Pinterest marketing is easy if you know what steps to take. This traffic growth guide offers twenty-five Pinterest growth secrets that will help you focus your efforts on things that will make your Pinterest marketing campaign strong.
Note: Pin scheduler Traffic Wonker has sadly gone out of business, but owner and CEO Andy Fling has given me permission to share his useful Pinterest research and other information on my site. I jumped at the chance as Andy is the smartest guy I know when it comes to Pinterest!
Part 1 – How to Grow Pinterest Traffic on Your Site
This first set of tips offers strategies to get your site prepared for Pinterest visitors and far more optimized for Google search.
1) Know Your Keywords
Well-chosen keywords will increase your site’s visibility in organic search engine results on Google and Pinterest. Make a list of words and phrases that describe your business. Then research these keywords with tools like Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, KWFinder, and Google Keyword Planner. Low competition, longtail keywords (a combination of 3-4 keywords) are your best bet. Not as many people will search for these longer phrases, but when they do they will be far more interested in making a purchase.
Longtail Keyword Examples:
Free Sheet Music
Affordable Wedding Dresses
Pinterest Marketing Strategy
2) Refine Your Post Titles to Grow Pinterest Traffic
Co-Schedule’s Headline Analyzer rates headlines based on four metrics, including:
Common Words
Uncommon Words
Emotional Words
Power Words
Many of the high-performing pages on my sites score low when measured by this tool. It’s not perfect, but it is a great resource to help you refine your titles. Download the free Power and Emotional Words PDFs and try a few variations of your title. If you manage to get a score of 70 you have a winner.
Examples:
The Ultimate Pinterest Marketing Guide :: 25 Growth Secrets – Score: 73
How To Be #1 in Pinterest Board Search :: Secrets Revealed – Score: 77
How to Use TrafficWonker to Skyrocket Your Pinterest Traffic – Score: 72
3) Write Epic Posts to Grow Pinterest Traffic
Epic posts don’t have to be long, but to be incredibly valuable they usually are. In most instances, posts with 400 words find modest success. Posts with 700 words do well. However, posts that consistently attract the most repins and rank the highest in Google search have 2,000 words on average. This length has become a benchmark for top bloggers.
4) Create Perfect Pin Images
Make your blog Pinterest ready with pinnable photos and graphics on every page. Canva is always my favorite design tool. Pin images that are optimized for all versions (desktop, mobile, etc.) of Pinterest are:
- The Perfect Size – 600px X 900px (3:2 Ratio) to 600px X 1200px (2:1 Ratio)
- Bright – Bright images work better than dark images.
- Colorful – Pick two or three colors that look great together. Use brand colors whenever possible. I use a Chrome Extension called ColorPick Eyedropper to select colors I like from images.
- Avoid Faces – Pinnable images without faces receive 23% more repins.
- Text on Image – Images with no text don’t get many repins. I’ve tried it myself.
- Readable Fonts – Choose a couple fonts for your brand and stick with them. Make sure they are highly readable. I read a study one time that gave recipe cards to a group of students. The students in the study perceived the recipe to be more difficult to make when the font was challenging to read. Fonts that are difficult to read could have a similar effect on the sale of your products.
- Attractive – Make your pins pretty! It’s your customers’ first impression of your product and your brand. Need some help? Visit Ridiculously Simple Pinterest Pin Design Tools.
Place the image to the right of your content.
5) Add Social Share Buttons
Add social share widgets from sites like AddThis.com or ShareThis.com to encourage visitors to share your content. They’ll turn the whole world into your marketing team – and they’ll be doing it for free.
Part 2 – Pinterest Marketing Tips
This set of tips focuses on optimizing your Pinterest growth secrets. It begins with the basics of account set up and then goes deeper into tips that aren’t often talked about, but are incredibly valuable to your marketing efforts. It’s like a cheat sheet for how to grow Pinterest traffic quickly and easily.
