In the last year, Pinterest brought to one of my blogs almost half a million sessions according to
my Google Analytics. That’s 93% of all my social media traffic. So, if you are still doubting if
it’s worth investing your time and effort into Pinterest or maybe you should focus on Facebook,
Instagram or other platforms, well, keep thinking my friend. In the meantime, folks like me
will leverage all the free Pinterest traffic that is left for us out of your generosity
But seriously, let’s talk about Pinterest and how you can use it to consistently drive free
traffic to your website THIS YEAR. I’ll talk about the industries, types of businesses and
niches that work particularly well on Pinterest. This video will give you 7 most practical steps
that will help you get traffic, leads and even sales from Pinterest. This video can be a little
on the longer side so if you are in a hurry, feel free to use the timestamps that I gave you in the
description below this video and watch the parts of the video that are most interesting for you.
I will focus on things that work well on Pinterest right now, not 3 years ago.
That’s important because things do change over time, maybe not fundamentally but many little
things in how we are using Pinterest this year are changing because the platform is adjusting
to what their audience wants and likes. Hi! I’m Anastasia of anastasiablogger.com
and on this channel I share my online business, Pinterest marketing and blogging tips. My goal
is to help 1 million human beings transition to online income streams like I did a few years back.
If this sounds interesting to you, I don’t need to tell you which buttons to click, do I? J
Ok, I assume you already clicked them, let’s dive into the steps you need to
take to be successful on Pinterest. 1 Step. Understand if Pinterest
will work for your industry or niche If you ask me will Pinterest work for a brick
and mortar business like a local coffee shop, not a global brand, but something that operates
in one city for example – I’ll be the first one to tell you Pinterest is not going to work
for you great. Or if you want to promote products targeting men only, it’s not the best fit for
this platform because the majority of Pinterest audience are still women. Or if you have a website
in a Hungarian and want to drive traffic from Pinterest, don’t get me wrong, but your audience
will be very limited. And Hungarian is just an example, it could be German or Hindi. You can
try Pinterest but you need to understand that your numbers will never get to the same levels as your
competitors have with their sites in English targeting US-based audience on Pinterest.
This platform is most popular in the US. So, maybe in case of a blog or eCommerce site in Hungarian
it is best to focus on Google for traffic. Speaking of eCommerce, I just wanted to
mention here as well that Pinterest works very, very well for eCommerce businesses nowadays.
So well that some bloggers are even getting upset that Pinterest is giving so much space to
eCommerce stores and sends them so much traffic. Now as for the niches,
you can look it up for yourself once you have a business account on Pinterest,
you will get the same data in your account. I will talk about creating a business account in a few
moments, but for now bear with me and I will show you which niches do really well on Pinterest.
So, do you want to check which niches are popular on Pinterest? Just look into Pinterest
Analytics – the click on Audience Insights, then choose All Pinterest Users and you will find the
top categories are Art, Home Décor, DIY and Arts, Entertainment, Design, Women’s Fashion and so on.
You can look inside each big category they show you smaller topics. All of these have a
potentially higher audience on Pinterest. 2 Step. Create a Pinterest business account
Once you evaluated whether or not Pinterest is a good fit for your business,
the next step is to actually create a business account. I’ve got this question a few times – is
it really necessary to use a business account? Can I keep my personal account and create pins
linked to my website? The short answer is no, you should not use a personal account
to attract traffic to any website because that would be a violation of Pinterest’s
Terms of Service and you could get your personal account suspended for this.
This could happen not on day one or day 45 of running your account. I don’t know when it could
happen but the longer you run your account that way, the worse you would feel about getting it
suspended. Over time, you will have lots of pins created and a lot of time and effort wasted.
The second reason to use a business account is because it will allow you to verify your website
and Pinterest gives priority distribution to pins linked to verified domains.
You will also have Pinterest analytics which is not available for personal accounts.
In addition to all of that, Pinterest business account is free to create and to run,
and you can even convert your existing personal account to a business account so if you have an
old account and want to keep your followers, you can do that in just a few clicks.
There is a separate video on my channel that shows you step by step how to set a business account,
if this step is relevant to you, check the link up there and in the description below.
3 Step. Creating SEO Optimized Boards Your Pinterest account will consist of boards and
each board is a collection of pins around the same topic. When you think about your boards,
they should have keywords relevant to your niche in the titles and descriptions of the boards.
How I would go about creating boards is always based on what you are covering on
your website and the categories of content or products that you have on the site.
