How to Get Traffic to Your Website with Pinterest in 2020

When I was starting my first blogs and websites online I didn’t even think about the Pinterest as a traffic source and just a couple of years later I discovered it and learned how to get traffic to your website with Pinterest.

In one sentence Pinterest one of the best source of organic referral traffic sources for blogs and business websites.

Pinterest is a search engine platform based on pictures. It’s really popular among women but also rising in popularity among men.

If you want to succeed at Pinterest you have to optimize your posts and web pages for it. Optimization for Pinterest traffic is like SEO with a few tweaks and a special picture designed for pinning to Pinterest boards.

But let’s start from beginning how to do everything correctly and generate traffic from Pinterest in 9 simple steps.

1. 1. Sign up for a business account on Pinterest.
   2. Verify your website on Pinterest
   3. Set up boards relevant to your niche and keywords that you are targeting
   4. Apply for Pinterest rich pins for your website or blog.
   5. Create your Pinterest pins
   6. Follow other Pinterest users in your niche.
   7. Join Pinterest group boards.
   8. Automate consistent Pinterest Pining
   9. Join Tailwind Tribes

Sign up for a business account on Pinterest

Starting a Pinterest account is as easy as any other account online. You go to Pinterest and Signup with Facebook, Google or fill the form with your email, but that is not enough for you, you want a business account for your profile.

After Sign up, Pinterest will offer you to follow relevant topic boards to your profile, follow only the board relevant to your website niche, don’t follow irrelevant personal content.

After that, you have to change your account to Pinterest business account. It’s important because Pinterest business accounts have different terms of service. It also has functions that regular profile does not have like rich pins, promotion pins and Pinterest Analytics that lets you track the results.

At edit profile page you can fill up your business name which you can change at any time, URL of your profile and about you section.

It’s important to write a good short description about you with relevant searchable keywords that describe your business or blog.

Also, add a nice profile picture, I noticed that Pinterest profiles with human face receive faster follower growth than the once with logos so keep that in mind.

Verify your website & social media accounts on Pinterest

Next very important step after you set up your profile is getting your website verified on Pinterest. And there are a few ways on how to do that.

1. First way of claiming your website through Pinterest

First step: Download and install Yoast SEO plugin at your WordPress website. Go to the social section and choose Pinterest.

Second step: After that open new window in the browser and go to Pinterest, in the settings section you can find claim website button. After you select that you can download HTML file or copy meta tag.

Third step: For confirmation through Yoast SEO plugin copy meta tag and go back to your page. Paste the meta tag into this box and then click the blue button to save.

Step Four: Go back to Pinterest window and click Finish button, after that your site should be confirmed.

2. Second way does not require any plugins.

First step: Go to Pinterest, in the settings section you can find claim website button. After you select that you can download HTML file save that file.

Second step: Upload the HTML file to your web server at the root folder – if you upload to a subfolder Pinterest won’t be able to access it

Final step: Go back to Pinterest and click Submit, after that your site should be confirmed.

Verify social media accounts

\nThis adds a benefit of growing other social media accounts, especially if you have a YouTube channel related to your niche.

Set up Pinterest Boards relevant to your niche and keywords that you are targeting

After your account is set up it’s time to add Pinterest Boards that are relevant to your niche. Think what people that relate to your business or blog are searching and how could you name those boards with relevant keywords. As an example, Interentuose is about business, marketing and blogging so those are they base keywords that I am interested in. Here are Internetuose Pinterest boards that I created to drive traffic:

• • Interentuose.com – This board pins are only from this blog, I sub categorized this board the same way that this blog is sub categorized.

• • Marketing Tips

• • Business Tips

• • Blogging Tips

• • Make Money Online

• • Social Media Marketing

• • How to Start a Blog

• • Get Web Traffic

• • Personal Finance Tips

• • SEO Tips

• • Business Motivation

So these are Internetuose Pinterest Boards after you created yours edit each board description with the relevant keywords in mind.

After you created your boards and created descriptions with relevant keywords for each board go to Pinterest search and find about 20 to 50 relevant pins to each board and pin them. After that, all your boards should have from 20 to 50 pins inside.

Remember don’t pin personal pins or create boards that are not related to your business or niche.

Bonus Tip: Make your Pinterest boards visually appealing.

Create cover images for your boards to stand out and make your profile more visually appealing. Best size for a Pinterest board cover photo is 735 x 735 pixels.

Apply for Pinterest Rich Pins for your website or blog.

One of the most important steps in generating traffic from Pinterest is enabling Pinterest Rich Pins for your website or blog.

This tool helps Pinterest identify your blog posts and read data from your website.

Rich pins that lead to your article let Pinterest users know that they can go to the website with the article that is related to the pin. Article Pins include article headline, author and story description.

Setting up those Rich pins isn’t easy but there is an easy way with Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress.

Social > Facebook and make sure that Open Graph metadata is enabled.

