HOW TO USE PINTEREST TO DRIVE TRAFFIC TO YOUR WEBSITE

Have you got a Pinterest Account and not used it since you set it up?

We see a lot of people coming to us that have an account that they set up years ago, created 1 board called “cool stuff”, pinned 5 completely unrelated things and then got bored.

It’s not their fault, Pinterest at first can take a bit of getting used to. People think of it as a social network and after realising that there isn’t any obvious interaction with your friends, stop using it.

In reality it’s not a social network at all.

It’s a search discovery tool and it’s there to inspire the creative beast within you!

If there’s one thing that we humans love to do, it’s create. Whether it’s art, food, music, home decor, fashion, photography.. the list goes on!

Pinterest fuels our creative obsession.

Here’s our Top 3 Tips for How to Use Pinterest effectively and drive high quality traffic back to your website.

1. Create Boards and name them what’s going to be Pinned on them!

If you create a board called “cool stuff”, it literally could be anything.

But if you create a board saying “Trendy Men’s Jackets – Men’s Fashion”. Well, that’s a bit more specific and also likely to be searched for by other users – thus giving you a higher percentage of being discovered.

You are covering great keywords AND popular categories too.

More importantly, you know what you need to pin on that board? Trendy Men’s Jackets! And only that and you can easily find it when you need it!

(How many times have you created a board and called it something random and then forgotten what it was or what was on it?)

2. Have well thought out descriptions filled with relevant keywords

It’s not enough to just have a board named Trendy Men’s Jackets. You’ll have to come up with some descriptive descriptions for the board and the pins that you pin to it.

Pinterest state themselves that to help you get discovered in the search results you need descriptions of 50-250 words per pin.

They also say not to use hashtags (we think that if it’s related and your brand is unique enough then to use them – we go into this as part of our Pinterest Business Course).

Include keywords that are related to the pin and also the website that it goes to. This is especially important for your own pins.

It can be a stumbling block to think up descriptions and might hold you back from getting up and ready so to combat that, here’s some tips suggested by Pinterest of what to include in your product descriptions:

• Products: Suggest ideas for what Pinners can do with your products, and add examples of special occasions for when they might use it
• Recipes: Describe the main ingredients of the dish, how to cook it and what events it should be served at
• Fashion: Include the type of clothing, designer and the season to wear it
• Travel: Tell people what the location is, and give ideas for what they can do there
• DIY: Describe what it is, how to make it and what materials they’ll need
• Photography: Add the year, subject, publication and photographer’s name

3. Change the Descriptions of your Repins

You might think that it’s easy and quick to repin other peoples content. This might be quicker but when a pin has a terrible description like “Image-12” (because that’s the file name) then this doesn’t help anyone find that pin!

This means that it’s important to check and change the descriptions of repins. If you do this then the more likely someone is going to find it from your profile and follow you.

Then your original pins will be showing up on their feed, thus driving traffic to your website. See the knock on effect?

If this all sounds like a little bit too much work, let me tell you that it’s not.

Focusing on this stuff now will guarantee more traffic, more followers and more repins. You’re building foundations that WILL satisfy Pinterest’s algorithm and ensure your account is optimised to send quality, targeted traffic to your website.

Don’t forget, pins are everlasting. People will repin your content for years to come  and there’ll be aconstant stream of traffic coming back to your site.

Sometimes people don’t even click through from the pin there and then. They pin it and come back to it when they need it so your chances of the traffic are long lasting AND renewable.

When someone repins your pin, their followers will repin it too so it just keeps going and going on lovely traffic generating autopilot.

Get your pins discovered and you’re set.

You can grow your Pinterest Account and it CAN be your No.1 traffic source. Smashing Facebook out the water and giving you a FREE traffic source – what’s not to love about that!

Remember Pinterest is a quality targeted traffic drive and  users are shoppers :-). There’s 100 million unique monthly users and 93% of those use it to PLAN PURCHASES.

Why shouldn’t it be your product they plan to buy?