Rich pins get a favicon when it is displayed in mobile and with a bold title when users see it on desktop.
So, users can clearly distinguish a rich pin from ordinary pins and naturally get attracted to it. Again for reach pins, Pinterest populates the description part from the source content and users can not manipulate it anyway.
Especially if your promoting your blog, then an article pin is the best choice for you. Through article rich pin you can easily create very attractive pins with your blog title & logo, its description, bigger headline and a link to your blog post. If you have a WordPress blog with Yoast SEO plugin, then creating an article rich pin is super easy.
But you have to either create a business account in Pinterest or convert your ordinary account to a business account to avail this facility of creating rich pins.
13. Be consistent and maintain a schedule to pin
This is a very basic rule for even in blogging also. If you are a blogger and blogging seriously for sometimes, you know why it is so important to post regularly and update your content regularly.
To keep your audience engaged and signal Google that the blog is active and serving useful content to its audience at a regular interval, consistency is the key.
Same here in Pinterest too. Try to pin consistently, at least 10-15 pins daily. When Pinterest will see that you are creating a number of good pins daily, it will also ensure that the pins get visitors.
14. Fix a time to pin
Every day thousands of pins appear on any Pinterest user’s home feed. So, what is the way to make your pin stand out from the crowd? How can you make a maximum number of people see your pin and repin it as maximum as possible?
A very effective way to do that is to fix a particular time and date when your parget audience remains online in the highest numbers. A study report published in HubSpot blog disclosed a very interesting fact that Saturday morning is the best time to start Pinning.
If you have a fashion or retail blog then you should post it on Friday after 3 PM.
During working hours generally, very less number of people remains active on Pinterest, so. You must avoid the working hours to post any of your pins.
Audience location and demography plays a role:
To fine-tune your pinning time, you should analyze the locations of your target audience and their demographics. But always remember over pinning is a very bad policy. Optimize your number of pins also.
Some more ideas to improve your pinning strategy in order to boost organic traffic to your blog using Pinterest:
- Pinterest has several other effective features except for Rich pins which can help you to display your content to more people. To name some of them are Pin it button, Promoted pins, etc. make it super easy for any visitor to find your pins.
- Pinterest has a dedicated marketing blog and Pinterest guide providing a comprehensive guide to gain good knowledge about marketing, pinning analytics and all latest news and updates on Pinterest.
- Watch video tutorials from the Pinterest video library about creating effective pins and optimize them.
Conclusion
Since its inception, Pinterest is a very popular platform and its popularity is still increasing. Bloggers should use such a popular social platform where millions of people visit daily to create a highly targeted audience. They can sharpen their skills of marketing, networking and creating attractive images here.
Certainly, if you continue your good work and put effort consistently following all the tips of this post, you will be able to boost organic traffic using Pinterest. But you have to remember that patience is the key here. All the points mentioned here are helpful and certainly drive traffic from Pinterest to your blog but you have to give it time. You can not ask or expect an overnight jump in traffic.
As you will go on creating good pins consistently at least for the whole one year, then if you compare the traffic volume one year before that to traffic volume today, there will be a significant increase for sure.