If you’re a blogger and you’re not maximizing your blog for Pinterest, you’re missing out on a lot of potential traffic to your blog. Pinterest is by far the biggest source of traffic to my blog, and I’m still getting a lot of pageviews on posts that I wrote back in October of last year via Pinterest. So, what should you as a blogger be doing to maximize your presence on Pinterest? These Pinterest essentials for bloggers will help you get everything you can out of Pinterest to attract more attention to your site’s content.
1. Verify your website. First and foremost, verify your blog on Pinterest. Their help section has great tutorials on how to verify your site that are pretty easy to follow. You can also apply to get Rich Pins for your site, which will display things like recipe ingredients. Once your site is verified, all pins from your site will display your favicon like this:
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And, Pinterest will show other pinners that this pin comes from your blog. Pretty neat, huh?
2. Make a pinnable image for every post. Or, at least every post that you want to wind up on Pinterest. Try to make them vertical, since vertical pins do best on Pinterest. I personally like to include enough information in my graphic to entice readers to click through and read the article, but not so much that they learn everything they need from the pin itself. Infographics get repinned a lot, but they don’t result in a ton of clickthroughs. So, if your goal for Pinterest is to drive more traffic to your site, think carefully about what you put in your graphics.
3. Make sure your pinnable images have a great ALT Text description. Most of the time, when someone pins an image from your site, the ALT Text of that image will populate as the description of the pin. Pinterest is turning itself into a search engine, which means having a good pin description can make a pin from your site show up in someone’s search results. Many pinners are too lazy to write their own pin descriptions, so do your best to write a great description for them.
4. Get the Pin It button. You want to make it as easy as you can for visitors to your site to pin your content so more people come to your site. You can get a simple “Pin It” button via Pinterest, or if you’re blogging using WordPress, you can get neat plugins that you can use to display a custom “Pin It” image when someone hovers their cursor over an image. I personally made my Pin It graphic in PicMonkey using my site’s colors and font and use the jQuery Pin It Button plugin, which is a little out of date, but I’m happy with the way it works.
5. Join big group boards. Once you have your site optimized for Pinterest, you want to get your pins out there. If you already have a huge following on Pinterest that’s relatively easy, but for those of us who aren’t followed by thousands of people, big group boards can help. I found the big boards I participate in through PinGroupie. You can search by category, so you can find pin boards with relevant topics to contribute to. Click through to the board you want to join and then find instructions for how to join, usually in the board’s description. I then use Board Booster campaigns to schedule pins to my group boards so I don’t even have to worry about remembering to pin to them. Easy peasy!
Bloggers: Do you use Pinterest to share your content?
Any questions about Pinterest that you’d like to have answered?
This is really helpful! Thank you. Do you know if there is a dimension for photos that is best for Pinterest?
You are most welcome! It’s definitely best to have photos that are longer than they are wide, but just how much longer they need to be can vary. Most of my graphics are at a 4×6 ratio, but if I had more content, like multiple photos for a recipe, I could make them longer. Constant Contact has an article that nicely sums up recommended image sizes for many different social media platforms: http://blogs.constantcontact.com/social-media-image-sizes/ I personally don’t upload images that are as large as Constant Contact recommends because I want my blog to load quickly. However, if you really want to optimize for Pinterest, you might choose to upload larger images to your site. Does that make sense?
So helpful! More helpful? When are you coming over to fix all my pins?
Whenever you like. 😀
Such great tips – I think I’m figuring out Twitter finally, but Pinterest is still sort of a mystery to me. I never knew about group boards!
Thanks, Alyssa! Group boards are super helpful for getting your pins out in front of a lot of eyes. Definitely check them out!
I am only a member in one group board but I have found that it’s definitely helpful in getting my pins out there. I’m going to check out your links to get in a couple more! Thanks!
Group boards have driven a LOT of traffic to me (relative to the rest of my blog traffic, anyway). I belong to a couple of big yoga group boards and I always get a lot of clicks and repins when I pin to those boards. It’s totally worth it!
Just started up a new blog, so these Pinterest tips are AMAZING! SO helpful – Thanks so much for sharing! 🙂
You are most welcome! Glad you found them helpful! 😀
Thanks for the tips. I’m trying to up my Pinterest game.
You are so welcome, Debbie! I hope they help you get more traffic from Pinterest! Let me know if you have any Pinterest-related questions that I might be able to help out with!
Working on Pinterest was a big goal of mine this year. I’m still not great at it. But I’m learning. Thanks for the tips!
It’s a great goal to have–Pinterest has so much potential! Hope these tips help! 🙂
I’m totally the worst when it comes to Pinterest. I know it could generate a lot of traffic for me, but so often I’ll write a post and be too lazy to make an image for it.
Like I said, THE WORST.
It’s not necessarily a big deal. Everyone has to choose the social media platforms that they want to focus on. I’ve found that Pinterest has worked really well for me, but every blog is different. 🙂
Oh, I need to work on the ALT text description. I always forget about that.
I honestly forget about it sometimes, too. Then I check to see what’s been pinned from my site, and I have one of those “oops” moments. At least it’s easy to go back and fix!
As a complete pintrest newbie, this is really helpful! Now to make it happen! 🙂
Yes! Let me know if you have any questions or if I can help with anything! 🙂
I’m most certainly not Pinterest ready, yet. That’s on my list, but not at the moment. Thanks for this post! Bookmarked this so I can refer to it later 🙂
Let me know if you have any questions when you get around to optimizing your posts for Pinterest! 🙂
There seems to be something about certain types of url’s where a website can’t be verified. For some reason, my main web site, daniela.com, cannot be verified because of how it appears at the top of browsers. Do you know anything about this?
Hmm, that I’m not sure about. I would contact Pinterest directly and see if they can offer some advice! If the URL immediately redirects to another URL, that may have something to do with it. 🙂
It doesn’t, but I’ll investigate and let you know. 🙂
Btw, I’ve made up small (business card size) cards to give to my clients asking them to be my “Pinterest Ambassadors” telling them pinning my product and blog post pins will do more for me right now than any online review could ever do.
That’s such a great idea! Way to be savvy and create a marketing plan that works really well for your business. I hope you can get things sorted out with Pinterest!
How to add pinterest widget on wordpress. Easy and quick tricks
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuYUSGo_dXk9X3Ajc4CbyAw
Please excuse the ignorance, but what does it mean “maximizing” ? Can you be specific?