Let’s take as an example Home décor niche. If you plan creating content around
various home decor styles like bohemian style, farmhouse style, minimalism and so on.
Or you might have categories on your site based on the different spaces in a house like living room
décor, kitchen décor, bathrooms décor and so on. Your board titles should be relevant to what you
have or plan to add to your website. Ideally, you should create your boards a few months in advance,
and start saving to them popular pins from other accounts, relevant to the focus keyword
in the board title. You are doing this to show Pinterest algorithm what your board is about.
So by the time you are ready to save your own relevant pins, the platform will have a better
idea how to categorize your own pins. Now, if you want to get a better idea
about Pinterest SEO, check out my free Pinterest Masterclass. You will find the link up there and
in the description below. 4 Step. Design Your Pins
The thing that I noticed is most intimidating for people starting on Pinterest is that
you will have to design vertical images and videos specifically for this platform.
Well, the thing is, vertical content format is not so unique to Pinterest anymore.
That’s because most of the users are spending time online on their mobile devices
than on desktop computers these days. So you can totally reuse your vertical
images and photos across multiple platforms including Pinterest,
Tiktok, Instagram and even on Facebook you have Stories and on Youtube you can use short videos as
shorts and also use vertical images as stories. Pinterest currently has several pin formats:
1. Image pins are my favorite – they have been on Pinterest since the beginning. And typically
pins with an image or a collage of images as a background and a text overlay generate most
of the clicks from this platform. You can add a link to the relevant page your site
to each image pin in the destination field. The recommended size for image pins is 1000
by 1500 pixels but you can make them a bit taller, the max image ratio should
be 1:2 so images go up to 1000 to 2000 pixels. 2. Videos pins should be vertical or square videos
and they have to be short. Pinterest actually recommends creating videos around 5-15 seconds.
Video pins typically don’t generate as many clicks as image pins and since it’s
harder to create videos than images, in my opinion you should only work with this format
if you have resources for this. Otherwise, you are better of focusing on image pins. If you
want to know all about the requirements for video pins, check out my video dedicated to this format.
I’ll give you a link to that video up here and in the description below. I’m sorry if I’ll have
to point you to my previous videos from time to time – it’s just impossible to include in this one
every little detail related to Pinterest marketing, it would make this video at least
an hour long and not everyone needs that many details. So those of you who want to learn more
about video pins – you can click on the dedicated video. And everybody else let’s keep going.
3. Idea pins are the most recent format on the platform. They were initially called
Story pins because they are essentially very similar to Stories on Instagram and Facebook.
But then Pinterest changed the name to Idea pins. Idea pins can include both videos and images. But
this type of pins doesn’t allow content creators to add direct links to their pages, so they are
not generating as much traffic as image pins. To create an Idea pin on desktop you’ll
need click on this Create Idea pin button. If you are on a mobile app,
the button is at the bottom of the screen. Want to know more about the best practices
for Idea pins? Check my dedicated video up there and in the description below this video!
Pinterest has also Carousel pin format that is rarely used, gives a lot of work and doesn’t have
any special perks in the algorithm as of now, so I don’t think you should even bother creating them.
By the way, if you have any questions about Pinterest the best place to ask me
is in the comments below this video! I do my best to answer all the questions and I appreciate
any kind of engagement and support to this channel – especially – hint – hint - nice
comments and likes on my videos J 5 Step. Learn What Works on Pinterest This Year!
This step is really crucial for your success because like any other platform,
Pinterest is constantly tweaking their interface, user experience and the algorithm. So things that
used to work a few years ago on Pinterest might be completely useless or even harmful
for your account this year and moving forward. So if you want to be always up-to-date with the
recent changes and updates, I really don’t know WHY you haven’t yet clicked the Subscribe and Bell
buttons to get notifications about my new videos. Because my Youtube channel has a strong focus on
Pinterest marketing, I’m in the trenches of it because I drive traffic from Pinterest to my own
blogs, I also work with hundreds of members in my Pinterest SEO Traffic Secrets course,
and I provide Pinterest account audits and consultations for 1:1 clients.
While working with businesses and clients from many different industries and niches,
I get to see their stats, the problems that they might have encountered with Pinterest, and also
the things that helped them grow faster. For example, you might have read somewhere
or watched some video that recommends to you join group boards on Pinterest. And you might
have wasted hours upon hours of work trying to be accepted to group boards. But the reality
is group boards have been barely any helpful on Pinterest for at least a couple of years now.
