Growing Your Blog: pinterest

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I’m participating in a series about Growing Your Blog organized by the lovely Kelly at LiveLaughRowe. The series which started this week is covering some hot topics including; link parties, conferences, social media, guest bloggers, giveaways, advertising, keeping and engaging readers and my topic, Pinterest.

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If you’re not familiar with Pinterest, brace yourself and start using one of the best tools to come along in a long time. Pinterest is a place to bookmark your favorite sites or pages from your favorite sites. However, instead of bookmarking or favoriting the URL, you pin an image from the site onto one of your pin boards.



You can name your boards and group them into categories; crafts, home décor, recipes, places I want to visit – whatever you want to pin. This is a snapshot of one of my boards.

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That’s the basic idea of Pinterest – pinning things that you want to reference later or want to share. A visual bookmarking site. However, an interesting thing happened along the way.

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Pinterest has turned into a powerful tool for bloggers. Suddenly, Pinterest is the number one referral source for my blog. Here’s how it works; someone visits your blog and pins an image from one of your posts. The image links back to your blog and the pin gets repinned multiple times. The result is multiple hits to your blog.

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More and more bloggers and blog readers admittedly are becoming addicted to Pinterest and there is a lot of potential for visits to your blog.

Here are some ways to encourage pinning and blog traffic:

• Add Pinterest buttons to your blog {follow me on Pinterest) and posts {pin it}.
• Keep and maintain a pin board dedicated to your own projects. You should be aware that Pinterest Etiquette frowns on pure self promotion. Here’s what they say: Avoid Self Promotion - Pinterest is designed to curate and share things you love. If there is a photo or project you’re proud of, pin away! However, try not to use Pinterest purely as a tool for self-promotion.
• Join Pinterest groups, parties and challenges. There has been a surge of these activities lately. Link parties and challenges where you make something you saw on Pinterest often times with a winner being selected. As with link parties, these activities could bring more viewers to your blog.
• Follow other user’s pinboards and gain more followers of your boards.
• Pin responsibly. Pinning and repinning can sometimes get sloppy. Whenever possible, pin from the original source just as you would want one of your images linked back to your site.

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For me, Pinterest first and foremost is still a way for me to visually catalog inspirational images and projects. The icing on the cake has been the traffic it has generated for me.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my insight into Pinterest. Tomorrow, head over to Imprintalish  for information on giveaways and advertising.

 The Grow Your Blog series continues all week with an exciting finale on Sunday to help you grow your blog. The participants are hosting a blog hop link party where you can introduce your blog. Join me on Sunday, February 19th and Grow Your Blog!

As always, thanks for visiting.

Carolyn