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Pinterest is a must for new bloggers. You can share your content on Pinterest. Your readers will want to save the most interesting posts on their boards. And all that saving of beautiful pins will bring increasingly more visitors to your blog. Sounds too easy to be true?

It is not. You can potentially get thousands of visitors if you put in some effort. I have read probably more than a hundred articles about what bloggers with great Pinterest traffic suggest to do to gain more visitors to any blog. So below I have listed many of these tips and tricks, which will allow you to share your blog with a wider audience.

But first – what is Pinterest?

Pinterest is like the largest image search engine on the web right now. The use case is straightforward:

1. See a nice picture on the web
2. Save the picture and link to it on Pinterest
3. Group pictures by their context on different boards
4. Continue

What’s the catch?

If it is so easy, you say, why do I need to give much attention to Pinterest, create a strategy, read the tips below? Well, everyone is on Pinterest. Thousands of people want to share their content and attract more visitors. And to succeed, one must stand out in the crowd, be persistent and learn from others.

As there is a great deal of advice out there, I suggest you not to be intimidated by it. And not to implement each one of these things. Start small and add some of these tips to your Pinterest strategy as you see fit.

When I started this blog, I read a lot about what other people are doing. At first, I was looking at this as a fun hobby, so I wanted to experience some traffic from Pinterest before investing in tools like Tailwind. I have been struggling now with manually pinning images from my blog and other great content to my boards, and now I am seriously considering upgrading my manual work to Tailwind. That would give me a systematic approach and better time management possibilities. And many more visitors to my blog from Pinterest.

Tips

Pinterest has been around for a while, so there are uncountable posts about how to gain traffic from it. Algorithms of how the pins are displayed and when they are deemed as more worthy than others change with time. What was working once may change over time. Therefore I would recommend reading about all the interesting strategies that people are applying to their Pinterest accounts and from time to time try something new.

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There are some universal things that you can improve on Pinterest and your blog to gain more return on your time investment in pinning. You have the power to enable your blog audience to share the content more easily and you may improve your Pinterest account to see the analytical results from that.

Tune your Pinterest account

• Use keywords in your pin descriptions. It will make your pins visible to Pinterest search. This will lead to more people seeing your pins and sharing them.
• Edit your Pinterest profile so that you can get more followers.
• Take advantage of the “About” section. There are 160 characters allowed – use them wisely. Let people know what your brand is all about. Keep it simple, clear, and consistent with the content that you are pinning.
• Get a business account. If you want to see more detailed statistics, you should apply for a business account. Instructions on how to do this are here.
• Confirm your website. This will allow you to see statistics about pins from your blog – how many people have seen them and how many have clicked on them. Instructions on how to do this can be found here. If you don’t have a blog yet, here are instructions on how to start a blog in a few minutes.
• Connect your Facebook and Twitter to Pinterest. This will make you look more professional, trustworthy and it even might grow your follower count on other social media platforms as well.
• Pin from inside affiliate platforms to create affiliate links and monetize your pins. You can pin from ShopSense and RewardStyle, and probably from some more platforms, and gain a small commission if someone buys from those platforms after clicking on your pin.

Improve your blog

• Add images to every blog post. This should go without saying – if you want people to share your post on Pinterest, there must be pinnable images in the post. In fact, there can be more than one image that is meant for Pinterest sharing in one post.
• Include a “Save” button on your blog. Make it easy for visitors to share your posts by adding a “Save” button. This will allow people to add images from your posts directly to their boards while keeping links and descriptions from your blog. Here are the instructions.
• Enable rich pins. Do you write recipes? Articles? Or sell products? Then you need to turn your simple pins into rich pins. This gives a bit more data about your pin to Pinterest, which is rewarded by showing your pin to more people. And your pin will be easier to find. Instructions here.
• Use your analytics to pin strategically. From your business account, you will have access to statistics about your audience and pins. If one pin keeps outperforming others, learn from it, and repeat its success. Find out the timezone in which you should pin by investigating your main audience and finding out their location.

What to pin

• Pin a lot. The numbers that other bloggers recommend to pin varies, but they are usually around 30-50 pins a day. On the one hand, this might seem like a lot of work, but on the other hand – if everyone is posting a bunch of pins daily, your 2 pins of the day will get lost in the massive feed your followers are browsing. The more you pin of quality pins, the more likely that people will see them.
• Schedule your pins in advance. In the Pinterest world, you will have a bigger audience, if you post your pins from time to time, and not 40 at once. And it will get tricky if you continue to regularly post something new throughout a day and do it with your own hands. A smarter approach is to use scheduling tools like Tailwind, where you can schedule several pins to your boards at once, and then the tool will do the posting for you.

