Over the recent couple of years, Pinterest has received much attention over the exponential growth of visits it has received. Recently, it was reported that Pinterest has generated more referral traffic than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn.
If you ever had any doubt over just how useful or popular Pinterest is, hop over to Pinterest’s Popular page and judge for yourself. Feel free to let me know what you think of them, when (and if) you could pull yourself away from the hundreds of beautiful pictures.
What Is Pinterest Really?
Launched as a beta-version in 2010, Pinterest is based on a very simple concept. Remember how you or your mother used to cut those lovely recipes or the inspiring home decoration ideas or the beautiful vacation destinations and pinned them on the pinboard? Well, Pinterest is the virtual version of this.
And because of the modern-day technology it is built on, Pinterest doubles up as a Social Media photo sharing website. Its users can create, manage and share theme-based images from recipes to crafts to home décor. So you can imagine the viral effect of this. Recent studies had shown that Pinterest attracts more female users and that more than half of its users are between 25 to 44 years of age.
Many websites had recorded an increased in traffic from just a few hours of pinning and re-pinning images in Pinterest. If you wish to learn how to drive massive traffic to your blog, check out the following tips.
Tip # 1: Quality Images
Just like how quality posts builds blog’s SEO, quality images attracts attention and re-pins among Pinterest users. So create beautiful images and photos and add them to your blog and Pinterest account. If possible, use your own pictures and make it look as amazing and inspiring as you can. There are loads of photo enhancing tools that are easily available these days.
Tip # 2: Add Pinterest Sharing Plugin
There are lots of plugins that you can put onto your WordPress blog eg Pinterest “Pin It” Button. This simple to install plugin adds a button on your posts that allows your visitors to easily pin your contents to their Pinterest account. It’s customizable giving you flexibility to pre-determine the image to pin or to allow your visitors to select the images themselves. You can also choose the pages to add the button to as well as the location eg above/below content or on post excerpts.
Tip #3: Run Contests
Ah, contests and giveaways. Everyone loves them. Run one every now and then to create buzz. You don’t have to get really expensive prizes. Perhaps some blog badges or DIY crafts (especially if yours is a crafts blog) or vouchers will do. In return, ask them to re-pin your pins or become followers.
Tip #4: Analyzing and Monitoring
It’s not enough to just link the images between your blog and Pinterest, you would need to monitor the traffic that’s being generated. There’s Google Analytics and PinReach that can do the job. You want to analyze your stats and see which pins are your most popular. What kind of images drive traffic and you may want to post more of these kind of images e.g. between wide-angle and macro shots.
Tip #5: Share Pins On Facebook and Twitter
You probably are aware that Pinterest allows its users to share their pins on their Facebook and Twitter accounts. Make full use of this as it allows your pins to be viewed and subsequently shared by a larger community. Note: free advertisement here!
At the same time, you can also “remind” your Facebook friends and Twitter followers that you are on Pinterest. Get them to check out your pins and more often than not, they will end up at your blog.
Pinterest is a simple yet powerful tool in generating traffic to your blog. It does not require rocket science to figure out how to do that. But it does need some good strategies. I do hope that the above tips would help in promoting your blog through Pinterest!
Awesome advice! I have been using Pinterest for a couple months now to generate web traffic and I have been successful but haven’t been able to attract my target audience so the traffic I generate isn’t ideal. But loved your advice and I feel Pinterest is awesome for branding purposes.
Visual images have become very important on the web. One of my clients is a branding strategist who creates infographics and really awesome motivational images. These tips will be very helpful for him to maximize pinterest.
I just started using Pinterest for my images but haven’t had much luck using Twitter for images, maybe I’m doing something wrong? Thanks for the write-up and tips!
“Twitter for images” seems confusing to me Jessica. 😀
Sorry I am not agreed with you as I am not getting even a single traffic from pinterest even after posting quality images.
I’ve been struggling with how to utilize Pinterest…and this article definitely helps to point me in the right direction. To start, I never thought about adding a Pin It button (duh!). Thank you!
for webmasters pinterest is not way of generating sudden traffic. you need to understand the behavior of pinterest users. they dont like tech article for first for all techies going gaga over pinterest.
pinterest users, most of them who spend their time like diy, humorous, quotes, artistic and interesting pictures. not google big g or an apple icon in 300-300 square image. so please understand the real mentality of pinterest users before wasting your time.
I’m very sceptical about Pinterest, since it just became popular this year. I guess I’ll give it a shot. I must say, there is a whole lot of great articles on hellbound!!!
