10 Essential Pinterest Tips for Beginners. Blogging for Business Growth

Pinterest is one of the most under-utilized search engines and yet it is an excellent resource for business growth for bloggers. So below we provide you with 10 Essential Pinterest tips for beginners, which you might want to implement immediately.

1. Use the Power of Pinterest for Keyword Research

Pinterest is actually a search engine and a very powerful at that!

For you as a blogger, this means the opportunity to do some very simple and yet highly effective keyword research, in very little time. You can use these keywords and terms in your:

• Image descriptions
• Image names
• Content titles and body
• Blog page meta title and description

Similar to Google, the first step in using Pinterest as a keyword research tool is to begin typing in a term into the search box on Pinterest.

As you gradually type, Pinterest will make suggestions to you, based on the popular searches that take place on Pinterest.

On entering the term “marketing”, you can see above that this elicits terms such as ideas, strategy, plan, and logo.

Not impressed yet?! I know, we are just starting with Pinterest!

Now enter a term such as ‘marketing’ into the search box and press enter and you will see the top-level terms that Pinterest suggests are important. Okay.

Not bad I hear you say. But now click on one of these terms to go a board-level deeper. Clicking on “ideas” and you will see something similar to this:

You go dig down several layers into terms on Pinterest and this really makes Pinterest quite unique to other search engines.

2. Ensure you have a Pinterest Business Account v Personal Account

If you already have a personal Pinterest account, it is extremely easy to convert to a business account and this free upgrade means access to Pinterest analytics!!

Extremely useful for improving your Pinterest strategy.

Simply head across to the “set up your business profile” page on Pinterest and they guide you through the process!

3. Optimize Your Profile Name and Description

• You can just write your business name on your profile, but you can also extend your name to include one or two keywords.
• Your Pinterest description should also be written with care taken to include some keywords that relate to your blogging niche. The description is an important factor in the Pinterest algorithm for ranking your site. Do NOT jump this step!

4. Use the Social Warfare Plug-in

The “Social Warfare Pro” plugin is used by many of the top bloggers and there is a very good reason for this. Social warfare is designed to make it extremely easy to:

• Control the way in which the images in your posts are shown on Pinterest.
• Get people to share your content through very visible and floating social media buttons.

This is the plugin used on this site for social media shares. The paid version is extremely cheap and worth every penny, given the effectiveness of this plug-in.

5. Make Sure You Optimise Your Pins

A very common and rookie mistake that many rookie users of Pinterest make is to fail to optimize the images they add. Do not be one of these people!

When adding an image, you will have the chance to edit the:

• Description of the image – make sure to include the keywords that are important for the image and also that you want to show in Pinterest searches for!
• Website – Ensure this is included given that it is the route to driving traffic directly to your blog or website.
• Make sure also to select the board and section to place the image in the most related location to make it relevant for the viewers of the image.

6. Pin Regularly

One of the things you need to realize about Pinterest is that it is set up in such a way that CONSISTENCY IS KEY to getting good results!

This is not to say though that you need to spend every second of the day Pinning images and losing the time to work on other aspects of your blog.

There are some great tools out there for bloggers to post consistently. One of the best such tools is Tailwind!

You might be able to go onto Pinterest daily but I recommend using Tailwind to better automate the scheduling of your pins.

If you plan to make money from your blog, you will be super busy trying to write posts and to create mail lists and free downloadables and doing many other small tasks.

So – do consider Tailwind as this is an excellent tool that really helps you to drive traffic from Pinterest, much more easily.

7. Making Images the Right Size for Pinterest

If you wish to maximize your potential on Pinterest, there are a few rules you need to consider when it comes to the size and shape of your Pinterest images.

A fantastic tool that I use for making custom Pinterest images (and also Facebook images) is Fotor.

You can use the free version but the paid version is extremely cheap at around 30 dollars a year and provides you access to all designs.

FOTOR is a great package for all design types including for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest custom images.

8. Use Vertical rather than Horizontal Images

I would strongly recommend designing images for Pinterest that are VERTICAL! For the best results, create  A GIRAFFE image!

Pinterest noticeboards are designed such that they favor Giraffe shaped images! Take a look at this example board below:

Make sure that your images are large – such as a minimum of 600 pixels in height.

9. Make Use of Group Boards

Sharing your pins onto ‘Group Boards’ is an excellent way to gain visibility for your own pins, provided you add your pins to boards that really match your own niche.

Searching for relevant and suitable group boards can take a little time, but is made much easier if you use the tool Pin Groupie

Enter a term and PinGroupie will detail all of the main groups related to your niche.

Once you have joined at least 10 Group boards, you can begin to post to these group boards. For this, Board Booster (discussed below) is the tool you want to be using!

10. Use Interval Settings on Tailwind

If you really want to use Pinterest to drive traffic to your site, you are not going to achieve very much, in reality, with 2 or 3 pins a week.

Major bloggers who get the highest traffic from Pinterest, you will find tend to schedule 20+ pins a day.

Many in fact pin 50+ a day. Bloggers such as the Crazy Tourist (1 million+ views a month) and The Travel Tester (1.5+ million a month views) do not post just a few pins a week.

You can see our post on scheduling pins to better understand how you can pin 20 times a day whilst publishing just one new post a week).

The tool most avid Pinterest pinners use Tailwind and one of the key features is the ability to schedule posts. With Tailwind you can also:

• Spend 1 or 2 hours a week to set up your full week’s schedule of pins.
• Use the interval tool so that you spread out the pins you make from the same post so that you avoid being seen by Pinterest as spamming content.
• Optimize how you post pins.
• Set up and optimize group board contributions.
• Test and improve the quality of your pins.
• Build the distribution of your pins by co-sharing content through Tailwind Tribes.

You can try a free trial of Tailwind here.

You can learn more about how to use Board Booster and further and more detailed strategies for using Pinterest for driving BIG TRAFFIC to your site via our Pinterest training.