Pinterest is often overlooked by blog owners trying to grow their platform and drive more traffic to it.
The reason for this lies on the surface – on a number of occasions Pinterest is considered to be a rather niche website that is most suitable for blogs that focus on cooking, DIY, fashion and design, etc. Hence, a stereotypically ‘female’ website that works best for the appropriate blogs.
Such an idea is backed up by the statistics of the website. Indeed, Pinterest is dominated by the aforementioned niches as the top 30 Pinners are food, fashion, design, and wedding bloggers.
For this very reason, Pinterest is rarely included at the top of the lists of the most popular platforms to turn to in order to drive more traffic to your blog. Usually, such online guides are focused on learning how to maximize the effectiveness of exploiting Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for social media exposure and, subsequently, increased levels of attention to the platform you are promoting through those.
Nonetheless, it does not make Pinterest any less suitable for those bloggers who do not fall into any of the categories stated above. If anything, it gives them some sort of a ‘first-mover’s advantage’ and allows them to become a leader in their niche more easily. Entry barriers for blogs operating in other markets are significantly lower, which is explained by the lower levels of competition within the website.
More and more large businesses and corporations such as Apple and Wal-Mart are joining Pinterest in order to direct a part of their marketing efforts there and further increase the amount of traffic they are driving in from various social media. This implies that there is, indeed, enough room for all kinds of bloggers on Pinterest and the platform can be extremely beneficial if used correctly.
There is evidence that suggests that Pinterest posts, pins, are 100 times more spreadable than an average tweet, which directly links back to the amount of exposure your content can potentially get from being published.
The Facebook comparison is equally as impressive: data shows that the half-life of a Pinterest post is 1,6000 times longer than that of a Facebook post. If that is still not convincing enough, think about how an average pin is capable of generating up to 2 site visits and 6 page views. Granted that the user base of Pinterest only continues to grow, this figure is likely to keep increasing over the next couple of years.
All of this justifies the use of Pinterest for bloggers who want to promote their blogs online!
The only condition is that your Pinterest strategy needs to be well thought-through and consistent, and you need to follow some of the basic rules that would allow you to generate the most traffic from your pins. You need to direct your efforts effectively and get a clear understanding of what exactly is the best traffic driver on Pinterest.
Pay attention to your pin descriptions
Pin descriptions are incredibly important for everyone who wants to drive more traffic to your blog with Pinterest. While the platform already does justice to your blog posts once you pin them and automatically generates the pin’s outlay with the post’s title and a little description, it is up to you to ensure that your pin is doing the most to drive as much traffic to your blog as possible.
You need to make sure that you are altering your pin descriptions to draw in as much attention to them as possible. You want to turn them into a really eye-catching piece of information that would make your target audience stop scrolling down their feed and dedicate some time to exploring the post you want to share with them. In order to achieve those results and make more Pinterest users follow through and click on your blog post link, you need to remember to give your pin description a set of particular properties.
To be engaging with your target audience and encourage the readers to visit your blog, you need to shape your descriptions as follows:
- Descriptive. First of all, you need to understand that textual content is equally as important as the visual one. While it is the picture that draws the initial attention of the pinners to your post, it is the detailed description that helps them to decide whether they want to visit your blog or not. If you manage to outlay all the key points of your post in the description and convince the readers to find out more, you will experience a noticeable increase in traffic on your platform.
- Helpful. One of the things that a lot of people are looking for in a blog post is a solution to a problem. If you manage to clearly delineate the problem that your blog post solves and actualize the post to the pinners that come across your pin, you will gain a lot more visitors to your platform. The explanation to this is fairly simple: not only people are more likely to trust the source that words their problem exactly, but they are also more interested in the blogs that are direct in their approach.
- Interesting. You need to make sure that your description is exciting. While it is not advisable to make your descriptions overly quirky (you need to ensure that the potential reader understands what your post is about without any struggles), you need to make sure you are offering something unique and exciting for them to want to go to your blog.
- Actionable. One of the most important features that your pin description needs to have is featuring a call for action. While it seems logical that those readers interested in learning more about the topic you are covering in the blog post you have pinned on your Pinterest board will click on the link and read the article, it is a proven fact that more users do so if they are encouraged to visit the page. Indeed, a simple invitation to ‘check out the blog post for more information’ can create a significant difference and increase the traffic a lot.
Focus on using keywords
Another thing that you need to consider is using keywords. Adding enough keywords is the basic rule of any SEO-driven marketing practice, but it is particularly useful for increasing your blog’s traffic with Pinterest. Not only will using the appropriate keyword allow your pins to rank higher in the search engine results, but it will also increase exposure levels in Pinterest itself.
It is essential to remember, however, that you should not use any artificial keyword stuffing as spammy results are likely to end up in shadowban, which will adversely affect your marketing strategy. However, you can also rely on a couple of strong hashtags to significantly increase your pins’ exposure.
Image Source: Leanne Wong
Schedule your pins to always be on time
If you are committed to increasing your blog traffic up to three times with the use of Pinterest, you need to remember that you need to build a solid relationship with the platform’s users as well as perform in accordance to the basic algorithms of Pinterest.
Both of those conditions can be met if you develop a trustful posting strategy and start posting not only lots but also consistently.
One of the best tips to maximize the exposure levels of your pins and therefore bring more traffic to your blog through Pinterest is by ensuring that you post at the right times. Pinterest algorithms work in such a way that your pin has more chances to be shown to the audience if it is posted when the users who are targeted by your pins are online. Therefore, you need to determine the times when your target audience is the most active on the platform and stick to pinning then.
Pin consistently
Another tip that can be used in order to drive more traffic to your blog with Pinterest is making sure that your pins are coming in a steady rhythm.
While it is important to be sharing high-quality content, you need to also remember that Pinterest traffic generation is a contest before anything else. Therefore, you need to make sure that you build a habit of posting at the same time so that your pins would be appearing on the dashboards of Pinterest users.
Optimize your images to be pin-worthy
Pinterest is a social media that focuses on visual content before anything else. While it does allow its users to share text posts and generate pins that consist solely of media files that are not images, it is images in particular that are proven to drive the most attention. Hence, the basic rule for everyone who wants to generate triple the amount of traffic they already drive to their blog is adding some high-quality relevant pictures to engage with the pinners.
The first rule is, naturally, adding the picture instead of leaving the pin blank. In fact, people tend to see pins as more complete and repin-worthy if they contain an image that would look good on their boards. Therefore, if you want to attract a wider audience to your pins and encourage people to check out your blog, you need to add some visual content to your posts.
Nonetheless, there are also particular rules to follow if you want your images to be effective in generating traffic for your blog. The most popular ways in which you can alter your pictures to be suitable for the platform and attractive to the target audience:
- Make sure your images are the correct size. While Pinterest itself does not have any particular requirements in regards to the size of the images you add to your pins, it is a fact that vertical images do much better than the horizontal ones. The reason for this is fairly trivial: most Pinterest users (up to 80%) access the platform using their mobile devices. Therefore, if you want to increase the chances of the pinners clicking on your posts and subsequently following through to your blog, you should stick to the aspect ratio of 2:3 or 4:5. Besides, longer pictures take up more room on the screen hence it is more difficult to pass them, and the readers’ eyes are glued to the picture for a longer time.
Image Source: Marketing Artfully
- Keep your images interesting and relevant to the post. Often, if your target audience is searching for a particular blog post or is simply researching a particular topic, they are not likely to check out every single pin they come across. Instead, they will turn to the pins that caught their attention or reflect well on their request topic.
- Add text onto your images. For the same reason as above, you should also be adding text captions to your pictures. It will make the process of selecting relevant pins easier for your target audience. On top of that, it will also make your pins look more professional and therefore increase engagement levels.
Become part of a group board
You should consider joining a group board if you are looking to drive 3 times more traffic to your blog. This tip is considered to be one of the most useful Pinterest-related traffic generation tips as it is easy to use and is extremely effective.
Image Source: IMG Gluten-Free
The concept is simple. All you do is join a group board (or, alternatively, create one if there is not one already). Group boards are collective boards that allow everyone who is a part of it to pin to it.
The best part about group boards is that due to being a result of a collective effort they, naturally, draw in more attention. Followers of a particular contributor who pins to the group board see the pin and are likely to check out the board. Once they get on the board, they will see all the other pins there and if your posts are of good quality, they will likely click on them.
The main reason for this method to be effective is that the people coming across these collective boards are interested in the content of these boards and therefore they automatically can be considered the target audience that you have managed to attract.
Guest author: Cheryl Hearts is a writer and journalist from Boston, Massachusetts. Her passion for writing started at an early age and evolved during the high school years. She enjoyed creating her own stories, so she decided to make writing her career. After earning a degree in Journalism, Cheryl started running her own blog CherylHearts.com where she’s covering topics of great interest to society.
The post How To Drive 3x More Traffic To Your Blog With Pinterest appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.
source https://www.jeffbullas.com/blog-traffic-from-pinterest/
No comments:
Post a Comment