6) Set Up a Pinterest for Business Account
Consider converting your Pinterest account into a Pinterest for Business account. You’ll be able to verify your account to make your business seem more trustworthy, help your Pinterest profile to rank higher in profile search results, and have access to Pinterest Analytics to measure the value of your marketing efforts.
The stats I like watching in Pinterest analytics are Profile analytics that shows me how my account is doing in terms of clicks and saves, and Website analytics that shows me how my pins are doing Pinterest wide.
7) Add a Great Pinterest Profile Photo
Dress up your Pinterest profile with a headshot of yourself or a company logo. If you have a great photo, but the colors aren’t vibrant, consider having someone enhance it on Fivver.com. My wife had someone do a few Photoshop tweaks on a photo, and the picture came back looking amazing. The colors were richer and the hard light was gone. The five dollars you spend will go a long way toward attracting business.
8) Create Boards for Your Customers
Create Pinterest boards that are filled with pins that meet your customers’ needs. Check to see what’s working for your competition and make note of their board titles and descriptions. Put their board titles and descriptions to the test with your favorite keyword tool. Then build your boards with the best titles and compelling 25-30 word keyword-rich descriptions.
9) Build Seasonal Pinterest Boards
Building seasonal boards provides you with an opportunity to draw visitors to your account with different keywords. Do you run a crafts site? Make a Christmas Crafts for Kids board. Are you a baker? Make a Christmas Cookie Recipes board. Position these boards in the top two rows leading up to the holiday. Move them back to the bottom when the holiday has passed.
10) Optimize Pinterest Board Order
Newspaper publishers understand the importance of placing the most important content “above the fold.” Follow their lead by positioning your most important boards “before the scroll.” This will help Pinterest visitors find the things you want them to find more often.
11) Build Followers
When you post a pin, Pinterest shares it with your followers first. If they like it, Pinterest will share it with even more people. To reach that wider audience you need followers that find your content engaging. If you’re just starting out, follow pinners with similar boards until to you reach 200 followers. On Pinterest that’s enough to get the ball rolling. After that, you can let your followers grow organically or move things a little faster with an awesome automation tool that I’ll mention later.
12) Sign Up for Rich Pins
Pinterest doesn’t tell you everything about how their search engine works, but they do let you know that Rich Pins rank higher in search results. Another perk is that since everyone isn’t using Rich Pins, the bold font on the Rich Pins helps your pins stand out.
When I converted TrafficWonker’s pins to Rich Pins I also tweaked pin descriptions and introduced a collection of new pin images for our posts. It’s hard to say what did the trick, but something worked because clicks to our site from Pinterest went up almost 500%.
13) Write Compelling Pin Descriptions
Write clear, helpful, and compelling pin descriptions that let Pinterest visitors know what they will find and get them excited about visiting your site. Sometimes the page title and a call to action is enough. On other occasions, well-crafted descriptions with power words are necessary to get the best response.
Example:
Wondering What It Takes to be #1 in Pinterest Board Search and Why it Matters So Much? We’ve Ranked 51 Boards in the #1 Position and More in the Top Ten. Click to Learn Our Secrets.
This description is from a pin that is doing quite well. It’s 181 characters long, which is pretty close to the recommended length of 200 characters. It beings with a question that I hope people will always answer with a “Yes.” It follows with a sentence that lets people know I can help them. It concludes with a call-to-action; “Click to learn our secrets.” This example is also chock full of keywords for the Pinterest search engine and charged with an emotional appeal at the end.
Pins that include a call-to-action at the end get clicked 80% more often.
14) Use Hashtags Cautiously
The additional keywords that hashtags offer can be a big help, but the link created from the hashtag is an escape route away from your pin. If you like hashtags, limit yourself to two and consider unique hashtags that will send visitors to more of your pins.
15) Curate Great Pins
Fill your boards with popular pins found at the top of the Pinterest search results. These pins are the ones that are currently resonating with Pinterest visitors. Adding them to your boards will help attract attention to your account and your products.
In addition to curating new pins with the Pinterest search engine, I also regularly visit the accounts of several top pinners to find quality pins to share. If they’re getting high monthly views, and I pin what they pin, I should get high monthly view as well. It makes sense, it works, and I imagine those pinners are pretty happy too.
