By now, you should have heard that Pinterest is a power-packed tool to help drive traffic to your blog. Professional bloggers are way past just adopting Pinterest as an option, but rather swear that it’s completely necessary to grow their platform.
You don’t need to already have a large following before you prepare your Pinterest account and blog – that’s the beauty of it! Whether or not you’re raking in 100 page views per day or 10,000, Pinterest is basically the #1 way to almost triple those numbers if navigated responsibly.
Can you really earn that much promoting your blog on Pinterest?
The short answer is – hell, yes. Officially launched in 2010; Pinterest has already garnered close to 200 million monthly users, with more than 100 billion pins published. Think visual-based gold mine that offers relevant, curated content from thousands of different niches. With a steady blend of the options below, it’s entirely possible to breach anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 with Pinterest blogging.
Still on the fence? We understand. There are many common misconceptions about using Pinterest, and that, unfortunately, still hinders so many bloggers from growing their reader base. Most people think that Pinterest is mostly for women planning their wedding, fitness geeks that are looking for meal prep recipes or artists picking up handcrafting (just to name a few niches that could do well on Pinterest).
However, that couldn’t be further from the truth. In 2018 alone, 50% of signups came from men! In fact, American males now make up close to 38% of the demographic that uses Pinterest to browse home improvement projects, DIYs, and outdoor activity blogs.
Skipping on Pinterest because of these untrue myths is a total waste –you could be stacking up on tons of engagement and traffic straight to your niche.
Pinterest generates 33% more traffic than Facebook, 71% more than Snapchat and 200% more than Twitter. Big numbers to miss out on when you’re looking to expand your blog’s reach.
Is Pinterest hard to learn?
On a scale of 1 to 10, you’re looking at probably a 5 in terms of skill and adaptability. Pinterest is one of the largest search engines in the world and is largely based on visual searches – so a lot of your homework would generally revolve around making things look good. Pick up on some visual marketing skills like graphics design, learn how Pinterest Analytics works and you’re ready for launch!
Here are some basic terms you need to understand before delving into the beautiful world of Pinterest.
• Pins: The very essence of the site. These are pictures that would lead to your site in the form of an embedded link.
• Boards: Organize multiple pins into visual boards that come under one umbrella topic. It’s helpful to have a few of these –to keep things neat!
• Group boards: Contribute to a group board by adding your pins to be viewed by a community. This is moderated by one person so you might need to request before joining.
• Feed: A curated homepage for all of your followed pins and people. Pretty straightforward stuff.
• Hashtags: Exactly what it says it is. Hashtags help group your pins together if a user were to search for one.
• Rich Pins: Pins that come attached with short snippets describing the content. Higher chances of click through!
1. Create a Pinterest business account
First things first, you’ll need a Pinterest business account. Here – you’ll be able to access features like Analytics, Rich Pins and all other added options that would help you along the way. You’ll also want to set a business name (if you’re self- branded then your personal name would be fine as well!) for your account.
Utilizing Pinterest for business purposes varies from using it personally. It’s true that you’ll still be able to link pins to your blog – but then again, you might be left out when it comes to monitoring engagement, etc. Signing up for a business account is totally hassle-free and won’t cost you a dime. Here’s an amazing guide by Pinterest on creating your business account.
2. Design relevant, informative pins
All set with a business account? Let’s get to pinning! Grouping your niche content is made easier with Pinterest boards. You’re going to want to batch produce your pins in order for it to get noticed. Beginners can afford to start with 20 pins/day. However, you’d want to slowly progress to around 30-40 pins/day for your blog to get really noticed and penetrate through your niche.
If you want to save time batch producing each design from scratch – Canva is the way to go. Many Pinterest bloggers swear by its template designing capabilities and it’s crazy easy to use. Their basic service is free, but as a beginner or intermediate blogger, it’s really more than you need.
You can also drive major traffic to your site by providing your audiences with a sneak peek of what your post is based on. Cue Rich Pins! This little feature allows you to write a short description of the linked content –which comes in forms of an article title, a map or even comments.
To enable rich pins, you’d need to make sure that your blog is also optimized with an SEO plugin. To power your WordPress blog, Yoast combined with the Social Warfare plugin is a good combination, if you need somewhere to start. These are the plugins that power this blog too!
