Let me guess. You heard about Pinterest and you’re thinking OMG another social network. You’re barely keeping up with Facebook, Twitter and the other socials, why would you need to even think about another social tool?

You might have also heard that Pinterest is just for chicks who pin all their wish lists, hobbies, crafts all day. Plus many think it’s just for ecommerce site. Oh so wrong bloggers.

Here’s the thing, if you don’t have an ecommerce site full of product images then you need to have a blog. For starters you cannot focus solely on pushing products on Pinterest; that’s goes with all socials and Pinterest is no different.

If you’re a blogger or a B2B company in order to maximize your efforts on Pinterest you need to have a blog that is Pinterest friendly.

Some of you may be thinking how in the world would I actually get more traffic from Pinterest because of a blog post?

In a simplified way a blogger or a publisher takes images from their website and pins them on their pinterest page and when people on Pinterest find the image and they click on it they are taken back to the company’s website. In that way Pinterest is driving traffic to your business’ website. That is visual content marketing.

In a very simplistic way this is how Pinterest works.

Since September of 2013 over 5 million articles are being shared on Pinterest every day. Many publishers are having huge success on Pinterest. For example, BuzzFeed’s second biggest social driver of traffic is Pinterest, after front-runner Facebook.

Pinterest has taken notice of their success and they have recently hired a head of media partnerships for the first time. The company has brought in Robert Macdonald, formerly of Google, to do the job.

“We are looking to work with a wide range of traditional and digital publishers across all verticals, many of which are already using the platform.”

Sadly most bloggers and publications have not caught on yet…

One of the biggest mistakes I often see in website and blogs is that they are not leveraging Pinterest’s free tools to get more eyeballs to their site.

What are they thinking? C’mon people let’s get going.

Not only that, when images are included they are too teeny tiny and are not even pinnable.

5 million articles are being pinned on Pinterest daily. If you want to grab your reader’s attention and have them sharing your content, visuals in your blogs are no longer an option, they are mandatory.

Here are six steps for making blog posts Pinterest friendly to get more followers:

1) Promote your Pinterest profile by embedding a Pinterest button

Go here to install your Pinterest “Follow” button http://business.pinterest.com/en/widget-builder#do_follow_me_button

What’s cool about this is that when you click on the “Follow” button users will see this pop-up and it gives Pinterest users a preview of your latest pins and information about your business.

 

 

 

2) Add a “Pin it” button.

Go here http://business.pinterest.com/pin-it-button/ and add it directly onto your product descriptions and blog images. Adding a Pin It button will help you attract new visitors to your company website and product pages.

According to Curalate “Pin It” buttons saw tremendous results: eight of Pinterest’s top 10 retail brands prominently displayed a Pin It Button. Brands like Ikea and Target generated nearly 1 million shares (aka pins and repins) from their website! WOW!

BuzzFeed increased the size of the Pin It button on their share bars and on individual images for readers coming from Pinterest.

77% of visits from Pinterest to BuzzFeed are on mobile, so the team also makes sure their mobile site loads fast and is optimized for Pinning, just like their website.

“When a reader comes from the Pinterest app on mobile, we show the Pin It button right on top of the image. We found that this increased pinning by 10 times!” Nguyen said.

3) Add board widgets at the end of your blog.

Get it here http://business.pinterest.com/en/widget-builder#do_embed_board

4) Add board widgets on the sidebar of your blog page

Get it here http://business.pinterest.com/en/widget-builder#do_embed_board

 

5) Apply for Pinterest’s Article Rich Pins

Article Rich Pins help you stand out from Pinterest’s smart feed. Look at the image on the left and notice how it stands out more than the one on the right. Article Pins include headline, author and story description, helping Pinners find and save stories that matter to them.

If you’re not technical, you’re going to need a web developer to do it for you. Get your Article Rich Pin here https://developers.pinterest.com/docs/rich-pins/overview/

6) Include a cover image in your blog post

If you’re not including images in your articles please begin to do so because you are falling behind the times. The visuals help tell your story. You’ve all heard that saying “a picture is worth a 1,000 words” right? Think about it. We live in a fast paced society where we’re glued to our smartphones, laptops, i Pads and images are easy to consume. This shouldn’t be all that surprising when 65% to 85% of people describe themselves as visual learners.

There are no more excuses not to have an image in your blog posts. Use a free tool like Canva to create cover images for your blogs! Canva makes it so easy for you to use their tool which includes a pre-designed Pinterest template perfectly sized to share on Pinterest and all other socials.

When you employ these six steps you will be well on your way to getting more traffic from Pinterest using visual content marketing and in turn growing your sales.

Over to you…

What else would you add to this?

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