Pinterest Shares Photos and Attracts Blog Visitors

7 Replies Tammi Kibler

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I have not had a lot of experience with Pinterest yet, but one night last week, I put up a bulletin board with photos from recipes on my quinoa blog, and I was impressed with the initial response. I received about a dozen email notifications within minutes. New people were following me or my quinoa recipe board; pinners were repinning my photos.
Referal traffic down to PinterestThe next day, my analytics showed nineteen new visitors to my blog from Pinterest. Mind you, all I did was “pin” the photos, I didn’t go out looking for followers or asking for people to like me.

I haven’t figured out how to fully exploit this yet. Pinterest is a very photo-oriented social media sharing site, where each photo is also a link back to an original blog post or web page.

Recipe Blogs on Pinterest

For a cooking blog, it is a no brainer. Pin a photo of each recipe and your board looks like this. (You can click on the photo to see how this looks on the site.)

An example of an online pinboardNotice that each photo bears the domain name, great for branding.

I imagine any blog could benefit from setting up a board for its blog posts. You could even create category boards if you wanted to.

Pinning is very easy. You can click and drag a Pin It icon to put in your bookmarks toolbar.

When you see a post you want to pin:

  • Highlight and copy the text you will associate with the photo.
  • Then click Pin It icon in your bookmark toolbar.

In the window that pops up:

  • Choose the exact image you want;
  • Choose the correct board;
  • Verify text is already auto-filled with the text you copied. If not you will have to fill it in.

I set up my board in about fifteen minutes. Now that it is in place, I can add pinning to the list of promotional tasks I will do for each new blog post.

Pinterest is still in beta and requires an invitation to join. If you would like to test it for organizing your favorite visuals on the web or promoting your blog, please feel to ask in the comments. I will send a Pinterest invite to the email you use to comment.

If you have experience using Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog, please comment below and let us know whether you feel it adds value.

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7 thoughts on “Pinterest Shares Photos and Attracts Blog Visitors”

  1. Bethany@Ninja 1100 blender

    I agree there’s quite a bit of potential. I recently took on my mom as a partner in our site and we’ve started the move into food blogging, and I’ve already noticed a difference. In fact, one of my other sites I happened to notice I got 50 visits in the last month from Pinterest. There’s a ton of potential on that site to anyone whose content is well represented in photos, like photography, apparel, food, etc. Naturally, your photography skills are also important, since that’s really what sells it. I’ve been on Pinterest only a few weeks now and I am really enjoying it a lot. I’ve got a cookie dough ice cream (as in, ice cream that tastes like cookie dough, not vanilla with cookie dough in it) recipe I’m working on and I bet it’ll be all over Pinterest when it’s done 🙂

    Reply
    • Christopher (admin team)

      Hi Bethany, it’s great to here that you too see there is potential in image sharing sites like Pinterest.

      I like the sound of your cookie dough ice cream, I think I may have to make that 😉

      Thanks for your comment, welcome to the community!
      Christopher – Admin Team

      Reply
    • Tammi Kibler@HowDoYouCookQuinoa

      Hi Bethany,

      I can’t wait to see those ice cream photos. Can you share a link to one of your boards so I can follow you on Pinterest.

      I think Pinterest has pushed content creators toward a tipping point where photos will be as important as headlines online. Blogs of any kind that can take advantage of a good graphic containing the right text to draw a click will succeed on Pinterest and in streams like Google+ and Facebook timeline that are de-emphasizing text headlines in favor of images.

      Thanks for reading and commenting, Bethany. I tried to comment on your coffee post but it won’t let me check the “Confirm you are not spammer” box or the “subscribe” box.

      I pinned the recipe, so I will find my way back again.

      Cheers!

      Reply
  3. Dominic@ComputerTooSlow

    Pinterest can really help drive some traffic if you are in the correct niches. Recipes (like you stated), products, and even books are a few of the things I have really noticed on Pinterest. I installed the pin-it button on a site (big recipe site) I help out with and they are seeing thousands of visits from Pinterest. So, the potential is definitely there. It will be interesting to see if they keep growing or if they level off soon.

    Reply

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