Taking Pinterest to the Next Level

Around the globe 150 million individuals use Pinterest every month (source). My account is  in the top 20,000 accounts, I’m pretty pleased with that. Pinterest is big news. Around 75% of my social media traffic comes from Pinterest, currently down from 90%. New readers and contacts are finding World Travel Family through my boards and traffic grows every month, it’s all down to Pinterest. My Google search traffic, formerly 75% of my total traffic, is down to under half even though it continues to grow and that’s great news.

To get to this point with Pinterest has taken trial and error but I’ve also read around the subject extensively, listened to podcasts and watched demos. It’s important to stay on top of new updates. Pinterest changes the rules to keep us on our toes frequently, sometimes annoyingly.

This is what’s working for me on Pinterest, right now in 2017. Taking some or all of these ideas and tips to your blog or business could help your traffic enormously.

 

There may be affiliate links in this post, they cost you no extra and all recommendations are 100% genuine.

Tips For Getting Serious About Pinterest.

I’m presuming you’ve already registered, set up your profile and started creating boards. Lets just take it from there. You must be sure to validate your blog, Pinterest sends you reminders to do this.

What is the Aim of Pinterest?

This is the reality of Pinterest. It’s advertising. As a bloggers your aim is to :

1. Get as many new people to your blog as possible via your pins ( and hope they stick around to become followers) to increase traffic to make more money and to impress sponsors.

2.To collect as many followers as possible to impress sponsors and increase reach of future pins.

3. To get people to repin your beautiful pins on Pinterest to spread brand awareness and generate even more traffic and facilitate 1 and 2.

4. You can also use Pinterest to generate more Amazon income.

Making the pretty pins is fun and creative and you can make good contacts through Pinterest, but in the real, cold, hard world this is why we use it, business. The beauty of Pinterest is that it’s longer lasting than your activity on other social media platforms, a Tweet is an instant hit, a pin can actively bring you traffic forever.

You Need to Get a Business Account, Register for Rich Pins , Add Pin-It Buttons and Board Widgets.

Pinterest actually requires businesses to have a business account. It’s very easy to make the switch by following Pinterest’s own instructions. Or click-through and read this tutorial.

Rich Pins, complete with your blog’s Favicon make a big difference in increasing your Pinterest visibility. They put your blogs name and logo directly under your images. If you follow the usual instructions, things become a little complex as coding is involved. There is a very easy way to do it, can read how here. If you already have the Yoast SEO plugin installed ( we recommend this), there is a great shortcut. Once rich pins and the favicon were up and running, I saw a significant increase in traffic to my blog from Pinterest.

Equipping your blog with “pin it” buttons is also a good idea, just follow Pinterest’s instructions. OR set up a site-wide, hover-to-pin option using Social Warfare . This this kick-ass plugin is the model I prefer for many reasons.

Pinterest for business also makes it easy for you to add Pinterest widgets ( click-through to build) in a shape to suit its location, after post, sidebar or header. These do, however, increase your page load time so I’m no longer using them.

What to Pin.

Don’t just pin your own stuff, make beautiful boards.

You are the curator of your boards and you want them to look amazing, be useful and appeal to as many people as possible. Pin things that are beautiful, striking, funny or informative, depending on the board. Your pins should stop scrollers in their tracks and make them go “WOW”.  Anything average will be ignored on Pinterest.

Your board is more likely to be found if it is well stocked with a lot of good quality pins. Pinterest needs to know that you are a good curator, work hard at that.

Don’t be afraid to repin your old posts, or to add new Pinterest images to old posts, this is where the magic really happens. Keep your work appearing at the top of feeds and boards to reach fresh eyes. I would recommend setting up a spread sheet to stay on top of your pinning.

Avoid looking spammy or swamping boards. Around one third your pins to two thirds other people’s pins works well.

Some of your boards will contain only your own work. For example, your first board MUST be your blog or business board, showcasing your work to people discovering your account for the first time. You can use the Pinterest ” move pin” feature to keep your best performing or most profitable pins at the top of the page where they’ll reach the most eyes.

Some of your boards will have mixed content, yours and other people’s. You can choose if you’d like it to be phtography based or blog post based. I find a mix of both works best.

