Pinterest has been instrumental in growing my blog traffic and followers across my social media accounts.
But what to pin on Pinterest?
My Instagram grew steadily when I first began, mainly because it wasn’t saturated back then and there weren’t many people doing Interiors as a niche.
It wasn’t until I sat down and taught myself how to use the platform and how to pin effectively on Pinterest that I started to see proper growth.
The platform has 431 million monthly active users and sits above Twitter in the World’s most-used social platforms. Not bad for an image search platform!
It is really easy to set up as well. If you haven’t already got a Pinterest account, read how to set one up here >>>
Pinterest – How to drive traffic to your blog and social media
What to Pin on Pinterest
The beauty of Pinterest is you can grow fast and push out content to a large number of people without having to worry about followers. Although, followers always help!
Pinterest is by far my biggest traffic driver (I am currently working on SEO becoming my #1 eventually as I don’t want to rely on other platforms to drive traffic to my blogs). How did I do it?
In short, I pinned. A lot! This was instrumental and helped increase traffic to my blog.
The long version –
You’ve got your Pinterest business account up and running, and you’ve claimed your website and created some boards.
How often should you be pinning on Pinterest to increase traffic to a website?
I get a lot of people asking me for advice and what to pin on Pinterest. Most people are shocked when I tell them that I Pin at least 25 times a day to my Melanie Jade Design Pinterest account.
It is a lot easier to understand if I explain what to pin on Pinterest.
One image – Multiple Pinterest boards
It doesn’t matter if you save the same Pin to several different boards. Each separate Pin to a board will count as one Pin and will increase traffic to a website.
Every Sunday I create a blog post with images and will save these images to different relevant boards.
Take this image for example –
This is an image of my recent IKEA hack of our living room units. I wrote a blog post about how I built the units with lots of images. This image was saved to these boards –
- Latest on Melanie Jade Design
- Living Room Inspo
- DIY
- Colour in the Home
- Colour Trends – Green
- Design Inspiration
Even if I just posted that image from my blog to the above boards, that’s 6 Pins of the same image I’m pinning to my boards on Pinterest.
Normally, I’ll have around 10 – 15 images from my blog to upload as Pins with links back to my blog.
This means I’ll create around 75 Pins on average from each blog post and helps increase traffic to my blog
How often should you be pinning on Pinterest? The suggested amount is at least 10 times a day. It is all about consistency and being seen, a bit like Instagram.
What if you have a blog or website that isn’t particularly visual?
This website doesn’t rely on images as it is mainly informative. So how do I create images for each blog post and increase traffic to my blog?
By using Canva!
Canva is my favourite blogging tool and it is free to use (although I prefer to use the membership option) I can’t recommend it enough.
It is so easy to use, it has thousands of pre-made templates to choose from which can all be modified to suit your branding and style.
You can choose different backgrounds, images, text size and font, elements, colours and frames to create eye-catching images for your blog.
It is really important to stay on-brand with your images so that your Pins are instantly recognisable.
In Canva, you can create your personalised brand kit which helps you stick with the same colours, font, elements and images for all your Pins.
I have a colour palette, a few different fonts and some graphics which I try to use on all my images created in Canva.
Creating your brand kit is extremely important when starting and I’d recommend it to any new bloggers. Canva has helped increase traffic to my blogs and is an extremely invaluable tool.
Make sure your Pins stand out
Another important consideration when deciding what to pin on Pinterest is whether they will stand out.
You are jostling with millions of other Pins and users on Pinterest, so you want your images to grab potential blog visitors’ attention.
Does the Pin explain straight away what your blog post is about? Is it easy to read?
Using text overlay on an image is the easiest way to make your Pin stand out and text size is key.
By using Canva, you can create Pins where text is the main event, a bit like my image at the beginning of this blog post. Use the biggest text possible on the image and include an image in the background.
Pins that do not have any photos or images included do not work very well. I have no idea why!
You can use one of your images behind the text or select an image from Canva. It has a large library of stock images that you can use in your creations and are royalty-free.
I mainly talk about blogging and social media on Be Social With Media, so I try to stick to computers, phones, social media icons and flowers (because I love flowers!)
If you can’t find what you are looking for on Canva, you can use free stock images from websites such as Unsplash or Pexels.