Pinterest has proved to be a good source of traffic to me that is why? I absolutely love it, so thank you for providing me with a legitimate reason to spend so long on it lol – a really good post thanks.
Pinterest is currently a really nice way for Small Business Bloggers to reach and network with others for link building. It’s like a cocktail party online. As long as you know not to take in too much and provide some value to the conversation in return you came come away with some valuable relationships. Good post, thanks for sharing.
its a great post on getting traffic through pinterest…i had used pinterest several times before but didn’t got any results but now thinking to use it again…!!
venturing into new social media is always a great idea for getting referral traffic. However to do it right is the way to go. Unless done right with tweaking it for your website, it might be a bit hard to get some good amount of traffic flowing. Thanks for the great post Jasmine
I got to know some basic tips about Pinterest with the help of your article. This is a great share. Thanks for the share.
I am also using pinterest however using all the above said tips. But I am not getting traffic from it. Can you please help me to get traffic from pinterest. I am working on an educational website. Pinterest is not working for this site.
Perhaps you can look at the pictures you pin on the site… try to use more attractive and interesting pictures?
Users spend less time on the company’s Website, choosing instead to browse from the company’s pinboard. Many brands and small businesses are using Pinterest, following best practices to get traffic on their websites and buzz around their products, so it is very beneficial now a days. Beneficial blog, thanks a lot for sharing.
Pinterest is one one of the growing social networking pin board and if we need to get massive visits, we should pin unique interesting images to our pin boards to people naturally re-pin it.
Thanking you for wonderful tips.
I have been struggling to find a way to promote my blog and articles on Facebook for a number of months now, you have mentioned some very good points that I will take into consideration.
One thing that I tried is joining groups & pages in my niche and posting some articles to those groups and pages (with permission of course), this never brought me in one single hit in the 6 months that I tried it.
Hi Jasmine,
I agree with your opinion of using quality images make good SEO and attracts readers. And the same quality images can attract and drive huge traffic from the famous photo sharing website “pinterest”.
Thanks for sharing the post.
To generate more traffic, including pictures in the blogs and posts is the best option. Pictures relevant to the post are attractive and attention seeking which go well with the readers in all the cases. Pinterest is a new and yet popular picture sharing site that can help us share our pictures on all other social networking sites.
I hard lot about pinterest. But I never used this tool to drive traffic to our blog.
Pinterest is really great site to get traffic but you can only get loads of traffic if your site is having great images. If you have a blog then try to put high resolution images in the blog post so that when you pin it, it looks great and attractive which results in good traffic.
but is it adsense safe???
does adsense like majority traffic from pintrest?
Yes, Pinterest is AdSense safe.. I think. I have not experienced any problems so far and I have not heard people having problem with this. Please share if you have a different experience.
It has no issues as far as I know dude. 🙂
Pinterest has proved to be a good source of traffic. Many problogger like Darren Rowse are using it for getting traffic.
I love Pinterest and I am really enjoying the potential (and the creativity) of integrating it with other social media and mobile marketing and let’s face it, it’s addictive and fun. You have provided some useful tips, thanks for sharing.
Haha, I really like Pinterest too… it’s really one of the most fun social media sites. I can spend long hours surfing the site checking out cool images and cool websites!
Agreed! Pinterest is really a great and simple tool to generate traffic. Well yes, quality images are more attractive and enhances the blog and sharing pins on Facebook & Twitter is really a good strategy. Thanks Jasmine for this awesome post and for the link to Pinterest Pin It button 🙂
really nice information about pinterest 🙂
i am using pinterest but its not helping me
Hi Jasmine,
With the evolution of social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest it has truly gained a lot of importance among people, specially with female users for Pinterest as most of the pins are related to Fashion. I like all the tips that you have shared, infact it is informative too. Well, I think in order to get massive traffic through your Pinterest site, you need to pin regularly with appropriate images relating to your content. Thanks for the share!!
Yes, I agree with you completely. To get consistent traffic, we have to write good content regularly and pin regularly too… and with attractive images of course!
Cool post. I’m getting good benefits from Pinterest but never got tips to get massive traffic. Thanks for this post Jasmine..
Is it more effective to link FaceBook and Twitter images directly to your blog or to link to Pintrest which then links to your blog. Seems you would want them going directly to your site?
Steve, if its about images only then its better to use pinterest which then links to your blog whilst twitter and facebook could also be used for this purpose.
Yes, that’s the preferred method because Pinterest works best with good images.