5 Steps I Used to Drive Traffic From Pinterest to My Website
Pinterest can send real traffic to your site — but not by itself. It took me a full year of running the same five steps to reach 2,000 visitors a day from Pinterest alone. Here’s the system, in order.
1) Set up a Pinterest account that matches your website
If you want more visitors from Pinterest, the account you use has to match your site. Same name, same logo, same URL, same categories. A Pinterest visitor who lands on your profile should get curious enough to click through to your website. The best way I know to make that happen: a logo that grabs attention.
2) Create at least 100 Pinterest boards
Once the account is up, start posting images. First, build at least 100 boards so the account looks full. When someone lands on a board full of images, they should think there’s a lot more where that came from. That means you need a lot of images on those boards. Start with 10 images per board, then keep adding at least 10 more to each one until you hit 100 boards.
At this stage, don’t upload images from your own computer. Find similar Pinterest accounts and share their images onto your boards instead. It’s faster, and it pulls their active users over to your profile. Before you start sharing your own photos, your account needs to look like it’s already full of content people want.
After that, add two of your own photos to each board every day. At that rate, you’ll have about 6,000 images uploaded by the end of the first month. The more images you upload, the more visitors you get.
One thing to know, though: sharing pages from your site that only have a single image on them won’t bring visitors to your Pinterest account. Every image page you send Pinterest traffic to needs descriptions and real content. Don’t send people to an empty image page. An attachment page, for example. To get traffic from Pinterest to your site, you need to use other methods too.
Note: When you share an image, add the link that sends the visitor to your website when they click it. Don’t skip this.
3) How to share images on Pinterest ?
To make an image more clickable, add a number like “+25” or “+42” to the end of the title. A visitor who sees that will assume there are more images waiting on the other side, and they’ll want to click. But if they click the thumbnail and don’t find a lot of similar images on the page that opens, they won’t come back to your account. So the page behind the click needs at least 20 images on it. That means building pages with thousands of images — yes, really. But there’s an easier way to do it, which is step 4.
4) Build one page per board that shows a rotating set of images
Instead of building a separate page for every image, send Pinterest visitors to one page per board. Here’s what the visitor sees: the image they clicked, full size, with its description. Right below it, a gallery of 10–12 similar images on the same topic. Click any of those, and the same thing happens, that image full size, its description, and a fresh gallery underneath.
Reload the page, or come back later, and the gallery shows a different set of 10–12 images from the same topic. Think of a page about bob haircuts. First visit, ten bob haircuts. Next visit, ten different bob haircuts. Same topic, different selection. That’s what keeps visitors seeing something new every time, and what keeps them from leaving your site.
The page should pull from a pool of at least 1,000 different images for that board. That pool is what stops the same images from coming back around. And each board gets its own page, you don’t reuse one page across different topics. This is how you show visitors that you have both a real Pinterest account and a website with real content behind it.
5) Add a Pinterest share button to your website
Put a “Share on Pinterest” button right below the images on your site. The point is to make visitors want to save the image to their own boards. This way, the visitors who came to your site from Pinterest end up bringing more visitors to it.
Where this lands after a year
If you run this system, a year from now you’ll have pulled at least 2,000 visitors a day to your site from Pinterest alone. It took me a full year to get there, and the number keeps climbing after that. Once it does, Pinterest stops being a channel you push and becomes one that works for you.
