So you’re finally warming up to the idea that Pinterest is for more than makeup ideas, organizing techniques, and Sunday brunch recipes? About damn time! There’s tons of blog traffic and re-pins just itching to come your way, but first there are a few things to learn so the content you’re sharing and re-pinning takes on tons of value and helps your entire profile grow.
Create a business profile
Creating a business profile is not only free, but it includes some pretty good perks as well! First, business profiles come with lots of stats so you can keep an eye on which pins are being re-pinned, which boards are performing the best, and how your traffic and clicks are growing, plus which topics interest your audience most.
And second, you’ll be able to set-up rich pins, which add more information like recipe ingredients, maps, and product prices to your pins automatically.
Know your audience
Let’s say you’re a travel blogger and you share posts about your country-hopping adventures. You write about the best places to eat, you write about the best places to sleep, you write about the best places to take a selfie and you write about all those thing with a solo lady traveler in mind. As you’re filling your travel-related boards with pins, you still need to be thinking about that ideal reader. Posts about family trips to Disney and honeymoons to Thailand, while popular and tempting to re-pin, don’t fit within your blog’s focus. Pinning things outside your focus can dilute your brand and your message and make the overall appearance of your profile confusing to potential followers. We want them to follow ALL your boards, not just a handful.
Share other people’s content
Want to get in good with Pinterest? Sharing other people’s content is the way to do it. You should be thinking of your profile as of big resource for the topics you blog about – like a library where your audience can go to find anything and everything they want to learn, get inspired, and be entertained. Plus, sharing lots of content on a daily basis helps to boost your boards’ value and drive more traffic to YOUR pins and to YOUR site.
Share your own content
I’m amazed by the number of people who don’t realize they should be pinning their own blog content and pinning it A LOT. I pin my own blog posts (depending on the topic) to between 10 and 20 boards, which brings a MASSIVE amount of traffic to my site every day. It’s my number 1 traffic referrer with more pageviews than search engines, Twitter, and Facebook combined!
I’m sure my traffic would be cut at least in half if I were to stop sharing my own posts and waited for other people to share them for me. Yes, lots of people come to my site and click that share button, but MORE people see my content on Pinterest and hit re-pin.
Write long image descriptions
First up, you can no longer get away with pinning blog posts with a three word description. Long descriptions (around 300 characters) are not only helpful in attracting lots of re-pins, but helpful for OTHER PEOPLE who want to share your content. It drives me bananas when I read a brilliant blog post and click that pin button only to find a blank description. People are not going to write your post description for you, so you MUST make it one of the steps you take before hitting publish on your blog post.
Yes, I’m going to keep adding this one to every single Pinterest-related blog post and email. I’ll rid the internet of this issue if it’s the last thing I do!
Pin blog posts multiple times
Yes, you can (and should be) pinning the same post multiple times to multiple boards. Just don’t do it all at once or you’ll look like a spammy jerk. Using a scheduling app like Tailwind allows me to pin one blog post to tons of boards all at the same time. Then I just drag them into time slots so they’re going out over two or three weeks. The more content you have floating around on Pinterest the more likely it will end up in front of new eyes.
Delete under-performing pins
Lastly, every pin you pin doesn’t need to stay in your boards forever. And because the chances of your pins showing up in the smart feed (the main page on Pinterest) depend heavily on the number of re-pins, those under-performing pins may be weighing down your boards and your whole profile (yikes!).
A little over a week ago I went through every single board in my profile and cleared out any pin that wasn’t pulling its weight. And as you can see by the graph below, it really did make a difference. You can actually see the exact date I dumped the dead weight and helped to improve the value of my boards. And the more valuable the board, the more likely it’s going to end up in the smart grid and be seen by new people!
Any Questions?
