Are You Frustrated From Wasting Your Time With Pinterest? Here’s What To Do

Nearly every blogger touts Pinterest as their number one source of traffic, but it just doesn’t work for you. You are lucky to get a handful of pageviews from the platform. You are frustrated because you’ve tried everything and you aren’t getting results! What are you doing wrong?

The good news is that Pinterest can work for you too. In this post, I’m going to discuss what you can do to correct your Pinterest issues and finally get results that make Pinterest marketing worth the time and effort.

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In order to fix your Pinterest woes, you need to go back to the foundation of your account. This will ensure that you are getting off on the right foot. Once you have your account optimized, you will be able to use an effective Pinterest strategy to get the results your blog needs.

Convert Your Account to a Business Account

If you haven’t already, be sure that your Pinterest account is set up as a business account. To get the most out of Pinterest, you will need to do this.

In order to convert your Pinterest account from a personal account to a business account, click on the “Settings” button as seen below (the three dots). Then click on “Edit Settings” in the drop-down menu.

Scroll down until you get to the section of your profile that says, “Claim Your Website” or click on the left menu item of that name. You will see the following information on your screen.

As you can tell from what is written, you will gain access to a business account by claiming your website as yours. Enter your website address, then click “Claim Website.” You see a pop-up menu that says, “Pick Claim Option.” I always choose “Add HTML tag.”

Copy the tag that is given and navigate to your blog’s WordPress dashboard. If you don’t have the “Insert Headers and Footers” plugin, download it now and return to the dashboard when installation and activation are complete.

Now that you have the plugin, click on “Settings” menu in the dashboard, then click on “Insert Headers and Footers” and paste the code provided by Pinterest in the box under the box labeled “Scripts In Header.”

Click save. If your website pops up a warning, you may need to whitelist the action. To do this, simply check the box and click the button to whitelist and refresh the page.

Once you have finished this step, go back to Pinterest and click the “Next” button. You will now see a box that tells you that your site will be verified within 24 hours.

Once 24 hours have elapsed or you have received your email, you will have access to a business profile. If for any reason this doesn’t work, contact Pinterest support.[yuzo_related]

Enable Rich Pins

Rich pins embed additional information into your pins and help you Pinterest track your pins. It is important to enable rich pins in order for you to develop an effective Pinterest strategy.

In her post, “How to Enable Rich Pins on Pinterest,” blogger Meg Fulton takes you through the process to enable rich pins for your blog. Once you have a Pinterest business account, it is quite simple, with only a few exceptions.

Before you follow the tutorial, make sure that you have Yoast SEO installed. This plugin will make it incredibly simple to validate your account. Most likely, the steps in the above post will work to validate your rich pins.

Unfortunately, there can be a validator error. My previous blog, One Day to Tomorrow was super easy to validate through Pinterest. When it came to validating this blog, I could not validate the account. I eventually had to complete the process manually.

If that’s above your technical knowledge, that’s okay. You can still do it. Gina of The Professional Woman Blog wrote a great post on how to fix this issue. If you do come across it, check out her post, “How to Fix a Pinterest Rich Pin Error.”

Branding Your Account

Now that you have enabled rich pins, you need to focus on branding your Pinterest account. This means using the same images on your Pinterest profile that you use on your website and other social media profiles.

This builds continuity in your brand and boosts viewer confidence. It is a small step with a large impact on any online business. Personally, I include my logo as my Pinterest profile picture, but you can use your headshot from your blog as well, this is your preference.

Establishing a brand is important to your business’s success on Pinterest. Establish who you are early on. You will need your audience to recognize your content at a glance. If they already know and like your work, they will be more likely to read another blog post from you. In order for this to happen, they have to recognize it as yours.

Branding is important on every platform, but especially on Pinterest.

Your Profile Description

You have 160 characters or less to write a profile description that lets your audience know who you are and what your blog is about. This is a daunting task. Be sure to include keywords in your profile that your target audience would be searching for.

In my profile, I state, “I help other bloggers become entrepreneurs and operate a successful blog.” and add a few keywords separated by vertical bars and my web address. You can shorten your web address if you need to stay under your character limit.

To draft your description, write down keywords that your ideal audience would search for. Underline or highlight the three most important. Now try to write a sentence using those keywords. If you can’t, list them following your sentence.

For example, a single mom of boys may write, “Helping single moms raise healthy, happy boys in a high tech world. Boy Mom | Raising Boys | Single Mom | singleboymom.com” I don’t know if there is a singleboymom.com out there, but if she had a Pinterest description, it should be similar to this one.

