What if you could get thousands of blog views from day one and have an ever increasing stream of Pinterest traffic?
Well, it’s possible.
Your answer and new business friend?
Pinterest.
I remember when I first started learning about Pinterest as a way to get blog views right from the start.
At first, I was skeptical.
I made this guide because I clearly remember the frustration of not being told the whole picture and only getting bits and pieces from posts that were mediocre at best.
I want this to be the ‘be all end all’ guide to getting a solid start with your Pinterest journey and well on your way to making your dream income.
I want to save you the hours upon hours of research and trial and error.
The great thing is, to market your blog or business on Pinterest, you don’t need to be techy, or computer savvy— you simply need a few basic design skills, a scheduler (or not), and some motivation.
There are a couple of specific steps you need to take, especially if you’re just beginning, to start seeing results.
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I’ve put together a Table of Contents to help you navigate it more easily!
Table of Contents
How It All Works— The Algorithm and The Pinning Ecosystem
Setting Up Your Pinterest Business Profile The Right Way
How to Do Pinterest SEO for Your Profile and Pins
Perfecting Your Pinterest Images— The Anatomy of a Perfect Pin
Experimenting With The Actual Pinning Strategy/Best Practices
How to Save Oodles of Time With All Your Pinning
Extra Tips, Hacks, and FAQ’s
How It All Works
How does Pinterest work exactly?
The simplest way to explain it is ‘an idea search engine.’
When you log in to Pinterest you’ll be met with thousands upon thousands of ideas or ‘pins’ curated by people just like you with infinite passions and interests from all around the globe.
Each pin includes a title, a description, and a link back to whatever the maker chooses (usually to their site, blog post, product, sales funnel, portfolio, etc).
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So if your blog/business is the movie, your pin is the trailer.
And you want to make sure your trailer makes as many people want to see the movie as possible.
To help you sort out your pins, you have Pinterest boards (like the corkboards you pin to in real life) for specific pins to be ‘pinned’ to.
- How can you use it to your advantage?
How can you sell if people don’t know that you’re selling?
Pinterest solves that very problem by exposing you to more people through the pins you create and set into circulation by pinning.
Think of your pins as online billboards (or movie trailers) that lead back to your site.
The idea is that once people land on your site you’ll convert that audience in some way- like through affiliate sales (of which I’ve made a handy guide for complete beginners too!), or digital products, or services, etc.
- The Pinterest Ecosystem
Every time you log into Pinterest, you never get shown the same mix of pins again.
Why?
Because Pinterest is always getting new pins added and/or repined and is always looking for the best pins to show you that match your interests.
It’s a constantly moving conveyor belt of pins.
Kind of like the public board people use to put up flyers of a bake sale or a lost dog.
If you pin your own flyer, it will eventually get buried under newer flyers from others who also want their message displayed.
Pinterest happens just like that except it’s online.
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And this is why you constantly have to be pinning great content from your own boards to group boards to get eyes and clicks on your pins that then turn into page views for your blog (and hopefully sales!). More on how all that works later.
For those of you who really don’t know how exactly pinning on Pinterest works, here is a diagram to help you visualize it better:
- How does the Pinterest algorithm work?
If we really want to get into the science of how exactly Pinterest chooses to spread and show each pin according to your pinning activity, here’s the best yet still-murky-due-to-high-secrecy-from-Pinterest-answer:
Pinterest used to have a smart feed (what determines what pins get shown on your home feed) where it showed the newer pins first.
Pinterest’s primary concern is increasing their positive user experience.
Instead of a ‘newer first’ home feed curation, since 2014, Pinterest uses a smart feed that looks at a variety of ‘scorable’ features from each pin that decides when where and how to show it on the platform.
In short, Pinterest wants more than anything to increase their pin recommendation accuracy for a better user experience. This is most likely what triggered their changing of a more linear algorithm of ‘newer first’ to something a bit more complex.
What exactly does this mean for you?
Nothing and everything.
It simply means you should be aware of Pinterest as a helpful addition to your business but also be careful to not see it as your sole provider of traffic.
So, if Pinterest changes their algorithm here and there is it still worth adding to your content strategy?
Most definitely.
If you’re not quite convinced, here are a few additional stats to give you a better idea of the power of Pinterest: (screenshot of business page)
Otherwise, let’s dig in a little deeper.
Setting Up Your Pinterest Profile The Right Way
Successfully setting up your Pinterest account requires you to change your mindset.
Don’t look at Pinterest as just a place for pretty pictures and ideas.
Think of Pinterest like a search engine.
Think of Pinterest like you would think of Google.
What does this mean?
This means thinking like your ideal customer and brainstorming how they would search for what you offer.
You want to make sure you’re as findable as possible.
Have your mindset changed and ready to go? Alrighty.
Let’s start with setting up the basics.
- Setting up your business account
The first part of successfully setting up your Pinterest account is opening a business account.
This way, you get access to analytics that you otherwise wouldn’t get through a personal profile.
Before you open your business account, have you set up your blog yet?
This way you can enter your domain name when you register.
Visit https://business.pinterest.com/en and click ‘Join as a Business.’
If you already have an account, don’t want to lose the followers you already have, and want to turn it into a business account you can:
Log in to your personal Pinterest account.
Then visit https://www.pinterest.com/business/convert/ and fill in the required info.
Tada! Your new (or converted) Pinterest business account has been created!
- Enabling your rich pins
Along with your new Pinterest account, enabling rich pins is an important step in the pinning process.
Enabling rich pins means that for every pin you repin, at the bottom of each, it’ll include your favicon, title, and a brief description.
Enabling rich pins does two things for you:
- It helps you gain recognition through your pins as you share and re-pin
- It helps establish more cred and increases engagement
To enable rich pins for your WordPress site (assuming you already have a blog up and running with at least one post) the easy way, there are just a few steps you’ll need to take.
First, download Yoast SEO as a plugin if you haven’t already done so.
Then, once it’s downloaded and activated, on your WordPress dashboard, click on it and choose the ‘social’ tab.
Once there click on ‘Facebook’ and move the slider to enable ‘add open graph meta data.’
Once you’ve done this you can now go to the Rich Pin Validator, enter any URL from your site and hit ‘validate.’
It can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours for Pinterest to approve your rich pins.
If you’re getting an error message make sure your permalinks, found under ‘settings’ in your WordPress dashboard, are set to ‘post name.’
Sometimes Pinterest will have trouble validating your pins if your URL’s are long and winding.
How to Do Pinterest SEO for Your Profile and Pins
SEO is a huge part of Pinterest.
If you plan on skipping parts of the Pinterest strategy, don’t choose SEO to skip.
Since Pinterest works as an ‘idea search engine’, it needs help finding relevant content with the help of your keywords.
It works much like Google uses SEO (search engine optimization) to find the best information that matching your search words.
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Let’s take a closer look.
Say you’re searching for ‘dinosaur cakes’. You’ll get something like this:
Pinterest will give you frequently searched suggestions to narrow your search and will even include board suggestions relevant to that keyword. Like this:
