how to use pinterest for marketing to increase traffic to your website, without having to invest hundreds or thousands of dollars in paid advertising every month
How to use Pinterest to promote my web Or better said For what reason should I spend most of my efforts
I think that the reasons will be left over when I explain how, thanks to this platform, I managed to triple my web traffic in less than 10 months , achieving almost 1 MILLION views per month on this website …
I think that after seeing this, there is no doubt that if you are a blogger or digital entrepreneur and want to increase traffic to your website, without having to invest hundreds or thousands of dollars in paid advertising every month, there is no better way to Do it, than using Pinterest + Tailwind .
So surely your initial question changed, and now it is….
READY WHERE DO I BEGIN?
1. CREATE A BUSINESS ACCOUNT
To start with our promotion strategy on Pinterest, the first thing you should do is create a Pinterest account for business.
Creating it is completely free, and with it you get access to analytics tools that will help you define the best practices for growing your account and increase traffic to your website.
A business account also gives you control over your brand and gives you the attribution of all content that comes from your platforms (even if the pin is published by another user).
If you already have a personal account, you can decide if you open a new account or update your current account , to access the functions of the business accounts.
2. PREPARE YOUR PROFILE
Once you have created the business account, edit it by completing your profile in the configuration, indicating who you are and what your website is about .
You can add a photo, your geographic location, a short description of what your project offers and any other useful information you want to highlight.
The idea is to ensure that if someone enters your profile, they are able to understand in less than 1 minute what your website is about and what you can offer them.
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3. ACTIVATE THE “RICH PINS”
The ” Rich Pins” are detailed pins, which in addition to a title and description, contain links that take the user directly to your website and other platforms.
They are, so to speak, the heart of the content promotion strategy on this platform.
To activate the “Rich Pins”, you must first claim your website (tell Pinterest that page belongs to you). Personally, I used the YOAST plugin to do it.
If you already have the plugin I leave you with the step by step for you to do it too.
Log in to Pinterest from a web browser and click on the option to see more (…) to open the menu
Select Settings
Click on Connect Accounts
In the “Connect your website” section, enter the URL of your website and then click Connect
Select “Add an HTML tag.”
Copy the tag (the code) and go to the Yoast plugin
Open the Social menu and then the Facebook tab.
Make sure the Add Open Graph metadata option is enabled, and click Save change s
Yoast – Facebook Settings – Open Graph
Now go to the Pinterest tab inside YOAST and paste the tag where it says Pinterest Confirmation . Click to save the changes.
Yoast – Pinterest – pinterest confirmation
Go to Pinterest debugger (you must open this link from the computer)
Enter the URL of any of your blog entries (do not use your homepage)
Choose the option of ‘HTML tags’ and then click on ‘ Apply Now ‘
You will see a confirmation (green hook) that your application has been processed
4. CONNECT YOUR SOCIAL NETWORKS
After claiming your website, I advise you to also connect your social media accounts and / or YouTube channel.
By connecting all your channels, you will give yourself the opportunity to improve the recognition of your brand, making sure that your account appears as author in all those pins content that you have created from your profile, those that you have shared from your other channels, or that any other user has created using content from any of the platforms you use (Instagram, YouTube, etc.).
5. CREATE YOUR FIRST BOARDS
To begin, I suggest you create 5 to 10 boards with topics related to your main theme and the odd ones on topics that are very popular on Pinterest, but always thinking about the tastes that you create, those that are interested in your original theme may have.
These 2 are topics on which, little by little, my readers had been asking me to talk to them. And that made me understand that although they are not directly related to Online Entrepreneurship, they complement each other very well with this theme.
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DEFINE THE TOPICS FOR EACH BOARD
Analyze those profiles that reflect authority (a good number of monthly visitors, followers and repins of their own content), in the theme you intend to develop.
Look at their boards, taking as a basis that the most experienced profiles probably already did the analysis, and they can give you a good idea of those popular themes that complement your main theme.
HOW TO CREATE A NEW BOARD IN PINTEREST
In your profile, click on the + symbol and then create board .
Choose a name for the board and indicate if you want it to be secret. In my case, I generally create the board in secret, and after adding at least 10 pins, I make it public.
Click create .
More information about secret boards.
