Are you trying to use Pinterest for business?

Do you need some tips and strategies to get started?

If you’ve ever been on Pinterest, you know that it is an amazing resource for finding delicious recipes, cool landscaping ideas and fun activities to keep your kids occupied. But you can also use Pinterest for business.

Listen Now

I follow some amazing bloggers like Melyssa Griffin and Peg Fitzpatrick who use Pinterest to grow their community and gain much more awareness of their blog posts. These are huge account and they have thousands of followers, so while I didn’t expect overnight Pinterest traffic, I do see the potential in using Pinterest to grow my website traffic to my blog posts.

When I checked my analytics, I noticed that I was getting little to no traffic from Pinterest. Here are some of the ways I helped optimize my Pinterest account and increase my website traffic from Pinterest.

Custom Pinterest Images

The first thing I did before pinning anything to my Pinterest account was create custom-sized images for Pinterest. You’ll notice that Pinterest images are a different size than any other social media image size (735 px x 1102 px) and so to make sure your images stand out on Pinterest, I knew this was necessary.

custom pinterest images

Create custom Pinterest images using Canva, Relay or Pablo

I even went through all of my previous evergreen content and re-designed many of my images, and when I did that, created Pinterest-sized images too.

To make sure my blog was ‘Pin-able’, I use Social Warfare that allows you to add in custom Pinterest images to your blog.

I also add some hidden text into the bottom of each blog post with my custom Pinterest image. This is especially useful if you don’t want to use a plugin like Social Warfare but want to ensure your Pinterest-ready images show properly on your blog.

If you want to use that hidden text, simply copy and paste this text into the text (not visual) bottom of your blog post and change the IMAGEURL.jpg to your image url:

<div style=”display:none;”> <img src=”IMAGEURL.jpg” ></div>

Optimize Your Pinterest Profile

Once I decided that I needed to up my Pinterest game, I took a look at my profile and made a few edits:

  • Added ‘Showcase Boards’ which live right under your bio
  • Made sure I had one board dedicated to my blog posts, which is the first board on my profile
  • Changed my bio to make sure it had my keywords in it
  • Any boards with less than 10 pins, I made ‘secret boards’ until I can fill them up with pins

Pin Consistently

Once I started pinning my blog posts to Pinterest, I saw how much time this would take, but how useful it is (like any social media platform) to be consistent. That is where Tailwind comes in.

With Tailwind, you can schedule pins to go out consistently each day, and you can schedule pins to groups boards, which is my next tip to growing your Pinterest account.

You can get a free month of Tailwind here (and I get a free month when you use my link! Win/Win!)

Join Group Boards

One setback I was having when I was trying to get more views on my pins was reaching more people. One huge way that helped this was finding relevant group Pinterest boards to join.

How to find relevant Pinterest groups:

  • go to www.pingroupie.com
  • search by category to find groups in your niche or
  • add keywords into the description
  • search through the groups to see how many followers, and if you hover over the description, you can see how to join the group board

Using Pingroupie to find Pinterest group boards

Group boards are great because you can pin your own pins to these boards and get more views, and potential followers.

These are a few of the main things that I found useful when starting to grow my Pinterest profile. I have nowhere near thousands of followers, but it’s a process, and I already started seeing results.

pinterest for business analytics

You can see the top web traffic bar which shows the amount of web traffic I get from Pinterest. I was getting no traffic (because I wasn’t using Pinterest for business) and once I actually started putting in some effort, I started seeing results (who knew).

Want to join me in my Pinterest journey? Follow me here!

Do you have any great tips for starting to use Pinterest for business? Share with me in the comments!