In this post, I'm going to show you how to use Pinterest to drive thousands of free visitors to your blog.
I'm excited because this is the same method that allowed me to take a blog from hardly any traffic, as you can see below, to 341 page views in December.
This is the time that I started to use this Pinterest strategy.
Within a month it had gone up to 6,000 page views.
The next month it traveled to 17,000 page views.
The month after that it went up to 26,000 page views.
Then to 60,000 page views in August and it has continued to climb since. This is a very powerful method that I'll show you.
Firstly, before we get into this…
What Is Pinterest And How Does It Work?
I thought I'd answer this with you now, in case you literally have no idea like myself when I first came across Pinterest.
So simply put,
Pinterest is a visual search engine with the human element.
To show you what that means, if you went onto Google and you typed in chicken recipes for slow cooker, you would just see a bunch of articles like this…
I'm sure that you would have definitely seen something like that before.
Just textbase results, sometimes they have an image, but that's how it looks.
When you go to Pinterest though, if you searched the same query, you're going to get visual representations of those articles.
So instead of having text-based articles, you're then going to have images that represent those articles.
And on Pinterest, they're just called pins.
As you can see, they are the images that represent the articles.
The next part is the human element.
Let me explain.
There are business and personal profiles.
Most people will have a personal profile, but either way, everyone will have some kind of a profile.
And then on each account, everyone has boards, and boards are just places where you can organize your blog posts (or articles that you like) and put them into relevant boards.
It's very simple.
As you can see, this account has different gardening boards for different types of gardening topics.
And then if you click onto a board, you will then see the actual pins (image representation) of the articles that appear on that board.
If I click onto the cold climate gardening board, for example, all the pins will be related to the topic of this board.
As shown here.
Some of these Pins may fall into another category of board as well.
Meaning they could be Pinned to multiple boards, which is good.
Lastly, if you actually clicked on one of these pins, you then go down to the final layer.
This is where you see the Pin details, such as the description of what the article is about, the number of re-pins it has, and the website that you're going to go to.
Also, this is the point where you can save the article to a specific board that you have.
If you click that, you're then going to go over to the site, that is really it.
So as you can see, the human element is people have their own profile and manually pin to their boards.
So not only do you have a profile for real people, but you then also have people going and pinning to different boards and sharing them all around Pinterest.
That is really what it is.
Pinterest, as you can see, is a visual search engine with a human element.
So the next thing you might be wondering is…
How Do People See Your Pins When You Pin To Pinterest.
Like how do people actually come across your pins in the first place?
There are TWO main ways.
1. Pinterest Feed
If you go onto your phone – most people will be using their phones, when they open up Pinterest, they will see the feed like this.
The Pinterest feed is a little like the Facebook feed.
You're going to see pins on your feed that other people have pinned on their own boards.
It's like when someone posts an image to their facebook, you still see it in your feed.
It's similar on Pinterest.
And that's whether that's their own content they've pinned to their boards or other people's content they've re-pinned to their own boards.
You will also see Pins that Pinterest shows in your feed but are not by anyone you follow. These will just be Pins related to the stuff you usually look at.
Pinterest is smart.
So if you usually look at Vegan related topics then you will see more Pins which are Vegan related.
This is whether you are following the users' profile of not.
Essentially, it's a mix of Pins from people you follow AND Pins from topics that you usually look at.
If you were to pin something to your board it may show up on someone else's feed that you don't know because it's related to the stuff they usually look at.
This is GOOD NEWS for you, as you want people seeing your pins.
The next way is they can actually just search using the search bar.
2. The Search Bar
You can use the search bar on a mobile or on a desktop. And when you search, you then get the related articles.
You want your pins to RANK HIGH so people click them when they do their search.
This is a search example on a desktop, but you can do that on a phone as well.
I hope that makes sense now.
Now I'm going to show you how to actually do this yourself.
How Do You Use Pinterest To Drive Insane Amounts Of Traffic To Your Blog?
With a bit of magic and a sprinkle of luck!
JOKING!
It's pretty straight forward.
Here's how…
1. Crease a Pinterest Business account.
The first thing you need to do is have a business account.
If you don't have one, then simply create one.
To do that, click here then follow the instructions.
Once you're set up and logged in, you're going to have the option to start filling some of this info in, which is located in the account settings:
- The URL of your blog
- Pinterest account name
- A small bio
The first thing you're going to do is ADD YOUR URL and VERIFY it.
Just follow the Pinterest instructions.
You'll be able to do that in your account settings.
The second point is to add your Pinterest name. This is probably going to be your blog name.
In the example, the website is called a PaleoHacks.com, and that's their Pinterest account name.