At least one of your boards should be a group board. Grow it and invite other pinners to collaborate so that over time applicants to this board will become a new source of traffic.

Where to Find Pins to Populate Your Boards

Anywhere! When I go onto Pinterest I always start with my stream, find an amazing image and pin it. Once you’ve pinned a box will pop up “also pinned to”. If that board appeals I’ll go there too, explore, like a few, pin a few, comment until another “also pinned to” notice appears that I love, then I go there and repeat the process. Pinterest is like a paper trail through a wonderful, amazing world, pick up what you like and share it with your audience and future audience.

Finding new pins is recommended, if you come across a webpage that’s just begging to be pinned, go ahead, pin it. If you’re first and it’s stunning it could lead to a snowstorm of repins and new followers.

Always be very wary of copyright. Never remove credits.

Try to find pins that link to original sources, you need to build a reputation as a reliable pinner. Sniff out scam pins or pins selling courses and ignore them.

Make Yourself as Visible as Possible

I always tell the kids that what I’m doing on social media is shouting “LOOK AT ME!”.

And it’s true.

The more you’re there, interacting, commenting, liking, pinning and repinning, the more you’ll get noticed. Pinterest gives preference in search results to regular users.

Naming Your Boards

Simple seems best, people often search Pinterest by board, so they’re more likely to search for “Sri Lanka” than “The Magical Isle of Lanka”,  if you see what I mean. That said, be smart, scope out the competition.

Pinterest will like your board more if you fill out all the information, so don’t forget the description for each board. The more Pinterest likes you, the higher in Pinterest’s search results you will appear. Your descriptions for boards and pins should contain key words, they need good SEO. Don’t forget, Pinterest is basically a search engine. People use it to find information, inspiration and ideas.

Pinning Your Own Stuff

Do not just pin every landscape orientated image from your blog posts. It looks rubbish and, again, will be ignored.

The Better Way to Pin Your Stuff

This is one of my oldest and best pins, with tens of thousands of repins.

Tall and skinny looks best on Pinterest.  Tall and skinny gets repins because it stands out in the Pinterest format. If you want people to click through to your post, not just repin it, you need to tell them that this is what they need. You can either put text on your pin or leave it as a plain stunning image, both can work. I’ve A/B tested the same pin, one with text, one without, the one with the text was pinned more times.

If you put words all over your pin “Click here for the most amazing post on the subject you’re most interested in!” or ” You need to read this post to change your life!” would work well, but could be disastrous for your bounce rate. So stay honest. Put words on the picture to describe the post, but make it as exciting as possible.

File names, alt tags and keywords in meta descriptions all play a role in putting your pin at the top of the listings. Try to make sure every image on your site has every field completed optimally.

Your images should ideally have your watermark or blog name on them. Consistent branding is always a good idea, even for Pinterest. Something I was guilty of not doing in the early days.

The ideal size for a pin, as recommended by Canva ( a free design tool with pre-made Pinterest templates) is 735 x 1102 px. Canva looks great but I use PicMonkey, another free design tool. These exact dimensions are only a guideline.

The Text Bit

Beneath every image there is a text box, here is your chance to sell your post and your blog. Grab people’s attention, give them a reason to visit your blog and become a follower. Think of every pin as an advertisement.

Pinterest doesn’t like #tags, one is OK, more than one and your pin will rank less highly.

Linking to Your Post

If you pin directly from your post the link is automatically inserted. If you pin by uploading your own image, you need to go to “edit” and paste in the URL in the box at the bottom.

Getting Your Pins in Front of Maximum Eyes.

There are 3 factors here, timing and number of followers and being good at Pinterest to start with, ie. Pinterest has to like you.

Timing is hard, if, like me, you have followers right around the globe. Evenings and weekends are best for Pinterest, but who’s evening? Australia or the US? At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter that a large proportion of my existing followers are Australian, its new followers that I want and they’ll probably come from group boards, so I go for the US. There are more people in the US.

Best times are :

Midweek  2-­4 pm and 10-11 am

Evenings 8-­11 pm

Saturday Morning 9-­11 am

Sundays are best for me, by a very long way. The Sunday boom flows through into Monday too.

Don’t pin everything at once, try to space out your pins and alternate the types of pins you’re sharing, make one about food, one about Asia, one about the UK and so on. That way you have more chance of appealing to someone. somewhere.

