Four Ways To Drive Pinterest Traffic to Your Blog

written by: brian baccus brands

posted on: july 24, 2019

Pinterest traffic generates a consistent influx of visitors to your evergreen content, regardless if you are posting new content every day or even every week. In this post, we will cover four key ways you can drive Pinterest traffic to your blog – setting up your account correctly, optimizing your boards, pinning quality images, and maintaining your account.

Pinterest + Us

Shortly after our first year of business, we realized that we needed to expand our reach from local clients to national and international customers. To do that, we relied heavily on Pinterest to drive traffic to our website. Very quickly our site grew from a few visitors each day to a thousand visitors from Pinterest each day. Over the years, as we have rebranded and changed our blog content, Pinterest traffic drives a significant amount of traffic to our website. As a result, we use this traffic to generate passive income through affiliate links and digital products.

Set up your Pinterest account correctly

The username, name, and description used for your Pinterest account should be the same one you use on other social media profiles, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Whether Pinterest or any other social media profile, your profile description should include keywords and phrases that are relevant to your brand. Consistent messaging across social media profiles reflects highly on your digital legitimacy.

Once you create your Pinterest account, you want to make sure you do two things – (1) convert your personal Pinterest account to a business Pinterest account and (2) verify your website through Pinterest. When you verify your Pinterest account, you will be able to set up Rich Pins. Rich Pins provide additional information on your pins from your site, regardless of if you pinned it or someone else.

Create relevant Pinterest boards

Your Pinterest boards should align with your blog niche. For example, if you are a food blogger, your boards should all be related to food. If you are interested in using Pinterest for other things, then create a personal account for those off-brand topics.

To optimize your Pinterest Boards, utilize these four best practices:

·        In each board, you should include a thorough description of what kinds of pins users can find. The descriptions should include relevant keywords and phrases. In our Instagram board, you can see what keywords and phrases we use to identify the types of pins found there.

·        Use tools such as Tailwind to analyze your boards’ virality score. This score shows the number of engagements each pin receives. The higher the score, the better for your images, board, profile, and website.

·        Strategically engage with group boards. You might find yourself invited to several group boards. When determining what group boards to join, make sure they align with your content and have more followers than your current profile. We found that several boards had poor virality scores and fewer followers, so we left those groups.

·        Use Tailwind’s Tribes to share your relevant content. I’ve been utilizing Tailwind Tribes to promote our graphics. It’s a way to share graphics without getting penalized with a low-quality group board.

·        A few years ago, you could delete and move pins, and it would result in a significant improvement in your Pinterest traffic. Since their algorithm changed, this method is not as reliable. We still recommend removing low-quality pins. During our sabbatical of blogging, we removed anything with poor engagement; our Pinterest followers grew by 1000+ without pinning any new content. Food for thought!

Pin quality matters

The best way to grow your Pinterest profile is to pin high-quality, beautiful images. Pinterest is full of hideous graphics. It’s pretty easy to stand out with beautiful templates. Using blog post templates to create a strong and consistent brand presence can have a lasting impact. Potential readers will be able to identify your content quickly.

When you are playing around with Pinterest templates, identify what sorts of pins do best for your brand. For example, long infographic type pins always do significantly well for me. Simple blog post templates do okay. Thus, WE spend more time creating infographics when possible. The type of graphic that works for your brand varies on your niche. Infographics don’t make sense for food bloggers, but long-pin collages do!

Anytime you pin an image from your website, always include a detailed description full of keywords and relevant search terms. We can’t emphasize how much this plays a part in creating viral pins. When I’m pinning our images, we take extra time to make sure that the descriptions are optimized. There are plugins you can use for this, but we prefer the manual approach.

When pinning content, make sure you are diversifying your content. Your pins should be a healthy mix of your images and others. Aesthetically, other people’s graphics should have a similar style to your pictures. Your pins (whether from your website or someone else’s) reflect your overall brand, so those pins should follow your brand standards.

Pin frequency

The easiest way to drive Pinterest traffic to your blog site is to pin frequently. Pin your content from your website (even the old stuff). Your readers will share your images on Pinterest, but you should be the first to pin your images. Instead of pinning all of your graphics at one time and the same image repeatedly to different boards, you can use Tailwind to schedule your pins for optimal engagement.

Pin images to multiple boards, especially if you are a member of group boards. Pinning the same image to multiple boards ensures that different audiences can view your image, which helps with virality score.

Consider deleting old pins with low engagement. If you have images that are not driving traffic to your website, you might want to consider reshooting them or updating the Pinterest graphic. Your Pinterest profile should be full of pins with high engagement. If the pins are really old, do not worry about doing this, they will be pushed down the board to show the newest ones first.

How to schedule pins to Tailwind?

With the Tailwind extension tool and app, you can easily schedule pins from your browser or phone. Here’s how you can schedule pins:

1.    Click the Tailwind browser toolbar.

2.    Select the pins you want to schedule.

3.    Click “Go Schedule!” button in the bottom right-hand corner.

4.    Assign the boards you want the pins to show up. You can also keep pins in your drafts queue by selecting “Save for Later.”

How many times a day should you pin on Pinterest?

Schedule between twenty to a hundred pins a day. Using tools like Tailwind, you can build up a queue of pins. So start small, such as twenty pins a day. As you add more pins to your queue, you can adjust the number of pins you publish. By using this approach, you will always have a healthy queue of pins ready to go. It’s better to be active 365 days a year with twenty pins, then pinning 100 images one day a year.

What is the best time to post to Pinterest?

Fortunately, you don’t have to guess at it (like Instagram). Tailwind calculates the best time for you publish your pins. When you set up your schedule, you will select how many times a day you want to pin. Then, Tailwind will identify what times work best for those pins.

Action Steps

If you need to do an internal audit of your Pinterest account, first focus on cleaning up your profile and boards. Once those are optimized, sign-up for Tailwind and start scheduling all of your images (even ones you’ve previously pinned). Focus on pinning evergreen or seasonally relevant pins first. Once you get everything cleaned up, you will find that you can work smarter, not harder.

I hope this information in this blog has helped you. It has helped up all the way up until this point and its just getting better. Follow us across the board at Brian Baccus Brands and Style Click Media