I opened my pinterest account over a year ago but I didn’t take it seriously until a few months ago when I started my 30 Day Pinterest Marketing Strategy to grow followers and traffic to my blog. It has been steadily growing so I think I am onto something.
After being on pinterest and seeing what others have been doing, I am seeing some mistakes that are being made and could be the reasons if you aren’t finding success, with your pinning efforts, or just not sure what things you should be doing if you are new to it all.
Once I learned what mistakes I was making, I took the steps to change them.
First I must say that pinterest is not like other social media sites, like instagram and facebook, where you hang around and mingle to grow your followers. It’s a search engine (and a powerful one) like google, where people are searching for things so you need a different approach to stand out from the crowd.
I actually like pinterest just for the fact that the emphasis is not on how popular you are or how many followers you have but on your pinning efforts. The pins I create have a purpose, as they are linking to my blog posts so that I can get pinterest traffic and grow my blog to make money from it.
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Related: Can You Make Money From A Blog?
Because I am a blogger, I know when it comes to google what it takes to get traffic from there. And believe me it’s not easy when google’s algorithms constantly change. It would be ideal to get all that free traffic from google but it doesn’t happen overnight. You have to do a lot of SEO (search engine optimization) and stay on top of it.
You can’t though put all your eggs in one basket, otherwise you are doomed if google traffic falls off the face of the earth. That’s where it’s important to diversify your traffic sources by combining google, social media and email marketing.
Related: 5 Affiliate Programs That Pay Passive Income For Life
Pinterest has over 250 million users and a top social media source for getting targeted traffic from. If you don’t see Pinterest as a search engine (search bar at the top of each page), then you will have difficulty succeeding without doing some pinterest optimization too.
5 Mistakes You Should Not Make To Succeed On Pinterest
1. Personal account instead of a business account – Look at the two options, which one looks more serious to you? If you want to promote your blog or products, then open a business account or change your personal one to business now. As a business account, you get access to pinterest analytics tools which is very helpful in knowing how you are doing and who your target audience is.
2. Your profile is missing in action – This is the first thing people see when visiting your pinterest page and it should have complete info: your pic or logo, website, business name should be your brand not just keywords alone (make money online) or name alone (if not recognizable like Donald Trump) to represent who you are. You can either put your website name or your personal name & keywords for your niche (eg. Lori Walters – Personal Finance). Before you could add a lot of words in your business name but now is limited to 30 characters so make the best of it. Your description should explain what you are about (put some keywords in there). None of these visible areas of your profile should be incomplete or missing.
And if you don’t have a website, get one pronto, as that is where you want your traffic to go and from there sell your products (or earn passive income from). Bluehost makes it easy to set up a blog with their 1-click wordpress install plus includes a free domain name and ssl certificate (to secure your site) at a special discounted price through my link.
3. Not pinning daily or regularly – So the last time you were pinning on pinterest was 6 weeks ago and you expect to have success? Everyone who visits your profile can see when you last pinned anything and if you look inactive, they would be hesitant to follow you. I sure wouldn’t. Neither would Pinterest give you any traction either. Even if you are busy for a week or a month, you have to be pinning something daily. It doesn’t have to be your own pins all the time as pinning others pins is also part of the equation (but not 80/20 in my opinion).
That’s where a time-saving scheduler is needed when you can’t be on Pinterest or just need some help in pinning at different times of the day. Try Tailwind’s (no-time limit) free trial to schedule up to 100 Pinterest pins. You will thank me for it!
Related: My Pinterest Marketing Strategy Now Includes Tailwind And It’s Exploding!
4. Not using vertical pins and keyword-optimizing descriptions – Vertical pins not only take up more space they stand out from square shapes, and is what the majority use so follow the herd because they work. Make your pins stand out by using quality pics and photo-editing tools to enhance layouts and add text to them. I use free pics from unsplash and edit them in canva or a photo editor. Then keyword-optimize your descriptions on pinterest (use hashtags too) so that when users search for specific keywords your pins will come up with the others (hopefully first).
When you type anything related to your pin content, in the pinterest search bar, it will bring up some other keyword ideas, including long-tail ones (a good way to find out which keywords to target), so use those in your pin description and hashtags .
5. Your website is a free hosted one or is your facebook page – You have a business account but you are using a free hosting like blogspot or wordpress.com or linking to your instagram or facebook. Did you see any successful business doing that? To be taken seriously, they all link to their self-hosted website in promoting themself. You need to get your visitors to your self-hosted site and from there promote whatever you want.
Pinterest is all about the visual in giving a first impression and any clicks from your profile or pins should go to your own site (on your own domain name). And by having your own self-hosted website, you can claim it to get additional features so make sure you do that.
As mentioned before, Bluehost offers inexpensive hosting that includes a free domain name, ssl certificate and an easy 1-click wordpress install. Take advantage of it! Check out my free tutorial on how to set up a blog and get it live in minutes.
If you have made any (or all) of the abovementioned pinterest mistakes, I am sure you will have success on pinterest once you have corrected them. Happy Pinning!
If you found this article helpful, PIN IT ON PINTEREST!
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