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How To Create A Pinterest Strategy For Bloggers That Grows Your Traffic [Ep. 47]

By Jessie Festa. This episode on Pinterest for travel bloggers is sponsored by Travelpayouts and also contains affiliate links to trusted partners I think you’ll love!

Looking for a Pinterest strategy for bloggers that actually leads to increased traffic to your website?

Well, you’re in luck, as in this episode of The Profitable Travel Blogger Podcast, we’ll be focusing on creating a Pinterest growth strategy that can truly help you grow your blogging business.

By the end of this episode, you’ll understand:

  • How to use Pinterest for blog traffic
  • Tips for shaving time off your Pinterest blog strategy
  • A Pinterest workflow – from creation to sharing
  • How to setup and optimize your Pinterest boards
  • Ways to get more engagement on your Pinterest account
  • And more!

Our special guest for this episode is Kelly Duhigg of Girl With The Passport, who will be sharing all of the above and more.

Table of Contents

A Powerful Pinterest Strategy For Bloggers [Podcast Episode Audio]

Click here to listen on Apple Podcasts/iTunes

Click here to listen on Spotify

Click here to listen on TuneIn

Free Travel Blogger Resource Library

To help you really jumpstart your blogging success, I’ve added 55+ blogging resources like printables, video tutorials, and workbooks into a FREE resource library for travel bloggers.

These resources are meant to help you grow your traffic, community, and income faster and with less overwhelm!

Grow Your Blogging Income With Travelpayouts ($50 Bonus!)

This episode is sponsored by Travelpayouts, the largest affiliate platform designed for travel content creators.

Travelpayouts helps bloggers earn on all types of travel services including flight tickets, accommodation, tours and activities, car rentals, insurance, and many others by connecting over 100 trusted travel brands with over 300,000 content creators globally.

If you’re interested in seeing success with affiliate marketing for travel bloggers, joining this network is a smart move.

Bonus: You can click here and use code “JESSIE24” to get $50 added to your first payout!

Improve Your Pinterest Marketing Strategy With These Helpful Tools

PinGenerator. This tool helps you create and schedule loads of pins instantly. Simply give it a blog post URL, click generate, and it will pull text and photos into your pin templates automatically. Bonus: The tool includes a built-in scheduler!

Canva. This graphic design tool makes it easy to create beautiful click-worthy pins using drag-and-drop Pinterest templates.

Keysearch (use code JESSIEONAJOURNEY for 20% off!). This powerful keyword research tool can help you create content that ranks in Google search.

Tailwind. If you’re trying to grow on Pinterest, Tailwind has many features that can help make this easier, like a smart pin scheduler, pin sharing communities, and advanced Pinterest analytics.

Pinterest strategy for bloggers

How To Create A Pinterest Growth Strategy [Podcast Episode Transcript]

*Note: This is the edited down and paraphrased version of the episode on using Pinterest successfully. For the full episode, listen to the audio version linked above.

As bloggers, one thing we can never get enough of is traffic – especially free traffic that we get to our websites organically without having to pay for ads.

And one of the best ways to increase blog traffic is with Pinterest, a social media platform that is also a visual search engine that allows your content to get seen by people who are truly looking for what you have to share.

The thing is, it takes more than simply setting up a Pinterest account and sharing photos and graphics to see success.

Luckily, our special guest for this episode, Kelly Duhigg of Girl With The Passport, is here to help us create a Pinterest strategy that actually works. She’ll be sharing best practices, a Pinterest content strategy, mistakes to avoid, and more.

By the end, you’ll not only have a Pinterest strategy, but you’ll likely understand how to enjoy social media again!

Before we dive into Pinterest for bloggers, I want to remind you of two free gifts waiting for you:

  • Click here for access to my Travel Blogger Resource Library, which includes 55+ resources for growing and monetizing a blog
  • Click here to join the Travelpayouts affiliate network for free and use code “JESSIE24” have $50 added to your first payout so you can start making money right away

1. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your Pinterest tips! To start, can you tell us more about yourself, your blog, and how you got into Pinterest?