Now here's some secret SEO tip 🙂
With the remaining space, you want to try and put in a few relevant keywords.
For the above example, they put paleo recipes, health and fitness tips.
Use that remaining space to put a few relevant keywords in.
The third thing is to add a description.
Make sure you use some nice and RELEVANT keywords.
In the example, they've put health advice, easy recipes, and functional workouts. Just relevant keywords to their blog.
Don't overthink it, just a nice simple description of what your blog is about and add some relevant keywords at the same time.
Congrats. That's the first bit done.
Now that you have your Pinterest business account and you've done this step, the next thing you need to do is create some boards.
2. Create Keyword Relevant Boards.
To start with, you need to create about 10 to 15 boards using relevant keywords as the board names.
You can add more boards as you go on, but just create 10 to 15 to get started.
If you feel you need more, then add more later, but don't create too many boards if you're not going to actually use them.
So start off with roughly 10 to 15, or whatever you feel you will be able to use.
Next, when creating your boards you need to use RELEVANT keywords for your board titles.
If you're unsure what keywords to use, just think of the broadest sense topics that your blog is about.
For example,
If your blog is about recipes you might have chicken recipes, and you might have pork recipes, and beef recipes etc.
Then those are going to be the broadest keywords for the topics.
We'll then create more niched down boards.
Obviously, a chicken recipe may still be classed as an easy chicken recipe or healthy chicken recipe or grilled chicken recipe.
This illustration shows what I mean.
Start off with the broadest keyword first.
Name your first boards after those broadest sense keywords.
Like the example above, you'd name the first board chicken recipes.
Then you'd think of the next narrowed down version of the keyword for that broad board.
Easy chicken recipes, healthy chicken recipes, grilled chicken recipes, crockpot chicken recipes, Thai chicken recipes…
Just whatever is relevant to YOUR BLOG
If you had a workouts blog, you could have a workout board, and then you could have high-intensity workouts board, then a cross country workouts board, gym workouts board, etc.
Hopefully, this makes sense.
Just narrow down from the broad board so you also have some narrowed down versions and name each board that keyword.
Once you have done that, you are then going to move on to the next step.
3. Add Keyword Rich Board Descriptions
You should now at this point have about 10 to 15 boards, give or take.
They'll be empty with no pins no board descriptions.
This step you need to go through and manually edit the board descriptions.
It's very simple to do.
You just need to make sure you add some keywords that are relevant to each board's topic.
In this example, this board is called chakra healing.
If you read that, it says articles and blog posts for chakra healing, chakra self-care, chakra book, chakra worksheet, self-care worksheet, opening chakras and balancing chakras.
As you can see, they're nice and relevant keywords.
That is what you want to do for your boards.
Just find some relevant keywords and add those as a description.
And I usually like to do something like this:
This board is about…[then just put the keywords].
Nice and simple.
When you have done that for each board, you should now have your main account page done. You should now have boards, and you should have keyword descriptions in those boards as I just showed you.
Next step.
4. Pin Other Peoples Content To Your Boards
The next step is to start a pining to your boards and get some board juice so Pinterest really understands what those boards are about.
What I like to do is start by pinning about 10 to 20 of OTHER PEOPLE'S pins to each new board.
And to do that, search each board's keyword in the search bar and pin the top content to your board.
For example, if your board was called Chakra healing then you would search that in the search bar and then pin some of those pins to your board.
And I don't pin them all in one day either.
Do about three to five pins each day to each board.
That's just to stop you looking spammy by pining 20 pins to 20 different boards in ONE day.
You don't want to do that.
You can divide it by morning and night if you want.
Maybe two or three in the morning, two or three in the night to each board if you want to do it that way.
But either way, three to five pins each day to hit about 10 to 20 pins on each new board.
Like I said, you want to search the board name into the search bar to get the pins that you're going to pin to your boards.
The reason to do this is that Pinterest is showing you these pins that are related to that keyword.
Like in the above example, you would type chakra healing into the search bar and then you would pin the pins from that search.
As you can see, those pins are obviously related to chakra healing.
If you pin those to your boards, Pinterest is going to know what your board is about.
You could also search for the keywords that you've used in a board description.
In the chakra healing example, we had the description and there were other keywords, you had chakra healing crystals, you could type in chakra healing crystals as well.
And pin some of those pins to the chakra healing board because that is still closely related to that board topic.
That is how you would do that.
So to clarify:
Just search each boards main keyword and maybe some of the keywords from the boards description and pin the RELEVANT pins to each board till you have about 10 to 20 pins of other people's pins done on each board.
That way Pinterest is then going to clearly understand what your board is about.
