10 Pinterest Tips For Bloggers
Lifestyle Tech

10 Pinterest Tips For Bloggers

May 27, 2015

Recently I attended a Pinterest blogger masterclass at Pinterest UK headquarters. This was a really insightful class and was really great to learn lots of information on Pinterest and how I can utilise it for my blog. I had read lots of articles recently about Pinterest and so it was really great to hear it from them themselves so I knew what I was hearing was right.

I of course, didn’t want to keep all this new-found knowledge to myself, so I decided to put together my top Pinterest tips for bloggers. And even if you are not a blogger most of these still apply and will help you improve your Pinning.

Firstly Pinterest is not a social network it is as they like to call it a ‘discovery tool’. You can search on Pinterest using key search terms and let’s face it you always find what you are looking for. Whether it’s an inspirational quote, festival fashion, pretty swimwear or maybe celebrity style inspiration, Pinterest is living and breathing content and images.

10 Pinterest Tips For Bloggers

Top Tips For Bloggers Using Pinterest 

1. Be Descriptive

The most important thing I took away from the class was to always use descriptions on your pins. This is something I am guilty of not doing. I see a nice pin I like and I just re-pin it. Not any more however. Make sure you give your pin a relevant and descriptive description. This will help the pin show up in search and people to find you and your boards. Here is an example of a pin that has performed well, this is a pin from my swimwear board, simply it’s a floral bikini and it’s been repinned 207 times so far since adding this description. Shorter descriptions tend to perform better, so keep it simple.

2. Give Your Board A Title

This may sound obvious but there are a lot of boards out there without a valid name. A valid name, well make sure your board name reflects what the board is about. It’s all well and good to have a ‘My Style’ board, I am guilty, or a’ Mum’s Fav’s’ but no-one is searching for those terms. Give your board a relevant title just like you would the individual pins.

3. Hashtags Don’t Work

Whilst you want to be descriptive, stay away from using hashtags on your pins. The reason – they don’t work or do anything so just stop OK.

4. Vertical Pins Work Well

When you are looking through Pinterest, go on head to your feed now. What images stand out to you? Yes it’s the vertical ones. Images with a vertical aspect ratio tend to perform better as they flow more throughout the feed. These also show up better on mobile when using the app. As a blogger put together vertical images that promote your content. Don’t use more than say four images on each and keep text to a minimum. I love this raspberry limoncello example, look how much it stands out on my feed.

10 Pinterest Tips For Bloggers - Vertical Pins | The LDN Diaries

5. Create Exciting Pin Content

Did you know you can pin animated gifs and videos on Pinterest? These can add a fun and interactive element to your boards. Maps are also a good way to create an interesting content board. You can create a map by creating a board and choosing the map option. Then ‘Add A Place’ and with each pin you can add a location to it, so it will pin it on the map. An example of this is my London board which is where I have pinned places I have visited on the blog. I also have a Barcelona and New York version.

6. Add The Pin It Button

The Pin it button you may be familiar with. This is a ‘Pin It’ button you can find when you hover over images on sites. Hover over the below image now and you will see in the top left hand corner a red ‘Pin It’ button. This helps your readers to pin your images straight to Pinterest. And if you click it, you’ll see a little message I have left for you in the description *the anticipation*. You can get your own Pin It button through Pinterest or use a WordPress plugin like I have.

YUM Strawberry Cheesecake! If you think this is a tasty treat then why not pin it to one of your boards? Otherwise let's get back to the tips...

7. Make Your Blog Pinable

For your readers to pin your content it needs to be pinnable. Make sure your images are high-resolution and are optimised for size. Images that are 600 pixels wide will look best on Pinterest. Plus any images must be at least 100 x 200 to be able to be pinned. Similarly when you are being descriptive on Pinterest, be descriptive on your blog images. Make sure you give images on your blog alt tag descriptions, as when people pin from your blog this is what will come up if they don’t change it. Which I reckon the majority of readers won’t.