Hi, I’m Kelly, and my blog is Girl With The Passport.

It started off as a solo female travel site and as I progressed as a blogger it quickly morphed into more of a New York City focused travel site.

I really got into Pinterest because I enjoy making graphics. Once I started learning more about SEO and keyword optimization, it was a natural fit to me for me to mix my love of the two and create high-performing pins on Pinterest.

2. Pinterest has changed a lot over the years. What are some of the important things people should know right now if they want to see success, particularly with growing traffic?

Seasonality is definitely important when it comes to seeing success on Pinterest.

Keep in mind that with travel people typically plan ahead. If they’re planning for Valentine’s Day they’re not planning it on Valentine’s day; they’re planning it a few months in advance.

So I think that’s something people really need to consider. I see a lot of people sharing pins for fall foliage at the end of October; however, you should really be releasing that content in June, July, and August to give the pins time to gain traction and momentum.

Additionally, I think what a lot of people do is they hear experts share new trends and best Pinterest practices — and they freak out and think they need to re-work everything.

Don’t.

Instead, I always like to tell people, “Stop. Dive into your analytics, look at your Pinterest account, and look at what’s working and what’s not.”

Then you can go from there. Really, the data is your best friend when it comes to knowing your audience because every Pinterest account is different.

And looking at the data is really a good practice for any social media marketing strategy.

Also, consistency is huge if you’re trying to understand how to use Pinterest for blog traffic. Make sure you’re creating new pins every day and that these pins are relevant to your audience and what your audience is looking for.

You also want to make sure your Pinterest pins are optimized for keywords.

3. Now let’s go back to the beginning for a moment to Pinterest setup. When it comes to setting up or tweaking your Pinterest account, what are some important steps to take?

Along with creating a business account, definitely keyword optimize everything. If you can put a keyword in it, do it. This will be a huge help in growing your traffic and taking your blog full-time.

There are different keyword research tools that you can use for Pinterest, but you can also get away with using the Pinterest search bar and the Pinterest suggestions for free.

I would optimize your pin titles, pin descriptions, your Pinterest board descriptions — and even your profile description.

For example, I’m primarily a New York City and solo female travel blogger. So in my profile description, those two keywords words come up.

Basically, use keywords anywhere and everywhere. It’ll help with your discoverability and making sure that the right audience who is interested in your content is actually finding you.

4. I know many bloggers who do well on Pinterest recommend focusing on seasonal content. I’m curious if you agree with this and, if so, does that mean you don’t pin your blog posts unless they are seasonal?

I definitely use the Pinterest data as my guide. I always try to keep a really good idea of what’s working and what’s not and what my audience is interested in.

So I do a fair amount of evergreen content because I find that certain things that are non-seasonal perform really well; but, I also do a big emphasis on seasonal content.

It’s great when you’re creating your content calendar for the year and you can kind of use that to guide everything, including when you’re going to schedule your seasonally-relevant pins.

And as long as you’re giving yourself enough time and sharing pins a few months ahead of time, you should be able to perform well on Pinterest.

Remember, too, that you can create “fresh pins” — as in, pins with new images — for older blog posts that are seasonal. So if you published a fall travel guide last year, you can create fresh pins for it this year to re-share it on Pinterest again.

Keep in mind, there are certain types of content that perform well on Pinterest, like listicles and bucket list guides. Basically content that answers questions, as most Pinterest users are looking for specific answers to questions.

5. Do you create a specific social content plan for Pinterest? If so, are there any tools or resources you use to create it?

I generally use SEO as my primary content creation guide. So I’ll find relevant keywords that are related to my blog niche — you can learn how to niche down here — and create content around those.

Additionally, I consider whether the content will perform well on Pinterest. A lot of my travel blog post topics will, because the type of content I create is the type of content that naturally performs well on Pinterest.

It’s great when a post performs well on both so I can get two solid traffic sources for the same article.

