Pinterest is an epic traffic source and you should be doing everything in your power to get Pinterest traffic to your website.
Why? Pinterest is better than Twitter and Facebook combined. Unlike Twitter and Facebook, who rely on a person seeing content that is right in front of them at a specific time, Pinterest is organized by topic and is less focused on what’s trending now. It is becoming more of a search engine every day, and as people find your content, they’ll share it with their followers, which keeps your pins at the top of your target audience’s mind.
Pinterest traffic builds and builds over time, instead of bursting into brief flame and dying out, like a match head in the wind.
You should get in on that traffic! Here are six tips that will help you get more traffic from this social network. Note: these tips are the low-hanging fruit — there’s a lot more you can do, but start here, then check your analytics to see Pinterest start to rise in your referral traffic.
1. Become a Business on Pinterest
Even if you do not treat your online property like a business (which you should!), you want to be a business on Pinterest.
Why?
Pinterest for Business provides multiple analytics reports, which are the tools and insights you need in order to be successful on Pinterest. Even if you already have a personal account, it is easy to convert it to a Business account by simply heading over to business.pinterest.com and clicking the “convert now” button.
2. Connect with Your Audience
Pinterest is a great place to build a relationship with your ideal clients and to visually speak to them. Show them that you understand them by offering up content that they will like.
You know your ideal client, right? What’s she like? What does she do when she’s not buying what you’re selling? Set up lifestyle boards that relate to your audience.
With your target audience in mind, come up with ten boards that will speak to them. Create them and ensure you add at least ten pins to each board.
3. Pin Your Products
No matter what you are selling – information, coaching, clothes, dog poop bags, make sure you are pinning your products. Now, people don’t want to only hear about your products. No one likes the friend that only ever talks about himself.
Pin your products and pin things that are helpful to your audience, from other sources. For every one pin of your own stuff, pin at least six other pins. Mix them in and make sharing the work of others a key part of your Pinterest strategy.
4. Participate Regularly
Just like staying in touch with friends, Pinterest wants to hear from you regularly. They like it when people come hang out with them, and in this case that means spending time on their platform regularly. Show up, hang out, pin a few things every day, and they will reward you by showing your pins (including those of your own products) to more people.
5. Help Your Readers Help You
Putting your work directly onto Pinterest yourself is only one way to get your pins in front of people. Ideally, you want every reader you have to be so enamoured with your work that they share it with others. The best way to make this a reality? (Aside from writing supremely helpful and awesome content, which you’re already doing, right?)
Make it easy for people to share your work! SumoMe Image Sharer adds not only Pinterest, but also Twitter and Facebook.
Best of all? It’s free! jQuery Pin It is another option that is free.
6. Make it Easy to Maintain
Hire someone to set up your pins and boards for you, then make that person responsible for maintaining your Pinterest profile. If hiring is not in the cards, there are affordable tools like Board Booster to keep things going.
Maintenance tasks include: pinning other content to your boards (aside from your branded board), pinning your new content and products, applying to group boards, creating a group board, deleting pins with a low repin count, adding your pins to the appropriate group boards, etc.
Want to learn even more? We’re looking for a small group of dedicated bloggers to join us as we teach you how to leverage Pinterest to bring your website dedicated sustainable traffic. Find out more about the Pinterest Strategy beta course here.
Bio: Anne and Kathleen have started dozens of websites over the past several years and they are always looking for ways to grow their traffic and efficiently utilize their time. You can find Anne at UniqueGifter.com and Kathleen at ForProfitBlogging.com (among other places!). Their Pinterest strategy course is bursting at the seams with actionable content to help you level up your business. Beta launches in February, full course launches in May.
Great post! I love pinterest but most of my blog traffic comes from stumble upon. I need to work on pinterest more!
I’ve heard lots of good things about stumble upon but I have not tried it yet.
Tradsies? I just started to use StumbleUpon a bit, alas the bounce rate is so high there!
Put a strategy together for both and the traffic will flood in!
Pinterest is huge, I haven’t seen the results yet from it. Time to work on making prettier pins:)
It is MASSIVE. It takes a bit of time for the traffic to build up, but once it does, it’s amazing!
