How To Use Pinterest for Blog Traffic

It isn’t a secret that Pinterest can be awesome for your blog traffic. In fact, in April, 67.61% of my traffic came from Pinterest. Over 67%! That didn’t happen overnight; I’ve been working on growing my blog traffic for 5 years, and my Pinterest has been a part of that. One question that I’ve gotten is how exactly I reached this point. It’s been a fair amount of trial and error, as well as research, but I’ve gotten to a point where I have a grip on exactly how to use Pinterest for blog traffic. In this post, I’ll share the things that I do, some advice, and some resources.

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Get the PDF! I have everything that you need for getting blog traffic from Pinterest here in this article. But it is a long read. If it’s more convenient, you can purchase the PDF file for only $5. It has the full article (including pictures) as well as information on how to make the most of Tailwind, and it doesn’t have any ads or pop-ups. This way you can save it to your computer and will be available for you to refer to anytime you want. I would love to give it to you for free, but it costs money to have an online store and it’s expensive to maintain a blog. I would love your support so I can continue to help those who need it. Not interested? Keep reading for free!

Before we really get into this, I do want to clarify something: this post will not go over Pinterest basics, such as how to add your own pins, how to pin an image, what boards are, etc. (But check out this post about how to get followers on Pinterest if you want those tips!)This is basically Pinterest 201 for Bloggers, aka for bloggers who have got the basics figured out. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get into this!

How To Use Pinterest for Blog Traffic

Optimize images for Pinterest – This basically means to make your images as Pinterest-friendly as possible. There are a couple of ways to do this. 1) Vertical over horizontal! Every time! Vertical images do SO much better on Pinterest than horizontal ones do. 2) Make sure they’re large enough. I’ve seen a variety of sizes put as “ideal,” but my go-to is making images for Pinterest that are 1400px tall. But that size is generally too big for my blog posts, especially because those images are then generally 1000px wide. This means that I save 2 different versions of each image for blog posts: a blog one and a Pinterest one. This is super easy because all I do is resize and image and it takes less than a minute.

SEO – We tend to think about search engine optimization (SEO) as a thing for websites alone, but it does wonders for Pinterest, too. In fact, my blog traffic started rising when I started taking SEO for Pinterest seriously. (I wrote an entire post about SEO as a whole, so I won’t rehash it here, but feel free to check it out.) There are several things that I did: included the SEO term I chose in the name of the image, in the description of the image, in the alt tag on the blog, and in the post URL that went with the image. The alt tag is one of the parts of an image that you can’t see when you read a post. But that tag gets used for the description when someone pins that image. In the pin description and the alt tags, I alternate writing a proper description – the alt tag for the above image is “You’ve heard that Pinterest can grow your blog traffic. But how, exactly? I’m breaking down how to use Pinterest for blog traffic, as over 65% of my blog traffic comes from Pinterest.” – and a list of terms someone might search for, like “Pinterest tips, how to use Pinterest, Pinterest for blogging, blogging tips, grow blog traffic.”

Group boards –  These are pretty much exactly what they sound like: boards that multiple people can pin to. For some, you can just join no problem. For others, you have to request to be added. These work best when you also pin from them, so that you’re not just expecting your pins to be shared without reciprocating. Some boards have rules of how many you should pin per image you add, so when you request to join, check that out. Now, which ones should you join? If you’re a member of any blogging networks, they often have a group board, so check that out. You can also Google “group boards to join.” Some boards have a specific focus, and others are a free-for-all. I’m a member of Blog Tips & Design, Social Media Tips, Girls Who Read, Blogging Tips, Life Tips for Your Best Life, The InfluenceHer Collective, All Things Blog, Female Bloggers Free for All, Great Bloggers, and Chronic Pinning.

Pin on multiple boards – Take advantage of multiple boards! Don’t pin something to a board that isn’t applicable (for example, I wouldn’t pin this post to my health board), but do share it in multiple places. Some of the boards you pin to might be group board, but also pin it to any of your own boards that work with the topic. One way to do this is to have a board devoted entirely to your blog posts, so you can pin an image from a blog post to that board, any of your own boards that are applicable to the post, and any group boards.

Scheduling – Scheduling social media posts in general is a life saver, but especially for Pinterest. I don’t have time to be on Pinterest multiple times a day every single day! I won’t get into my strategy for scheduling pins as a whole here, as that’s a story for another day. But I always schedule pins that promote my blog posts when I schedule other social media promotions, and I use Tailwind to do it. One of the many things I love about Tailwind is that I can schedule pins for as many boards as I want and I can space those pins over as long as I want. Here is how you can get the most out of Tailwind for Pinterest. 

Grow your profile as a whole – This is probably self-explanatory, but having more followers will bring more eyes on your posts and hopefully more shares, too. Some ways to do this are to post a link to your Pinterest on your blog, share links to your profile on your other social media networks, and to participate in follow trains in various Facebook groups.

Easy pinning tool on your blog – Make it easy for people to pin your posts! If they like a post or that image, they might want to share the post on their Pinterest page. But they can’t do that if you don’t have an easy way to do it because humans (myself included) can be very lazy. What exactly am I talking about here? If you put your mouse on any images in posts on my blog, you’ll see a “pin it” button appear. This is from the plugin jQuery Pin It Button for Images! Because this blog is run on self-hosted WordPress, I use plugins. If you are on Blogger or SquareSpace, I’m sure there are similar things you can do or have for the same effect.

Have a blog page of just a freebie for your mailing list – One great way to grow your email is to have a page or post with just a freebie that links to a mailing list sign-up. But did you know that this is also an awesome way to grow your blog traffic? Here’s why: I’ve included smaller mailing list sign-ups in many posts (including this one; see above), but I recently made individual pages for these freebies, like this one. Then, I shared the images on those individual pages on Pinterest. When people see that image on Pinterest, they click through to see the whole post. Sometimes they end up signing up for my mailing list, but sometimes they don’t and they read other things. But either way, it brings more blog traffic.

How have you gotten more blog traffic from Pinterest?

Like this post? Share it and check out these:

 How To Use SEO To Stand Out + Free SEO Checklist, How To Optimize Your Social Media Platforms as a Blogger, 12 Blog Traffic Boosting Tools To Try in 2018, 10 Things Every Blog Needs