Important Note: As I mentioned above, after creating the boards, add at least 10 pins to each one before making them public. If you just start and you don’t have enough of your own content to fill the boards, don’t worry. Simply share attractive and relevant content from other profiles with good authority.
The idea with Pinterest is to become a good “content curator”, and always share relevant, entertaining and good quality information to your followers
At the beginning you will probably share mostly third-party content, but the idea is that little by little you will be sharing mostly your own content.
CREATE A BOARD WITH THE NAME OF YOUR WEB
It is a practice that I have adopted in each of my Pinterest profiles, and that has helped me to organize myself better and give all those users interested in viewing the content of my blog, a summary of my best pins.
6. HELP PINTEREST PROMOTE YOUR BOARDS / CONTENT
Add categories and descriptions to each of your boards, so that they are much easier to find by those interested users. This will increase the chances of Pinterest recommending your board, in related content.
Try that the descriptions contain popular terms on your subject. To find them, simply write your main keywords (those that best describe the fundamental aspects of your theme) in the platform’s search engine, and look at the suggestions it gives you.
Examples of popular terms related to the theme “travel”
WHAT KIND OF CONTENT WORKS BEST IN PINTEREST
Before I explain how to create attractive pins, I want to clarify that not all the content of a website is suitable for Pinterest.
For example, if you have content that is limited by a defined time (such as lightning flight deals that I publish on one of my travel websites), and you promote it on Pinterest, it will most likely not work.
And this is so since a pin does not take off immediately, and probably by the time it achieves some visibility, the flight offer has already ended.
If you have a mix of content with short expiration and other non-perishable , try to promote those items with perennial content, or that are easy to update.
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1. DISCOVER HOW USERS THINK
In the case of Pinterest, users of this platform are generally looking for inspiration .
Most of the time, people enter Pinterest with a specific project or need in mind, so we can consider it a platform dedicated to helping their users make decisions, assisting them in the phases of inspiration and planning and, finally, helping them to take action
2. CREATE ATTRACTIVE PINS
Strive to create pins that have visual appeal
My favorite ” non-designer design” tool is canva.com. It is super easy to use, has dozens of designs created especially for Pinterest and ready to use , and gives us access to most of the options, completely free.
If you decide to add images on your pins, make sure they are of good quality and do not violate the copyright of the photographer or owner. If you don’t have your own photos, I recommend using these free image banks .
Make sure that both the text of the image, and the title of your pin, attract attention
Titles are, in my opinion, the most important part of a pin. Use your creativity both in the text that you will show in the image, and in the one you place in the title.
Of course, make sure that your desire to excel does not make you fall into “clickbait”, which is nothing more than trying to deceive the user with a sensational title, that little or nothing has to do with the content and that only seeks to increase the clicks
3. ALWAYS PRIORITIZE HIGH QUALITY CONTENT
Try to focus your energy on creating quality content that suits the interests and needs of your audience.
Put yourself in the place of your reader and try to understand what you are looking for. When choosing the topics you will talk about, always look to create content that helps the public of the platform you use (in this case, Pinterest), to make decisions.
4. PUBLISH UNDER THE “LAW OF PARET”
If you’re still starting, and you don’t have much of your own content and of good quality, share under the 80/20 law.
What does this mean? Well, 80% of your pins will be curated content from other accounts (try to publish only the most relevant accounts) and the remaining 20% will correspond to your own content.
This will allow you to stay active while you manage to publish enough articles on your blog, so that you can make different own pins and gradually vary the percentage (hoping to reach the point where you publish mostly your own content).
AUTOMATE YOUR PINTEREST ACCOUNT
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5. SEO-PTIMIZE YOUR PINES
Be sure to complete all sections of which a Rich Pin is composed . This information gives users (and Pinterest) a better idea about the pin, and what to expect if they click on it.
HOW TO DO IT?
Create a description for each pin. Try to be short but attractive, and with a good dose of SEO (if you do not know what it is, go to Google and you will find thousands of articles that can help you optimize your pins and the content of your website).
Take into account that the descriptions are capable of transmitting a lot of information about the image of your brand (one of the most valuable assets of every digital entrepreneur).
By using this space well, you increase the chances that Pinterest decides to display your content, while helping you define the type of users to whom you should suggest it, depending on the keywords you use and the behavior / tastes of the potential reader.
Important Note: Include as much content as possible in the description. You can use up to 500 characters, although I advise you to summarize the most important in the first 50 characters, since they are the ones that most users will probably read.
