Pinterest is the New Black

Lately I've been focusing on building my following on Pinterest. If I enter group giveaways, I try and make sure that Pinterest is one of my follow links. When I first started blogging, I didn't care much about Pinterest, or about building a following on there. But as I started getting deeper into Saturday Sessions, graphic design, weight loss, sports tutorials and even randomly saw my pins being repinned by people who didn't even follow me, I realized how beneficial Pinterest could be to a blogger. 

Then I realized, wow, I have lots of pins that I thought were beautiful and/or helpful but were never getting repinned. So here are some of my tips I've learned through trial and error on how to maximize your Pinterest account.

The majority of my images are wider rather than taller, because that is what looks best on the blog. I try to remember to have the image on the post that I want pinned to be taller rather than wider. 

For example, when I first started doing Saturday Sessions, I used this as the image for Pinterest...

Not only does that get lost because it is so tiny in the Pinterest feed, all you see is Saturday Sessions, you can't really focus on what the tutorial is. 

Now compare this image, which jumps out on the Pinterest feed and you know exactly what the tutorial is for.....

  

Pretty big difference right?

This is probably pretty obvious after reading the first tip. But don't forget to make an image for each post that you want pinned. Otherwise, if people want to pin your post, they're likely to pin something random and out of your control. Someone once pinned a selfie I had on the sidebar, not exactly what I had in mind.

I shake my head at the screen when I see a full recipe listed in the description of a pin. Come on, man! Don't give it all away. You want them to click to your site, right? Not have everything they need right there in Pinterest. That isn't doing you any good...

What do you offer your readers? A good laugh, tutorials, fashion? Use that to your advantage and utilize Pinterest over every other social media platform. People follow you via Twitter and Bloglovin, but you actually reach even more people through Pinterest. Having 1,000 followers on Pinterest is going to go 8x further than having 1,000 followers on Twitter. I just made that number up, but I think it is probably pretty accurate.

Sometimes on Pinterest, you need to focus on the excitement of being secretly Pinterest famous! For example, the pin below has been repinned thousands upon thousands of times. Guess what, that isn't helping me at all. I'm not getting extra traffic because no one is going to click this image, because there is no need to visit the website it came from. But I'll just settle on knowing that I'm the one who made this. Go me.

On the flip side, just because a pin isn't being repinned much, doesn't mean you aren't getting a whole lot of traffic from it. For example, the pin below from my post about sorority recruitment rarely gets repinned, but I actually get a lot of traffic to this post from Pinterest.

Let's think about that Sorority Recruitment post's pin again. Recruitment happens twice a year right? It all depends on which school you go to. Some schools do recruitment in August, some in January. This post originally was published in August, but it is always going to be a good idea for me to go back and repin this image again the following January, and even again the next August! 

I am not a fan of the pin it button that blocks the entire image. But I am a fan of adding a pin it button that is small, subtle and still allows you to see the full image. Pins from my site have quadrupled since I added the pin it buttons to my images. Highly recommend!

So if you have a BRILLIANT post, go back and slap an image on that thing, pin it and start getting some traffic to your old posts. And don't forget to check out Helene's Saturday Session guest post from July to see even more tips! 

And finally, remember you get out what you put in to blogging. Take the 5 minutes of extra time to size each of your pictures properly, take the time to design a pin specifically showcasing what your post is about, go back from time to time and repin your old stuff! Pimp that blog of yours out for the world to see! 

What tips would you add to my list?
Oh, and won't you come Pin! We're open!