The Only Tools You Need To Dominate On Pinterest (And Drive Thousands Of Visitors A Month)
Ah, Pinterest.
You probably keep hearing about this visual search engine every week, don’t you?
What’s so special about a bookmarking site where you save recipes, tutorials, blog posts and more?
Well, besides the fact that some consider Pinterest the second largest search engine next to Google, and that Pinterest can bring in 3x more traffic than any other social platform, or that you can even seriously grow your email list with Pinterest – it’s just super easy to dominate on this social platform!
How to drive traffic to your new blog
Earlier this year I started a new blog in a new niche to help moms become mompreneurs. Since I’m a mom with twins and work at home as a freelance writer, I wanted this blog to help other moms work towards building their blog and eventually developing a product.
Four months ago I started my journey to grow my blog’s traffic, income, and followers and share reports on my progress with my readers.
The main way visitors find my blog is via Pinterest. It’s my number one source of traffic by a long shot.
And this is no accident. I decided that my promotion strategy would focus on using Pinterest to drive traffic and gain subscribers.
But, how do you do this, and more importantly, what tools do you need to be successful on Pinterest?
Because if you’re thinking that you need a ton of tools to grow your traffic with Pinterest, you’re wrong.
You only really need four tools (and most are free). That’s why Pinterest is easy for new bloggers to use as their source of social traffic.
Let’s dive in and learn about the only tools you need to dominate on Pinterest.
1. Tailwind / Scheduling tools
Tailwind is a popular scheduling tool for Pinterest. It equips you with analytics, a reporting system and advises you about the ideal times to schedule your pins.
So, there’s no guessing when your target audience will be on Pinterest. By using these suggested times, you know your pins will reach more people and get your blog more exposure.
Tailwind’s user interface is easy to learn and comes with a video tutorial to help you start scheduling your pins.
The two main sections you need to be aware of are your schedule, which shows your time slots, and your scheduled pins, which is a drag and drop system.
In your schedule, the dotted time slots are suggestions from Tailwind – they turn green when you select them – while the gray ones are the times you’ve input.
When you view your scheduled pins, you can use the drag and drop system to move your pins to different time slots.
You can schedule your pins from your blog or other blogs using a browser extension, or you can repin directly from Pinterest.
Tailwind offers a free trial, which allows you to schedule your first 100 pins for free.
One unique thing to note about Tailwind is that, unlike other automation tools, Pinterest has officially approved this tool.
Tailwind, along with Buffer and a few other tools, are considered official Pinterest Marketing Developer Partners for Content Publishing.
As mentioned, other scheduling apps include Buffer and BoardBooster.
Buffer offers Pinterest scheduling with their Awesome plan for $10 a month. They also have a seven-day free trial to test out their user interface and analytics.
If you use other platforms to promote your blog, Buffer may be your best choice since you can schedule your posts to multiple platforms including LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Facebook groups.
One last Pinterest scheduling app that’s also popular is BoardBooster. They aren’t on Pinterest’s approved marketing tools list, but are extremely popular nonetheless. They offer your first 100 scheduled pins free and for $5 per month you can schedule 500 pins.
BoardBooster works by creating secret boards on your Pinterest profile. When you have a secret board, nobody else can see it or pin to it.
You collect pins on these secret boards and BoardBooster pins them to the actual board. For example, if one of your boards is called Blogging Tips, BoardBooster creates a secret board called ‘-Blogging Tips’.
You pin to the secret -Blogging Tips board and BoardBooster schedules it to the Blogging Tips actual board.
One neat feature of BoardBooster that Tailwind and Buffer don’t offer is the ability to loop your pins.
BoardBooster will revive your oldest pins by repinning them to the same board. You don’t need to worry about duplicates either; BoardBooster automatically deletes the pin with the least number of repins within a week.
Price: $9.99/month when you pay annually
2. Canva
Canva makes new bloggers look like professional graphic designers. You can produce professional-looking pin images with Canva’s free tool.
There are over 1 million images and graphics to choose from, and thousands of templates and free icons to use. You can also use your own images, which is great if you have stock photos already or you want to use your logo on your pin images.
Canva uses a drag and drop approach, which makes it easy to size your image and move your fonts, icons, shapes and text boxes around.
To get started, you can choose a social media template or you can choose custom dimensions. Personally, I set my pin image size to 800 by 1422 pixels.
Next, either choose one of Canva’s images or upload one of your own. After you drag the image on top of the canvas, you can easily resize the image to fit.
Next, add your text and there you go!
If you need help, Canva offers a library full of tutorials to help you learn all about their features.
Another tool to help you create pin images is Pablo, from Buffer. It’s a really easy way to make Pinterest images. They offer free images and fonts to choose from and sizing is a cinch – just click on the Pinterest icon and your image automatically resizes to the correct social media image size.
Once done, you can share it directly to your social media platform, or download it for later use.
Price: Free
3. PinFollow
Let’s face it:
You want to grow your social media followers, not just your blog. Having a lot of followers shows influence, credibility and popularity.
And on Pinterest, it’s no different. Pinners view your profile and pay attention to your numbers.
But, when you’re starting out, it’s hard to gain followers. So, what do you naturally do?
You start following other pinners in the hope that they will follow you back. But, some won’t and using PinFollow easily helps you find out which pinners aren’t following you back.
If you want, you can unfollow those that don’t follow you right from PinFollow. Just be careful not to mass unfollow or follow pinners as this is considered rude and unethical and can get your Pinterest account suspended.
By unfollowing some pinners that aren’t following your back, you pare down your list and can start to build a tribe of loyal followers.
Price: Free
4. PinGroupie
Want to know the best way to grow your blog with Pinterest? Group boards.
Group boards typically have a larger following and can help get your pins seen by a new audience.
But, how do you find these group boards on Pinterest?
A free tool you can use is PinGroupie. There are over thirty categories to choose from, or if your niche isn’t represented, you can search for it under Description.
PinGroupie gives you the number of pins, collaborators, and followers for each group board to help you decide if the board is worth joining.
Typically, more collaborators mean you can pin more often – depending on the board’s rules – and more followers mean your pins will reach more people.
Once you’ve found a group board you want to join, you can either email the owner of the group board and request to join or you can comment on a recent pin from the owner asking to join.
Usually, the description of the group board will tell you how to join. For example, Andrea Beltrami’s group board tells pinners that they need to follow her and then email her your request.
Price: Free
Wrapping it up
Right now is the best time to tap into the power of Pinterest to grow your blog. No longer is it just a playground paradise for food or lifestyle bloggers. Content marketing bloggers, mom bloggers, work at home bloggers and more can dominate on this platform.
By using Tailwind to schedule your pins, your time is freed up to work on the important things like content creation. Canva helps you create professional looking pin graphics in minutes and it’s easy to learn, even if you’re completely new to graphic design.
If follower counts and social proof is your thing, then PinFollow can help you grow your true following of loyal pinners. And finally, to really dominate on Pinterest, you have to join group boards and PinGroupie can help you find the best boards to join.
Over to you – what tools do you find have the biggest impact on growing your blog on Pinterest?
The post The Only Tools You Need To Dominate On Pinterest (And Drive Thousands Of Visitors A Month) appeared first on Blogging Wizard.
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