Pinterest Success Stories And Tips For Increasing Blog Traffic From Pinterest

Even though I may have a tinge of jealousy, I like hearing about success stories.

Success stories, from my friends especially, give me a goal. It seems like every day, I hear of something new a friend has accomplished. From a new writing job for a major entertainment company to hearing that a friend’s blog has gone viral, I love knowing that good things happen to good people.

Pinterest is quickly becoming one of those success story-makers. With a 70% traffic increase in just the first 3 weeks of January (from 10 million to 17 million hits), Pinterest is helping make websites and posts go viral.

credit Hitwise

I asked a few of those friends who’ve had successful pins to share their tips on how to to help your blog posts get more traffic through Pinterest.

Pinterest Success Stories

Curvy Girl Guide | @curvygirltweets | on Pinterest
As the Social Media Editor for Curvy Girl Guide, I started the contributor-driven Curvy Girl boards just when Pinterest started to take off. It’s taken off very successfully for us, making Pinterest the #5 traffic source (notably ahead of Twitter) for our online magazine. In an article by Ad Age, Lands’ End credited Curvy Girl Guide as the catalyst for starting their own Pinterest account on which to pin their products:

Land’s End first learned about Pinterest from a blog community — Curvy Girls Guide. “They introduced us to Pinterest and at once we realized, it’s kind of an immediate attraction, visually stimulating and inspiring and we wanted to see how we can make it work for Lands’ End, specifically for Canvas,” said Michele Casper, PR director for the company.

Casey Mullins | @mooshinindy | on Pinterest
Recently, a post Casey published on Babble garnered nearly 200,000 hits in a matter of a few days from Pinterest. The pin below of a photo Casey took of our friend Emily’s baby on a bookshelf went crazypants on Pinterest (asshat commenters not withstanding, or maybe as a result of?). As of the publishing of this post, the pin has over 500 likes and over 1800 re-pins. That can mean a major traffic boost for Casey’s post from which the photo was pinned.

Katy Carter | @ katyshecooks | on Pinterest
Katy calls herself a “small” blogger, but whatever that means for her now, will not be the same in the next few months if she keeps pinning the food posts she publishes. Food and recipe posts are on par with arts & crafts pins; you can’t find enough of them around Pinterest and everyone loves them. Even though she just started pinning, she finding “already, I’m seeing very steady residual traffic.”

Heather Spohr | @mamaspohr | on Pinterest
Heather is already a popular blogger, but with the increase in traffic to her blog that she’s seeing from Pinterest, she’s growing even more successful. Heather says she’s “received 142K hits from pinterest in the last 30 days” as a result of she and others pinning her posts. The pin below has received a combined nearly 2000 re-pins and 400+ likes from all of the times it’s been pinned.

April | @mommynamedapril | on Pinterest
April has been publishing her recipes and food photography on her blog for several years, but with the rise of Pinterest, she’s seen a massive increase in web traffic to her food blog. In January alone, she received over 450,000 hits from Pinterest alone, up from 100,000 in December. As you can see from her blog’s source page on Pinterest, April’s high-quality food photography is working to her advantage with the number of pins and re-pins from her blog.

Tips For Increasing Your Pinterest Traffic

• Always put an image with your posts. ALWAYS. I have lots of posts that are pinned onto “Good reads” or “Favorite blogs” boards. Those are the ones that give me the traffic. [from Heather]
• Pin your viral-worthy posts on Sunday afternoons. [from April]
• Give your pins a short, catchy title that if you read it, you would want to click to read more.
• Watermark images with your name or web address that you think will be re-pinned.
• Pin your own blog posts. There is no algorithm (like with Stumbleupon) that “punishes” you for pinning your own blog.
• Categorize your boards properly.
• Link your Pinterest account with your Facebook account. “Likes” on Pinterest will show on your Facebook timeline.
• Don’t limit your pinning to your own posts. Pinterest is social, be social with others on Pinterest.
• Go back and pin relevant posts from past months and years. Pinterest is relatively new, so older posts may not have been “discovered” yet on Pinterest.
• Pin from a blog post NOT from a home page. The link associated with your pin needs to go back to your post, not your main home page (unless you’re pinning to share an entire blog or website).

What About You?

If you have your own tips for making the most of Pinterest, please share them! Do you have any Pinterest success stories of your own? I want to hear about them!

Looking for an invite to Pinterest? Let me know, and I’ll send you one. And if you love me, which obviously you should, follow my Pinterest boards. Leave a link to your Pinterest profile in the comments, and I’ll make sure I follow you back.

Tagged as: pinterest, pinterest success stories, pinterest tips, traffic from pinterest