Now go to Rich Pins Validator and post the URL for any blog post from your website to the Validator. You only need to validate and click apply for one blog post on your site to enable Rich Pins across your whole domain.

Pinterest will notify you via email if Rich Pins are enabled in about the hour sometimes it takes up to 24 hours.

Create your Pinterest pins

Now when Rich Pins are enabled, your website is claimed and boards are created it’s time to create pins that will generate you Pinterest traffic.

There are a few ways how to create Pinterest pins. I personally use photoshop for my blogs, but a downside of that is that it is expensive and require a lot of time to learn, so this option is basically only for users that are already using photoshop.

Another more user-friendly feature is using Canva. You don’t even need the paid version, the free version is more than enough to create Pinterest pins.

You can even select Pinterest Pin template that is built in Canva. The optimal Pinterest image dimension in 2019 is 735 x 1102 px pixels.

Remember to keep the same theme and design throughout all your pins, it helps with your branding on Pinterest in the long run.

After that create a short pin description that describes the article with the relevant keywords. You can find popular Pinterest keywords in Pinterest search, just enter one keyword and you will find popular related keywords below.

After you created your pins, pin those pins to the relevant boards that you created earlier. You can even create a few pins for the same article.

Also, don’t use images from google and make sure they are not copyrighted you can run in some problems if you use copyrighted images in your pins. There is a lot of free images online or just use your own photos or illustrations.

Follow other Pinterest users in your niche.

Now when your profile shines it’s time to follow others in your niche.

I recommend following everyone in your niche with good profiles and good relevant content.

Give most of your attention to the top players in your niche, that way you can see what they are doing and how fast they are growing.

The small accounts and small blogs are great to follow because usually, it’s easier to make a connection, they tend to follow you back and pin your pins.

Remember not to play Follow – Unfollow game on Pinterest, it usually not ends well and your account will probably get banned from the platform.

Join Pinterest group boards

Pinterest group boards are a valuable tool to build your profile, reach the audience and grow web traffic.

With group boards, your profile is exposed to followers that are still not following you and it helps to build your audience especially when you are just starting out.

The most advanced way to find Pinterest group boards is using Pin Groupie. This site lets you find group boards based on a title and description you can also filter boards in other important metrics too like followers, collaborators, repins, and etc.

After you found a group board that you want to be apart of, follow that board. After that, you will need to contact the owner of that board and ask to be added. Usually, you can find the mail of the owner in the description of the board in other cases you have to do some work.

Other ways to reach group board owners:

1. 1. Message them throughout Pinterest
   2. Go to there website and find contact details
   3. Find them on other Social media sites

Remember don’t join group boards with poor engagement and repin rate also the boards that have fewer followers than you do. You can analyze group boards before joining with Tailwind.

You can sign up for a free Tailwind trial here!

Automate consistent Pinterest Pining

How many pins you should pin depends on the profile. In my experience, in the beginning, it’s best to pin about 30 pins a day and later when you build a following dive down to 5-15 pins a day.

It’s important to pin to only yours but others pins too, especially in the beginning. I recommend repining 2 to 4 pins from other blogs to 1 of yours, especially in the beginning.

Going to Pinterest 5 to 30 times a day is basically impossible and you can not pin all the pins at the same time. Also there are times of the day when people use Pinterest more and you have to pin at those times.

Don’t worry you can automate pinning with Tailwind, it automatically generates the best times of the day based on your profile and pins for you.

And with SmartLoop feature, you can even set your pins to be repinned at certain intervals so all you have to do is set and forget it.

I like that you can see analyze the performance of your pins and profile and see what you are doing wrong. Tailwind also really helps when you need to choose group boards.

You can sign up for a free Tailwind trial here!

Join Tailwind Tribes

Tailwind Tribes is by far my most favorite feature of Tailwind and it’s free for everyone.

You can find tribes related to your niche and join them. Tribes are full of like-minded people who post inside relevant content and you can post too.

The best part is that the majority of tribes ask you to repin one pin from tribe to pin one of your own pins.

Now I usually receive up to 20 repins from one pin posted inside the tribe and that translates to thousands of people reach which translates to traffic to my website, this repin rate happened when I started using the tactic that I cover in the last paragraph of this post.

I had a couple Tailwind accounts and promoted few blogs and these results are not typical, your results depend on: Tailwind Tribes you join, content that you produced, pin design and many other factors. You can find typical Tailwind results in this article.  Either way, Tailwind Tribes is a great tool and I definitely recommend you to use it.

For free you can join 5 Tailwind Tribes and post 30 pins inside them every month.

Bonus tip for Pinterest Marketing

You already know that you need to repin other people content to your boards so repin the right content.

I recommend repping or scheduling the majority of your content from Tailwind Tribes that you are a member of and Group Boards that you are a member too.

This help other bloggers see that you constantly repining their pins and as a thank you, they start to repin your pins too. This works extremely well after a few months of consistent pining.

You can also read the article I wrote about how to use Tailwind for Pinterest marketing, there I talk about Pinterest automation and Tailwind more deeply.