Here are 3 ways advanced Pinterest marketing strategies can super focus your blogging efforts, save time and supercharge your traffic.
there are promotional links in this post… if you click them and buy I will get a wee bit of money (you will never pay more for clicking my links and may just save some money with my links!)
A while ago I wrote a post about Pinterest Marketing Fails where I did a case study on how my lovely SEO bloggers are screwing up their Pinterest strategy. Functionally they refuse to make tall pins on their blog posts… sigh.
I have had some super nice conversations with some heavy hitters (like ahrefs and a few others) and they super politely told me that they had tried Pinterest and thought it sucked. It took too much time and was not bringing in enough traffic compared to their Google SEO efforts.
I get it!
But Pinterest has changed. They are more focused on SEO and I think NOW is the time that things might be right for bloggers to take another look at Pinterest.
This is NOT a how to set up Pinterest post!
There are a million posts about how to set up your account, make boards and then share, share, share.
Oh, and you should do 9 OTHER people's posts to each 1 of yours.
Are you freaking kidding me? My goal is not to get a ton of traffic for other people, my goal is to get traffic to my website, not be a free traffic generator for everyone else.
Just Make Some Tall Pinterest-Worthy Pictures Please
I know there is a ton of information out there about how you should make your Pinterest pins. They should definitely have people (or not). They should be warm colors not cool colors. Plain pins with just words work best (except not always).
STOP! I am not talking crazy design here.
Just ask your graphic artist to make a tall pin in addition to the wide short pin when they do your blog post graphics. That's it.
No “special pins”, no “pinterest ready pins”, just make the same graphic with a different orientation!
For example, I took the ahrefs graphic and just cut and pasted it taller and added the blog post title…
This is not rocket science. Yeah, you could spend hours or day's finding the perfect Pinterest pin style, but why not just start with taking 2 extra minutes and making a tall pin and hiding it on your posts.
Oh and then use the “ALT” tag to put in your (already) SEO'd title and description so that there is some info when the “Pin It” button is hit.
3 Advanced Pinterest Marketing Strategies
I am a data driven marketer. I don't like strategies that require that I “friend”, “like”, “comment”, “chit chat” or anything else people-y. I like practical, measurable, data driven marketing that has more of a chance of succeeding. These are my top 3 advanced Pinterest marketing strategies based on that criteria!
1. Do An Audit of Your Current Pinterest Standings
The very first thing you should do to find out what is already working on Pinterest is to check your Pinterest stats. Analytics > Overview
I like to look at two factors, first how many website clicks am I getting for the last month on all time pins… these are your current winning pins!
Now you might not think that 759 clicks for one pin will move the needle on your website, but consider that I have pages and pages of these pins that are all sending between 759-1 click to my website per month!
I also like to check what is working now… these are the stats for the pins I created in the last 30 days…
As you can see these numbers are considerably lower, but in 6-9 months they could be in my top-top pins!
Historical Data From Ahrefs Short Pin Problem That Might Help You!
Spying on Ahref.com, they have some pins that are working. Those three same posts have 108 repins just on those three posts. You can tell that three different people pinned it by looking at the bottom and seeing the name of the pinner and the board they put it on!
There are pages and pages of pins from ahrefs that regular, normal readers and Pinterest people have pinned for them.
Now, common Pinterest marketing wisdom has some kind of convoluted program of following that board, trying to get them to follow you, etc. I do follow the board if it seems to have interesting pins, but in general I just want the overall data about which of my pins are actually working.
That is great for the posts that they made big pins on, but this is what it looks like when there is no big pin…
These pins are from desperate Pinterest users who want to have the info, but could not find a beautiful tall pin. When there is no big pin, the Pinterest pinning app will make an ugly, plain pin with just the title of the post.
As you can see, these pins have 5 repins total. Wah, wah, wah.
No Pinterest power users are EVER going to pin your ugly blog post title pin.
Additional Resource: 3 Ways To Make A “Perfect” Pinterest Pin
If you have a business Pinterest account, you can get even more data!
Go to Analytics > Website to see this data
The first two were from when I was split testing the “best real estate marketing posts” versus “best realtor marketing posts”. Both rank well, but the click conversion for the “realtor” one is better.
In the middle you can see that there are two of the same pin (How To Take Super Amazing Product Photography) and you might think that is a mistake. But when you click through you see that both of them were pinned by people whose photography boards are MUCH more popular than any I have…
That is 365 clicks to my website from two pins that I did nothing for… free traffic!
And the cool thing is those pins don't go away. They just sit out there like little time bombs that could go viral later if the right person sees it and pins it to their popular board.
Related post: Cool “history” of how a Pinterest Pin went viral!
How Can You Use This Kind of Data?
If you are a blogger and have any kind of strategy for your SEO, you can use the same skills on Pinterest.
a. Figure out which of your keywords work best on Pinterest.
You can SEO your Pinterest pins just like you do blog posts. See which keywords are making the most impact and then reverse engineer them for additional content or use those kinds of keywords in future posts.
b. Do an outreach program to Pinterest users who have pinned your site and who have generated lots of hits.
If you are used to doing link building outreach emails, you know exactly how to do this… email your top pinners, praise them for their amazing taste in pinning your content, ask them to pin additional relevant pins.
here is a great article on Advanced Link Building Strategies
c. Write blog posts that will be popular on Pinterest.
Here is where you can put a little thought into your content strategy. Say you write 5 posts a week. Why not do 4 posts for Google and 1 for Pinterest? Take one of your best posts and gear it towards “mompreneur bloggers” or do a “SEO for fashion bloggers” post.
You don't have to change your core content type, just make some of it more geared towards audiences that are HUGE on Pinterest.
