If you think Pinterest is just for party planning inspiration and creating mood boards, think again! Using Pinterest to promote your blog, if done properly, could more than triple your traffic.
It’s honestly one of the best websites out there for bloggers. Using Pinterest to promote your blog isn’t just an option, it’s a necessity.
Here’s how to use it.
Using Pinterest to Promote Your Blog
Before we even get started on how Pinterest can bring in traffic to your blog, you need to set up your account properly.
Did you know that just like Facebook and Instagram, you can get business accounts on Pinterest? More importantly, did you know anyone with a website can get one?
Yep, you can.
How to Set Up Pinterest to Promote Your Blog
1. Set up a Business Account
If you really want to see a difference to your blog traffic, sign up for a business account (https://business.pinterest.com/en-gb/creating-your-account) for free.
To start with, all you need to do is fill in your email address, password, and business name. Then just click ‘create account’. You’ll then be asked to claim your website (https://help.pinterest.com/en/business/article/claim-your-website) to get access to the business account perks.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll have full access of Pinterest analytics. Here you can see useful data such as how well your pins are behaving. Or how many monthly unique viewers your Pinterest account gets. Or more importantly, how many times people visit your website.
Apply for Rich Pins
Not many people know about rich pins. I only recently discovered them myself.
Basically, a ‘rich pin’ is a pin with much more information than a standard pin. You can use rich pins on Pinterest to promote your blog posts by including a bigger headline, logo, and link back to your website.
Rich pins come in 5 kinds; movie, article, product, app, and recipe. As a blogger, you can apply for article rich pins. Here’s how to apply for them.
Optimise Your Business Name
One way to easily attract the right audience and build your followers, is to optimise your business name. It’s a simple but effective way to use Pinterest to promote your blog.
By ‘optimise’, I mean adding keywords to your profile name. Look at this example from The She Approach. Ana has her first name followed by all the types of things people will find on her Pinterest. This way, anyone that comes across her account, either in their feed, or in someone else’s follower lists, they know automatically what to expect from the page.
The easier you make it for people to find you, the easier it will be to start attracting followers from your niche.
2. Set-up 10 boards
The sooner you get your boards up and running, the better.
I’d advise you to set up around 10 boards for starters. Create boards that sum up what your business is about, and then search and share around 10-20 from these topics.
For example, when we first created our Pinterest account, we created these boards:
- Travel Photography
- Travel Inspiration
- Budget Travel Tips
- UK Travel
- Trip Planning
- Blogging Tips
- Photography and Editing Tips
- Blog for Money
- Blog Traffic Tips
- Social Media Tips
The more you use Pinterest, the more board ideas you’ll get. In general, 10 is a good number to start with though.
3. Create Eye-Catching Pins
Pinterest is all about attractive images. If you’re serious about using Pinterest to promote your blog then this is a must.
All the most successful bloggers spend time creating professional looking, ‘pin-worthy’ images for their articles. And if you want to be taken seriously on Pinterest and stand a chance of people saving your pins, then you need to do this too. Follow these steps to create attractive pins.
Create an account with Canva
Canva is without a doubt the best tool I’ve come across so far for creating beautiful graphics. It’s brilliant.
Canva is a completely free tool to use and it’s super easy to get the hang of. It operates on a freemium business model so it’s free to use but if you want to unlock the premium version you’ll need to pay for it.
The free version is more than enough to create pin-worthy images though.
Know Your Sizes
Pinterest images should always be a 2:3 ratio. Our images are 735 x 1102px. However, Buffer recently posted a size guide for social media images, and they recommend 800 x 1,200px as a good size.
It’s up to you really. Just make sure to keep to the 2:3 ratio. Longer images are a must for Pinterest.
Know Which Images Do Well on Pinterest
Louise Myers from the Visual Social Media Expert, claims the best way to create traffic-driving pins, is through colour, photos, text overlay, and design.
The colours that perform the best on Pinterest are warm tones of red, orange and pinks. In fact, these tones get twice as many re-pins. Pins with an obvious theme tend to perform well also. Plus, people will start to recognise your images by using a theme too.
For example, we use this hexagon to display the article title every time we use Pinterest to promote our blog posts.
We also know that darker coloured pins perform much worse than light to medium coloured pins. Although plain white backgrounds don’t perform very well. Try to go for a lighter toned background that gives some context to what your article is about.
For example, an article about the best places for winter hikes and skiing could have beautiful snow-capped mountains featured in the background. In general, most people report that photos without faces in them perform a lot better.
