20 Tips to get more traffic from Pinterest

The internet is getting more visual every day.  We spend hours every day staring at the screen, for work, for emails, for leisure and gaming, for entertainment, for TV and more.  Our eyes can get tired from too much close up work, too much reading text and are inevitably drawn to images. Big, bright, bold images.  That’s why so much advertising is image based rather than text based.  And Pinterest is the ultimate image-based way to browse the internet.  Done right, it should also be in your top 5 traffic referrers to your blog.  So spruce up your boards, get busy with commenting and tracking, and see how can you get more followers and traffic from Pinterest.
 

1. Be neat and tidy and organised
Spend a few minutes a day over the next few days tidying up your boards.  Make sure you don’t have two boards the same, make sure your pins are in the correct boards, go through and edit each board to give it a description, and a short but appealing title, remove empty boards.  Rearrange your boards with those most important or most appealing or most popular along the top line.  Give each board a relevant and attractive cover.

2.  Give yourself a shout out
Your top row of boards is your most valuable real estate and those that are immediately obvious to new visitors.  Make sure that any boards you have that feature your own products or posts are along that top line – give yourself top billing in your own show.

My Pinterest Page – I’ve done pretty well in the last 9 months with over 12,500 followers.


3.  Use group boards to your advantage
Group boards are really popular among bloggers and internet users with the same interests.  Join group boards to showcase your own work to the board followers and set up your own group boards to attract new followers to your Pinterest account.  You get a nice full board without having to do any of the work!  Monitor any of your own group boards carefully for spammy or inappropriate content and remove it quickly and remove the offending pinner.  You can find group boards in this directory.

4.  Learn what images your readers like
Check what content is being pinned and note the types of images that are picked most often.  You can find pins from your own site using this address  

5.  Watermark your images
Not everyone will necessarily pin your image from the original source, sometimes by mistake.  Make sure the content can still be found by adding your website address to your images.  Have a search box on your site so a reader can find the correct content in case a pin has the site address rather than the post address linked.

6.  Interact with pinners and leave comments
If someone pins your content or leaves comments on your pins, join in the conversation.  Thank them for pinning, add a comment and be sociable.  However, take care.  Pinterest can suspend your account for spamming the boards if you simply go through and Like all the pins and comment with ‘thanks for pinning’ in a short space of time.  Reserve your attention to the pins that bring in the most re-pins or traffic.

7.  Learn Pinterest Tips from the experts
New to Pinterest and need some help?  Learn from the best with this book - Pinterest Savvy: How I Got 1 Million+ Followers (Strategies, Plans, and Tips to Grow Your Business with Pinterest) (affiliate link)

8.  Create niche boards Pinterest can be overwhelming with its content.  Help your visitors find exactly the content they want by breaking down your large boards into smaller niche boards.  Don’t have a board for food if you can split it into cocktails, desserts, crockpot recipes, appetizers, BBQ etc.  It will make it easier for you to find the content you want too.

9.  Brand your page 
If you are primarily using Pinterest in conjunction with your blog, website or business, then make sure your user name and profile reflects this.  You can change your name to your name plus your blog name, or just the blog name or whatever seems best to you.  Do add your blog address to your profile and write a brief description of what your boards might feature. Search engines do index this page and your other boards so make your descriptions keyword rich to appear in search engine results.

10.  Add your own pin description
The description for your pin can be almost as important as the image.  Add a caption or alt tag description to your blog images that will become the default description if that image is added to Pinterest.

11.  Have a PIN IT button
Encourage your visitors to Pin your content by having a Pin it button with every post.  Each post should ideally feature a range of social sharing options – make sure Pinterest is one of them.  The more times your image is pinned, the more visits and repins you will get.


12.  Pin your own material
Don’t go mad and spam your own Pinterest boards simply with your own blog posts and images.  Think that a comfortable ratio would be one pin for your own content with every 10 pins of  other content.  You can have self-promotion boards such as my ‘I made these‘ board but don’t bore your followers by making all your boards about you.  Or you won’t get many followers, just your Auntie Pam.

13.  Pin more tutorials
Tutorial pins see a 42% higher click-through rate than the average pin. [Source: Pinerly]  So if you feature tutorials on your blog, make sure to pin them and make it obvious there’s a tutorial behind that picture.  80% of pins on Pinterest are re-pins, so you need to pin your own stuff and get your stuff pinned and re-pinned in order to get those re-pins in front of a wider circle who will see and re-pin and so on.

14.  Be topical, timely and trending
If it’s February how many clicks do you think you will get on your Christmas recipes board?  Not many.  But get a Valentines Gift ideas pin in front of visitors at the beginning of February and it has a much higher chance of getting pins and click throughs.

15.  Include a Call To Action
If you want something, then ask for it!  Include a Call to Action in your pin, such as “comment below”, or “click here”.  The graphic at the top of this post was designed especially for Pinterest.  It’s in a vertical format so it takes up more room, and it includes a CLICK HERE call to action.  I don’t just want people to pin it and save for later (which might never come), I want them to click it now and come visit this post.

16.  Try out different sorts of images
There are several ways you can make your images more pinnable.  Try a vertical format rather than horizontal to give your image more space on the boards and feed.  Include a title on the image itself, especially if the image is the end result and you are featuring a tutorial – make it clear what’s behind the image.  Make a storyboard image showing several of the steps and the end result – again this identifies a popular tutorial post.  There is a great post on Sverve with examples that you will find really useful.  Try to include at least one of these options for every post.

17. Make your images find-able
As Pinterest grows with more than 30 million users, and countless pins being added every day, it is also an excellent visual search engine.  Keep this in mind when describing your pin.  Include rich keywords.  Is your post about a recipe for BBQ sauce?  Then make sure BBQ sauce recipe is included in the description.  Hashtags aren’t as widely used on Pinterest as other media – a well crafted description and an eye-catching image are all you need.

18.  Verify your account
This is easy to do and gives you another opportunity to brand your page and attract visitors to your site.  Your URL is right there in your page header and is clickable.

19.  Create great content behind your pin 
Pins come from readers.  A reader must like what you have written and want to share it or save it in order to even think about adding it to Pinterest in the first place.  So make your content Pin-worthy.  Show how to do something faster, cheaper, better or easier than ever before and write a post that deserves to go viral.

20.  Be cautious about monetizing Pinterest
I don’t think for most pinners this is a big issue, but I do know that bloggers can be approached by brands to pin their products for money.  You can also join sites like Viraliti to be paid to pin.  Exercise discretion and only pin those products or sites that you believe would appeal to your readers.  And don’t forget to follow the FTC disclosure requirements and mark your pins as an advert.
I’m sure you have lots of other Pinterest tips too.  How do you use Pinterest to bring traffic to your site?