Bloggers have long known that Pinterest is an effective tool to grow your blog. Pinning content from your own blog, as well as from other sources, can help build your brand, drive traffic to your site, and grow your audience.
Yet in many cases, bloggers aren’t doing everything they can to increase their followers via Pinterest. Sure, they’re adding “Pin This” buttons to their posts and designing photos to be easily shared. But growing your blog via Pinterest requires more than making it easy for your existing audience to share your content. With that in mind, if you aren’t doing these five things to attract readers to your blog, you need to do so now.
1. Include Keywords in Your Pinterest Name and Profile
When people bring up your blog’s Pinterest page, what name appears? It makes sense that you would use your blog name, but you may be missing out on Pinterest search traffic if your name doesn’t contain keywords.
When someone searches for content on Pinterest, the results are displayed in several ways. There’s the keyword level — they search for “apple pie recipes” and can opt to see results that are just pins that have those words in their title. They can also see pinners and boards with “Apple Pie Recipes” in their names. Therefore, it makes sense that you should be using your keywords in your profile name. In other words, if you blog about dog behavior, your Pinterest user name should be “Name of Your Blog — Dog Behavior Expert” or similar.
2. Apply for Rich Pins
Rich pins are a relatively new idea from Pinterest and are designed to give users more information in the pin itself, to increase engagement. You’ve probably seen these in a lot of recipe pins: When you click on the image in Pinterest, the ingredients and at least some of the instructions are right there, giving you a better idea of what making the recipe entails. Pinterest offers rich pins in several categories, including recipes, apps, movies, places, products, and articles.
To begin providing rich pins from your blog, you’ll need to apply to the program, and include specific metadata in your posts to allow Pinterest to convert it to rich pin. Doing so can make your pins more intriguing to users — and drive them to your site.
3. Create a Blog Board
It may seem obvious, but creating a Pinterest board specifically for your blog is an important way to drive traffic. If you have a lot of blog posts, create boards to sort them by topic. Be sure that your pin includes a summary of the post and a link, or make use of a rich pin. Be sure that your pin board also includes keywords in the title to maximize SEO.
4. Engage with Users
Pinterest is different than other social media in the sense that engagement is different here than on, say Twitter. It can be difficult to have a conversation with users, especially when pins are pinned and repinned hundreds of times, and new conversations are always being started.
Still, you can add to your audience by being an active user of the site. When someone repins one of your pins, check out their boards and follow or like their stuff. Regularly pin content from other users on your boards, and watch for comments on your pins, and respond. Above all, be sure to pin consistently, so your stuff regularly shows up in your followers’ feeds, increasing the chances of getting repinned and exposed to new audiences.
5. Design Your Blog to Retain Followers
So someone clicks on a pin and finds their way to your blog. What do they see when they get there? Do they just stay and read that one post, or do they poke around a bit to see more?
Bloggers who get the best results from Pinterest are generally those who effectively drive visitors to more content on their site. For instance, instead of loading up your sidebar with sponsorships, use that space to highlight more great content. Include a selection of similar posts or “You May Like” posts at the end of every post. Link to your previous posts in new content. Invite new visitors to check out what you have to offer. Not everyone will become a regular follower, but the more you entice people to stay, the more your audience grows.
Pinterest is just one tool that you can use to grow your blog audience, but it’s a very effective one. Make sure you are doing everything you can to capture traffic that comes from the site.
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