One of the hardest parts about building a blog is getting traffic to it.
One of my favorite movies ever is The Field of Dreams.
Even if you haven’t seen it, you might have heard this quote from it: “If you build it, they will come.”
Boy was that ever a lie. I applied that principle to my first blog.
I built (what I thought was) a cool site, but out some awesome content, then sat back like “ALRIGHT! Let the users and money start rolling in!!”
I literally laugh when I think about how absurdly wrong I was.
In email 1, we talked about choosing our niche and I mentioned that you’ll want to pick one that does well on Pinterest.
Why?
There are 3 main ways to bring traffic to your blog:
- SEO (Traffic from search engines like Google.)
- Paid Ads
- Pinterest/Social Media
SEO is fantastic and you’ll definitely want to optimize your site for it (more on this later).
The problem is, ranking on page 1 in a search engine, even if you do everything right with your SEO can take months.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t really have wait around for months to make money with my blog kind of patience.
Paid ads can be useful, but I don’t use them at all anymore, we can get into this more later, but for now, we want results so let’s get into number 3.
Ah, finally, we’ll actually talk about Pinterest.
Immediate traffic.
THAT is why you should care about Pinterest – and choosing a niche that does well on it.
What is Pinterest
If you don’t know what Pinterest is at all, here’s the 10k view explanation:
Pinterest is a social website that you can go to essentially save pictures and links in groups of common things.
For example, I have boards on blogging tips, DIY projects, outfits, etc.
Pinterest is kind of grouped into the social media category because you can connect with friends and other uses, but what makes Pinterest distinctly different from other social networking sites like Facebook, is this:
Users don’t come to Pinterest to socialize and see what their friends are doing. Users come to Pinterest looking for solutions to problems.
Bloggers (aka you, you money making machine!) write solutions to problems. You get where I’m going with this?
The other difference is that on other social networks, your post likely only gets engagement for around a week at best.
Pinterest pins can still bring you traffic a year later.
How to Pinterest Successfully
I could make an entire course on Pinterest strategy and how to generate traffic from Pinterest (I will likely do this in the near future so be on the lookout if you’re interested).
We can at least get into the cliff notes version to get you started.
- Pin design
- Keyword optimization
- Engagement
- Community
Pin Design
Pinterest is a visual platform.
There is a space for title and description (getting to those in a minute), but largely it is image based.
That means you need to create an image to go along with your blog post.
You want that image to be well designed so that it attracts attention.
Pinterest users home pages are just a huge bundle of images, so you need to make yours stand out among the others so that it gets clicks and “repins”.
Keyword Optimization
In a way, Pinterest is like a search engine. That means SEO practices still apply.
The good news is, Pinterest SEO is much easier to rank for than other search engines like Google.
While it is a primarily visual platform, it still relies on text to determine what to show it’s users.
Choose keywords that are relative to your website and/or post and be sure to include them in:
- Your profile description
- Your board descriptions
- Pin titles
- Pin Descriptions
- Board names
- Profile name
Engagement
Pinterest gives preference to profiles that are active.
Manually pinning can take up a lot of time.
I recommend a blend of manual pinning and scheduled pinning.
What is scheduled pinning?
Services (I use Tailwind) that allow you to schedule multiple pins ahead of time. This will help you to “stay active” on Pinterest without actually having to spend all day on Pinterest.
Community
Connecting with the community in your niche will also help you out tremendously.
This is especially true if you’ve just created your Pinterest account and don’t have many followers yet.
This doesn’t mean you have to make a bunch of new BFFs, all I’m referring to here is Group Boards and Tribes.
Group boards are boards on Pinterest that more than one users pins to.
Tribes are communities through Tailwind that share each other’s content.
You only want to join boards and tribes related to your content.
Just doing these tips (given you are using one of the niches from email one) can get you a 100 pages views in just a few days.
Long term? Pinterest has brought me hundreds of thousands of page views. I would guess that a decent portion of you are reading this thanks to Pinterest.