6. What does your workflow look like for sharing a new blog post on Pinterest?

Essentially what I’ll do is I’ll create a blog post or update an old blog post and then I’ll make sure to create at least two pins.

You can create as many or as few as you want, and there are a bunch of plugins that’ll actually hide the pins on your your post. This way, you can make sure that your site is still performing at optimum speed.

From there, I’ll pin the pins to Pinterest.

One best practice is to pin directly from your blog post so that Pinterest attributes it to your site. You’ll definitely want to add this step to your blog post promotion checklist.

I recommend pinning to your most relevant board first, as this is a big indicator for Pinterest SEO. This way, Pinterest sees exactly what the pin is about and can show it to the right people.

So if I have a New York City travel guide pin, I’ll pin to my New York City board first, then New York State, then my USA group boards, and so on. This is why you’ll also want to focus on creating niche boards related to your blog brand and what you write about.

Add this strategy to your blogging workflow to help grow your traffic with Pinterest!

7. How often do you recommend pinning, and do you schedule these pins or manually pin them?

I do a bit bit of both. To be perfectly honest, for my clients as well as my own accounts I haven’t really seen a big difference, so whatever works best for you is fine.

Typically, I recommend that people do at least three pins per day.

Also, I suggest that you create new pins and that they’re on different topics so that they’re not directly competing with each other.

I’ve seen people recommend doing as many as 10-20 new pins a day, but really I’m not sure how anyone has time to do this.

But again, it really just depends on your goals, where your Pinterest account is at now, and how quickly you want your account to grow once you’ve created those pins.

I personally manually repin mine immediately just because I’m there and it’s easy. I haven’t found a huge difference in terms of traffic whether you pin manually or you have a Tailwind Pinterest strategy and schedule it via their smart scheduler.

8. What are some common mistakes you see bloggers on Pinterest making that can hurt their chances of seeing success?

I often see people create Pinterest boards for topics they don’t have content on.

For instance, I write predominantly about New York City. Therefore, it wouldn’t make sense for me to create an Australia board. I’ve never been there and I don’t write about it.

Instead, I’d create boards for things like the boroughts — Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, The Bronx, etc.

If you have boards you can’t pin to, don’t be afraid to delete them. Do it slowly to make sure you don’t accidently delete anything important, but don’t be afraid to simplify and strip your Pinterest profile down to make sure you’re attracting the right audience to your account.

Because if you’re not creating content on a topic, then it doesn’t belong on your profile.

9. Thank you so much for sharing this helpful Pinterest advice! Before we sign off, can you let everyone know where they can find you?

Alright, now I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you feel inspired and empowered to create a Pinterest strategy that can help you grow your blog traffic and income.

Don’t forget to grab access to the free travel blogging resource library. There are a ton of resources in there on growing your community and increasing your blogging profits.

I’d also like to thank our sponsor, Travelpayouts, for helping to make this episode possible. Remember, you can click here to join their affiliate network and use code “JESSIE24” get $50 on top of your first payout so you can start monetizing right away.

And of course, make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes sharing these bite-sized strategies for bloggers who want to turn their blogs into profitable full-time businesses.

Happy blogging!

Grow Your Social Media Channels With These Helpful Past Episodes:

How To Grow Your TikTok Account & Make Money As A Blogger

How To Grow & Monetize A Facebook Group As A Blogger

How To Grow & Monetize Your Blog With LinkedIn

Why You Need A Drone & How It Can Help You Grow Your Blog

A Streamlined Workflow For Organizing Your Blogger To-Do List

9 Clever Ways To Increase Blog Traffic & Get Blog Followers

The Ultimate Guide To Twitter For Bloggers

7-Step Blog Post Promotion Checklist (Trello Board Included!)

How To Enjoy Social Media – Growth Strategy Included

How To Be Comfortable In Front Of A Camera

How To Find Niche Keywords That Drive Traffic With Competitor Research

Click here for all profitable blogging podcast episodes.

 

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What Pinterest for travel bloggers tips would you add?