How To Get Blog Traffic From Pinterest in 2024 (50K visitors/month)

Not using Pinterest for your blog? 

Well you should be…

Pinterest is one of the most underrated traffic sources for bloggers.

The visual search engine has hundreds of millions of users all over the world just waiting to visit your blog.

For many bloggers, Pinterest is their #1 traffic source and definitely the best social source. Just take a look at the Google Analytics screenshot below – Pinterest is driving more traffic than every other social network COMBINED.

And these are weekly numbers.

You don’t want to miss out on getting your blog in front of millions of people just because you don’t know where to start! 

Let’s go through the best ways to use Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog.

How to use Pinterest for your blog

• Create dedicated pin images
• Pin every image from your blog post
• Make it easy for others to pin from your site
• Optimize for Pinterest SEO
• Frequency & Consistency
• Work with Pinterest influencers (for free)
• Join Group Boards

Create dedicated pin images

The images you pin are obviously the most important aspect of your Pinterest strategy. It isn’t enough to just use any image (although quantity does help – we’ll come back to that). The best images are optimized for maximum engagement.

Let’s take a quick look at an example page on Pinterest.

Which ones are you most drawn to? 

And which ones are you most likely to click on? 

The data tells me these ones get the highest click-throughs…

The key reasons why these get the most clicks:

• Portrait orientation – they take up more space in the feed, increasing the likelihood of being seen.
• High-quality photo – blurry images and poor quality images get ‘down-voted’ and less likely to be seen and who would want to click on a bad image
• Text on the image – this shows that if you click through there are more information or more photos that you may like – this hugely increases the click-through rate
• No faces – data suggests that images without faces get up to 23% more clicks than those with faces.

So for every blog post you write, make sure you create at least 1 dedicated pin image for the post.

You can make pins using any design app you like. If you are just getting started, I recommend using Canva, it comes with hundreds of templates that you can quickly edit and download.

You should create at least one pin for each post on your blog. To start with you will need to go back in and create pins for all your existing blog posts. Once you have done that, you can just create a new pin each time you create a new blog post.

Here are some more examples of pin images for inspiration

How to create Pinterest images in Canva?

Head over to Canva and click on their Templates page.

Now search for ‘Pinterest Pins’ and you’ll be presented with hundreds (if not thousands) of different templates you can use.

Just work your way down the list and decide which one you like the look of. You’ll be able to completely customize the text, fonts, colours, everything.

Once you’ve found one you like the look of, click on it and then click ‘Use this template’.

Now you can edit the template to make your branding, add your logo and website, etc.

Canva now has a super-cool integration with Pinterest that you can share your image straight from Canva – this is great if the post is already live, but if not you’ll need to download it.

I’d recommend downloading it as a JPG to reduce the file size.

It’s now time to add it to your blog post. There are two potential locations for you to include the image:

1. After the introduction, some bloggers like this as it puts it front and center of pretty much every reader and increases the likelihood of the image being saved to Pinterest. The downside is that it pushes down your content (that the reader came for) further down the page.
2. At the end of the post, this means it doesn’t get in the way of the content, but will also be seen and pinned less than if it was higher up.

It’s completely up to you where you choose to place the image in your blog post, testing it out on different posts and see what works best is a good starting point.

Make it easy for others to pin from your site

If you are using WordPress, like most other bloggers – there is an abundance of plugins you can use to make it easy for others to pin from your site.

The obvious thing to add is a ‘Pin’ sharing button where you include your other social sharing buttons such as Facebook Share or Tweets.

We used the Social Snap plugin and positioned these social sharing buttons floating to the side of the screen which makes sure they are constantly visible to users but also not too intrusive. 

This is a great first step but this next technique will dramatically increase the number of times users pin your images.

Social Snap has a unique feature that allows you to activate the Pinterest Save button when a user hovers over an image.

When we activated this on our blog, we saw a 10x increase in the volume of pins made by others from our site.

How to set up Social Snap to add an overlay to your images?

Add the Social Snap plugin to your blog, the free version offers the basic features for this (we do recommend checking out the premium version of the plugin).

Now head over to the plugin settings and click on ‘Social Sharing’ and then ‘On Media’.

Toggle the button ‘Enable on media’ to turn on this feature.

Once activated, you’ll see a range of customizations you can make on how it displays. From where the button appears on the image, the size of the button, the shape, and many more.

It comes with a cool preview feature so you can see exactly what it looks like on your blog.

Once you’re happy with the settings, remember to press save and you’re all set.

Optimize your pins for Pinterest SEO

Each pin has a title and description for you to tell the reader what your pin is about. Typically it will pull the title of your blog post for the title and the excerpt or the meta description of the post for each pin.

This is okay if you are really strapped for time – as it should include basic optimisation that you would have done for your blog post.

But to see even better results, there is more you can do.

To maximise the engagement for your pin you need to:

• Include relevant keywords in both the title and the description – make sure you add them in a non-spammy manner.
• A longer, more helpful description – this makes it easier to include more keywords to increase the chances of being found in Pinterest search but also helps give more information for users to know what they are going to click through to.
• Include a call to action – add a ‘check it out’ or similar within the description to increase the number of click-throughs to your post.

