Do you love pretty pictures? Are you always in need of a great recipe? Do you want to have all your tutorials saved together in one place? What about clothing ideas and inspirational quotes? You know where you can find all of these and more, don’t you? Pinterest. We are excited to focus on this fast-growing social media network for our forth day of Blogtober.
Blogtober: Pinterest
Pinterest is my number 1 traffic referrer. If something were to happen, and Pinterest disappeared, I’d be quite the unhappy blogger. While it’s never a good idea to rely on one social media network to bring traffic to your blog, it’s smart to nurture the relationship you have.
Tips For Using Pinterest
- Pin more: My best advice is to pin way more than what you’re doing. If you reply and tell me you’re already pinning 100 times a day, I’ll still probably say to pin more. 😉 I grew very quickly when I was pinning heavily during the evening hours with beautiful images like food, weddings, and parties.
- Clear and bright photos are key! Just like with Instagram, when you repin or share your own work, they need to be vibrant images. For Pinterest, vertical images are best. They need to be large, bright, and clear. I recommend at least 700 pixels wide by 1000 long.
- Skip timely pins. The worst things to pin on Pinterest? Giveaways, sales, pictures of your family (unless it’s like a photography tip post or maybe even a travel tip guide). They are not relevant or highly pinnable images.
- What does your audience want to see? Pin THAT. Grow your following so that when you share your own content, you have cultivated a captive audience.
- When does your audience want to see it? I have found that early mornings or late nights are best along with Saturday and Sunday mornings. When is your audience awake and online? Or, when are they scrolling through their phone at a soccer match or while catching up on Hulu?
For more tips, check out all of our posts about Pinterest.
Link Up To Grow Your Pinterest Following
Link up your Pinterest profile below, and follow five new people. After you follow, repin, leave a comment, or like at least one of their pins.
What is your best Pinterest tip?
Share it with us in the comments, or on twitter using #SITSBlogging!
Want to catch up with all the fun we have been having this week?
Check out all of our other Blogtober posts:
- Blogtober: Let’s Get Social With Pinterest - Oct 23, 2014
- Blogtober: Let’s Get Social With Instagram - Oct 21, 2014
- Let’s Get Social With Our Blogtober Challenge - Oct 13, 2014
- How To Make Money Online With Google Adsense - Sep 18, 2014
- How To Take Great Pictures With Your Point And Shoot Camera - Aug 6, 2014
I’ve been waiting for this one as I am so excited to find new blog friends on Pinterest! Thanks for another great link-up! I, too, find that the majority of my traffic comes from Pinterest, and my highest repins received are when I pin on Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday morning, and Sunday morning. LOVE Pinterest and look forward to connecting with more SITS sistahs there!
Oh, and I’m #338 on today’s link-up! 🙂
Question for you all……when you talk about pinning is that original pins or also re-pins??
Pin both! Just remember the 80/20 rules is good for all social networks. 80% others, 20% yours.
Thank you. I love re-pinning:)
I think the tip of pinning vertical images is fantastic! I still see so many of my fellow bloggers creating those long horizontal images for their blog posts. Those come out super tiny on Pinterest. Great piece!
Thanks for all the great tips today on Pinterest! I thought I knew everything there was to know, but I learned a couple of new things today!
Hi Ladies – Looking forward to following a lot of you today. I am #235 and I have a question. How do you place your name with an “@” sign after the Blog. The only thing displayed was my blog name. Thank you all for your help!!
Cheryl, do you mean when you write your name in the link-up tool? I just write “Marlynn @UrbanBlissLife” in the “NAME” field. Or do you mean in another location?
Marlynn – Thank you! Yep that is exactly what I was referring to. Okay, so the next time I type my name followed by the @ sign and the my blog. You are so kind. I appreciate your response!
Cheri xo
Yay for Pinterest! I am trying to improve our page so much! I love Pinterest personally so doing one for my blog is AWESOME! I am going to follow all, I am #285 so here we go!
I love group boards. I always seem to get a lot of pins when I pin to group boards. I also think great quotes (inspirational/motivational) alone with a beautiful picture are highly pinnable. Great party. Thanks for hosting!
Awesome tips! I definitely need to focus more time on Pinterest. I’m still trying to alphabetize my boards, lol. Thanks for sharing! 😉
Great tips! I’m #261. I love Pinterest so I am going to follow EVERYONE before me!!! So fun!
One thing I’ve recently learned but haven’t put into action yet is to really utilize group boards for the topics that you blog about. Its a group of people you arleady know are interested in your topic, making it likely they will re-pin and/or visit your post.
Pin things that you actually want to pin – chances are that if you find it worth pinning, someone will find it worth repinning! Also definitely *don’t* only pin stuff from your own blog and definitely *do* take advantage of the ability to create specific boards.
I have a general social media question … I use social media for Berkshire Family Focus and Renaissance Mom … I’ve been participating in Blogtober, but I’m wondering how much time should be dedicated to social media and how to fit it all in (recommendations). I feel like besides running my site, including all these social media sites is like running 10 other websites. Any one have any comments or suggestions?
Kelly
I can relate to your issue. I try to limit the amount of social media I participate in. I would rather participate in a few social sites well vs. many social sites but not keeping up. I also started with pinterest and didn’t join facebook until I was comfortable with that, then when I finally felt ok with facebook and just this past week joined twitter and who knows I might be done after that or who knows (twitter is a bit overwhelming right now). Plus I never forget to engage on websites thru comments or contact pages. But as someone else once said to me it is ok to take few days off or even a day, there is no social media police…lol.
I definitely need to pin more, but the things I have pinned are consistently where a majority of my traffic come from!
Where is the linky ? I pinterest a lot about ideas for many things but I also pin others pins on author and books ! I have a good following but not huge yet.
Linda Finn
Great pinning tips. This last week since I changed my own content images to pin I’ve gotten more traffic from pinterest. I have learned so much!! Here I am thinking pinning too much was bad. I cleaned up my boards and working on fixing names and things.
Pinterest has been one of the more challenging social networking platforms for me. These tips are very helpful!
Wow. I really don’t Pin enough — maybe a couple of my own pins per day and then share many others. I need to get a move on it. Thank you to my wonderful SITS Girls.
And I thought I was pinning too much yesterday. hihihi
Thanks for the giveaway pin tip. 😉
My favorite! I will follow as many as I can but I will also follow back anyone from here. I’m #98 on the list. 🙂
Does anyone have advice on how to best arrange your boards? I had read that having your own blog board first, followed by seasonal/holiday boards on the first row is best. Do you agree with this or not? How do arrange your Pinterest boards? Thanks 🙂
I agree! I then have boards for my main topics of my blog (food, parties, Blogging) in the next row.
Followed everyone up until #81. 🙂 Will be back later to follow of the rest.
I need all the help I can get with Pinterest. I need to get better at pinning! I find I enjoy looking at other peoples pins rather than pinning my own and growing my following. Thanks for the tips xo
Pinterest brings me 85% of my traffic so I have really worked hard to improve my photography (especially food) and pinnable images using PicMonkey. Once you get the hang of it, it’s not so hard. I have found it helps to “batch” my work, so looking ahead at my posts for the week, I do all my photo editing and creating graphics in one session, instead of bouncing around from task to task. That way it doesn’t take up so much time.
Thanks for these link-ups every day! They’re great 🙂
Gina – Doing “batch” work is such a great idea. I’m going to start doing that. Thanks for the tip!
Thank you for the tips. I know that I am not pinning enough, it’s one platform that I have not been using to the full extend. I will have to dedicate a few hours a week to pinning.