8. Add A Cover Image

Unfortunately no matter how pretty your profile is, the majority do not look at your profile. So even though they look pretty in the symmetrical and colour co-ordinated order, this doesn’t really affect your performance on Pinterest. However DO make sure your board has a cover image. This will entice people to click on your board when it comes up in search.

Pinterest board cover images | 10 Pinterest Tips for Bloggers

9. Specific & Timely Boards

The more selective your board the better it can perform. So instead of a general fashion board, why not create separate boards, for example types of fashion, ‘Denim’, ‘Suede’ and maybe even something random like ‘Jelly Shoes’. The more unique is better. You just don’t know who is searching for these terms. Popular boards on Pinterest right now include men’s style and white bathrooms. Also think of content to pin around timely events e.g Halloween. If the holiday is coming up pin this a few months before and place it at the top of your boards. Google crawls the page from top to bottom so hopefully will bring up your content.

10. Use Rich Pins & Verify

If you are a blogger, which I am guessing you are if you are reading this. Then make sure you verify your website/blog. You can do this once you sign up for a business account on Pinterest (it’s free). This will give you access to insights and stats to see what people are pinning from your blog. To get analytics and verify your website click here. Don’t worry you just need to add a small piece of code to your site and you will get a lovely verified tick on Pinterest like me. You can also see what people have been pinning from your blog by going to https://www.pinterest.com/source/(add your own blog url).

Pinterest Profile The LDN Diaries | 10 Pinterest Tips For Bloggers

Rich Pins are also a good way to help promote your content on Pinterest. These make your content show up on Pinterest with lots more details. For example if you had a recipe on your blog and had a rich pin, on the pin it would show the ingredients and recipe below the pin. The types of rich pins are film, recipe, article, product and place. So for most bloggers we would use article. You can sign up for rich pins by clicking here and following the instructions.

I hope these tips help you maximise your Pinterest potential. You can follow me on Pinterest at pinterest.com/theldndiaries.

This post may contain affiliate links, meaning when you click the links and make a purchase, we can receive a commission. 

You Might Also Like...

9 Comments

  • Reply
    Dalton-Banks
    May 27, 2015 at 10:34

    This is such a useful post and some great tips! I quite often just re-pin without writing a description too – need to become more descriptive! x

    • Reply
      Paula
      May 27, 2015 at 10:41

      Thanks! I know I always did, especially on the app, but have seen such an improvement after changing my ways! x

    • Reply
      Paula
      May 27, 2015 at 10:55

      Thanks! I know I always did, especially on the app, but have seen such an improvement after changing my ways! x

  • Reply
    Lisa
    May 27, 2015 at 11:40

    This is a great post. Thanks so much. I mostly use Pinterest for my own purposes but if I can help optimise it for use with my blog, so much the better!

    • Reply
      Paula
      May 27, 2015 at 11:47

      Thanks Lisa! Yeah definitely you should 🙂 x

  • Reply
    Sinéad Danielle ✿
    May 31, 2015 at 20:20

    Reeeally helpful post – clearly it was a great masterclass! I read a really cool trick somewhere which explains how to enable a different image to be pinned than the one on your blog – so for example you can have a landscape image on your blog, and then a vertical one that gets pinned! I know it sounds like a lot of work but I think tailoring for pinterest definitely goes a long way!

    Sinéad xo ♥ fabuleuse, toujours ♥

    • Reply
      Paula
      June 5, 2015 at 17:30

      Thanks Sinead, glad you found it useful! That sounds a great trick, do you remember what it was? X

  • Reply
    Jordan Alyssia Chambers
    June 4, 2015 at 10:27

    Umm great post!! Really helpful – iv never really understood pinterest as well as i should!

    • Reply
      Paula
      June 5, 2015 at 17:28

      Thanks Jordan glad it helped!

Leave a Reply