In order to monetize your blog, you need to drive traffic to it. One way to do this is by learning how to get traffic from Pinterest. If you master this platform, you can get a ton of unique visitors to your website.
Daniella Flores, owner of I Like to Dabble, a personal finance and side hustle blog, has mastered the platform. Of the 40,000 – 50,000 monthly unique visitors, she gets to her blog, Pinterest is responsible for half of them, a whopping 20,000 – 25,000 visitors! She recently sat down with Andy Hill to discuss how she got started with Pinterest and what Pinterest growth strategies you can use to grow your blog.
Daniella’s Background with Pinterest
Before starting her blog, she’d always been a “huge user of Pinterest” who loved using the platform. After learning from Michelle Schroeder-Gardner that you can use Pinterest to grow your blog, she decided to give it a try by following some online guides.
By following the advice in the guides, she saw tremendous growth in referral traffic from the social media platform. At one point, the majority of her website traffic came from Pinterest, thanks to some pins going viral.
The traffic she got from the platform helped her get accepted into the exclusive ad network Mediavine in March 2018. Her income from advertisements have ranged from $400 at its lowest to $1,500 at its highest point. Not a bad return on investment from applying the growth strategies she learned, right?
Pinterest Growth Strategies
For those of you who want to know how to drive traffic to your blogs from Pinterest, Daniella was kind enough to share some of her Pinterest growth strategies. The first strategy she discussed with Andy was design.
Design
A well-designed pin that draws people in can help you get more Pinterest traffic to your blog. Although what a good pin is depends on your niche, the ultimate goal is to get the user to click your pin so they end up at your website or funnel.
To increase the likelihood of a user clicking your pin, you should:
- Include a call to action (Unless the pin has the article’s title on it. Daniella uses a call to action mostly on her product pins.)
- Use pictures for the backdrop
- Insert text inside a big shape at the top or in the center of the pin
- Try using bold color splash that “pops” to draw users in
If you’re not that great at design and don’t want to spend a lot of money on it, she recommends using free design tools like Canva. Although Daniella acknowledges that some of the design elements and stock photos aren’t free, she says it is good for creating a basic pin. She recommends using their free template as a guide but suggests switching it up a little bit to stand out on Pinterest.
In addition to free resources like Canva, she recommends using Unsplash for free stock photos or simply typing in “free Pinterest templates” on Google to find something to start with.
Before you think about designing pins, you’ll have to consider the structure of your Pinterest account.
Structure
Another important growth strategy is making sure your Pinterest account is structured properly, so you can get traffic from Pinterest. Daniella says, “When you first create your account, after filling in your profile, the first action you will want to take is creating boards.” It is recommended that you start off with 10 boards; these boards should be categories that are somewhat relevant to your business or niche.
Also, when you create your boards, she recommends not getting too vague on your categories. For example, instead of creating a “travel” board, Daniella recommends creating a board called “Brazilian destinations” or something more specific.
In addition, you should pin pins to category relevant boards. If you start pinning pins to irrelevant boards, there’s a chance Pinterest won’t show your content anymore “because it doesn’t know what it is.”
Boards are divided into the following categories:
- Personal Boards
- Private Boards
- Group Boards
For group boards, you can invite others to join or they can request to join your board, which allows them to tap into the power of the Pinterest community.
Community
Imagine if you just started using Pinterest and didn’t have many followers. How would you go about getting your content seen by more eyes? Daniella recommends using group boards to use the audience of others. Then, your pin will be seen by a wider audience, potentially netting you more followers and more Pinterest traffic to your blog.
Another Pinterest growth strategy for gaining more followers she recommends is including a keyword in your username. For example, in her username, she includes the keywords: side hustle and money tips. After making this change, she started seeing a huge increase in followers.
When you go to Pinterest and search for people, she shows up as the fourth result for the keyword “side hustle.”
To leverage the power of group boards even more, she recommends using some tools.
Tools
Social Media Schedulers
Tailwind, a Pinterest and Instagram scheduler and analytics tool, is the first one Daniella recommends. According to her, it was originally a Pinterest analytics tool before it branched out to pin scheduling. It has board analytics tools that Pinterest doesn’t have.
In addition, Tailwind has a feature that is similar to group boards in Pinterest called Tailwind Tribes. According to their website, this tool allows you to “add your own content to a Tribe and have others view, schedule and share your content to their own audience.”
Since Pinterest has made their own version of it, Daniella is currently reevaluating whether this tool is worth it. At the moment, she schedules 10-15 pins using this tool and manually pins the others herself.
If you don’t like Tailwind, she recommends testing out Later, another Pinterest scheduler that has a free version that’s limited to one social media profile.
Don’t want to use a third-party tool to schedule pins? You can use the schedule pin function within Pinterest itself. According to Pinterest’s website, you’re limited to scheduling 30 pins in the future.
Group Board Tool
To find group boards, Daniella recommends using a free website called Pingroupie. There you can search for group boards that are in your niche. For example, if you go to the website and type in “side hustle” it will show you all the group boards that have been submitted to the site.
From there, you can narrow down your search by selecting certain criteria such as date added, number of followers, number of collaborators, etc.
Although according to her, there has been some debate about the effectiveness of using group boards, she still sees a good amount of growth in Pinterest traffic from using them.
Simple Pin Media
The last resource she mentions is a website called Simple Pin Media. Daniella mentioned that this website has a lot of great free tools.
In order to find out what these tools are, I did some quick research and found these wonderful resources:
- Pinterest marketing planner that helps you plan out your content for a year
- A Pinterest image guide to help you optimize your images to get more clicks
- Promoted Pins Guide – learn how to use Pinterest ads
In addition, you can sign up for their list to be updated on what’s new in Pinterest marketing.
Daniella loves Pinterest, but I know some other bloggers, including myself, who have gotten frustrated by the platform. If that’s you, you don’t have to learn how to use Pinterest. The solution is to consider outsourcing this task to someone else.
Outsourcing
“What if you don’t have time for Pinterest”
While reading this, you may be thinking that you don’t have time to learn how to get traffic from Pinterest. You may enjoy other parts of blogging more, such as creating content or affiliate marketing. To avoid having to learn this, Daniella recommends outsourcing this task to a Pinterest virtual assistant.
According to her, outsourcing can cost between “$12 to $30” an hour, depending on what you want. The virtual assistant can help you create pins, schedule them to be pinned to boards, and measure the growth of your account.
If you’re having trouble finding a good virtual assistant, she recommends:
Spending money on a virtual assistant may be well worth it if you can drive more traffic and increase your blog’s ad revenue.
Getting Started with Pinterest
Are you interested in dabbling a little bit with Pinterest? Daniella has some recommendations on how you can get started.
To get started with Pinterest, she recommends taking the following steps:
- Create a Business Pinterest account by going to Pinterest Business
- Go to Pinterest Academy to learn how to use the platform for your small business
- Read her guide on How to Use Pinterest for Your Small Business
According to Daniella, the Pinterest Academy can give you a “huge leg up on the competition.” She wishes it were around when she first started.
Does your blog get traffic from Pinterest?
What Pinterest growth strategies do you use?
Please let us know in the comments below.