For this, try to think about what can make a user decide if your pin provides value.
When writing your description, be sure to include the most relevant keywords, but don’t over-optimize using them excessively, because that’s not good either.
6. PUBLISH THE CONTENT IN YOUR MOST RELEVANT BOARDS
Personally, I don’t share all my content on each of my boards. I only do it if the pin and the board complement each other.
I also do not recommend the practice of sharing a pin (same image with the same link and description) several times on the same board, as it can be seen as SPAM.
As I mentioned before, in each profile I have a board on which I save all the content of my website. I generally consider it my main board, so I start publishing each new pin (my own) there, and then I share it on the other boards on which it applies.
7. USE HASHTAGS TO INCREASE YOUR REACH
Add some hashtags using your most relevant keywords, to help people find your content.
8. OPTIMIZE YOUR WEB TO RECEIVE TRAFFIC
When a user clicks on one of your pins, it means that what you have to offer has drawn attention and wants more information.
Once the user enters your website, you must strive to guarantee a pleasant experience and provide the answers you are looking for.
This will help you gain authority (and possibly also a new follower). This will obviously also help Pinterest take your website into account as a quality content channel and increase your authority.
To achieve this, make sure you have an optimized website (good loading time, simple and attractive design, easy to navigate and have quality content).
THE “STEP BY STEP” TO BRING THOUSANDS OF FREE VISITS, TO YOUR WEB
1. JOIN GROUP BOARDS
When you are just starting and your account still does not have a good reach, in the collaborative boards related to your theme , with quality pins and less than 50 members (they are usually better managed), you will find the ideal way to take off.
HOW THESE BOARDS WORK
When you create good content, you have attractive pins and you join a group board (a board with more than one profile participating and in which all its members can publish), you open up to the possibility that the other participants share your content in their boards themselves, making it be seen by some of his followers.
HOW TO FIND GROUP TABLERS
To find group boards, all you have to do is review the profiles of those accounts with a theme similar to yours.
If you are from a computer, you will see that there is more than one photo in the circle above the name of the board (where the profile photo appears), or if you see it from the cell phone, you will find a group icon.
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2. CREATE YOUR FIRST GROUP BOARD
Once you get your first 50 followers (a number that I like, but does not mean it is written in stone), create a group board and invite some accounts that you find interesting within your niche, to join your board.
I do not advise to make your first board (or invite to participate accounts of a lot of authority) before getting some followers, because there are few large accounts that will be interested in participating in group boards with an administrator who is just beginning to promote his profile.
This is because the idea of a group board is that the collaborative effort brings benefit for all parties , and not that only new accounts benefit from those with greater authority.
That said, there is always the option that you try to invite those accounts you admire and see what happens.
If anyone accepts you and shares your content on their own boards, it will be giving you enormous help by allowing you to leverage your reach to promote your content.
When creating a group board, I advise you to define the guidelines that you would like the members to follow, and communicate them when accepted.
FOR EXAMPLE:
Have a minimum of X followers to request access
Post once a week on the group board
For each publication you make, you must share that of a partner on your own board
Only publish content related to the main theme of the board
Take care of both spelling and pin quality
3. PROMOTE YOUR PROFILE FROM OUTSIDE
After mastering the basics of your Pinterest profile, it’s time to review the details that can help you promote your account off the shelf.
For this you can add Pinterest widgets on your website, so that people interact more easily with your content.
For example, adding the save button helps your readers become promoters of your content by creating pins by saving content directly from your website.
On the other hand, the follow button allows your readers to follow your Pinterest profile with just one click.
You can also insert pins or boards on your personal site, to present your Pinterest content to your readers. To do this, you can use several free plugins , and one of the most complete is this one .
AUTOMATE YOUR PINTEREST ACCOUNT
Try Tailwind, the best programming and analysis tool for Pinterest. Advance weeks of work in just a couple of hours.
4. DO NOT BE AFRAID OF THE “TEST AND ERROR”
The A / B testing or the technique of testing different versions (either of an image, title or video), is practically mandatory on any content promotion platform, and in this sense Pinterest is no different.
Not only must you try different versions for the title you use, but you must also do it in the design, description, hashtags and boards in which you share each of your pins (some will have more like followers than others).
