The Easiest Way to Increase Traffic to Your Blog

Ok, so you started a blog now what? Sit and wait for people to read it? The only people reading your blog are your mom and your great Aunt Hilda. Hmm so what do you do? It takes time to build up a loyal readership. Luckily, there are shortcuts out there to get your blog seen and I will show you those shortcuts. In this post I will show you what Social Media strategy I used to get my blog from zero readers to over 400,000 monthly readers. I will show you how to get your blog seen and I will share with you all the free tools that I use that will take your blog to the next level.

Promoting your Blog

The key to getting your blog seen is that you have to promote it, that is where social media come in. Twitter, Instagram and Facebook work great to promote your blog. But in my opinion Pinterest is the number one social media site to promote your blog. So, this post is going to be dedicated to using Pinterest to promote your blog.

What Makes Pinterest Stand Out Above Other Social Media for Bloggers

The reason that Pinterest is my number one choice for gaining blog traffic is that more than other form of social media people come to Pinterest to gather ideas. They are searching for things. Think about it you get on Instagram to get inspired and connect with people, Twitter to be entertained and Facebook to see what your friends are up to. You get on Pinterest to search for and gather the best ideas. Here is your light bulb moment Pinterest is more of a search engine than a social media site. So, if you have the best blog post on oatmeal pumpkin spice chocolate chip cookies and if you promote it on Pinterest right then the people looking for that recipe will find your blog. Then suddenly you have readers and if you do it right you have a lot of readers!

Setting up Your Business Pinterest Account

So, now you understand why Pinterest is the best for bloggers. If you are a blogger and you don’t have a Pinterest account set one up right away. You will want to set up a business account and it’s free. (I love free.) You will have to link your site to your Pinterest account. Pinterest will walk you through this step. Be sure to set up an appealing profile. Give a brief description of your blog and choose a picture of yourself. Studies have found that the profiles pics that do best on social media are a head shot with a smiling face. People want to follow people not companies so show that you are a real person.

Next is the fun part start creating boards that your blog readers would be interested in. Start with topics that you blog about. When you create each board, you want it to be searchable. Use search terms in the board title and description. Then you want to post at least 20 posts to each board to start with. You don’t want someone to look at our page and see any half-created boards.

How to Make Pinterest Work for Your Blog

Now you have your Pinterest account set up and you are blogging. If you have not set up your blog yet, no problem, check out this post to get you started in 5 easy steps. Since Pinterest is all about images you want to make sure you have some for each post that you can use to create pins. If you are a food blogger, fashion or home décor this is easy you should have tons of great pictures for each post. If you are more of a marketing blogger or information that is not image heavy then you can use one of the free image websites to create great looking pins. My favorite sites for free royalty free images are Pixabay and Unsplash.

My Favorite Free Tool to Create Gorgeous Pins

Ok so now you have got your images. You need a tool to help you take those images and turn them into Pinterest works of art that are the exact size Pinterest loves with text on top of images to draw viewers to your blog. Plus, it would help if it had beautiful templates that makes creating pins a breeze, and how about something that has a free version. I know it sounds too good to be true but it actually is not there is an app out there for that! It is Canva, they have an app for your phone and a desktop version too. The desktop version works a little bit better but I love the convenience of using the app on my phone. I can literally create pins while I am waiting in the pickup line at school or while getting my hair done. Huge time saver. I highly recommend you check out the app and take a look at the Pinterest templates.

Scheduling Pins

Now that you have your beautiful Pinterest profile and boards set up and have created some gorgeous pins let’s start scheduling pins. That leads me to another must have tool for bloggers, Tailwind. Tailwind is a scheduling tool for Pinterest. How it works is it allows you to pin one pin to several different boards at different times. It will spread out your pin so it can be seen by more people. It also allows you to join Tribes where you team up with other bloggers and they pin your pins and you pin theirs. The tribe feature alone is worth joining Tailwind. You may only have two followers but with Tailwind you can instantly have your blog in front of other people’s audience. Tailwind has a free trial offer right now that allows you to schedule up to 100 pins for free. I started there and ended up by the subscription because I love it so much.

Pinterest Analytics

Pinterest has a great feature that is your analytics. You can see how many monthly viewers you have. What does that even mean? Monthly viewers are the amount of people that are seeing your pins. When you switch to a business account you will also get to see more analytic like for each pin, how many people are seeing it, pinning it and most important for you clicking to your blog to read it. It is important to spend some time checking out your analytics to see what kinds of pins people are loving so you can make more like those.

Ok, now you hopefully have a game plan to get started to use Pinterest to increase your blog traffic. If you are completely new to Pinterest just start creating some pins. They won’t be perfect at first but you will get better the more you create and find out what Pinners love. I wrote this post because I have been getting a lot of questions about blogging and since I think it is the best job in the world, I wanted to share it with you too. Leave a comment if you have been using Pinterest and how it is going.