Still not on Pinterest? If you're a blogger it might be time to get serious about marrying Pinterest with your blog. Pinterest can provide a hand full of benefits for those that are ready to take their blog to the next level.
One of the main benefits of Pinterest is that it could provide massive amounts of traffic to your blog, whether it's through Pinterest promotions, or by creating that one amazing Infographic that get's pinned hundreds of times.
And if you can drive traffic to your blog, then this will give your blog a higher chance of getting advertisers and sponsors to pay attention to your site. So how do you get more traffic from Pinterest back to your blog?
Here are 5 Tips to Increase Traffic to Your Blog
Pinteresting Tip 1: Link Your Uploaded Pins Back to Your Website
One of the best aspects of Pinterst is its ability to allow pins to be linked back to any page on your website. This is a fantastic way to drive back traffic to your blog.
Any time you upload a picture that's related to your a blog post or your website, whether it's a picture of you attending an event, like Social Media Marketing World, or if it's a behind the scenes recording of a podcast episode, EVERY single pin you upload that's related to your business should go back to your website.
In order to do this, and it's best done on the desktop version of Pinterest, is to hover your mouse over your uploaded pin until a pencil icon shows at the top right hand corner. From there, click on it, and look for box that reads “source.” This is where you can change or add url of your choice. This url then becomes the destination of the clicked pin.
And yes, technically you can do this for any pin or repin as well.
Pinteresting Tip 2: Add Your Blog Website to Your Pin's Descriptions
One of the best things you can do is add your own website to your pins' descriptions. This is because websites are clickable in pin descriptions for the desktop version, but the url is cut off. The person I've seen who is the MOST consistent with this is Peg Fitzpatrick, who puts the url of the blog posts in her pins' descriptions.
However, the urls listed in pin descriptions are not clickable on Pinterest mobile apps. With apps, the full url is listed as well, making long and ugly urls not visually friendly on Pinterest. If you're considering using a url shortener, think again. If a users clicks on the shortened url link, it could lead to a Pinterest warning page stating that the link could lead to spam. This is why you don't see many of them on Pinterest.
The good news is that if you're really serious about tracking website clicks in your pin descriptions to see if they are being clicked on, Pinterest does allow for UTM tracking.
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Pinteresting Tip 3: Get Rich Pins for Your Blog
If you want your blog to get noticed on Pinterest and want to drive more traffic to your site, then I strongly suggest that you implement rich pins for your blog.
Rich pins are a special type of pin that provide extra information to Pinterest users. The benefits include bolded titles for your pins, meta descriptions taken from your blog, as well as amazing call to action buttons, especially on the iPad app version of Pinterest, which blatantly has a button that states “Read this on…”
Rich pins for articles will help you stand out against the thousands of other blogs that don't have rich pins.
If you run a self-hosted WordPress blog site, and want to get rich pins for articles, then check out this tutorial.
Pinteresting Tip 4: Join A Group Board Related to Your Blog
For me, joining group boards has been a great way of driving traffic. Group boards are Pinterest boards that have more than one contributor. Here's an example of a group board that what was created by Julie Grandbois about DIY Crafts. Her group board has over 10,600 followers with over 1,200 contributors.
When you're able to contribute valuable blog content, and expose yourself to thousands of people through group boards, there's no doubt that you're going to see an increase in traffic. And the best part, if the group is managed well, you're being exposed to the right audience.
Finding group boards can be hard when you're starting off, so an excellent tool that I recommend to use is PinGroupie. It's a great way to find group boards and sort them by keywords, the number of followers, how much repinning is going on and so much more.
Pinteresting Tip 5: Provide Amazing Content that Influencers Want to Repin
A great way of driving traffic from Pinterest back to your blog is to ensure that you provide amazing content on Pinterest. Think of creating a blog topic and a pin that would really grab people's attention.
The blog topic could be about breaking news, or offer an extremely helpful tip.
I wrote a blog post about the Best Times to Pin on Pinterest, it was pinned by someone who had close to 500,000 followers which helped spike traffic for the next two days. I have to tell you the downside of that though, even though traffic spiked during those two days, the bounce rate from during those two days were incredibly high. This was because the Pinterest influencer was a photographer, and her main audience wasn't that interested in Pinterest marketing.
If you're a looking for a more systematic way of doing this, then take time to build relationships with other influential pinners. Repin some of their content, take time to comment on their pins, and reach out to them on other social networks like Twitter, Google Plus or on their blog.
But don't mistaken Pinterest numbers as the way to determine an influencer. Cynthia Sanchez of Oh So Pinteresting, has over 10,000 followers but whenever she repins one of my pins, I know it drives quality traffic back to my blog and an audience that wants to learn about Pinterest. Generally the traffic she sends by sharing my pins has resulted in people visiting more pages and spending more time than the measured average.
Those are my five tips for using Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog. Do you have a great tip that you would like to share? Please leave the tip in the comments section.
NEW TO PINTEREST? Check out Ms. Ileane's SlideShare Presentation: Pinterest 101 – Building Your First Pinterest Board from Scratch
