When it comes to driving traffic to a blog, many people overlook using Pinterest. You may have heard of marketers using the popular image sharing site successfully but dismissed it as not being relevant or as just a fad. However, when used effectively, the site can be a major source of traffic. The following are 5 tips to help increase the number of visitors to you blog by using Pinterest.
- Create Original Content And Pin It
More than 80% of pins are actually repins. If all you do is repin other people’s images and content, you won’t be very successful at building an audience at Pinterest or driving traffic to your blog. However, if you can create valuable and interesting visual content that is uniquely yours, you can potentially have an entire army of individuals ready to repin your original pins and help you get a ton of exposure.
Some of the best types of visual information that you can provide include Infographics, videos and images with color backgrounds. Also keep in mind that simple is often better.
To really see a big surge in traffic, try giving something away on your pin. If you have a cool new app, template or tool to share these can be very popular. Promote your giveaway ins a pin and then provide a link where people can sign up to get their freebie.
You can also add value to content that you didn’t create. For example you can write a quality post about a certain resource and pin that. People really love these types of pins, and they can drive a lot of traffic to your blog.
Just make sure to remember to edit your pin so that you can add your link after you have uploaded the image that you want to pin from off of your computer. Many people forget to do that. You won’t get any traffic to your site if you forget about this important step. If your image isn’t pinned from an actual site, it will default to a dead link.
- Pin Teasers And Tutorials
Most people think that beautiful and funny images are the only things that are popular on Pinterest. However, genuinely useful information can also do very well. In fact, research shows that tutorial pins have much higher click-through rates compared to most pins.
People absolutely love to learn something new. They also love storing and sharing useful information. So think about what types of information your target audience would consider to be valuable and useful and make some pins about these topics.
Teaser pins can work very well because people are curious about them and will click through at very high rates. Usually a teaser pin will have a colorful background or some text in the top area of the image that just tells you what you are about to learn. For example, “5 Things You Must Do Before Publishing Your Next Blog Post.”
The pin is used to pique people’s curiosity so that they will click through to learn more. This is a very effective strategy that can work just as well for service and product based business as well as bloggers.
Incorporating trending topics into the captions and board titles of your pins is another highly effective strategy for achieving high click-through-rates.
You just need to find creative ways to relate your services, products or content to current events that are trending. Or you can use events like holidays to create a Christmas Gift Idea board and fill it with gift ideas using the products that you sell from your site.
You can promote blog posts in relation to current news or trends that relate to your industry or niche. Think about topics are hot in your niche or industry right now. Come up with content and interesting pins to drive more traffic to your blog.
- Inside Your Caption, Add A Call To Action
Don’t forget to use proven marketing strategies that work well in other types of marketing with your Pinterest efforts as well. Adding a call to action to your captions can significantly increase like, comments, repins and click-throughs, so don’t forget to use this proven strategy.
Every caption should include some sort of call to action, such as “repin this,” “comment below” or “click here.” A call to action can even be incorporated inside the image on your pin.
To make this strategy even more effective, add a link in the caption with your call to action to really see traffic to your blog skyrocket.
- Hold A Contest On Pinterest
Many companies have held contests on Pinterest and seen a significant increase in traffic to their sites as a result. Now you can get in on this type of action too. Just host a contest where in order to participate people need to either repin the pins you have on Pinterest that link back to your blog or they can repin content that is on your blog.
There are many excellent ways to run contests on Pinterest. Look at what some of the major brands such as Land’s End and Sony are doing in terms of the contests they run to get ideas.
Your main goal with a contest is to get as many people as possible to share pins promoting your blog. To help make your contest even more successful, make sure your pins feature the type of content I have discussed in this article. The winner of your contest should be the person who generates the most exposure for you. For example, their pins had the most re-pins or they have the most followers to their board.
If you follow the advice in the 5 tips above, you should see a significant increase in the traffic to your blog coming from Pinterest. The methods I have given you are simple but highly effective methods for creating interesting content that will provide your business with a tremendous amount of exposure. Now it’s time for you to start applying this information to start driving traffic to your blog using Pinterest.