16) Optimize Your Pinterest Boards
I’ve written a lengthy post on Pinterest board optimization, How To Be #1 in Pinterest Board Search :: Secrets Revealed, so I won’t go into to much detail here, except to say that your most important boards should have 100+ pins to perform well in Pinterest search. Other boards should have a minimum of 20 pins. If you’re willing to really dive in, check out the post to learn how I’m ranking 51 boards in the #1 spot in Pinterest board search.
17) Build Similar Boards with Varied Titles
I have several Pinterest boards that have virtually the same pins, and similar titles:
Examples:
Pinterest Marketing
Pinterest Tips for Business
Pinterest Strategy
Pinterest places significant weight on your title and word order when ranking your boards. I decided to build several boards with slightly varied titles so one of our boards is discovered no matter what searchers type. Pinterest Analytics shows me that it was worth the effort.
18) Join Collaborative (Group) Boards
Group boards offer a level playing field to every pinner. All you need is an invitation to share and suddenly you’re connected with a completely different audience and multiplying your saves and clicks. Search for 10-12 collaborative boards on which to share your pins, and stay consistent. My post, Pinterest Marketing for Beginners :: 5 Steps to Explode Your Traffic offers many tips on how to choose group boards that will be beneficial to your account and Pinterest marketing efforts.
19) Build More Boards
Our study shows that the average number of boards for top pinners with 300K+ followers is 56 boards. Creating more boards will provide you with additional “points of entry” to your Pinterest account. Check out our How Many Pinterest Boards is Too Many? post to learn more.
Internet marketing is all about creating “points of entry.” The more you cross-promote, the more you’ll create points of entry for visitors to find and click to visit your products.
20) Cross-Promote Pins
Cross-promote your pins whenever possible. It’s simply a matter of pinning your pins to every relevant board that you own, with the goal of building many points of entry to your site.
21) Create Multiple Pin Images for the Same Content
I’ve created multiple pin images for the same post and/or product for years now and have had great success. I recently started creating pins with slightly varied titles too. For my post, How to Use TrafficWonker to Skyrocket Your Pinterest Traffic, I went crazy and created ten different images and posted them to Pinterest over several days.
About a week later Pinterest sent me an update to tell me two of these pins had received 22K impressions in the previous week. Five weeks later this post is still on fire, adding about 16 social shares a day for the last five weeks with no signs of stopping.
22) Add Pins to Your Most Relevant Board First
When you add a new pin to Pinterest the board title and board description are added to the pin data. Every time your pin is repinned, it will carry this information forward. If your board title and description are SEO optimized, including great keywords, your pin will have a much better chance to perform well in Pinterest search. After it’s posted you can repin it to less relevant boards and group boards.
Example:
Post your new “Chocolate Chip Cookies” recipe pin to Cookie Recipes first. Then post it to your NewYorkBaker Posts and Chocolate Madness boards.
23) Stay Active
Pinterest rewards pinners that stay active on the site by ranking your pins and boards higher in search. You can repin pins to your account, add fresh pins to Pinterest, leave a note to let pinners know that you tried a pin, or automate your pin scheduling. They’re all great ways to stay active.
Part Three – Pinterest Marketing Tools
Part three includes a few marketing tools that you will find helpful and time saving.
24) MiloTree
MiloTree is a pop-up that helps you grow your email, Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook following.
MiloTree’s pop-up is an easy and cost-effective way to grow your social media followers and email list. It can be set up in a few minutes and you don’t need technical skills.
25) TrafficWonker
TrafficWonker is the “zero effort” Pinterest pin scheduler. Add your pins once and you’re done!
Hope you can put these Pinterest growth secrets to use in your own Pinterest account.
Here are some other posts from Andy that you might find helpful:
How to Make Your Pins Go Viral
Is Your Pinterest Account Leaking Massive Traffic?
Social Media Scheduling Tips
by Andy Fling
Founder and CEO of TrafficWonker.com
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