Today you will learn one of the most effective ways to drive traffic from Pinterest. You can use this to promote your website, your products, and even your affiliate links.
Unlike getting traffic from Medium or Quora, Pinterest is more than just a social media network. As well as being one of the biggest traffic sources available, Pinterest is a search engine too.
Table of Contents:
Pinterest As A Traffic Source
To get the most out of Pinterest you need to understand Pinterest user’s behaviour; it’s the 3rd biggest search engine in the internet. So we need to treat it like one.
In Pinterest:
- 75% of search queries are one to three words long, meaning they are short tail keywords
- Wider topics perform better. When we use Google, we are commonly aware and clear of what we are looking for, but on Pinterest things are open for creativity and people don’t tend to have a specific idea, just a general one and are open to suggestions
- People on average view 60 pins per query, it’s a lot in one session, meaning that when they enter the website, they are willing to look through a lot of content for a significant period of time
- 80% of users are on mobile, that’s why they prefer short tail keywords, as they don’t want to write a lot
Structure Your Pinterest Account
- We start with our normal account which is going to focus on a short keyword, that’ll be your main keyword
- Then you’re going to create multiple boards, which are still going to be short tail keywords, with 2 or 3 words only, those being secondary keywords
- Lastly, you create pins with long tail keywords, that are specific, and with them you will get traffic to your website or affiliate links.
Convert Into A Business Account
If we’re creating a new account, what we need to do is to click on the upper right arrow and go to “Unlock Business Tools”, that will change our account to a Pinterest Business Hub.
This includes:
- Analytics
- Ads manager
- Audience insights
- Verified merch, and more, mostly for free.
All these tools will help you grow your audience and therefore make more sales. You choose a business name depending on your offers and your niche.
For this example, I’m choosing digital marketing. You input a website if you have one, if you don’t, you choose “none”, then the focus of your brand and your goals, and fill out all the remaining information. In just a couple of minutes you have your Pinterest account ready to work.
It will ask us if we would ever be interested in running ads on Pinterest, and we will go with yes, because that’s a traffic source.
You can skip the free ads consultation for the moment. We got a few options to start, we’re going to go with grow your audience and create an ad.
Your Pinterest Profile
Before anything, you need to complete your profile.
For this you have to choose an adequate username, to do this you need to think thoroughly the keywords you are going to use according to your niche.
For your profile picture, I recommend your face or at least, a human face, this creates connection and trust.
Pinterest Keyword Research
For Pinterest keyword research, we leave Google, Ahrefs and SEMrush behind and we are going to focus on how Pinterest works.
We need to know what type of boards and pins to create, and we do that with keyword research.
In the search bar, we’re going to look for our focus keyword, and similar to Google, Pinterest will recommend us some related keywords. So, I’m going to show you a few ways to get keyword ideas.
Pinterest gives you an element called guided search, which are potential additional keywords, that can make your topics more specific.
That guided search is sorted by popularity, which is going to be your main inspiration for your board names. The more guided search elements you use, the deeper your keyword list will be; and the more specific it is, the better your pins will get.
Creating Pinterest Boards
So, if our main account is about digital marketing, a board could be about social media strategies, and our pins could be about Twitter or Facebook marketing strategies.
Therefore, with multiple boards and multiple pins, we can use a wide range of keywords that will give us traffic, and more traffic means more money.
To create pins, we must first create a board. In our profile, that option will be available. We must give it a name according to our main keyword.
Once we have our board, we can create our pins. For example, as I am using for example a digital marketing account, I can create a social media marketing board, and then I can create a Facebook marketing strategies pin. We also must place our keywords in the pin’s description.
Then, in the destination link box, you put your affiliate link or website that you’re promoting.
Study What Works On Pinterest
The image you use for your pin, is absolutely vital. Your content or other people’s content that we know that work, we can use them as inspiration to get more traffic.
We go back to the search bar and we look for pins similar to ours, and we’ll see they also have an affiliate link to get traffic from Pinterest, and we’ll do the same.
Look at the images popular pins use, their proportions, their optimization, their headlines, their descriptions and hashtags, is all very important so you can create your own pins and get traffic from them. It is important to note, do not copy them, learn from them.
- Check the affiliate program terms and conditions of every offer you want to promote. You might have an offer ready to go, but maybe that offer won’t allow you use social media marketing.
- Create high impact images, at Canva.com you can create eye-catching images that will be perfect for your pins, so you can get the traffic you want for your page.
Creating Pinterest Images
On Canva “Pinterest pin”, and you will get hundreds of templates that we can you and modify for your interests, and most of them are free.
For example, this one with this motivational quote, we just click and start editing, the tools are very easy to use and you will get the perfect image for your pin. Direct from Canva you can export them to Pinterest.
A small tip; rename the file with the keywords that you used for your pin or your board.
If we are going to create ads, we need to use Chrome.
We can use any of our pins, choose the destination and our budget, along with the time we want our ad to be available.
If you don’t want to pay for ads but you still want to get powerful data through Pinterest, uncheck the expanded targeting box, uncheck automatic interests too, and there you will have a whole world of topics and niches that will help you get more keyword ideas.
- Disclose affiliate links, this is a legal requirement wherever you are, and you can do so smoothly by adding it to your pin’s description, which you can do even through a hashtag.
What’s Next?
The important thing about Pinterest is consistency. If you want to know my secrets and you are committed to increasing your audience, your traffic and your sales, I will show you my method completely free at profitcopilot.com/traffic