5 Top Tips On How To Use Pinterest To Grow Your Blog

Last updated on 26 November 2024

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Pinterest is one of the greatest ways you can grow your blog.

I know that there are probably hundreds of thousands of these posts out there in the internet world, but I thought I’d just share what I discovered about Pinterest in the past few months. In January of this year, I got 13 new Pinterest followers. This past month? Over 100. I know that, in the grand scheme of things, that’s not much. But for those of us with little blogs, this was so awesome to witness. Having a sudden increase in Pinterest followers has been a lot more traffic for my blog too, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

So how did I go from just over 10 new followers in a month to over 100? There are 5 easy things that I started doing more, and I thought I’d share them today.

Scheduling apps/websites

Third-party apps and websites are perfect for when you want to schedule pins. Perhaps you’ve written a blog post, and you’ve pinned the image diligently but you’d actually a few more different pins to connect readers to your site. Apps such as these allow you to schedule pins to different boards, so you can set them up and forget about them. Personally, I use CoSchedule, which I use for sharing all my blog posts to social media through. It’s incredible. It enables me to set up pins in the future that will post without me doing anything, and will ensure that people who missed the first pin get the opportunity to see it and follow it to my blog.

Pin for others as well as yourself

Remember Pinterest is a search engine. If you notice that a lot of people are following one of your boards, make an effort to find cool new content that you can pin for them. Obviously don’t pin things that you yourself don’t like, but making a conscious effort to find images and ideas online to share makes a big difference. You’ll find that your pins get re-pinned more and more, and that other people start following your boards.

Consistency in your boards

Pick a style or look for your boards and stick to it. If you name your boards in all lower case or ALL IN UPPER CASE that’s fine, but be consistent. Choose one way to name your boards, and continue to do that. Make your boards obvious too. Name your food boards Recipes or Food, or more specifically Desserts, Dinners, Nibbles etc, rather than obscure names. People are more likely to look at your board and even follow along if they can tell what they’re looking at.

Make your blog images easily pinable

We all know that pinning portrait images makes them stand out on Pinterest and people are more likely to see them and also click them, rather than landscape images which get lost in the crowd. But it’s those landscape images that look better on your blog most of the time.

How do you have a portrait image on Pinterest that links through to your post which has an original landscape image without having to upload them to Pinterest yourself? This year I discovered you can create those portrait images so that when people go to Pin your landscape image on your blog, the image that appears is actually the portrait one.

On the Developer site of Pinterest there is a list of codes which you can put into your image’s HMTL code to make this happen. It’s made such a difference to my following and also my blog traffic. When people can see an eye-catching, portrait image on Pinterest, they’re more likely to click through…and boom. They’re on your blog. Give it a go – Pin the title image of this post. When you do, you’ll notice that the image that appears in the Pinterest pop up window is actually a longer version of this one. Clever, right? Here’s how to do it:

In your blog post, select ‘Text’ or ‘HTML’ to see the behind-the-scenes code of your post. If your image is at the top, that will be the first <img> tag. If not, find the image you’d like to add a portrait pin to. The image tags end in /></a>. Just before the /> you want to insert the following code (which you can also find on that Developer page on Pinterest): data-pin-description=” ” data-pin-media=” ”

Between the ” ” you need to write the description that you would the pin to have when people pin it, and then between the ” ” after the data-pin-media code, you need to insert the URL of the image that you pin. This will need to be uploaded somewhere (so I have mine as a media file on my WordPress blog for example), then find the URL that points to that image, and insert it into the code. And that’s it! Make sure you don’t have any spaces before or after the “.

What it will look like, with the blue text the original image, the red what you’re adding:

Pin pin pin

I do know that this sounds so obvious, but I never really used to pin things to my boards very often.

I would go to Pinterest for ideas, but never pin them, or I would pin one image a week. When I downloaded the Pinterest app on my phone and started pinning while I was watching TV shows, for example, I was pinning a lot. Suddenly, my followers shot through the roof. The more you pin, the more your name and your boards are out there in the Pinning world. If people are drawn to your pins or your profile, then they are more likely to see those blog pins I mentioned above, and they will click through to your blog, ergo more blog traffic and who knows? Maybe they’ll stick around and start following you?

So there we have it! Just 5 things that I’ve really learnt and discovered this year with Pinterest. Of course, you probably already do some if not all of these things, and I know that paying for something like CoSchedule isn’t for anyone, if you’re serious about using Pinterest to promote your blog and yourself, then do give it a go.

I hope this has been at least semi-helpful. I am in no way an expert of Pinterest, but if you have any questions I will do my best to answer them. Or I’ll send you in the direction of a great blog post by someone else.

What about you? How much do you use Pinterest?
Do you use it as a place to promote your blog and content?