Almost all of the content we share in our free support community (from sharing in groups, the list of flashy titles and variables in both copy and design), can be applied on Pinterest, Facebook and almost any other platform.
5. AUTOMATE YOUR PUBLICATIONS
Lean on Tailwind (a tool that has a free trial period), for mass publishing.
This way you can program hundreds of pins and repins in a short time, and make sure that you will stay active on the platform, even if you are sleeping or on vacation.
6. BE CONSTANT
Being constant and if possible, maintaining daily activity, can bring you great benefits.
Personally, I try to share at least 5 new pins a day. However, although it is something that works for me, I advise you to do tests so you can find your own recipe.
The possibility of maintaining that frequency, will depend on the amount of content you have available, the amount of images you have prepared for that content, as well as the time and tools you have.
AUTOMATE YOUR PINTEREST ACCOUNT
Try Tailwind, the best programming and analysis tool for Pinterest. Advance weeks of work in just a couple of hours.
7. ALWAYS BET ON THE “FRESH” CONTENT
Pinterest loves new content . Therefore, if you are thinking of sharing the same content 2 and 3 times, I suggest you think about it before you fall into that common mistake.
8. BE PATIENT
This is a medium and long term game. When your authority is increasing, your waiting times for the content to take off will go down. As the start can be somewhat slow, I advise you to despair.
Many of the pins can take days, weeks, months (and sometimes even years) to take off. That takeoff can occur when you least expect it, and thanks to the person you least imagine, so give them (and give yourself) time.
In the end, as in everything when you do things with calm and good lyrics, it will really be worth it.
9. ANALYZE YOUR ACCESSES, AND ALSO YOUR MISTAKES
What is not measured, is not improved. Therefore, before creating a new pin group or implementing a new strategy, I advise you to analyze the performance metrics of your profile and content, using the analytics offered by the platform.
This way, you can confirm the way in which people have interacted with your content, and thus have a better idea of what works, and what doesn’t.
These statistics are visible only to you, and you can learn a little more about how to interpret them, in this entry on the official Pinterest website.
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CAN GROUP BOARDS STOP BEING BENEFICIAL?
Yes, and if you do things right, it is something that will probably happen (like me).
If it reaches the point where your profile grows to a higher level than most of the members of the group boards in which you participate, those boards may no longer be beneficial to you, and may even end up affecting (or stalling) The scope of your profile.
At the beginning it is quite simple to find content from other accounts that have a greater virality than that of your own content (since your profile is very new). However, over time you will grow and if you do things right, maybe the time comes when most third-party pins you find on your subject and in your language, have less interaction than yours.
This was exactly what happened to me with the profile of Carlicas , and I saw how within 4 months of creating my account, growth had stagnated. It was maintained, but not increasing, so I decided to analyze the cause.
There I realized that most of my pins were more viral than those of the profiles of which I shared content, so I made the decision to change my strategy and test if that change could help me out of that pause.
The change I made included getting out of some of the group boards to which I belonged (I’ve been doing it little by little) and sharing mostly my own content.
After implementing this change in strategy by analyzing the boards to which it belonged (thanks to Tailwind’s analytics), everything started to rise in an impressive way.
AUTOMATE YOUR PINTEREST ACCOUNT
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HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN IT IS TIME TO LEAVE?
Several months ago I decided to leave absolutely all the group boards to which I belonged, and once again my reach began to increase.
After doing so, in a matter of a couple of weeks I went from a little over 6 million, to more than 8 million unique visitors to the profile.
To realize if the group boards to which you belong follow you or not contributing benefit, you can analyze them through the analytics that I explain in this article .
Another way of knowing that the time has come to analyze if you should leave is when you have a period of stagnation of 1 or 2 months in a row, as it happened to me (although this is not always the main reason).
MAKES YOUR ALGORITHM WORK FOR YOU
Let’s see … let’s try to understand a little how Pinterest works. How does the platform decide which are the pins it will show, and to whom?
If we understand the platform a little more, we may be able to put aside the panic that takes hold of many after each change in the algorithm occurs, and instead we begin to analyze with cold head what happens, in order to adapt.
I want to make something clear: It is true that we will never have full access to the operation of the promotion platform algorithms (Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, etc.).
However, we can take note of everything they have already explained to us and add to that some of our experience, to find a way to promote our content in the most intelligent way possible.
