Drive Referral Traffic to your Blog with Pinterest.
How to Drive Referral Traffic to your Blog with Pinterest
No one should be putting Pinterest in a corner. With over 73 million users, Pinterest has been known as one of the most powerful and sophisticated social media ever. If you want to boost your referral traffic with the use of Pinterest, you need to diligently pin images to achieve this goal. After months of using Pinterest in my marketing strategy, I have noticed an explosion of referral traffic and a steady flow of high-quality visitors from the social platform. The popularity of your Pinterest account will also depend on how you engage with your subscribers and how you can easily make and share your content. I will be discussing in this post how you can drive referral traffic to your blog using Pinterest.
Start with building a solid Pinterest presence
If you are only starting to use Pinterest for the first time, the best way to attract followers is to create ten (10) boards, each with a minimum of 10 pins. One board should be dedicated solely for your blog content only while the remaining boards should focus on generic topics associated with your blog. You can have a board with social media marketing resources as well as blog articles you can spread all throughout your boards over time. Remember to pin other contents in between so as to have a variation on your Pinterest feed. This will limit your account as being tagged as spam behavior which will eventually lead to users unfollowing you if you practice doing such behavior.
Always keep your content fresh! You can have a steady Pinterest presence simply by being active on the platform by pinning your blog posts as well as other relevant pins related to your niche. Although you can’t schedule pins on Pinterest, you can choose apps like Tailwind, Viral Tag or Viral Woot and that has the capability of scheduling pins on Pinterest.
Always think of your keywords when pin descriptions and creating Pinterest boards
Pinterest runs on the principle of guided search, meaning, pinners can find great content by searching keywords. Always add your keywords in your blog content for it to be easily found by users using the search function of Pinterest. Remember not to overdo your keywords or force your language into your pin descriptions.
Beautifully crafted pin descriptions is a great way to help your pins be easily found in the Smart Feed. Your content needs to be relevant to the search so once your audience clicks through your pins, it will live up to its promise in the description you added.
Hashtags, however, do not work on Pinterest and may even hurt your pins. To help improve your search ability, it is best you have each Pinterest board with an appropriate description as well as a category.
Optimize your image visuals
Pinterest is known as all about images. For you to be widely known on Pinterest, you have to utilize this fact to your advantage to get referral traffic. You have to always come up with great visuals that will help entice your target audience.
To increase your chances of getting repined images (referral traffic), follow these tips:
- Directly pin your videos on Pinterest.
- Using watermark on your images is a must branding strategy.
- Always create tall aspect ratio images 735 x 2058 pixels to aim for greater visibility on Pinterest.
- Create more infographic images as these usually gets more traffic and repins.
- Avoid using faces in your images. Visuals without faces gain 23% more repins.
- Use your own mix of clever pictures, step-by-step intros and text overlay. Tips and how-to’s and checklists images will receive more attention.
- Always use dominant colors in the images you create for Pinterest.
Don’t forget to add the Pin-it button to your blog
The best way to gain user engagement and referral traffic is to make sharing as easy as possible. Remember to add a pin-it button to your website for easy sharing of your images on Pinterest.
Your visitors will appreciate it more if you can make their sharing experience a lot easier
Images on your blog posts should always be Pinterest-friendly. Therefore, make it your business to make your blog Pinterest friendly by adding a Pinterest widget to your blog.
It’s easy to cross-promote your pins on Pinterest with all your other social media accounts including Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tumblr. You can do this by simply adding your links on your Pinterest pins. You can also add your Pinterest link in your email signature and even add your most popular pin when you’re doing an email blast on a weekly basis.
Remember to always engage with your followers
The best way to convert your site visitors into Pinterest followers is by engaging with them. Pinning consistently is very helpful if you want to increase your engagement. If you are too busy to pin, you can use third-party apps like Viral Woot or Tailwind to schedule the pins for you.
Make it a habit to check the boards and pins of your followers and repin these images that may be relevant to your business. Pinning content from influencers is also a great strategy to boost your referral traffic. Commenting on pins of your followers will also help drive user engagement. You can even leave a link to your site in the comment box if you already have Pinterest authority.
What are the Key Points for creating a Viral Pin
Having all these in mind when creating your Pin:
- Tall aspect ratio
- Checklists in them
- Tutorials
- Informational based (Infographic)
- Compelling images
- Text overlays
- Detailed description
- Tasteful Branding
- Calls to action
The meaning of a great pin:
- To Pin, means to capture intent and increase engagement, which is to people that a specific idea is achievable.
- To Pin, Means to drive clicks should give Pinners a reason WHY they need to take action.
What does it take for the Pin, to really start getting the referral traffic:
- Start creating your own original content.
- Give a call to action on every Pin you create.
- Use original photos or download them from Royalty free sites.
- Apply High Contrast fonts with the light background.
- Try to use multiple dominant colors in your pins.
- Do not use faces in your pins.
- Apply for Pinterest Rich Pins here.
- Give a full description of a Pin between 200 & 300 characters in length.
- Don’t use Shortlinks in the source of the pin, as Pinterest will mark your pin as a spam.
- Collaborate with others by Pinning your Pins to other Pinterest Group Boards. Use Pingroupie.com to find the boards that can work with your niche.
Know what time to pin those pins.
The timing that is recommended by research, between 8pm-11pm est., 9 pm traffic is at its peak! Also, 2-4 pm on Saturdays and Sundays.
My best advice to you will be to always test many different pins and watch your Pinterest Analytics like a hawk to understand what is performing best so you can continue to create what people like best and gets higher exposure to your pins.
Lastly, if there’s anything I missed here, feel free to let me know in the comments.
MOST important Tip I can leave you with, start getting Referral Traffic to your site is by PINNING DAILY!
It’s that simple!
Have I missed anything in this guide?
If so, do leave me a comment.
Terrence Freeman says
This is an awesome article Anna and you know one thing that I have not been doing is adding the keywords to the description is my pictures. Great tips as always sis 🙂
Terrence Freeman says
This is an awesome article Anna and you know one thing that I have not been doing is adding the keywords to the description is my pictures. Great tips as always sis 🙂
Anna Zubarev says
Hey Terrence, I certainly agree that a lot more people are not optimizing correctly their images for proper syndication. I have another blog post to share with you on this topic that can help you understand this better: http://bit.ly/optimizationsizes
Let me know if all that would make sense to you and I m here if you have any other questions on that end.