Creating blog content is something that any business or marketer can do. The fact is that an effective blog content strategy can create a successful Pinterest presence which can drive real traffic, leads, and sales.
Here are some marketing success tips you need to know about Pinterest and blogging.
Blogging for Pinterest
You’re blogging for your readers, but you also want to be found by search engines. With so much competition for Google search traffic, it’s natural to feel a little bit confused.
Pinterest is a visual search and discovery engine on which you’ll face far less competition than Google and is a more even playing field for brands and businesses of all sizes. What Pinterest looks for is different than what matters to Google.
Very long, comprehensive blog posts are highly favored by Google, while much shorter pieces, as long as they are on a reputable site and feature beautiful, useful images, can do quite well on Pinterest.
Also, short posts, a few hundred words to accompany beautiful images are great for Pinning! Though they may never generate much Google traffic, on Pinterest they can be found, repinned, and generate traffic to your site as effectively as can much longer posts.
Just remember to keep your images beautiful, useful, and inspiring – and try using multiple images which link to the same content – making more out of the content you produce.
Tip. Google = specific answer, Pinterest = inspiration and motivation.” Remember that when you are writing for your Pinterest visitors!
Blog Matters
Now that you’ve determined who you’re writing for, where should you publish that content? You can use free services like Medium, Quora, or Tumblr.
When your content lives on a platform you do not own, you may hold the copyright, but you don’t own that content. It can go away in an instant. If you’re like most bloggers, you might put hours into one post – so why risk all that hard work?
If your blog supports your business or if you want your blog to BE your business, you need to own the content and you need to control the entire environment that houses it.
More importantly for your Pinterest success, you need to be able to Pin images that take people to your site – not something owned and controlled by someone else.
WordPress is a great blogging platform, but make sure you host your WordPress installation instead of using WordPress.com. Customers are becoming savvier, and they can spot a shortcut. On the platform, craft the environment, and take yourself seriously so others will, too!
Reliable and effective hosting is available for well under $200 a year, WordPress is a free download, and you can get beautiful themes for $50 and under. If you want something even easier.
Get More Pinterest Shares and Exposure From Your Blog
Once you’ve started your blog, how does it work with Pinterest? How can you get more and more traffic from that social network?
The easiest place to start is to use Pinnable images on your blog. It’s all too common to find an article about Pinterest. Images that are taller than they are wide will stand out well in the feed.
If one image is good, two are better! Giving people multiple options will increase shares to Pinterest. It’s another way to get more mileage from one blog post. It also allows you to tweak the text on the image to appeal to a slightly different audience on Pinterest.
Your Pins will perform better in Pinterest search if you use keywords in the image file names, descriptions (which you can set in the alternate text), and even in image captions. These are all signals Pinterest looks for.
Make it easy for people to share the image you want them to share with a description you’ve crafted. Use Social Warfare, a plugin for WordPress which allows you to have your typical blog header image at the top but will pull up a Pinterest-optimized image when you click the Pinterest share button.
Implement Rich Pins to make your Pins more useful – they pull in price, location, recipe data and more – and they perform better on Pinterest than other Pins.
Add the Save button to your blog to give people another easy way to Pin any image that is on your site. When visitors hover over an image, the “save” button appears, providing a visual reminder to Pin!
Confirm your site with Pinterest to get more analytics to help you continue to make progress.
Making Blogging Easier and Faster
All of that sounds great, but one of the most common challenges facing new bloggers is deciding what to write about in the first place. Where do you get ideas for blog posts?
Always being aware of what topics, niches, or solutions people are searching online.
For instance, if you’re on Facebook, Twitter, Quora – anywhere people are asking questions, you might take a few moments to answer. Could you turn that answer into the beginnings of a blog post? Chances are, more people are out there looking for the answer and chances are, you could answer it. Those are the fastest blog posts you can write!!
Write what you know! Use video! Interview your favorite experts, upload the video to YouTube, embed it into a blog post and add a transcript of the video. Easiest blog post ever.
How (and why) to Keep Pinterest Visitors on Your Blog Longer
After you’ve published a few posts, the next task is to begin to think about the overall experience that your readers have when they come to your site. And, more specifically, what do they do after they read an article?
This is a challenge with all blog visitors (not just those coming from Pinterest) – keeping them from leaving too soon. It’s also important to keep people around a while because Google looks at “time on site” when determining where to put you in the search rankings. And it’s important if you want to grow your email list or make sales on your site.
For new bloggers especially, once the blog post is written, there is such a sense of relief that it’s tempting to hit “publish” and celebrate! But it’s not quite done yet. It’s up to you to tell your readers what to do next. When they are at the end of your article, what do you want them to do?
That’s where the Call to Action (CTA) at the end of the post comes in. It can be a fancy image or a simple text link, but the CTA provides the next step. You might be asking them to sign up for your email list, read a related post, download a .pdf, or sign up for a webinar. Whatever it is, don’t be shy.
Throughout the blog post, you should be linking to other related resources on your site. People are unlikely to go looking.
Pop-ups or slide-ins, when done well, can work well – encouraging people to sign up for your list or give their email address in exchange for a valuable .pdf. Just make sure there aren’t too many of them – no one wants to be bombarded with pop-ups!
The easiest way to keep people around longer? Embed a video in your blog post, preferably at the top so people will find it and start watching. A fifteen-second video view is easier to get than a fifteen-second read on your post!
Capturing Pinterest Blog Traffic
Now that your blog posts are pulling in traffic and readers from Pinterest, and you’re helping them to discover other pieces of content to read on your site, what next? How do you begin to funnel those readers into actual customers?
People do buy on Pinterest using Buyable Pins. They do go from Pinterest right to a site and buy something after seeing it for the first time. But, more people are saving Pins for later purchase, which means if you want to catch anyone other than impulse buyer, you need to get Pinners to sign up for your email list.
Pinners tend to start searching for and discovering items long before they know exactly what they want. That’s why 97% of searches on Pinterest are unbranded. People have a vague idea that they want running shoes or a gift for a co-worker, but they’re not usually in a hurry to buy.
So, do your best to get Pinners on your email list! And make sure you have conversion tracking pixels installed for Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter advertising so you can retarget the traffic Pinterest brings to your site with ads. Trust me, even if you don’t think you’ll advertise, add the pixels now just in case. You can only retarget people who come to the site after the pixels are installed.
For the best results on Pinterest, you need a blog. That doesn’t mean you need to spend thousands (or even hundreds) to set it up or spend hours and hours a week writing. But you do have to write and attract your target audience or target market. So you can increase your sales and your income.
P.S.
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