Pin Your Way to Popularity: How to Generate Traffic with Pinterest

The traffic numbers generated by Pinterest have marketers buzzing and brands in a tizzy to jump on board and get their content on boards (Pinterest boards, that is) before they miss out on the latest social media trend.

Dubbed “digital hoarding”, Pinterest is exactly as it sounds: pinning things that interest you. Now the fastest growing traffic source, brands and bloggers alike are looking for ways to leverage this new favorite platform to drive traffic and business.

7 Ways to Pin Your Way to Popularity

#1: Tune In – As with any social media platform, the key to being successful at Pinterest is understanding the local culture. Follow the golden rule of the web and lurk before you leap. Pay attention to Popular topics.

Research by RJ Metrics shows that Home, Arts & Crafts, Style & Fashion, Food and Inspiration & Education are the most popular topics. Pick the popular topics that intersect with your content and focus your posts and pins there.

#2: Originate Pins – Pinterest works as a virtual word-of-mouth chain for popular things. When you repin a pin on Pinterest, it shows as being repinned via another user for one pin only.

If, however, you pin from the original source, the link back to you is maintained through all the iterations of pinning, making your profile visible to more of your fellow pinners who appreciate your topic.

#3: Be Pin Friendly – The latest viral interest in Pinterest merely demonstrates a shift across all of social media toward visual sharing. Sites with highly appealing visual design will win out over hum-drum graphics.

Make your posts pin-friendly by integrating interesting (and pinnable) graphics and add a Pinterest share button to your other social sharing widgets. If you are worried about your beautiful photos getting stolen, add a simple watermark to brand it as yours.

#4: Find and Follow Fans – Use the Pinterest source function to see all the pins to your site (http://pinterest.com/source/URL). Make sure to LIKE and comment on pins to your site to up their popularity.

But more importantly, engage with and follow the people who pinned them. Think of it as a really simple way to find and interact with your best fans – after all, they took the time to pin or repin something from your site!

#5: Be Active – Don’t always pin your own stuff – it’s looked upon as poor social etiquette just as only tweeting links back to your site is considered spammy. Instead draw attention to your pins to your site by maintaining an active board around it.

Pin and promote related content around the pins to your site because more often than not, people will visit your board after repinning an interesting pin from the same category.

#6: Organize Your Boards – Create narrow categories for each board and only post content that fits with the board because while some people will choose to follow you (and therefore, every board you create), others will opt to follow individual boards.

For example, I started pinning all recipes to Yummy Stuff, but now I have reorganized into even more focused categories, like Yummy Stuff: Baking and Yummy Stuff: Crockpot Cooking, to better enable fellow pinners to search through my boards and choose to follow by category.

#7: Entice with Descriptions – Consider your pin descriptions mini advertisements for whatever you are pinning. Get creative and think of it from the perspective of the people who see your pin.

For example, jazz up a simple recipe title with a testimonial for why you love the recipe. “This recipe is so simple to make – it only takes 15 minutes from start to finish!”

Do you love, Love, LOVE Pinterest? Me too! Let’s become Pin-Pals! Connect with me on Pinterest!