Find Out How to Experience Blog Growth Through Pinterest

You CAN experience blog growth through Pinterest. You just need to understand where to add value to your pins. Part 2 of the Pinterest series will show you what to add where.

Pinterest, Part II

Each week I host a link-up for inspirational posts. And each week, I spend time pinning each post to my Inspire Me Monday Pinterest board. Each week, I read wonderful posts that I wish I could share with my other boards, but I can’t.

Ok. I could if I wanted to, but when I started this Pinterest account two years ago, I determined to only pin certain types of pins to my boards. I based my decision on a class I took, and the teacher made a good case for why we need to keep our Pinterest boards tidy and professional-looking.

According to the teacher, Pinterest boards need to look professional and provide value. Which means I don’t pin anything to one of my boards that doesn’t meet those criteria. Except for my Inspire Me Monday board, because I truly want to help out my fellow bloggers as they try to grow their blogs.

I have a pretty broad definition of ‘professional’ when it comes to Pinterest pins. I never studied graphic design, and I have doubts about the professionalism of my own graphics at times. In my book, a pin looks ‘professional’ if it has the right layout (vertical, not horizontal) and I can read any text on it.

In my experience, many bloggers take the time to make their graphics look professional, but they fail to include the second element—adding value.

Back before I took the course on using Pinterest, I thought I just had to throw a graphic up on my post and it would reach millions of Pinterest searchers. Not exactly. I had taken a step in the right direction, but very few people shared my posts via Pinterest.

Experience Taught Me What to Put Where in the Metadata

I didn’t experience an increase in traffic referrals from Pinterest until I started adding the following things to each pinnable graphic on my posts. These simple elements added value to my pin. They either helped people find my pin (through hashtags) or search engines find my pin (through keywords).

1. Alt Text—describe the purpose of the image. Alt text helps the visually impaired find your posts. If you use your snippet here and for the description box, you’ll save time because you’ve already used your keywords for SEO in your snippet.

2. Description—this shows up on your Pinterest description. Make sure you have hashtags here.

4. Keywords—help Google sort visual images. Make sure you use your SEO keywords here.

Before you get discouraged about all that added stuff, remember that you can copy and paste your snippet into two of the three boxes.

Pinterest just added a fourth requirement—a Pinterest headline. Make sure the first sentence of your snippet has your keyword/s so that they end up in the Pinterest title.

Simply filling in these areas on your graphic’s metadata panel turns your graphic into something of value. Otherwise, your graphic’s metadata will show up looking like Cinderella before the Fairy Godmother worked her transformation.

What Makes People Share Pins?

Experience has shown me that people share pins when you have the valuable information added to them already. No one wants to take the time to add that information in for a blogger—especially other busy bloggers.  

As a busy blogger who has a full-time job, I don’t have the time to add value to other people’s pins. When I do come across a pin on a post from the Inspire Me Monday link-up that has the value already added, I share it on multiple boards.

Although I keep talking about Pinterest graphics, I really mean all of the graphics on your posts. Why? Because Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and other search engines and social media monoliths rely on us to properly label our stuff so they can find it.

When people discover our posts via a search engine, we call that ‘organic.’ And if Facebook and Twitter ever disappeared from the face of the earth, people would still find our posts.

You can review what needs to go into your snippet over on this post.

Do yourself a favor. If you want to experience steady blog growth, include pinnable graphics on each post that have valuable information inserted in the correct places.

Find out what goes where on your blog graphics' metadata panel. Knowing this will add value to your graphics (and increase organic search results). #blogger #write28days #Pinterest Click To Tweet

Don’t let all of this new information discourage you.

Tomorrow we’ll ponder how far we’ve come on our journey and what steps we need to take next to continue to meet our goals, improve our blogs, and maintain steady blog growth.