Use High Quality Images
Although Canva has some fantastic free photos, sometimes they don’t have what you’re looking for. Try searching through these royalty-free websites for high-quality photos to use for free.
If you do use photos from any other sources than the ones we state in that article though, make sure you credit when required!
4. Create Text Overlays
Text overlays in your pin images are a must. Users want to be able to scroll through their feed and immediately know what a particular pin is about.
Canva allows you to do this so don’t worry. It also has some really good templates for you to use or get design inspiration from!
You should try to play around with the fonts and text colours to make the pin stand out and easy to read. The keywords for the article should be made bold, large, and colourful.
It’s really important that your text overlays are easy to read, so don’t place your text over a busy background!
5. Optimise Pin Descriptions
Just like your text overlay, the pin description needs to feature your keywords.
You have a maximum of 500 words for your Pinterest but bear in mind only the first 75-100 words show in the feed. So make sure your keywords are places at the start of the description.
Avoid repeating what the title and text overlay says though. The description is your chance to entice users to click and save your pin, hence, directing traffic to your blog.
Use Hashtags
Pinterest now endorse the use of hashtags in pin descriptions, and even give them high visibility in search results.
Think about your target audience and what kinds of hashtags will lead them to your pins. Again, you could include your keywords in the hashtags too.
You should use around 20 hashtags per posts. If you’re struggling to come up with some yourself, try searching for your keywords in the search bar and see what comes up. The chances are the high-ranking pins will have related hashtags for you to pinch.
6. Post at the Prime Times
A really important part of using Pinterest to promote your blog, is posting at the best times for your target audience.
Posting in the middle of the day for example is pointless, as most people are at work. Pinterest is more of a nocturnal site, so posting mid-late evening is best, as this is when users are most active.
With your business account, you’ll be able to see when your users are most active by looking through your analytics.
If you’re really not the analytical type though, get yourself a Tailwind account and it will do it all for you.
Using Tailwind
You should get Tailwind anyway, as it’s the best scheduling tool for Pinterest out there.
The beauty of Tailwind though, is that it analyses your follower activity, and schedules your pins for when your followers are most active.
Within a few weeks of us using Tailwind, it tripled our monthly unique viewers!
You can upload your pins directly to Tailwind to schedule, or you can download the Tailwind extension for Safari or Chrome. This way, when you’re browsing Pinterest and see something you like, you can schedule it straight from your browser without even having to open Tailwind up. It’s brilliant.
Check out our step-by-step guide to using Tailwind.
7. Get Involved with Group Boards
A final way you should use Pinterest to promote your blog, is by joining group boards.
You can see which boards are group boards by looking in the top right corner of the board. There will be a collection of all the contributors profile images, like this.
Make sure you don’t over-do it with group boards though. Joining lots of group boards that don’t perform that well will negatively impact your account.
Join less boards that are a better quality.
Here’s what to look for in a good quality group board, according to Louise Myers:
- The board fits your niche
- It doesn’t have too many contributors
- It’s active but not too active
- It gets re-pins
- The board has a good amount of followers
- Look out for boards that encourage members to reciprocate pin-shares
For more information on using group boards on Pinterest to promote your blog, check out Louise’s ultimate guide to group boards.
Follow us on Pinterest (link in sidebar) for more useful information like this! Also check out our blogger hub to get lots of free blog resources straight to your inbox.
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One of the founders of People of the Planet. Psychology graduate, digital marketer, and lover of travel and exploring new places!
4 Comments
Very informative and helpful guide. I hadn’t thought of using pinterest before as a promotional tool but makes total sense.
It’s a fantastic platform and our main source of traffic at the moment so it’s definitely worth checking out. We’re working on lots of Pinterest advice articles at the moment to be released over the next few weeks so keep an eye out for those. Thanks for the feedback, we’re really glad you found it informative!
Do you have any pointers for creating short articles? That’s where I always
battle and I simply wind up staring empty display for very long
time.
Hi Dwayne, in most cases longer articles which hit around 1200-2000 words generally do better, however there is still room for short articles on blogs. For example for a summary of a topic. It’s hard to stop yourself going off on a tangent once you start writing about a certain topic, so I’d suggest asking yourself exactly what it is you want to get across to the reader. Then, write out a few points that you want to make throughout the piece and elaborate on those rather than trying to squeeze in too much information. It’s much better to be clear and concise than cramming in loads of facts and not really explaining what you mean. A short article could be good as a ‘starter’ article which you post before publishing a ‘main’ in-depth article on the same topic. Then your readers get a short, easy to digest article on a certain topic which may spark their interest for the full-version.