2. Pay To Promote Your Pins
About a year ago I took a Pinterest course and the gal who taught it said something that really stuck with me. If you are not willing to pay even $5 to promote your blog post, you probably didn't do a good enough job writing it in the first place.
That really hit me and I started thinking about doing a $5 promotion on Facebook or doing a $5 promotion on Pinterest, immediately the choice became clear.
Say you are willing to spend $.25 per click (I KNOW I am super cheap!) Doing a $5 promotion for $.25 each click I will get 20 clicks.
If I do that on Facebook or Google I will get 20 clicks and that is it. If I do that on Pinterest I will get 20 AND some “pins” which mean saves on boards. These pins could turn into other pins later as other people find that pin and save it.
The lifetime value of that pin is SO much higher than if I do any other kind of promotion.
How do I know this works?
I promoted this post a while ago but I am still getting results (that is why there is “P” over on the right side of the report. This month it got 524 clicks to my website and 77 more saves to Pinterest.
Here is my Google Analytics data for Source > Pinterest
Between the two pins I did for this blog category I have gotten over a thousand clicks to just this website page.
August is my absolute worst month of the year (many of my readers are women with kids so back to school crushes all of my traffic). During “normal” months I get 5-8,000 hits a month from Pinterest.
This is my best pin, it has over 10K repins. That is, it is the my most popular pin that I PINNED. There are at least 2,000 other copies of this pin out there that I did not initiate!
There are many pins out there that other people pinned that I cannot track the data for, but I do see it on the analytics end.
I paid a wee bit to promote this one when I wrote it but all the growth after that is organic from Pinterest. If you are going to do advanced Pinterest marketing, you definitely want to get at least a little bit of a budget for paid placements!
3. Use Tailwind To Increase Your Reach
Okay, I kept hearing about the Tailwind App and was sick of it! I had tried it a while back and it had nothing that really made it any different than other pinning apps PLUS I couldn't automate everything so why take the time to learn about it.
And then… I bit the bullet and tried Tailwind again!
The skies opened up and the heavens parted. With all the changes Pinterest has made (like not showing the number of repins on our posts) Tailwind is giving me great data AND the ability to supercharge the sharing of my posts in a really structured, trackable way.
Scheduling Your Pinterest Posts
So first off, I was not good at scheduling updated shares of my blog posts (with over 800 who has the time to do all this manually?) But with Tailwind I can schedule them out at “intervals” and make sure that I am not swamping my boards with the same kinds of pins all time… let me explain!
I have different sections of my site that go to different boards…
So using the Tailwind “interval” feature and a spreadsheet, I can make sure that I am scheduling the same types of posts to go out on time but CONCURRENTLY for the different parts of my website!
Tailwind Interval Scheduler
Two things to love here! Tailwind allows you set up lists of boards so that you can just say “All Esty Boards” instead of having to search manually PLUS they let you set “interval times” that can be from hours to days apart.
What I am doing here is saying to Tailwind, “save this picture that is linked to my high end buyers post to these 5 Pinterest boards over the 5 days between Sept 24-29.”
As you can see, it is pretty easy to use a spreadsheet to note the scheduled time and make sure you are not “over sharing”. I do this same type of things for all the all the areas of my site like Real Estate Agents, Product Photography, Pinterest Marketing and have them pinning right at the same times of the Etsy posts because the boards and readers rarely overlap!
because I am so visual it is much easier for me to find the pins if I know what the picture on the pin is!
Getting Other People To Share Your Posts
All of this is great and makes me super happy that I can be more deliberate, but I am still on my own to generate all the traffic. I read in EVERY post about Pinterest that you should join a whole bunch of group boards and then spam them with your pictures…sigh.
That does not feel like marketing, it feels like spraying and praying.
Well Tailwind has an answer to that too… Communities!
Tribes are where you can find people who are sharing posts similar to yours AND who are also interested in marketing on Pinterest enough to follow the rules of their tribe. These people feel much more business oriented and effective.
Once you join a Community you can post YOUR pictures to it and then Community members share them on their boards. Here are a few posts that I have shared…
Those bolded numbers mean that about 60 people have scheduled my pins to go out on their Tailwind shares. These are ones that I will see traffic to my website over time!
Increases In Pinterest
Let's start with the increasing repins and and domain pins in Pinterest. That top number (holy buckets) shows that some of my pins got a whole lot of attention! That is because I am sharing A LOT MORE relevant pins to my boards. BUT that is not my website.
My website got 107 more pins than average after using Tailwind last week which is nothing to sneeze at! Just to let you know, this is continuing to grow (I have 162 more pins in the last rolling average so that wasn't a fluke!)
Pinterst Website Stats
I can hear my blogger friends who hate Pinterest now, “all that is great but does all that sharing mean anything at all to website views?”
Here are my Google Analytics for that “Find Local Followers” blog post. It is a super good post that had NEVER had any traction at all on Pinterest, but after adding it to the communities it is definitely heading in the right direction now!
I KNOW! 8 shares is nothing to write home about, but this EXACTLY the same as hitting some of those long tail keywords on your website that accumulate into thousands of hits a month!
Advanced Pinterest Marketing Strategies For Bloggers Wrapup
I am SUPER happy with the results I have gotten after only one week of taking my “so-so” Pinterest efforts and really making them a focus of my time. None of the things that I have done are revolutionary, they are just good solid marketing strategies that I use for social and SEO.
The thing that is different about Pinterest that IS different than Google is the exponential way that a pin can start to bring you traffic. One little pin can sit out there for months doing nothing and then the right person can find it and repin it and BAM… all of a sudden you are seeing a ton of website traffic.
But even better, you can track that traffic back to its source and start to understand what you did that made all that lovely traffic head your way!