Those who read me know that I always like to go straight to the point, so I will summarize what the four main factors are, and that they are known to influence the probability that your pins will reach a greater range on Pinterest:
1. DOMAIN QUALITY
Make sure you have a Pinterest Account for Business, with a verified domain, and with own Rich Pins and good quality.
2. PIN QUALITY
Strive for your pins to be visually appealing, and take the user to a landing page with quality content. Also make sure you have optimized the pin with all the options that the Rich Pins allow us.
3. AUTHORITY OF YOUR PROFILE
The authority of your profile is largely based on the way in which the reader receives your content.
This increases when that content is frequently saved, has comments and clicks on the link, and when other Pinterest users create new pins directly from your website (using the promotion options on your website, which I explained above).
4. RELEVANCE OF THE CONTENT
Here comes to play the role of SEO or search engine optimization (yes, Pinterest is a search engine, not a social network ), and how much the segmentation by keywords that you have defined in the description matches, with the type of content that users of the platform are looking at that moment.
AUTOMATE YOUR PINTEREST ACCOUNT
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A GREAT CHANGE – THE PINTEREST IPO
It was amazing to see the “tragedy” expressed in each line of his comments, the thousands of content creators who came complaining to dozens of forums and communities of Facebook , dedicated to the topics of content creation and digital ventures.
In case you still don’t know, the fact is that Pinterest officially became a public company (listed on the NY Stock Exchange), in April 2019.
When a company plans a public exit, it is usually accompanied by several changes in order to become more profitable for its investors.
This, especially in the case of social media platforms and search engines, usually means that they must reduce the spaces of their organic content, in order to increase in their feed the spaces dedicated to paid advertising, since that is what generates them earnings, and keeps them.
IS IT POSSIBLE THAT THIS HAS AFFECTED THE TRAFFIC OF SOME PROFILES?
Yes, it is possible that something has to do….
But thanks to the experience I obtained with several experiments that I launched in the “worst moment” (right after seeing the panic in which hundreds of content creators entered forums and communities of which I participate), I can comment that the downturn has more to do with the authority you have on the platform, how you analyze each movement, in addition to the type of content you are uploading.
To prove that it is not the algorithm, but the poor promotion and content that makes the success of a blog difficult, I launched a new test website right after the IPO (public exit).
In less than 3 months, it has more than 100,000 monthly visits thanks to Pinterest. All without even having social networks to promote yourself (you don’t have Instagram or Facebook profiles yet).
Pinterest
Pinterest, with its generosity, had had us very badly used.
From now on, to see results equal to those we used to see without so much effort, we will need to be more creative every day and that is where most will probably go down, some will stay and a few will go up.
And this is not only because of the issue of paid advertisements (which have been gradually implemented in several regions), but because of the competition that grows more and more every day. And ladies and gentlemen, whoever gets scared about it, should do his best to be recursive and adapt, or perhaps he will have to reconsider this type of work.
WHY DO YOU SOMETHING SO?
As I said, Pinterest has been extremely generous with content creators. In my personal case, giving me more than 300,000 visits every month on this website and hundreds of bloggers in my community , thousands of monthly visits, without charging us a single penny.
I think it’s a good idea for content creators to begin to understand that these platforms are not charitable organizations and that, like all of us, they need to be maintained because, after all, they are a business that seeks to be profitable.
What I think is, that being Pinterest a search engine and needing fresh content, they will continue to work with us and offer us a very good opportunity to promote our content.
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WILL THE SAME THING WITH FACEBOOK AND REDUCE THE ORGANIC SCOPE OF THE CONTENT CREATORS TO A MINIMUM?
Personally, I don’t think that the organic reach is going to be reduced so much, at least not for those who work in their authority and who strive to create good content.
As Pinterest well explains in its official blog:
“Content creators help make Pinterest the perfect place for people to discover what they love to do and do it.” Then they continue saying: “ Pinterest would not be the same without you; therefore, we want to make sure you have everything you need to achieve success. ”
On Facebook (since this is a social network), not only is competing with paid content, but most of the space on the walls is reserved for friends and family since, after all, it is a social network .
In this case, think better of Google (which is a search engine) that has paid Ads, but most of its space is still dedicated to organic content.
For all this, if prioritizing our efforts is (and should be), Pinterest is still my # 1 recommendation to achieve web traffic.
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