3. Creating multiple landing pages
The minute a person clicks your pins, they expect to see what they came for right away. Landing pages make this entire process a whole lot easier, straightforward and provides your audience with a clear call-to-action. For example, if your pin displays a product/service –it should lead your audiences straight to the listing. Avoid leading people to a homepage or about us section as that forces them to divulge in the information that they did not seek out. Keep it relevant and direct; you’ll definitely see more conversion rates that way.
You should also highly consider pinning high performing blog posts because they do really, really well on Pinterest. A good rule of thumb is to encourage diversity through your pins’ links. This means that creating multiple pins that lead to landing pages, blog posts or just product listings. Even it’s for the same offer.
This helps to increase sales and leads! Let’s say you’re promoting your latest marketing eBook. You’d want to maintain workflow of 5 direct pins that lead to a landing page, 5 infographic pins that lead to a blog post and maybe 5 more that lead straight to the product page. Just make sure that what you illustrate on your pin is exactly what you lead your audience to.
4. Affiliate Marketing
To really drive up your income –you’re going to want to consider affiliate marketing. Not only does it allow you to earn a small commission when someone makes a purchase; it also helps you still keep your Pinterest account active when you’re currently not up for churning out content or promoting your own brand.
Here, it doesn’t exactly matter whether or not you have a blog (all you need is a Pinterest account and a decent number of followers!) Tens of thousands of companies offer affiliate marketing options –so you can highly count on it being available for your niche. If you insist on driving traffic to
your blog instead, you can still reach out to brands and companies to see if they are open to paying for written blog posts and reviews about their products.
Your follower count, reach and engagement would help tremendously here; as more brands are inclined to pay more when you have a bigger network. You can start off by signing up for an account at popular affiliate networks like CJ.com, ShareASale, as well as Amazon Associates and Rakuten Linkshare. Then, manage all the affiliate links with a WordPress plugin like ThirstyAffiliates.
5. Promoted Pins
Like any other social media platform, Pinterest also offers paid options for advertising your pins. This comes in pretty handy if you have a budget for marketing–and need to engage audiences fast. Their paid platform offers promoted pins that run on a cost-per-click (CPC) model that prompts you to pay only when someone has clicked a pin.
To start, select your goal amount of audiences and a fixed CPC bid for your campaign. You can choose how long to run it, and when to pause and then immediately receive analytics to measure its success. You should totally consider advertising organic pins that have a really high engagement to accelerate marketing performance.
If you’re looking to get started for free without paying, another great tool to use to grow your blog via Pinterest is Tailwind. They offer options for scheduling your pins, checking broken links and also connecting you with other pinners! Their ‘Tribe’ section allows you to view similar pins in said niche contents, and to share each other’s content. Think of it as a group of like-minded people, interested in the same topic.
Click here and sign up for Tailwind for FREE.
It’s a lot to take in at first glance – but fret not. Picking up on Pinterest and navigating its’ waters is relatively straightforward and does not massive amounts of digital marketing knowledge. The basics will do and will only take at most a (or two) week to pick up. All in all, Pinterest never disappoints when it comes to growing your blogging platform. Each and every Pinterest-based blogger has an arsenal of tools at your disposal to help drive traffic! It is important however to remember this one thing, making money from Pinterest takes time and effort up front.
You may not be able to immediately notice results from the first week or second week of making your business account. Pinterest relies on your slow and a steady hand, monitoring trends and pin performance through their analytics (or Tailwind), delivering relevant content true to your brand and niche and of course incorporating affiliate marketing tactics! It’s less of a quick fix and more of a consistent algorithm that would allow for any blogger (beginner or advanced) to see money rolling in.
What do you think about this guide? Let me know your thoughts below.
Jeremy has been running several online businesses behind his laptop for the past 5 years and he has worked as a freelance web developer previously. A trained marketer by profession, he also has Ruby on Rails and web development knowledge. His forte lies in eCommerce, SEO and content marketing. He’s been featured on Vice, Thrive Global, YFS Magazine, Forbes and several other publications. He prefers to connect with people on LinkedIn.
