Why Pinterest Marketing Is Essential

Last Updated on January 8, 2020 by Katherine

Blogs need pageviews (AKA traffic) to survive. There’s no other way to put that. Did you know that an effective Pinterest Marketing Strategy can help you get those page views? More traffic means more money. For instance, my goal is to have this blog pay for itself by the end of the year. I need to continue to grow my traffic for this to happen.

One thing to remember though is getting more traffic is not going to do anything unless you monetize. If you’re looking for monetization tips, my go-to place is Making Sense of Cents. I wrote this post on the assumption that you want traffic so you can make money, but even hobby bloggers can use this post to increase their page views.

Pinterest = Search Engine

Just as you want to rank on google, you will want to rank on Pinterest with your blog. Pinterest is a visual search engine. All the for-profit or business blogs out there have some presence on Pinterest. I get the bulk of my referral traffic from Pinterest.

Getting Started with Pinterest for Business

The first step to getting started with marketing your blog on Pinterest is to sign up for a business account. Depending on your situation, you may wish to have separate business and personal accounts. In my case, because I’m blogging under my name, I chose to convert my personal account to a business one.

To convert to a business account, you need to access your account settings and scroll down toward the bottom; you should see an option to “Convert to business account.” Click on that and follow the instructions.

Claiming your website is the next step in the chain, the following menu option under your settings is “claim,” click on that, type in your blog’s address and click claim. You will then need to follow the instructions and upload a bit of code onto your website, so Pinterest can properly verify you.

Pinterest Profile Optimization

Next up, you want to optimize your account description and get some boards up (with descriptions as well). You want keywords, but in the case of your profile and board descriptions, hashtags aren’t searchable, so I don’t use them here (I do use them in the pin descriptions).

I use the Pinterest search to figure out keywords for my boards. So, let’s use my “Blog Tips” board as an example.

I believe you should seek to answer three questions in your board description (and you can apply these questions to your profile description as well):

1. What pins are you going to find?
2. What are people going to be able to accomplish?
3. Who is going to benefit from this?

So for blog tips:

1. Tips and tricks on how to get more traffic to your blog, plan fantastic content, and, in general, make their blog amazing!
2. Gain more followers, traffic, and not have to stress about coming up with the perfect headline for their blog posts.
3. Bloggers and other creatives may find these tips useful.

My new description is “Tips and tricks for busy bloggers on how to make their blogs amazing! Get tips on social media, content planning, content writing, SEO, and more!”

You can find more helpful tips from Blogging As I Learn It.

Tailwind Is a Schedulers Dream

Tailwind (Affiliate Link) is the official tool recognized by Pinterest, which means it’s less likely to be shut down going forward. It is a paid tool, but if you can afford $15 per month (it is cheaper to get a year subscription, that’ll knock that down to $9.99 per month), it can save your sanity. It allows you to reap the benefits of Pinterest rewarding frequent pinners because you can schedule pins to go out when you’re spending time with family, working your 9 to 5 job or whatever.

In my case, I still work part-time, and I am a freelance writer. Tailwind allows me to sit down once per week for 1 hour and schedule out a week or so of posts. That way if I get a rush re-write job or have to go to work, I’m not worried about what my Pinterest feed is doing, because Tailwind has my back!

According to Pinterest, there is no benefit to pinning more than 50 times per day, I’ve set my Tailwind schedule to 35 per day, that allows me some leeway if I get into a manual pinning craze.

Additional Features in Tailwind

I use two other features (I have a limit with them with my level of account, but I have not yet to had to purchase additional boosters to them). Tribes and Smart Loop.

Tribes allow you to share your content with similar bloggers. These bloggers will then pin your content to their boards and get you some more eyes on your stuff and more traffic. At the Plus level (which is my subscription), I have five tribes I can belong to and up to 30 monthly submissions. That’s perfect if you are starting!

Smart Loop allows you to loop your pins. Looping is useful for your evergreen content which you want to periodically reshare to continue to get some traffic juice from it. At the Plus account level, it allows you to have a total of 250 total posts from all your smart loops. I’ve got three loops, and my posts are sitting around 82, so I don’t need to upgrade just yet.

You can also set up rules in each loop, which is helpful when you want to loop into group boards, which will have rules you need to follow!

Other Tools

Canva

You are going to want either software or a site that can help you create stunning images so you can entice people to repin and share your content. Canva is fantastic for this, and it’s free. You can buy a business subscription to get more features, but I haven’t felt the need to do this yet. I aim to have three pins per post.  I have one pin visible in each blog post and hide the other two (you can read about why you may wish to do that at Seaside Sundays).

Unsplash

If you are not a professional photographer (or even if you are and don’t want to use your images), you need to find royalty free images. You cannot find these with a google search. Unsplash offers stunning images, and they are my favorite site to find what I need!

Pixabay

I find these are a little more “stock” like than Unsplash. If I can’t find it at Unsplash, I can usually find it here. Word of warning though, they do pull advertisements from Shutterstock (which is a paid stock site!).

Buffer

You can schedule pins from Buffer for free (they have a limit to how many per week), but it can help to take some pressure off the manual pinning.

Pinterest App

I love this option if you need to do manual pinning. The Pinterest App is for your phone (my link is for the google play store, you’ll need the apple store for iPhones, etc.). Once installed, you can pin on the go, but please don’t pin and drive!

Final Thoughts

If you are a blogger and you want to generate more traffic to your site for free (that is, organically), you need Pinterest. Pinterest is less “social” than other social media platforms because you aren’t as concerned with followers. With Pinterest, SEO, and creating “pinnable” images are where you should be spending the bulk of your time.

If you don’t have a blog just yet, but want one, check out SiteGround (Affiliate Link) hosting options! To monetize, you will be much better off with your hosting (read more about that with my earlier post).

So, get out there, create some pins, and get yourself the traffic you deserve! Do you have a tip that I didn’t cover or want clarification on something I covered? Let me know in the comments down below or drop me an email at kat@katherinededul.com! As always, if you loved this content, please share it with your network and pin this to Pinterest!

Are you struggling to get productive with your business or just life in general? If so, as a gift for visiting my site, I’d love to share with you my productivity tips. If you’re interested, enter your email down below to access it.

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Next week I’m going to experiment with transferring a photograph to a wood piece. I’m super excited to share my results, so be sure to check that out. Until then, stay crafty my friends!