I always used Pinterest as a hobby platform but these are some great points to take into account!
Pinterest can be a great source of huge traffic to any site.
I used to do that, too, until I noticed a slow trickle of clicks to my site. Once I really focused on it, it was like “whoa! TRAFFIC.”
I have been wondering how i can grow my pintrest.
Thanks for your helpful information dear
http://www.itgirl.co.ke/uncategorized/shirt-dress/
Glad you found it helpful 🙂
I am new to Pinterest so this post would be very helpful to me. Millions of websites all over the internet and getting traffic to my site is hard work.
Mhar Sefcik
http://www.leytestar.com/
That is indeed the challenge – best of luck!
Thank you so much for this great post! I will definitely focus more on pinterest this year. Your beta course sounds good, but too pricey for a budget traveller. Can I wash your dishes for joining your course? 😀
Haha, sure. I also need someone to do the floors and bathrooms 🙂
Thanks for these tips. I find pinterest a lil overwhelming… This post helps alot.
Glad it helped. I will be posting more Pinterest strategies in the coming weeks. So check back soon or you can sign up for the newsletter to be informed when the posts goes live. http://brianmanon.com/free-blogging-worksheet-and-checklist/
Always looking for ways to increase and do better. thanks
🙂
Pinterest is great, but way harder to maintain than other forms of social media- at least for me. Thanks for the great tips to make it easier to navigate.
Interesting, I find it to be a lot faster than Facebook and twitter!
Thank you for those tips. I definitely should spend more time on Pinterest. Wait, did I just say this? ????
It is totally worthwhile!
I did’t know that Sumome sharer is free! Glad I found your post. I’ll try it.
It is! There are so many sweet SumoMe tools that are completely free.
great tips – thank you! pinterest has been great for my beauty blog!
I have been wondering what the heck to do about Pinterest and I appreciate your tips for getting started. You make it easy and doable — thank you!
Thank you for these tips. I plan to get more strategic about my Pinterest account over the next couple of months.
Great tips and great post! I’ve slowly been seeing the positive results of good Pinterest usage!
Thanks for the tips! Very useful!
I am new to Pinterest so this list is very helpful to me. Thanks
This is a great post! I have been looking into using Pinterest as a platform for driving traffic, and your post is a wonderful resource. Thanks!
Saving this guide! It’s so useful to Pinterest newbies like me 🙂
Pinterest brings traffic to my blog like no other.
xoxo, Jenny
Great tips! I have just reached the point where most of my traffic is coming from Pinterest and it is a huge source!
Great tips! Thanks!
Thanks for all the great tips, i’m working on my Pinterest strategy at the moment so this is really helpful.
Very informative thank you!!
Pinterest is such a large platform, I just didn´t get on with it that much. :/
I have recently been paying alot of attention to Pinterest and it is starting to pay off. Great post
So many great thoughts. We are growing the amount of traffic to our website from Pinterest, so this gives us a lot to think about- thanks! Rhonda at redemptionmarket.com.
Great tips, it’s definitely an area I need to spend more time on.
Hey Brian 6 fantastic tips. I’ve been a keen Pinteest user fr a few months and had already become a business on Pinterest. One thing I’ve tried to do with not much success is to connect with my audience.
Chatting on Pinterest has not been a great success for me so far. Any tips re this aspect as the system is there – I just need to know how to use it more effectively.
I’m also a user of the Pindrill software that enables me to very quickly share lots of content across all my boards and my followers but it pdesnt help with th key challenge I have with Pinterest – engagment.
Thanks for sharing your expertise Brian – very much appreciated
Best wishesfrom the remote Thai village marketer
Peter
I have been thinking about using Pinterest, but do not know much about it. Thank you for the tips.
So true! Pinterest is growing and growing like crazy
Super helpful tips! Currently struggling with pinterest as a traffic source 🙁
I totally agree! If you work well on Pinterest then it can be a big source of traffic in the long term as compared to Facebook or Twitter. Some great and useful points in this post.