Content from your blog

• Don’t be afraid to create multiple pins for the same post. Do A-B testing (or even A-Z testing, if you like). What does it mean? You can create several Pins for a single post with different pictures, text and color combinations to see, which pins outperform others. What’s more interesting is that if one pin from a post does extremely well, it will also increase success for other pins from the same post.
• Don’t pin the same pin to several boards at once. This will not bode well with Pinterest algorithms.
• Don’t delete your own pins or boards because they have no traction. Pinterest takes time and a pin can go viral even after several months of being not noticed. You need to be patient and it may be rewarded. One pin can bring visitors to your blog even a long time after you initially pinned it.

Other content

• Repin other’s content. Like on any other social media platform, people want to see different content. You could pin everything from your blog only, but that would bore your followers out of their minds. And Pinterest algorithms wouldn’t like that as well. Sharing amazing content other people have created might lead your followers to pins from your blog.
• Quality over quantity. The Pinterest smart feed is deciding, what content people will see. It considers not just the quality of the pin, but the quality of the source as well. So it is a tricky balance – in order to get noticed, you should be pinning a lot, and at the same time, the content should be amazing. As for myself, I choose to pin what I find interesting, so the quantity is lower.
• Pin 50% – 80% content from other authors. As a beginner blogger, it would be hard for you to generate so many pins from your own blog to have 30 new pins each day for your boards. So the wise way of dealing with this is by pinning other people’s pins to your boards. In the beginning, the percentage of other’s content will be bigger, but you can bring in more of your own pins, as the content grows on your blog.

Board tips

• Create a board that is exclusively yours. The name can be “The best of [your blog name here]”. That is a great way for people to find all the stuff you have created on one board conveniently together.
• Add categories and descriptions to your boards. This will make it easier to find your board for potential followers. Be specific and use all the space provided.
• Organize your boards. Pinterest is all about visual appeal and first impressions. If you have several boards, keep your blog board and boards related to your niche on the top. Make sure that the first impression (first two rows of boards) look nice and send the right message to visitors to your page.
• Don’t create too many boards. People usually go to Google or other search engines, if they want to find something very specific. And it will be hard for you to organize and maintain your own boards if you have too many of them.
• Recreate all of your board covers to look more cohesive and professional. You might have noticed that professional pinners have a cover styled specifically for their boards. This is a way of looking more serious about Pinterest to your potential followers. You can simply upload a picture and choose it as a board cover.
• Delete or hide boards that do not appeal to your target audience. If you are converting your personal account to use as a business account, you will probably have some boards that don’t match your niche and target audience. It would be good to hide these boards or at least move them to the bottom of your board list.

Group boards

• Join a group board. Group boards have many contributors which also result in more pins inside them and broader audiences. They are great for boosting traffic to your blog. A sneaky way of how to choose the right group boards to join is to see, what other people in your industry have chosen to pin to. Just find some other bloggers in your niche and check their group boards. Usually, group boards have some rules about how you can join them. Don’t be shy and contact the board creator to ask to join the board, if it is not against the board rules.
• Find the best group boards. You can use a tool like PinGroupie to filter out group boards in your niche with the most followers. When you join such a group board, keep an eye on how your pins are doing there. If the board does not rank well with Pinterest algorithms because the quality of its pins is too low, it’s better to leave it.

 Create pin-worthy images

• Create images in 2:3 aspect ratio. Larger pins might get cut on mobile devices, so your audience might not see the whole pin.
• Use multiple or mosaic images within a pin. You can use Canva templates for this.
• Choose stunning pictures. But be careful about the tools you use. Images found on the web have copyrights protected, so it is a bad idea just to take random pictures. My favorite source of free high-quality images is Unsplash.
• Make sure the images on your blog have descriptive “alt” text and file names. Pinterest takes “alt” text from your images as the Pinterest description. If you provide this text, in most cases users will not change it, so you will be in control of what descriptions will go to Pinterest and later will be used to find pins from your blog.
• Hide images that are meant just for Pinterest from your blog audience. If you create a bunch of different images for your post to be shared on Pinterest but don’t want to burden your readers with them, you can simply hide them from your post. If you have sharing buttons on your blog, the images will appear there, when a visitor wants to share the post. How to do it?
  • Add image to the post;
  • Switch to “Text’ tab of your blog post in WordPress;
  • Find the image code there, it should look like this: <img src=”https://wandernity.com/…image name.png” />
  • Add tag before the image and after the image, so that it looks like this: <div style=”display: none;”> <img src=”https://wandernity.com/…image name.png” />

Add text to your images

• Include text on your image. It will capture attention and make the pin more clickable. There are great free tools for creating pins from templates like Canva and PicMonkey.
• Text on your pin doesn’t have to match your title. The only restriction here is that the text should not be misleading.
• Use a call to action. Pins that include texts like “Click to read” or “Find out more” generate more viewer engagement. Just don’t reference Pinterest functionality, like: “Click here to pin!”
• Stay true to your brand. You can put your logo or blog address on every pin you create. It’s cool to use your own images and style pins in the same manner by choosing dominating text colors and fonts.

Do you have any other tips and tricks in mind? And more importantly – are you using any of these and have you noticed a difference in how implementing changes to your Pinterest improve visitor count to your blog?