Pinterest strategy with secret success tips for more traffic, email subscribers and sales

You could read about the difference between landing pages and sales pages here, and now it’s time to attract traffic to your amazingly crafted sales and landing pages. 

Here’s a little reminder of what we’ve gone over already – do these steps first before diving into this post:

• How to make money with your blog and how to diversify your income as an online entrepreneur
• The business + legal side of blogging
• Getting started with affiliate marketing
• What to look for in an affiliate program
• Creating a content strategy your readers will love
• Getting started with content upgrades
• Creating products to sell
• Building a landing page that converts
• Writing sales pages that convert like crazy

I reach over 1.2 million people a month, using this strategy and the best thing: it’s completely automated. The bigger you are, the more paid strategies you can use like ads, affiliates, PR and paid traffic, but let’s start with something that’s free. It’s actually my FAVORITE thing in the world. It’s Pinterest. If you’re running a blog, Pinterest is a big win. It not only drives traffic (#1 referral in Google Analytics for many), you can now offer your products via the ‘Shop’ button and make money using affiliate links. Time to schedule Pinterest for a more strategic attack! Now for real, I pin about 50+ pins a day. A DAY. And it only takes me max. 10 minutes a week. How? Scheduling! But there’s one downside to Pinterest; it’s highly addictive. All the beautiful pins give me endless inspiration. So to make this social search engine website a little bit more productive, I schedule my Pins automatically. Yep, you read that right. You can Pin pins yourself, or you have them automatically searched and pinned by a scheduler. How awesome?! This means, being active on Pinterest every hour of the day, even when you’re totally enjoying your REAL life, you know, outside the office, on the beach for example.

How to get started with Pinterest

• Convert (or open) a business account. This way, you’ll have access to analytics. Everything else will remain the same. If you already have a Pinterest account, you can click here to convert your account. If you want to open a new business account because you already have too many personal boards to hide, create a new business account for your blog here.
• Enable ‘rich pins’ by confirming your blog’s url. Rich Pins provide more context about an idea because they show extra information directly on a Pin. There are four types of Rich Pins: app, product, recipe and article.
• Make sure you prepare your blog by installing the ‘save button’, so that others can easily share your blog’s content.
• Make sure your Pinterest account matches your brand: create boards (at least 7) that align with your blog, create board covers in your branding and make sure you use keywords + a good board description (this is how people will find your boards!)
• Add SumoMe to your blog (download the plugin here) so when people hover over your images, they will see a ‘pin’ button.
• Create your pins with PicMonkey to create images with text overlay in the cloud. Although beautiful images work really well on Pinterest, as a blogger, you need people to click on the pin if you want traffic. That’s why text works best. If you don’t have photography skills (or time!) use stock photos for your pins. Do some research on pins similar to the one you want to create to see ‘design’ trends. When I started keeping an eye on others instead of creating just beautiful pins, I saw a spike in clicks and repins, as some colors and designs are just popular by certain groups.

Once you’ve optimized your Pinterest start strategy, it’s time to change the fun part of pinning to a strategic way: make sure you attract pinners to your landing page.

You do this by creating pins that work, just for the landing page:

• Use vertical images. Ideal size: the longer the better. The ideal aspect ratio for a vertical Pin is 2:3—600px wide x 900px high. Square images—600px wide x 600px high—can work well, too. Pins longer than 1260px high will get cut off, and people will only see the entirety of the Pin when they tap it for a closeup. Pinterest optimizes Pins that fit within these preferred aspect ratios.
• Make sure you include keywords in your pin. Make sure that all your blog images are named right. If they’re not, you can download WordPress plugins that easily change bulk images to do so with images already uploaded. The name that will be visible is called (in the back end) ‘the alt title’. When you upload your image, make sure you change the actual name of the image (for alt tag purposes). So when you have an image, make sure it’s not called ‘IMG_002” but “How to follow this course”. This way, when someone pins the image from your blog, the title is imported into Pinterest. This is also where you should include your keywords found in your keyword research.
• Make the process a two-click process: from the pin to your landing page and with one click a download or a buy.
• The best practice to find keywords that work (aka Pinterest SEO) is by typing in the keyword: and seeing what Pinterest itself suggest in the keywords underneath your search:
• As you can see especially ‘food’ is a great topic on Pinterest as they not only import full recipes from ‘verified sites’ (rich pins), you can search on diet, recipe time and ingredient. So make sure you include all these details if you blog about food.
• In case you don’t blog about food; see the keywords next to it? They suggest the keywords for every search topic you use.

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• To optimize your pins to be found, make sure you enter some of these keywords in your pin description.
• Make sure you don’t just use your blog titles as text overlay in your Pins. Make sure you ‘solve a problem’, because this is how people use Pinterest. They type in search terms, not blog titles. So when they search for something and you have the answer, you’re winning.
• It’s okay to have multiple Pins that lead to the same post. In fact, it can be beneficial to save a variety of images that might appeal to different types of Pinners. Just make sure to add unique descriptions that are specific to each Pin—it’ll improve your SEO. I usually create about 4 pins for every post – that speaks to different niches or people that the post can be relevant for. So when it’s a marketing post, I create a pin for bloggers, but also for entrepreneurs.
• Make it your mission to A/B test pins, how do they perform? Which one works better? Do this for your best 3 articles, and take it from there.
• If you want to upload multiple images to your blog post to test which works best, you can hide the images. This way, they will appear when someone uses the Pinterest plugin – but they are hidden when they read the post. The full tutorial here. 
• Of course this isn’t all. You need to automate your pinning to times that your audience is online. I use a tool called Tailwind to schedule my pins. So it takes me about 10 minutes a week, to post over 50 pins a day!

More resources on using Tailwind and a $15 gift card here. 

• Pinterest business: the secret to reaching more people on Pinterest as a (blog) business
• Automatically schedule your Pinterest pins with these 5 tools
• Pinteresting! Affiliate links are now allowed on Pinterest
• Why image is the most important part of your business
• How to hide image html to A/B test Pinterest images for more traffic