How to get traffic from Pinterest without being on Pinterest

Pinterest is one of those social media sites you don’t need to be on to get traffic to your blog or website. Like on Facebook, anyone can visit your site, like what they see, and share it to their social networks. You don’t need to be on Facebook yourself for other people to share content from your site, although it does help.

Ideally you’d be on social networks yourself, broadcasting your own content, and growing your audience, but the problem when you’re running your own business is that you just don’t have time to be on every social network all day long – social media doesn’t pay the bills and you do have to actually spend some time on the things that generate revenue for you. But you can optimise your site to encourage and facilitate sharing

Pinterest is a site which is brilliant for sharing nice images, particularly of pretty products such as clothing, interior design, and recipes. Read this post about How to…Pinterest to learn more about this fast-growing network.

This is how you can optimise your site to encourage the sharing of your content on Pinterest without you even knowing about it.

1) Have nice images on your site. People need to have something to pin, and on Pinterest this is specifically images. High-definition product shots are great, and if you have a choice of whether to make them landscape or portrait in orientation, portrait is best for Pinterest.

2) Create custom graphics. For a blog post, you can create a Pinterest-friendly graphic to include in your post. Put it near the top of your post so it’s the first option when someone goes to pin it. You can make a nice graphic from your photos with text and fancy overlays on a free software tool such as PicMonkey. Have a look at some of the images on Pinterest for inspiration. How about this one?

3) Name your graphics! When an image is pinned from a site, Pinterest takes the image name and alt tag for the Pin description. If your image is called something like IMG-001-061 then change it using SEO-friendly keywords. While the pinner can edit this text for their own liking, for those who are too lazy, you have a ready-made, searchable pin with the keywords of your choosing.

4) Install a ‘Pin it’ option – If you add social share buttons to your website or blog, make sure you include a Pinterest one too. This is important because a) it helps people when they want to pin something and b) because it reassures the pinner that you’re happy for your content to be pinned. Some people don’t like being pinned because it means their photos go out of the realm of their control, and many respect this. If I don’t see a ‘Pin it’ option or badge on a site, I often don’t.

5) on WordPress and similar sites you can install a plug in or widget which makes a Pin It button pop up on the image when someone hovers. Try it on the image above and you’ll see what I mean – this is the Pin It Hover Widget from WordPress. There are lots of Pinterest friendly widgets you can install using WordPress. Have a search and see which ones you can use.

You can track what people have been pinning from your site by a simple url search which is explained in this blog post from Mashable.

Good luck!