There’s no doubt that you’ve heard of Pinterest by now, but did you know that Pinterest drives more traffic to publisher websites than Twitter, LinkedIn, and Reddit combined? Pinterest is number two in terms of social traffic referral behind Facebook for online publishers.
We've looked at Understanding Pinterest for Your Blog, but how do you increase traffic to your blog with Pinterest? Here are five sure fire ways to watch your visitor count go on the up and up.
1. Use Texts in Photos that You Pin
Imagine passing through a grocery market and never seeing a single headline on a lifestyle magazine. If the photo was great it would make you take a glance and admire the photo, but what are the chances that you would pick up the magazine and read it?
This is the importance of having text for pins that lead back to your blog. A good text headline in a photo can convert a casual browser of pins to a person who will stop and click through to get to your blog.
A headline such as “Easy to Make, Kid Friendly, Banana Bread Recipe!” can do wonders to attract the right audience to your blog. Here’s an example of a photo I used for the Candy Meister.
It’s important to remember that using small fonts on your photo may be good for you blog, but are terrible on Pinterest. This is because more than half the users of Pinterest use it on mobile devices where screens are smaller. A small font will cause people to squint and keep scrolling past your pin.
If you’re looking for a free tool for to use for adding texts to your photos, Pic Monkey is amazing for that! Best of all it’s free and doesn’t require registration.
2. Link Uploaded Photos Back to Your Blog
At times, there are some bloggers or small businesses that will upload their own photos onto Pinterest But once the photo is uploaded, they don’t link that original photo back to their website or to their specific blog post. Once you’ve uploaded your photo you can click on the pencil icon and have it redirected back to the site that you want.
Within that paragraph is a golden nugget of information. You can technically upload ANY photo and have it redirected back to your site. So if you happen to upload some funny food adventure photos on Pinterest you can have that redirected back to your blog.
3. Put the URL of Your blog post in the Pin’s Description
Having your blog post’s url written in the description can help reduce the number of clicks required to get to your website and drive additional traffic from desktop users of Pinterest. PInterest displays the website as a hyperlink, but this doesn’t work for mobile.
Generally if someone wants to visit your website through a pin she must click on the pin first, then it enlarges, and then she has to click on it again before being redirected to the site.
As a side note, Pinterest doesn’t like url shorteners, so if you’re hoping to track the success of this particular pin or method using a url shortener, your link will be labelled as spam.
4. Create Pinteresting Descriptions
Once you’ve created a great headline for your pin (the picture and the headline will do 80% of the work in attracting someone) the other part is to be a great copywriter. Being a blogger most likely means that you have a gift for words and captioning.
Here’s the beauty of a description. Most people are not going to change descriptions you write for your pin. This is why it’s vital that you have a good description because you never know when your pin is going to go viral, and have tens of thousands of people see it.
The most important part of a description is the first 100 characters. The description should entice the reader even more to click on the pine and repin it. Use words in descriptions that either expresses an emotion or a benefit in some way to get them to click on the link.
“A Banana bread recipe that will make your children smile and laugh from step one to step fun! For this family fun delicious recipe visit www.nameofdomain.com “
Of course you can use longer descriptions (up to 500) but the first 100 are vital because mobile users generally see the first 200 characters or so.
Did you know?
Here’s an interesting fun tidbit about descriptions. When people use the official pin bookmarklet tool or any or official pin it button made by Pinterest, they automatically take the description of the alt tag for that photo. Here’s an example
5. Make it Easy For People to Pin from Your Website
To me a visual website that doesn’t have a pin it button is the same as not having a tweet button now. It just feels so weird to me, and by not having one you’re robbing your fans of doing marketing for you.
Imagine having your blog fans doing blog promotion for you even while you sleep. Isn’t that awesome? But you have to make it as easy as possible for them, this is why having a pin it button is so vital. Not everyone is going to have an official pin bookmarklet tool on their browser.
There are several tools out there that have a pin it button to allow users to easily pin. The one I use on my own website is from AddThis, but pretty much all social sharing suite tools for blogs have a pin It button option.
The good thing is that Pinterest recently released an official pin it hover button, which allows people to pin pictures while their mouse hovers over it. This doesn’t work for mobile though, which is why it’s important to have a social sharing tool like AddThis. Instructions on how to install the hover button can be found here.
The advantages of using official pin it buttons made by Pinterest is that you can actually check out who’s pinning directly from your site. If you’re curious to know who those users are type in
www.pinterest.com/source/yourwebsite.com (yourwebsite.com being your main website.)
Those are the five ways to help drive more traffic to your blog with Pinterest. We would love to hear more from you, what are some effective ways you have found using Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog?
Be sure to tune in to the site tomorrow when we announce our first one day Pinterest workshop!
This was part 1 in a three part series that Vincent Ng will be writing for FBC on Pinterest. Part 2 and 3 will appear in November and December, respectively.
5 Ways To Use Pinterest to Drive More Traffic To Your Blog was written by Vincent Ng. Vincent is the president and chief blogger at MCNG Marketing. He is the founder of the Pintalysis Marketing Blueprint, and the author of How to Search Optimize Your Pins for Pinterest and Search Engines. Follow him on Twitter @VincentNg or on Google+.
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Great Post Vincent! I’ve been trying to figure out the hover pin works for a while now.
Hi JP, thanks for the comment. Glad to know it was of a help. If you’re using Yoast SEO for WordPress it will make it a lot easier. http://www.steamfeed.com/every-blogger-needs-know-pinterest-rich-pins/
G’day! Very helpful indeed Vincent! Thank you!
Always enjoy learning all things blog related every day too!
Cheers! Joanne
Thanks for detailed information