Pinterest for Bloggers

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Pinterest is a treasure trove of great ideas and inspiration from bloggers around the world. People go to Pinterest in search of solutions to their problems and inspiration for future experiences or dreams. A quick search on Google can easily take you to the picturesque view of a gorgeous beach location or yummy dinner find. At times, most of these images might take you to Pinterest, where you see a bunch of similar pinned pictures. You find something you like and clicking on it takes you to a blog article all about it. This is how some successful bloggers today get most of their traffic.

If you’re a blogger looking for ways to expand your audience, Pinterest is your answer! Here’s why:

All in one Place

Pinterest has boards, which users treat as their digital scrapbooks where related pins(basically just images that can be linked to your blog posts) can be pinned together. This means you can create a board for a specific niche and organize your content accordingly.

You can make a pin for each of your blog posts, making it easier to navigate. Sometimes, if clicking on your pin didn’t show them exactly what they wanted, users are more likely to wander around your board to find similar stuff.

Relevant pins keep popping up all over the app, so placing your pins on the right boards is a good way to make sure your pins reach genuinely interested viewers.

Awesome Audience

Pinterest users tend to spend more time on it as compared to users of other social media platforms. The average time a user spends pinning images and posts on to their boards every time they log in is about fourteen minutes.

Studies show that half of all female users who created a Pinterest account four years ago, use it even today. The number of men using Pinterest in the US is more than those that read Sports Illustrated and GQ put together! A platform that not only attracts users to join, but also keeps them glued to it? This kind of reach can help you boost your blog’s performance immensely.

Most Pinterest users in the United States belong to the category of high-income households and a major percentage of them are women looking for clothing, interior decorating or fashion ideas. It is fairly easy to engage them with fancy articles and influence them to purchase your goods. As bloggers, we must keep in mind that Pinterest is the platform where people come to dream, find information, and make purchasing decisions based on the pin they are saving.

When users pin your images, it reaches their followers too. With some catchy image headers and colorful backgrounds, you can increase the chances of getting users to pin your posts onto their boards.

Tools like Canva provide amazing templates that you can use to attract viewers.

Also, half of the country’s millennials (aged 18 to 29) use Pinterest regularly for ideas, with respect to lifestyle or home decor, and almost always buy the products that they look up. This means a lot of business for bloggers on Pinterest.

Image Source

Social Media or Search Engine?

Pinterest is a visual search engine. It is the perfect cross between a social media network and a search engine. When was the last time you saw an ad on Facebook? Can you recall not cursing it for interrupting your Flashback Friday moments?

Most social media networks aim to connect people with one another, and advertising products or driving traffic to blogs is often just a distraction to users. The specialty of Pinterest is that it is a social network that people come to, looking for these ‘distractions’.

Users log into Pinterest looking for inspiration in a certain area and the pins they see are exactly what they searched for. Needless to say, it is easier to sell something that the customer wants to buy.

Long-Lasting

Another plus is that the content on Pinterest doesn’t fade out over time as in the case of Twitter or Facebook posts. These social media giants deem old content as irrelevant and prefer not to show them in their top results.

The half-life, that is the amount of time taken to earn half its views, of a tweet is 24 minutes. The half-life of a Facebook post is 90 minutes. But the half-life of a pin is a solid three and a half months.

Your pins will continue to appear in search results for a long period of time as long as the keywords in your description match the user’s interest.

Level Playing Field

Often, starting a new brand is stressful because existing brands that are already well-established can intimidate you. Statistics show that most searched terms on Pinterest are not brand-specific, which means that its users are open to trying out new things.

Your pins are going to be as likely to appear as that of any other brand. If you worry about being overpowered by your competitors, fret not, for Pinterest will give you enough opportunity to shine!  

Fascinating Features 

Pinterest lets you set up Business accounts using which you can track the traffic you are driving to your blog. Bloggers can see exactly where they are getting their audience from and what kind of pins improve searchability results.

Pinterest offers group boards, a feature using which several people can pin to a particular board. You can look for group boards in your niche, preferably ones that go well with the vibe of your blog, and join them. This would allow you to reach more customers even without having a huge base of followers on your Pinterest account.

The timing of your content plays a very important role in hitting the feeds of more users. Tools like Tailwind allow you to schedule your pins at times when it is likely to reach most of your audience. Manually pinning all your posts can be tedious, so this saves a lot of time and is extremely efficient.

Conclusion

Having said all that, Pinterest provides immense scope for bloggers to grow their viewership and drive targeted traffic to their blogs. With new platforms arising every day on the World Wide Web, it is hard to pick one as your promoting medium, but Pinterest reaches the right audience and has shown results that most others haven’t. You can check out my post <insert link to http://www.msvirtualmaven.com/10-ways-to-build-your-brand-and-increase-visibility-using-pinterest/> for tips on how to use pinterest for bloggers!

Pinterest is easy, fast and it is free! What more could we need?