How to Be Pinteresting and Gain Website Traffic

Pinterest is a fun and highly effective way to use images to compel potential customers to click through to your website. An “online pinboarding” network, Pinterest is in line with the social-media trend towards visual communication—explaining how it has risen from zero to more than 40 million users in just three years. Join 70% of the world’s top 100 brands, and drive traffic to your business site from Pinterest.

We took a peek at Pinterest for marketing in “Drive Traffic to Your Yola Site: Get Social!” In this post, we’ll provide useful guidance and tips on how to give your website traffic a boost using Pinterest. For additional help, check out the Pinterest Help Center and the Pinterest for Business pages.

Already Have a Personal Pinterest Account?

Instead of adding a business account, you can opt to change your personal account to one for business by going to the business account conversion page. First, make sure you’re OK with the business terms of service.

Now, follow these five steps to boost your Yola site traffic using Pinterest:

1 – Create your account and profile.

Getting started with Pinterest is fairly intuitive. If you do get stuck, however, go to the Help Center. And don’t miss these two important steps:

– Verify Your Website 

Once you’ve officially connected your Yola site to your Pinterest profile, a checkmark will show next to your web address on your profile page.

– Connect to Your Twitter and Facebook Accounts

In your Pinterest account settings under Social Networks, select Yes to “Use your Twitter account to Login.” Visitors to your Pinterest page will be able to click the Twitter icon on your Pinterest profile to go to your Twitter page, and you’ll be able to tweet any pin right from Pinterest.

Do the same for Facebook to be able to post pins to your timeline, but note that this only works with a personal Facebook account not a Facebook page.

TIP – Want to post your business’s pins to your business’s Facebook page?

If you have a Twitter account for your business, connect it to both your Pinterest account and your Facebook page. Then, whenever you tweet a pin from Pinterest, it will also post to your Facebook page!

2 – Set up pinboards. 

This phase takes some thought about your company character, your prospective customers, and what will interest and compel them. Consider demographic information about your customers, such as sex, age and parenting status, as well as their possible hobbies and leanings.

Accordingly, set up topic-specific virtual boards (pinboards) where you display (“pin”) images you’ve uploaded or linked from websites. Give them names that grab your audience’s attention, remembering that the board name will also be displayed on any pins you post to Facebook.

Pinterest users can follow your business (all of your boards) or one of your boards.

Useful Pinterest Social Scene Stats

• Pinterest users in the United States are 70-84% women, 50% parents, and predominantly 25-49 years old.
• Pins with prices earn 36% more likes that ones without.
• Pinterest users are 173% more likely than Facebook users to find an item they want or buy.
• Food is the #1 content category, with the attention of 57% of users.
• Only 9% of users have participated in a contest or promotion on Pinterest vs. 30% of users on Facebook.

3 – Prepare your Yola site.

What images from your Yola site would make good pins? What will excite potential customers and drive them to click? You may plan to pin fabulous product and people photography from your site, or maybe provocative infographics or illustrations. You might even want to consider developing new visually stimulating Yola site content with Pinterest in mind, especially in the blog section. Beware of pinning images only from your site, though, as you don’t want your boards to come across as big marketing brochures.

– Add Pinterest Buttons to Your Yola Site

The Pin It button makes it easy for shoppers to pin photos of your products to their pinboards. You can also add a Follow button so visitors to your Yola site can see your Pinterest activity on their Pinterest home page.

4 – Make your pinboards eye-catching and engaging.

Winning attention on Pinterest is all about eye candy, originality and engagement. Your pins need to stand out to your specific audience from among millions of pins, so go all out on the visuals.

– Create New Pins

The best pin images to use are your own, for originality and to avoid photo licensing fees and infringements. You can also find free and low-cost photography from Creative Commons, iStockphoto, DepositPhotos and many others.

REMEMBER – When you pin images from your Yola site, clicking those pins will take viewers where you want them to go: back to your website. So take advantage of the extensive Fotolia library of professional-quality photos available for you to load onto your Yola website to pin.

– Repin Existing Pins

Another way to keep your pinboards fresh and interesting is by repinning other users’ pins. Not only can you find some real treasures for your audience, but you also show your appreciation to the pinner and can engage them and their followers in dialog in the comments area.

5 – Learn what your audience wants.

Get a better understanding of what interests and compels your audience, using Pinterest Analytics. View the numbers on people pinning from your Yola website and clicking your pins, as well as changes over time. You also find out which of your pins are the most repinned, who repins them and what else they are pinning. Leverage the data to inform decisions about what content to include on your Yola site and Pinterest boards.

Another way to stay in tune with your audience is to communicate with to them directly. For instance, engage them via comments when they repin your pins or ask your followers for their opinion on a pin.

Pinterest is a fun yet powerful tool for growing your Yola website traffic. Use it effectively on its own or, for an even bigger marketing boost, we recommend Pinterest in conjunction with Facebook or Twitter. Check out this post about using Facebook and this one on Twitter.

Happy pinning!