Notice, it has keywords other single moms would use. Helping single moms, happy boys, boy mom, and raising boys are keywords that are included in the description. The web address is also mentioned. This way, people checking out her profile will be able to copy and paste the web address to visit her blog directly.

It may take a few tries, but try to get the most out of your Pinterest profile description.

Board Names

It’s okay to title a board on your personal Pinterest account, “LOL” or “Life Goals,” but for your business account, you should make the board names more targeted and generic so that they’re easier to find in search results.

Your niche will determine what you should name your boards. For instance, the “Single Boy Mom” should have boards labeled “Fast, Healthy Snacks” instead of “Yummy!” This is not only more professional, it shows up better in Pinterest search results.

Also, the boards you pin your blog posts to will influence the search results of your Pin. If you pin your newest pin to your “Yummy!” board, it will get lumped in with other posts about yummy things. “Fast, Healthy Snacks” defines the pin more and will allow Pinterest to categorize it more accurately.

The board itself will also show up better under search results. This allows your target audience to find your boards and posts quickly and easily.

As with any description, your board names need to include the keywords for the topic of pins you will be posting to it. Choose your keywords wisely.

Board Covers

Part of branding your Pinterest account is including board covers for each of your branded boards. To do this, I use Canva to create square images for each individual board. I make sure to use my brand fonts and colors on my images and include my website/logo on each board cover image.

Once you have created board covers, you will need to upload them to Pinterest manually and individually unless you embed them in pages on your blog. To do this, click on the plus sign next to the Pinterest search bar to add your image.

Once you see the pop-up screen, upload your image and use the web address of the image’s destination page. This could be a category page or your homepage.

Once you upload the image, you will be taken to the screen that allows you to pin the image to a board. Before you pin the image to its board, be sure to include a description of the pin that includes keywords for the board and image. You can also use hashtags on these images as they are technically pins.

Pin the image to the appropriate board, then go to your Pinterest Profile. Click on the “Boards” tab, then scroll down until you see the board. Once you locate it, hover over the board images and a little ink pen shape will appear beneath and to the right of the images. This is your edit button. Click it.

Now you will see the board’s name, description, and category. The fourth item is your board’s cover image. Click the “Change” button and use the right and left arrows to select the image you wish to use as the cover. If you don’t see your cover image, return to the page that lists your boards and refresh it and try again.

Note: I’m not sure why it does this, but if you try to change the cover from within the board, it formats it poorly and it doesn’t display properly. This causes your boards to look “off” on the Pinterest app and when someone is browsing your boards.

Board Descriptions

Your board descriptions are like your profile description. They require keywords to attract your target audience. Board descriptions can be changed either from the “Boards” tab page or from within the board’s page.

Since you have already written several descriptions, I won’t go into too much detail here. Just remember that each board needs to include a description with lots of keywords to attract your target audience.

Add Pin Buttons to Your Blog

If you don’t have easily accessible Pin Buttons, no one will pin your posts. The more people that pin your images, the more traffic you will receive.

I recently added and changed the Pin buttons on my blog and it seems to be improving my pageviews and increasing my blog’s activity on Pinterest. In just a few days, pins from my blog had jumped 32%. That’s a huge improvement for such a small change.

First, I changed my main social share plug-in from AddToAny Share Buttons to Social Warfare by Warfare Plugins. I chose to add buttons to the top and bottom of my posts, as well as to keep them visible and anchored to the bottom of the browser as you scroll.

That way, the buttons are always at the reader’s fingertips and they don’t have to search for them. Making this step easy for them means that your readers are more likely to follow through with the pin.

I also added the jQuery Pin It Button for Images by Marcin Skrzypiec. This plugin adds a pin button to the images on my blog when a person hovers over the image. It turns pinning an image into a one-click action, further increasing the number of pins your post receives.

Create Pinterest Optimized Images

Your blog needs images that perform well on Pinterest. That means you should use vertical images in your post and embed additional hidden images in the post as well. In her guest post, “A Super Simple Pinning Strategy that Will Cut Your Pinning Time in Half,” Jenna Arvidson suggests having multiple pins on each post.

To do this, I insert the image from the “Visual” tab on the blog post’s text editor. Then I place to cursor to the left of the image and click on the “Text” tab. This places my cursor in front of the “img” image tag for the image. Then, I enter the following code before the tag.

<div style=”display: none;”>

After the image tag (which ends with a “>” pointy bracket, I enter the following closing tag.

