How to Get Traffic From Pinterest to Your Blog and Website. (+ How It Works)

Over a year ago, Pinterest has become my number one traffic referral and I can’t recommend it enough. All the strategies I use seem easy and straightforward to me, but they might not be as easy for a beginner blogger or someone who has been blogging for a year but has been using other platforms to share their posts.

I thought it would be great to write a post in which I’ll include the tips on how to get traffic from Pinterest to your blog and website, as well as how Pinterest actually works, so the steps which you and your potential readers are taking in order to get traffic from Pinterest to your site.

I can’t remember how many times I was asked questions like: “How to upload my content to Pinterest” or “How can I get people to click through to my site”. I see so many bloggers and business owners, struggling to understand, how Pinterest actually works in terms of getting traffic and it might be because a lot of them are used to just pin a pretty image to their Pinterest board and don’t click though.

I mean, when I had a Pinterest personal account (not a business account) I used to search for a home décor or travel inspiration and simply pin the image I liked to one of my boards. I didn’t click through because all those images didn’t have a text overlay, which would be sort of incentive for me to click the image and go to the site.

The goal for using Pinterest for business is NOT ONLY to get repins, is to get click through to your website which can get you traffic, email subscribers or clients.

This post contains affiliate links marked with (*) for products I recommend. If you decide to make a purchase, I will earn a commission at no additional cost to you. Thank you for your support!

Let me explain it in more detail below on the infographic:

HOW GETTING TRAFFIC FROM PINTEREST TO YOUR BLOG AND WEBSITE ACTUALLY WORKS IN 5 STEPS:

To recap the steps:

Step 1 – Design a pin (blog post graphic)

Step 2 – Upload the image to your blog

Step 3 – Pin image from your Blog to Pinterest boards

Step 4 – Someone sees your Pin

Step 5 – They click through to your blog posts = Traffic

Now, let’s move on to the strategies which will help you get traffic from Pinterest to your blog and website. There are 8 of them:

HOW TO GET TRAFFIC FROM PINTEREST TO YOUR BLOG AND WEBSITE

The top 8 strategies to get traffic from Pinterest to your blog and website

1. DESIGN AT LEAST ONE VERTICAL IMAGE FOR EACH OF YOUR BLOG POSTS

On Pinterest images and utilising SEO (which we’ll discuss in the next point) are absolutely the most important. 80% users are using Pinterest on their mobile devices, therefore long, the vertical image stands out more in the feed.

In order to get traffic from Pinterest to your blog post, you need to have at least one vertical image with text overlay (the blog post title) in the post.

2. UTILISE PINTEREST SEO

As I’ve mentioned above, utilising Pinterest SEO is something you NEED to do, to make sure your pins, boards and your profile are visible. Pinterest is a search engine like Google, so you have to put keywords in the places I’ve just mentioned.

Nowadays, bloggers and business owners search for content on Pinterest by simply typing the keywords, for example, to find blog post like this one, they would type in “How to get traffic from Pinterest” or “How Pinterest works” and this post would pop out, because of the blog post title visible when you have the Rich Pins enabled (point 5) and keywords I used in the pin description which is an alt text in WordPress.

You should also include keywords in your bio, display name and in the board descriptions. For the bio, I always advise explaining what you do, who do you serve, what services or products do you offer using keywords.

3. CREATE A BOARD JUST FOR YOUR CONTENT

This is also a really important step and most bloggers and creative entrepreneurs miss that. You need to have a board in which you only have your own pins (your blog posts, portfolio images, product images, graphic promoting your services, content upgrades or courses etc.) and you should call it as your business or blog name.

In my case, I have four boards just for my content, one is “everything board” called MintSwift Design where I share my designs, products, services and blog posts. The second one is just for MintSwift Blog Posts as you might figure, it contains all of my blog posts images and supporting images for the posts, but only vertical ones. The third board is for my shop and it’s called MintSwift Shop and the fourth board called MintSwift Brands & Websites Portfolio is filled with my brand & website design portfolio

Of course, you don’t need to have four boards like me, the one or two are enough. The reason for creating a board with just your own pins and putting it as your first board is that when someone lands on your Pinterest profile they would see this board first and chances are they will click on it and then to your blog posts.

4. ENABLE RICH PINS

I have a separate blog post about it, so I won’t go into details in here. Just click here to read the post about enabling Rich Pins with a free tutorial.

5. CREATE MORE THAN ONE BLOG POST GRAPHIC FOR ONE BLOG POST

When you publish blog posts, your main objective is to make sure that it’s seen by as many people as it can. It’s hard to have a lot of content to share on Pinterest if you’re just starting out and have 3 blog posts on your site. That’s why I recommend creating more than one blog post graphic for one blog post.

