Easy Way To Increase Traffic With Pinterest to Your Blog!

If you’re a blogger, you need traffic, right? You probably know about writing good content, keyword research and SEO. But did you know Pinterest can drive a lot of traffic to your site? Did you know that sharing your content on Pinterest can bring traffic to your site for months to come, instead of a just a few hours when sharing the same content on Twitter of Facebook? Today I will show how to easily increase traffic with Pinterest.

Many bloggers’ lives (including mine) have been changed by increased traffic to their sites from Pinterest. For example, in the last 30 days my health blog received 80% of its traffic from Pinterest (I am diligently working on beefing up my other traffic sources, but in the mean time I’m enjoying this free traffic form Pinterest and the benefits that come with that traffic: building my list and making affiliate sales ;). If you wonder how to get traffic with Pinterest, you’re in for a treat 😉

Part of my success with getting traffic form Pinterest is that I create beautiful pictures. Pinterest is a very visual platform: people come there to take a break from housework, or to relax at the end of a long day, and even plan for future projects. If your images aren’t speaking to them, you missed your opportunity to get saved to their boards and eventually get visits to your blog.

On the other hand, if your image enticed them, they’ll save your pin, and all their followers can now see your pins on those boards, giving you a change to get Pinterest traffic.

So, what makes a good Pinterest image?

The right image size

You need to create images that are taller rather then wider: no matter how good your images is, if it’s a landscape type image, it will get lost in the sea of beautiful, tall images.

As you look at the images above, can you see how it’s a lot easier for the image on the left to grab your attention? Pinterest image dimensions are important to the success of your pin in being shown and shared.

I create my images in Canva, a free software that make it a breeze to create the right images for all your needs. Canva has templates for pretty much all social media channels, as well as an option to create custom dimensions.

The best Pinterest image size is 735 x 1102 pixels, and it’s what I choose form Canva’s options.

A good mixture of colors

In my experience, images with vibrant colors do much better on Pinterest than dark or washed out colors. You’ll need to do some experimenting to see what works for your niche. But try to include red and orange, and beautiful blue and green colors in your experiments.

Which one of the two images below attracts you more?

An engaging message in the text of your image

Pinterest images need to tell a story quickly. Add some text to your image, letting your reader know what that image is about, so they don’t need to guess.

If you’ve done your homework before you started blogging, you’re using good keyword phrases in your titles. And while Pinterest needs good keywords (we’ll talk about that soon), your image’s text needs to be grabbing the reader’s attention fast. If your blog post title is a bit long, shorten it and make it punchy, catchy, and give it a bit of emotion.

Easy to read fonts

Be careful with the fonts you use on your images. I like to use 2 fonts: a block font and a script font. When choosing your fonts, make sure they are easy to read. You don’t want to confuse a potential buyer. You want to make it easy.

Which one of the pins below do you think is easiest to read?

 

Brand your Pinterest images

It’s important to create images that are consistent with your brand. This includes a certain “look or theme”, using the same fonts and including either your URL or a “stamp” that represents your brand. This helps build not only brand recognition, but also trust. Once someone sees a few of your pins and likes them, seeing your brand’s seal will subconsciously tell them that’s an image they want to pay attention to.

Write a keyword rich description for your pins

Every pinnable image needs a keyword rich description: this helps your pin come up in Pinterest search results. When I say keyword rich description, I don’t mean you should stuff your description with a list of keywords. Instead, write a description that helps your reader connect with the subject of your post, and use keywords to paint a picture of your message.

Your alt tags serve as the description for those pinning form your website, so make sure you include a good description in the alt tag of every image on your site. I suggest doing this even for the images that you don’t intent to pin. On my site, many people have pinned landscape images and thankfully I had good descriptions on them, so my brand is consistent

 

Use the right file name for your images

Before uploading your pictures to your blog, make sure you name your images with descriptive keywords. Don’t upload the images straight from your camera, with a name that means nothing, or worse yet is gibberish. This is one more way to make your pins known.

Other ways to increase traffic with Pinterest

Now that you know how to increase traffic from Pinterest by creating amazing pictures, let’s look at a few more ways you can add visitors to your site from Pinterest:

• make sure your site is Pinterest friendly: add social sharing buttons and install rich pins
• be active on Pinterest: pin regularly (you can/should use Tailwind of Board Booster to help you schedule pins, so you don’t have to be on Pinterest all day long)
• participate in group boards: this gives you a lot more visibility

Now go make some gorgeous Pinterest images for your blog and get the Pinterest traffic flowing to your site.

If you need just one more bit of encouragement, here are just a few of my Pins that went viral 😉

If you want to remember how to bring more Pinterest traffic to your site, make sure you save this to your Pinterest for easy access!