Pinterest decided at some point that group boards have been abused by spammers
so pins saved on huge and generic group boards became way less effective as the algorithm
started penalizing those group boards. But if you Subscribed for my channel,
you would have known that so just press that red button and let’s move on!
The other thing you need to know about Pinterest updates that are happening this year is Idea pins.
This format is relatively new to the platform and so Pinterest is trying to encourage content
creators and businesses to make more Idea pins. It’s hard to convince us to make them
because well… you can’t link any page from your Idea pins like you can do with image pins. But
the algorithm is pushing Idea pins to the top. And since so much space is given to Idea pins,
regular pins are not getting as many eyes and clicks as they used to.
Idea pins can bring traffic indirectly – users would have to click on the Pinterest profile
that created the pin, and from there they might end up on your website’s homepage.
This traffic can bounce quickly if your homepage has nothing to do with the Idea pin
they came from but if your homepage is captivating or if you have a sign up form on it, you could
even grow your email list using Idea pins. Another thing worth mentioning here is that
in some countries (United States and the UK as I’m recording this video) you actually can add
links to products from your Idea pins. Currently it only works on Pinterest app so you have to do
it on your mobile phone, not on desktop. And you still can’t link to whatever page on your site
like from an image pin. But you can tag either products on your site – which is great news for
eCommerce businesses. Or you can make a direct link to an affiliate product so you wouldn’t need
to send traffic to your site first in this case. INSERT clip I made on my phone here
Now, you need to understand that new things can come up at any time and while I covered in this
portion of the video as much as possible about the updates on Pinterest, you might be watching
it a month from now and there is something new. I can’t change the content of a published video,
but I found a different solution. I have a very long blog post on my site that has a history of
all the updates and new features that happened on Pinterest in the last few years. At the top part
of the post you’ll find most recent changes. While I can’t update a video once it’s published, I can
update my article, so if you want to check it out, the link will be in the description below.
6 Step. Practice Your Patience Pinterest doesn’t work like Tiktok or perhaps
Instagram. If you have been on Pinterest for many years, you might have seem the times when a new
pin could get a couple of hundred views on day one, and maybe a thousand views in a few days.
That could happen with some established accounts in the past. But these days checking
impressions on individual pins obsessively in the first couple of hours or days is useless.
I mean, you can still do it if you feel like you need more drama and stress in
your life or you want to look like this! For everyone else, what you need is first
give me a thumb up for reminding you of this old grumpy cat meme. And second,
you need to post on Pinterest and forget about your pins for a month or maybe a few months.
Let the algorithm do its thing and you’ll see impressions on your individual pins climb up
over time. It’s very common to see from 0 to 3 impressions on your new pins, and this
happens even with established Pinterest accounts. What you need to pay attention to is your overall
account analytics to see if there is a positive dynamic from your efforts. And even more so,
you need to keep an eye on your Google Analytics because that’s where you can actually see the
amount of traffic that Pinterest brings you. 7 Step. Use Automation When You Need It
In my Pinterest course, I have an entire module dedicated to scheduling pins through Tailwind
scheduler. It’s the most Pinterest-oriented scheduler out there, and if you use Tailwind
you can also plan your content for Instagram and Facebook under the same account. I published a
separate video with a Tailwind tutorial, you will find it up there and in the description below.
You’ll also find there a link that gives you the first month of Tailwind for free.
The thing is, sometimes people assume that they HAVE to start using Tailwind as soon as
they created a Pinterest account. But it’s not by accident step 7 in my video. It’s not the first
thing you need if your account is very new and you are just learning how to even create a pin,
then give yourself some time to understand the platform before you jump into automation.
If you have a new blog with 10 or 20 blog posts or a small eCommerce store
with a limited stock of items, then don’t even bother trying to schedule pins with Tailwind.
You can use Pinterest’s native scheduler at this stage when your daily pinning volume is small.
But if you are managing Pinterest for a website that has hundreds of pages you could create pins
for, then definitely have a look at Tailwind because you’ll be able to schedule pins to
several boards instead of doing it one at a time. These are the most essential steps you need to
take if you are starting on Pinterest this year. If you found this video helpful, give me a like,
subscribe, and hit the Bell button so that you don’t miss my new videos.
Don’t forget to watch my Pinterest Masterclass if you haven’t already done it.
The link is up here and in the description below. Before you close this page, I manually picked
for you some of the most important videos on my channel that can make you successful on Pinterest.
Check them out here and there, and I’ll see you in the next videos!