Once you've done that, it's time to move on and actually pin your own content to your boards.
5. Pin Your Own Content To Your Boards
Yay now the time to start sharing your content!
So to do that, choose the article you are going pin to Pinterest.
And just so you know, if you don't have a pin, I'm going to show you in a min where you can get these done.
So firstly, you need to create a pin and then pin it to your most relevant broad keyword board first.
For example, if you have a chicken recipe, which happens to be a grilled chicken recipe, you wouldn't pin it to your grilled chicken recipe board first.
You actually want to pin it to a chicken recipe board first.
The reason is, more people are going to search chicken recipe than grilled chicken recipe.
So you'll want a pin it to your board keyword board FIRST.
And remember this: Your first board is the MOST IMPORTANT.
Never pin it to some random board.
Pin it to your most relevant broad keyword board first because that is the most important.
And just so you know, you can create MULTIPLE pins for each article.
You don't have to create just one pin.
Actually, I recommend you create multiple pins for each article, or at least once you've pinned a pin to each board that you're going to pin it to, then create a new pin and then work your way back through those boards at some point.
And just so you know, it does take a little time to get traction.
You are new, you haven't got much history of Pinterest. So it's normal to be slow at first.
Just expect that.
I have a method to help you get more people to see your pins which we will cover in a minute.
If you want to know how to pin or add your pin to Pinterest – it's very simple.
On your desktop, you're going to see a red icon with the plus (+) sign. Click that and then click create the pin. You will then go and fill in the details.
Here's a completed example.
You'll add your image, your description, your headline, and your URL.
Again, use some RELEVANT keywords in this description and then a few hashtags with some more keywords in.
Maybe three to five keyword hashtags.
This will help with your Pinterest SEO.
Then once you do that, choose the board from the dropdown that you're going to pin to.
Congrats you've just pinned a pin to Pinterest!
Here are some quick recap tips.
- Pin a new pin to your most relevant broad keyword board first
- Your first board in the most important
- Create multiple pins for each article
- Takes a little time to get traction
Oh, and if you're wondering the time frame for pinning to boards, just pin each article to a new board each day until you've run out of relevant boards.
Then create a new pin and cycle through the boards a day (or a few days apart) at a time.
This goes for all your pins.
If you have 30 articles then mix it up, start pinning some articles on some days and some on other days.
Just don't keep pinning the same pin to the same board, day in and day out.
How To Create Pinterest Pins.
So I told you I would show you where to create pins.
Simply head over to Canva.com
It's free to use. And they have a section for creating Pinterest graphics.
They have many templates.
You can use their templates or you can start from scratch and just make your own.
Either way, it’s so easy to use.
If you get stuck, just Google how to create pins on Canva and you'll see some great tutorials.
Very simple and like I said, it's FREE!
So we are nearing to the end of this article. And I do have one more tip.
How To Get Some Quick Traction With Pinterest Boards.
This is great for getting access to thousands of other people's boards' followers.
It's so helpful, especially in your early days.
I do want to mention, this should NEVER be your only strategy.
Eventually, your OWN BOARDS will become your BEST BOARDS!
So to do this strategy you need to find group boards.
And the best way to do that is to go to the BIG PLAYERS in YOUR niche.
Put the keywords of your topic in the search bar and you'll see the big accounts with loads of followers and then go to their board list and search through their boards.
Quick tip: Make sure you are searching for “People” and not “All Pins”.
When searching the boards for each of the accounts you're looking at, you may come across boards with a circle of multiple profile images like in this example.
That is a group board.
Then just click on that board and it will take you down to the board level and you can see the information there.
Here's an example.
You can see it's full of great keywords as we said to do before. And also it has a way to join the board.
It says, if you'd like to join us, let us know the comments and we'll send you an invite.
And that is how you do it. Just Following the instructions.
Just so you know, there are many ways you could join a board.
Sometimes they have a request to join button, click that. Sometimes they put their email in the description, then email them and ask to join.
It's really that simple.
Just go for it, find those boards on other people's accounts with the circle, with the multiple profile images in, and then request to join them.
When you join a board you're going to get access to the followers of that board.
In the above example, there are 6,000 followers.
You're going to get access to those people and which is amazing, especially when you start off.
I do want to say again though, don't rely just on group boards.
Eventually, your boards will become your BEST boards and group boards will just be a part of the process.
You do want to focus mainly on YOUR BOARDS overall, and just use group boards as something extra to help get you some traction.
That’s it for this post.
What to do next? If you are not a member of the “Freedom Through Blogging” Facebook group then I invite you to head over to Facebook and join the group.
I'll see you there!