To save a lot of time, consider creating a template/s for your blog posts graphics. I have several different templates I can use for one blog post. The main template is with a solid background colour and my submark logo. You can see examples of my templates below:

I recommend hiding the additional images within a post by using the tutorial from this blog post.

6. SPLIT YOUR MORE GENERAL BOARDS TO SPECIFIC BOARDS

I talked about it a bit in the third step when I shared about my four different boards. Pinterest’s Smart Feed displays pins as best (repined by others) first not newest first, therefore the number of repins is important. By splitting the general boards like Social Media tips, to boards like Pinterest tips, Instagram tips, Facebook tips etc. you can increase the number of repins.

For example, this post about how to get traffic from Pinterest to your blog and website will go to seven of my boards (excluding the group boards), so to MintSwift Design, MintSwift Blog Posts, Pinterest Tips, Website & SEO + Traffic Tips, Business Tips, Blogging Tips, Social Media Tips and the pin will already have 7 repins, because I’ll pin the image first to MintSwift Design board and then repin it directly from that board on Pinterest (NOT from my website, I only pinned the first pin – so called original pin, from my blog) to other boards I just mentioned.

7. PIN ACTIVELY AND ON AUTOPILOT WITH BOARDBOOSTER*

UPDATE 16.08.2018  – Since June 28th, 2018, BoardBooster is closed down.

BoardBooster* is my secret weapon for Pinterest. Nowadays, I spend only about 30 minutes per week or even less on Pinterest. BoardBooster* does everything for me! The only time I spend on Pinterest after implementing my strategies is to manually pin new blog posts after I publish them and that’s it.

You can read a bit more about BoardBooster* in my blog post How I Grew My Pinterest Visibility in one month by 500%, I can’t recommend BoardBooster* enough!

8. JOIN GROUP BOARDS

I haven’t really talked about group boards anywhere because I tested a strategy whether it’s possible to get traffic without group boards or with just being a part of several of them. (I’ve seen bloggers who joined 30+ group boards and has no groups on their own and I DON’T recommend doing that! I recommend, having 10-15 boards you’ve created). And guess what? You don’t need to be on a dozen of group boards in order to get traffic to your website.

Of course, group boards can be beneficial to bloggers and business owners, I just think they shouldn’t be your main strategy. When you post your blog post to a group board, it’s most likely more people would see it than if you just post it on your personal boards. If you utilise Pinterest SEO, your pins and boards are seen anyway, so don’t worry if you’re not a part of any group boards.

Let’s recap:

1. DESIGN AT LEAST ONE VERTICAL IMAGE FOR EACH OF YOUR BLOG POSTS

Have a long, vertical images for your blog posts, with a blog title overlay. Don’t bother pinning square images, they don’t work well on Pinterest.

2. UTILISE PINTEREST SEO

Pinterest is a search engine like Google, so you have to put keywords in your pin descriptions, board descriptions and your profile. You should also include keywords in your bio, display name.

3. CREATE A BOARD JUST FOR YOUR CONTENT

Create a board in which you only have your own pins (your blog posts, portfolio images, product images, graphic promoting your services or courses etc.) and you should call it as your business or blog name.

4. ENABLE RICH PINS

Click here to read the post about enabling Rich Pins with a free tutorial.

5. CREATE MORE THAN ONE BLOG POST GRAPHIC FOR ONE BLOG POST

Create more than one blog post graphic for one blog post to have more of your own content on Pinterest to share. Create a blog post graphic templates to save yourself a lot of time.

6. SPLIT YOUR MORE GENERAL BOARDS TO SPECIFIC BOARDS

Create more specific boards for example by splitting the general boards like Social Media tips, to boards like Pinterest tips, Instagram tips, Facebook tips etc. you can increase the number or repins.

7. PIN ACTIVELY AND ON AUTOPILOT WITH BOARDBOOSTER*

Use BoardBooster* to schedule and loop your pins on autopilot so you can focus on creating even more awesome content for your audience while getting traffic.

8. JOIN GROUP BOARDS

Join quality group board to give your pins a bigger reach. If you’re writing topics like business, blogging, social media, email marketing, photography, design, branding, freelancing, productivity, WordPress, Squarespace, e-course/e-book creation and other business or blog related topics – my boards it for you!

I hope this post will clarify how getting traffic from Pinterest actually work, so the steps to “upload” your content to Pinterest and then getting traffic to that pin.

Which of this traffic strategy about Pinterest is the most beneficial to you?