Lastly, don’t forget to add your URL in every Pin created in Canva or whichever design app you choose to use. Not only does this help people recognise your work quickly, but it also stops people from re-using your Pin to point potential followers to their websites. It happens!!
You could also add your URL to all your images but I choose not to because, well, it takes a lot of time!
Infographics
Pinterest loves an infographic! They are one of the most saved Pins on Pinterest and can easily be created in a design app.
Infographics can apply to all niches. I regularly create one breaking down the main points of a blog post.
You don’t have to go into too much detail, just pick out the main bullet points of any blog post and stick them on an Infographic.
Pin every single product in a separate Pin
Yep, you read that right! If you’ve got products to sell on your blog or website, make sure that each product has a dedicated Pin.
It’s easy to do, just upload each image to Pinterest, and add a title and description and a link back to your website.
There are weeks, possibly months’ worth of Pins right there!
Your products can also be turned into Product pins that are shoppable. This is a great way to make more money via Pinterest and increase traffic to a website!
More on Monetising Pinterest >>>
How to Make Money on Pinterest – 10 Way to monetise your Content
Pin all your social media content and images
A few years ago, when I began to take Pinterest seriously, I started adding all my Instagram posts to the platform under its dedicated board – @MelanieJadeDesign Instagram.
I think this had a huge impact on my growth and engagement as I was always getting messages from people saying they saw my kitchen/bathroom/garden on Pinterest and they found me on Instagram.
It’s not rocket science. You pop up an image that you have spent time styling, taking photographs of and editing, why wouldn’t you want to share it on Pinterest? THE image-sharing platform.
If you make sure you put a link back to your Instagram account, you will start getting new followers. Guaranteed.
Idea Pins
I have to admit, I haven’t fully gotten on board with Idea Pins yet (as of Nov 2022), but this is something I will be concentrating on in the next few weeks.
If you want to know how to Pin effectively on Pinterest, Idea Pins are now the most important thing you can do on the platform.
What are Idea Pins?
They used to be called Story Pins, but unlike other platforms where stories disappear after 24 hours, Pinterest Story Pins were evergreen. The name change was so Idea Pins could reflect what they were – Multiple Pins bunched together to help inspire.
Idea Pins can include up to 20 images and videos (it has been touted as a video first Pin) to tell a story. If you’ve got a DIY project to show or just want to show people a few new products, Idea Pins can do it all in one go.
This is an important move by Pinterest as most platforms are now moving solely to short-form video content. We are all creating videos for Reels and TikTok now, so you can upload these posts to Pinterest as an Idea Pin.
The only downside to Idea Pins is that you can’t put a link to your website. So, why should we spend any time on them?
Mainly because, a bit like Instagram heavily pushing Reels, Pinterest is heavily pushing Idea Pins.
I have seen a sharp decline in impressions and views on my Pinterest account recently and I think this is because I have only uploaded a handful of Idea Pins (although it could be the normal summer lull when everyone is outside enjoying themselves!)
I will be investing my time in creating Idea Pins in the next couple of weeks and I’ll let you know how I get on!
And finally, I have to give a big shout-out to the Tailwind App
As you can see above, when you take all your content and turn it into Pins, it is quite easy to produce 25 Pins a day.
But still, how am I posting 25 a day? Am I sitting at my computer and uploading every single pin? No!
I use the Tailwind Scheduler app which does it for me. It costs $9.99 a month, but you can get a free trial to begin with to see if you like it. I can honestly say, it is worth every penny and is probably one of the most important tools for my blog.
Tailwind is like a big pinboard where you can stick all the Pins you want to publish onto your different Pinterest boards over a period of time. Tailwind will then schedule these pins for you (it also has a handy tool for suggesting your most active times on Pinterest to get maximum eyes on your content).
I spend around an hour a week (this includes creating all the Pins I need via Canva), normally after I’ve posted a blog post and scheduled all my Pins for the next week or so.
Tailwind saves time, helps you to schedule more pins than if you were doing it manually and helps spread out your Pins to different boards so you are not bombarding Pinterest users with the same image over and over again.
The two most important things that increase traffic to my blog are Pinterest and Tailwind. I can’t stress this enough!
You should now have a good idea of what to pin on Pinterest, so it’s time to put it into practice.
More on Pinterest…
How I Grew My Pinterest Views to 4 Million Monthly Views in 4 Months
How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog and Social Media
