How to Promote Your Blog or Business With Pinterest

by Richard Rowell; Co-owner of Brand Shamans & Write W.A.V.E. Media

Photo credit: Pixabay, Public Domain

Pinterest is quite a social media phenomenon. It has become quite the diversion for millions around the globe. Not only is it a great new way to search for images, but users can also save them on "pin boards" for future reference. Pinterest allows for research on a wide variety of topics, including architecture, food, fashion, interior design, and many, many more. The list of topics for images you can find is practically endless!

So, is Pinterest right for you to use in promoting your blog or business?

It depends on what category you fit into. Pinterest is becoming friendlier for businesses (and blogs) all the time. They have business accounts that let you track pin performance. Be sure to have high quality pictures (at least 640 pixels wide) ready to upload that work with the related keywords you want your blog or business to be found for.

Even better, if you already have high-quality pictures on your website’s blog posts, you can use Pinterest's Pin-It tool to post it to Pinterest directly from your site. This automatically links the picture back to the page it appears on within your website,  making for a good back-link.

While that back-link doesn't provide any "link juice," it can still be a good source of traffic for those curious to see where a picture was pinned from. If this picture is re-pinned by other users, the link goes along with it, giving you a lot of potential new links back to your site.

How Best to Use Pinterest for Your Blog or Business

The best part of Pinterest is the fact that you can create a limitless amount of pin-boards. This means you can have each board be dedicated to a specific topic, product, or service. Say that you have a bakery. You can create boards displaying your bakery’s pastries, another with your breads, and another with your specialty goods, broken down by each type.

You can get even more specific. Still, be sure to choose more general broad keywords for your boards that should get a decent amount of search traffic. Keep in mind that pins actually show up in Google searches. So it's a cool way to get some off-page SEO for your blog and website.

For bloggers, it’s very easy to take the great pictures you’re already using on your blog (hopefully!) and embed text as a caption on it with the title of your article. Obviously, you want those titles to be catchy, as you would in any case. In the case of baked goods, you may want to have a blog post with a title such as “10 Ways to Bake the Perfect Loaf of Bread.” Then, put that post title as a caption on a picture of a warm loaf of bread right out of the oven. That will definitely entice people to click through and read the article and a lot more likely to re-pin that pin if they find that information useful.

How Does Pinterest Fit into My Content Marketing and Social Media Plans for my Blog / Business?

As stated before, the back-links on your pictures can be very valuable. However, the trick is to get your picture seen. With how quickly Pinterest has grown, the number of pins on the site is growing exponentially on a daily basis. The best way to get your picture seen is to have people re-pin it.

A re-pin simply means that someone liked your picture enough to pin it to one of their own pinboards. Users who follow the boards that your pictures have been pinned on will then see the recent pictures that have been added to those boards. Then, they have a chance to re-pin them to their own boards.

Pins can spread very quickly on Pinterest. It's a good idea to also find users that pin a lot of pictures related to your own keywords. This way you can re-pin their pictures to other boards that you curate specifically for pictures that are related to what you do, but may not necessarily compete with you.

This strategy will make your boards easier to find. As it is easy and common for users to follow all of a particular user's boards, it gives you an easy chance to share your pins to a wider audience more quickly. As with any social media platform, the more followers you have, the greater your reach will be. That reach can grow extremely quickly if you have content that people crave.

It seems like many people are having great success with Pinterest in promoting their content, including many bloggers, businesses, and writers. If any of you have any Pinterest success stories that you would like to share, we would be thrilled to hear about them! Happy pinning!