Scheduling pins makes a big difference, particularly as I sleep while America is online. Tailwind is only $10-15/ month, Board Booster s $5 per month. Both allow me to pin round the clock.

 

UPDATE:  Manual pinning still works very effectively and is possibly better than using a scheduling tool, but who has the time? If I spend an hour a day on Pinterest I see excellent results in traffic but I need to be pinning around the clock. Over the years I’ve used Board Booster alone and recently Tailwind alone. I’ve come to the conclusion that you need both to really maximise Pinterest’s potential . They do two different things. Board Booster is ” set it and forget it”, Tailwind is more of a time suck.  Tailwind is a pretty big outlay, around $120/year but it’s incredibly versatile, allows unlimited pins and gives you in depth insights and analytics. Board Booster is simpler, faster and cheaper. Using the two together is genius.

GET A SCHEDULING TOOL, or TWO

Tailwind, Our links give you a big discount, click through for details.

Board Booster, get it here, I’m a big fan as it’s cheap and frees up my time.

I had a VA that I was training up to take over my Pinterest account. Before I’d even finished training her properly I’d paid her more than the Tailwind plus Board Booster outlay.

Group Boards can be your best friend on Pinterest ( but they are not a quick fix, you need to be good at Pinterest before group boards will help you much). At the moment I have 17,000+ followers, but some of the group boards I’ve joined have many more. It’s pretty easy to see how that works. Find the good ones and follow the joining instructions under the board title. Find the best group boards in your niche with tools such as Pingroupie. If a group board isn’t helping you much or has poor repin rates, leave.

I’ve noticed that group boards followed by real people, rather than just bloggers, bring me a lot more traffic. Try to be selective. Some group boards are totally useless. I use Board Booster’s or Tailwind’s own stats to figure out which perform best for me.

If you’d like to join my group boards, get in touch, this one is for food and travel, I also have one for travel bloggers.

Group Sharing Threads are of questionable value. If you’re just starting out use them, for sure, you will gain followers and spread your pins wider. I don’t really use them any more because I don’t want to clog up my personal feed with pins I don’t really like or want to pin. You will find plenty of sharing groups for bloggers in your niche on Facebook.

Viralwoot formerly Pinwoot is a tool for growing followers, targeting repins and scheduling. I used it in the early days to rapidly increase my following and I’ve considering upgrading to the paid service for scheduling. However, the followers you get here are “fake” in that they have no real interest in your work. They’re just repinning to get more repins of their own. Think about what you want. Your time is probably better spent working out a “real” way to become a Pinterest Ninja. I have not included an affiliate link here to Viralwoot because I no longer use it, so that would be dishonest.

Use the Move Button

Use the Move button, top left of your home page, to keep your own pins at the top of any group boards you manage. That way new visitors will see your pins first and are more likely to save them. When I visit a new board I rarely look at more than the first few rows. Your pins need to be at the top. Do this daily if necessary.

Less Social Media More Family Travel

I’ve put too much time into Pinterest but I’ve seen real results. We now have around 17,000 followers and around 600 click-throughs to the blog every day from Pinterest. I’ve put in a lot of hours to make this happen, it wouldn’t have been possible if we were on the road full-time and there are no real shortcuts or cheats other than hiring a Pinterest VA ( yes, I do that sometimes, $50/hour, get in touch)

I’m very glad we’re getting back to the full-time travel soon and I hope my  followers, readers and friends will be along for the ride. We have a passion for travel, it’s still there and we will continue to try and share that passion and encourage others to get out and have adventures. I still enjoy blogging, I’m not going to stop, but my online time will nose-dive soon as I spend more time exploring and with my boys. I’m glad I got all this set up while we were stationary.

The real world is far more interesting than Twitter ( I totally didn’t get Twitter, but it’s starting to make more sense now) so I’ll take the foot off the throttle for a while at least. Good luck with Pinterest, it’s a great tool and lots of fun.

Did you sign up to follow our journey and get more blogging updates? Did you follow our Pinterest Blogging Tips board? It’s a great resource as Pinterest is always my first stop if I want to learn something new. I’m personally checking every pin for its usefulness, look for my comments.

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