</div>

If you enter the text correctly, your image will be invisible until you click on the pin button on that post. This is the quickest way for me to hide multiple images. You don’t want to clutter your post with a lot of Pinterest images, so this works perfectly.

Include a description of your Pin in the Alt Text

As you “Add Media” and upload your images, you will notice a few boxes to the right after the image has uploaded. The third text box down, titled “Alt Text” or alternative text, is where you want to write your pin description.

You can always enter the description after you upload the post, but if one of your readers pins it, there will be no description on their pin, unless they manually enter one. That’s why the Alt Text is so important.

Pinterest uses the description of a pin to help it identify the content of the pin. It isn’t able to read the text on your image, so it relies heavily on the boards the image is pinned to and its visual content for search results. The alt text allows you to include keywords and text to help it better identify the pin’s content.

Keep your description brief and full of keywords. Only a small portion of text is used for search results, so focus on keywords that your target audience will use most frequently.

Pin to Relevant Boards

As I mentioned in the last section, Pinterest has to use a combination of factors to identify your pin for search queries. Elna Cain goes into depth about this in her blog post, “3 Unkown Pinterest Tips to Grow Your Blog Traffic (and Presence).”

If you have time, watch the video as well. It will help you gain a better understanding of how Pinterest figures out what your pin is about. This will help you get better search results for your pin much faster, so it is worth the time spent.

Use Group Boards

Group boards are the greatest marketing advantage of Pinterest. Joining group boards for topics in your niche are a great way to share your posts with a much larger audience and get more pageviews. The process of joining group boards can be tricky, but the results are well worth the effort.

You can locate group boards by typing in any topic + “group” or “group board” in the search bar and clicking on the drop-down and selecting “Boards.” You can also view the group boards successful bloggers in your niche use. Either way, you will see something similar to the following when you find a board.

First off, I am not a member of this board. This is a random board I found in the search results.

The first thing you should do is read the description and ensure the board is accepting contributors. Once you have verified this, view the pins and rules to see if the board is right for you. To request an invite, you usually have to follow the group board, follow the board owner, then contact the owner. Each board is different, so read carefully.

The owner of the board is the person in the first bubble from left-to-right, as seen above. This is the person you will need to follow and/or contact for an invite.

Once you have done everything that is asked in the description, contact the board owner in the manner they specify. This may be via an email, direct message, a form on their blog, or contact via another social media channel.

I usually provide my Pinterest Profile URL and the URL for my blog in the message. Once you send your message, you wait. Sometimes you will get a response within hours, other times, it takes weeks. It depends on how often the board owner checks their messages. My point is, don’t sit around and wait for it.

Once you have submitted your message, there is nothing you can do until you receive an invite, so I suggest looking for other boards to join in the meantime.

Don’t Spam!

While you should share your pins to group boards, make sure that you follow the group rules and don’t spam the board. There are some boards with very few active pinners. If that’s the case, leave the board. Pinning multiple pins in a row can hurt your Pinterest views.

Try to use boards with lots of pins and lots of active pinners in your niche. These boards aren’t easy to find, but they provide you with the most value for your time.

Also, space out your pins and don’t pin your pins back-to-back. This looks spammy and makes it easier for your pins to be overlooked individually.

Consider Boardbooster and Tailwind

Boardbooster gave me a HUGE boost when I first started my blog’s Pinterest account. In no time, I built a strong following, as well as tens of thousands of monthly viewers. Board booster is great for scheduling pins and looping older pins so that they get fresh views on larger boards.

If you don’t want to pay for a subscription, I highly suggest signing up for their free trial to get a quick boost to your views and to build your Pinterest account quickly.

Tailwind is another awesome pinning tool that schedules pins at optimal or specified times. If you want a pin to get more organic views, allow Pinterest to choose the optimum time to pin it for you.

Another huge advantage of Tailwind is Tribes. While Boardbooster also has Tribes, I really haven’t found them nearly as helpful as Tailwind’s.

Tailwind’s tribes are like Pinterest Group Boards. You pin your pin to the Tribe to share your pins and reciprocate. Some tribes are better than others (just like group boards), so don’t be afraid to try out new ones until you find which work best for you.

This is another scheduler that has a free trial. Try it and see if you like how it works for your blog.

Pinterest Can Work for You Too!

It may take a week or two of regular pinning for you to start seeing results from the changes you have made. The good news is that once your account is optimized and you are pinning to groups, you are on your way to the Pinterest success.

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