We found that using hashtags had no effect on the engagement levels or click-throughs on our pins so you do not need to worry about them.

Frequency & Consistency

There is much debate about how often you should post on Pinterest. 

Some say you shouldn’t post any more than once a day whilst others say you should post as much as you can. 

Here’s what worked best for us after trying different schedules:

• Post at least 20 times per day
• Try and post roughly the same amount of pins each day (don’t switch from 30 to zero and back again)
• Pin to a variety of boards
• Don’t just pin one blog post 20 times in a day

Pinterest is the social platform you can post on the most without getting any negative response.

Posting 20 times a day might sound like a lot but you can often schedule in bulk using tools, our recommendation is Tailwind.

Here’s how we scheduled a week’s worth of pins in under an hour using Tailwind…

First up, you need to collate your images into a single folder, this means you can bulk upload them all in just one go.

Now head over to Tailwind and click ‘Create new pin’ and ‘Upload Images’.

Note: The interface of Tailwind can be a bit daunting when you first get in there, but you will get used to the areas you use the most.

It will take a little time for all of the images to be uploaded but once they are, it’s time to set the titles, descriptions, links and relevant board to save the images to.

Make sure you remember to edit the link to each pin – it defaults to your homepage which isn’t ideal for engagement.

Once you’ve completed each pin, click the ‘Schedule all drafts’ button and you’re set.

Work with Pinterest influencers (for free)

Pinterest influencer marketing isn’t what most people think of when they talk about influencer marketing.

However, if you can work with popular Pinterest accounts then you can piggyback off of their audiences to drive traction on Pinterest for your blog.

We managed to do this completely for free. Here’s how…

Head over to PinGroupie and take a look at their influencers section.

Enter a broad keyword for your industry, for example ‘interior design’.

You’ll then see the most popular accounts by monthly viewers.

You’ll also see the website associated with their account, go to these and find the contact details for these influencers. Note: Some will be businesses, just ignore these ones as they will be less likely to share your content.

Next up, plan a blog post that needs to be image heavy. An example in the interior design space would be a blog post of ‘bedroom ideas’.

As part of the blog post, reach out to the Pinterest influencers and ask them to contribute an image to the post and some commentary, such as how to achieve that look of the image.

Most will be happy to contribute to your blog, bloggers help bloggers.

When the post goes live, thank them for their contribution and explicitly ask them to share the post on Pinterest.

One post got over 409,000 saves on Pinterest and drove over a million views over a three year period.

This entirely happened thanks to working with influential Pinterest accounts and then asking them to share the post on Pinterest.

It gave the article the traction it needed to drive hundreds of thousands of saves on Pinterest in a matter of a few months.

Pin every image from your blog post

This goes slightly against the need for creating Pinterest-friendly images.

But there are elements to Pinterest’s algorithm that quantity over quality can also win.

So as long as every image in your blog post is relevant, then you should make sure you add it to Pinterest no matter what orientation the image is.

Whilst the most engaging pins are portrait, with text, etc, other images are interacted with so you’ll need a higher quantity of these to drive more traffic.

Here’s how we pinned every image in a blog post in under 10 minutes:

Make sure you have Tailwind’s Chrome Extension added.

Once your post is live, head over to your post and make sure every image has loaded.

Press the Tailwind button in the extension bar.

You’ll be presented with every image it finds on your blog post. Select which ones you want to save to Pinterest.

Then press ‘ Go Schedule’.

You’ll be taken to the Tailwind scheduler screen to add descriptions and boards. The title will automatically be taken from the blog post.

Wiz through the images and add the relevant information, press ‘Schedule all’ and you’re done.

Join Group Boards

Pinterest group boards are a great way of generating more traffic to your blog. These boards are communities where multiple accounts can pin on a single board – they can increase your exposure by giving your pins much more exposure.

You can either join a community board, where if you pin regularly (without spamming) other people who follow the board will see your pins and save them or click on them.

Head over to PinGroupie (the best tool for finding Pinterest group boards) and enter a broad keywords of your industry.

You’ll see hundreds of relevant boards that you could join.

By clicking on the board link, you’ll be able to see a description of the board. It will usually showcase the rules of the board and the instructions on how to join.

Simply work your way down the list and apply to join the boards which are most relevant to you.

Once accepted you’ll be able to schedule pins to the group boards through Tailwind – just make sure you follow the rules or you’ll risk being kicked out and not get the value of the board.

Also, make sure you engage with others within the board, saving their pins, commenting, etc as they will likely reciprocate which will help you in the long run.

Pinterest Traffic Results

So you might be wondering what sort of results you can expect from putting in this effort with Pinterest.

If you can use Pinterest consistently, you can expect to see a dramatic increase in your Pinterest traffic to your blog.

When I spent six months consistently executing the tactics in this post, I grew the traffic from Pinterest from 3000 monthly visitors to over 50,000 monthly visitors 

As with any tactics to grow your blog, the key is consistency. So stick at it for a few months and you’ll definitely see results.