7 Beginners Pinterest Tips for Bloggers to Gain Page Views

Pinterest Bloggers Series - Tips and tricks to boost your blog traffic

This month I have had over 1,000,000 pin views (yep, ONE MILLION! - stats from January 2021) to my Pinterest account and most of those pins are directly from my blog either pinned by me or blog visitors.

​Pinterest is my main driving force for visitors and traffic on my blog, so thought I would share a few tips and tricks for gaining page views and mastering Pinterest in a two part series for fellow bloggers.

​Be warned it is an intense post, but the rewards are worth it.

​I'm going to cut out the jargon, there are NO affiliate links, no forced email list sign ups or selling in this post, just me sharing my tips. 

Firstly have a look around my Pinterest Page 
​Kerrymay._.Makes Pinterest​

The below information and stats are from 2017, when I hit 200,000, I am now on one million page views a month on Pinterest.

1. Prepare Your Blog With Google Analytics

So you've got your blog and want to try to gain page views... the first step is to sign up to connect Google Analytics to your blog. It is easy to sign up, just visit the page and create an account, this will now start monitoring your blog traffic. Bookmark the page so you can check on your web page/blog stats. I use the Acquisition tab for most of my analysis and then click social links and or referrals to see how many visitors I have to the blog and where they are coming from. Below is the social acquisition for the last 4 months from May to August and you can see that Pinterest has dominated my page views with very little effort from me. I spend more time promoting on Facebook than anywhere else.

My blog is coming up to a year old and I'm so proud to have achieved almost 20,000 visits and over 33,000 page views in that short space of time. I used to have a successful website years ago and that had a total of 800,00 page views, but that was over the course of around 8 years and it was a slow process driving traffic to the site. Below you can see how my Monthly visitors have grown since I started taking Pinterest seriously.

Update August 2019: My blog is now almost 3 years old and I currently get above 300 views a day or around 10,000 pageviews per month, even getting 20,000 when a pin went viral.

2. Add SEO Descriptions and Keywords to your blog post

I promise to keep these short... SEO is so important for your blog traffic. Make sure whenever you hit publish or schedule that you have got a title in the SEO section and a description that tells people what the post is about, this will automatically add the description when you pin to Pinterest. Use keywords and long tail keywords that might make searching for your content  easier.

​For example if I am posting about a planner set up, I would use a detailed title in the SEO section that explains more about it, such as Planner Setup - How I Use My Travelers Notebook. This adds extra search criteria, words and categories to your post. If lots of people are searching for planner setup, you need to be sure your site is seen, so adding more keywords increases those chances. You can read more about long tail keywords and why we should be using them on ahref's blog: long-tail-keywords-research

​Post titles are important in your Google and Pinterest ranking. How to... or posts with numbers such as 5 ways to... perform better in searches. The description should then have keywords such as planner setup, plan with me in my Travelers Notebook etc, this all helps to narrow down the search and opens it up to a wider audience.

3. Pinterest Set Up 

Add around 15-20 different boards to start with and have a board for your best blog posts. Make sure the boards all fit in with your overall blog niche or category. People who are interested in your blog want to see relevant pins, not pins about plumbing if you have a blog about art. If you do want to keep boards that are personal you can set these as secret boards in the board settings. Don't have too many boards, it can be overwhelming for you and followers.

Set your Pinterest account up with a detailed (keyword rich) description, add a suitable and searchable name for each board and add category and description for each board (through clicking board settings which is the pen icon). Make it all look pretty and consistent (I go for pastel and bright colours for my main board image to make it visually pleasing for the visitors).

​Set the board image again in the settings (you can only do this on a pc or laptop). I will discuss Rich Pins and getting a business account in the next part of the series.

4. Use Tall Pins, Canva and Visme

Tall or long pins do better than small images. The second and third images above are my most re-pinned pins from my blog. They have over 8,000 re-pins between them in just a few months and most of my blog traffic comes from these posts. Use a free program on your pc called Canva - Create logos, banners and website graphics. It's an amazing image editor that provide free to use templates for all your web graphics needs.

Sign up for free here
Canva - Design for Everyone

​Select Pinterest Graphic and have a play with the templates and try to use your own images to make them stand out from others. Bright and pastel coloured pins perform better than dark or blue (cold colours). Apparently they get up to 60% more pins. 

Visme:
​If you want to create long infographics then the tool you need is Visme. This is a great tool for any social media graphics, but the infographic feature is particularly strong. Check them out here - www.visme.co. Read here for a cool feature they have for creating statistical on your website.

5. How to Pin and Where to Pin

Don't just pin your own pins, it is important to pin useful content to other boards too, try to link these to your niche. Boards with high quality pins that have a high pin count will do better and get more views. ​

Pin Consistently and Often, this goes without saying. You can't pin a post once and expect it to be re-shared. You need to get it out there, pin it often and re-pin it to a few boards spaced out over several days and weeks. You can and should pin to group boards, but currently Pinterest likes you to add content to your own boards.

​I often re-pin pins that have dropped down my board and then delete that pin after re-pinning, this refreshes the pin and brings it back to peoples feed. Try to have around 50-100 high quality pins on each of your boards as this will get you more viewers. It is advised to pin around 15-35 pins a day, a mix of your own and others, it sounds a lot but it is worth doing, besides which I enjoy browsing and pinning.  Pinterest also now favours 'fresh pins' - these are new image pins that haven't been pinned before, but they can link to a previously pinned url. So get creating new pins and new content. If you do add to group boards, then make sure they are boards that are in your niche, don't have too many pinners, but have a high follow count.
​
​Get rid of badly performing pins - higher pin counts do matter. I prefer manual pinning, but more on this later... told you this was an epic series! If a pin is doing well keep re-pinning it to a variety of different boards and group boards (more on these in the next series). ​

Please pin me to Pinterest to refer back to

6. Ask people to pin your images

That simple, in the image caption on your blog I usually add a 'don't forget to pin me'  or a 'If you liked this post please pin me' comment, simple but effective. 

7. Add a pin it code to every blog post

Add a simple Pin It button (Now a Save button) to your blog at the bottom of every post. That way other people can pin it and share, it all counts for your total pin count.

​You can get the code here. You do need to add a short bit of code into your blogs header area too. (Easier to Google this rather than me trying to explain it though).

You can set the buttons so when you hover over the image the Save button appears - you can give it a try on my Pinterest image above. (Feel free to pin it too).

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Phew, I hope you got all that. These are just the beginners tips, give them a go, have a tweak and let me know if they have helped you. You should start seeing the changes to your traffic straight away. 
​Take Care, Kerry xx

Related Posts:
Blog Planning Organisation and Planning Goals for 2018
Blog Planning, Organisation and Productivity

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