Business owners plug hours and hours of promotional time into Facebook, Instagram and twitter. But, how many of you are capitalising on Pinterest to promote your online services? And more importantly, could Canva and Pinterest be used to help increase your blog traffic or business hits?
Where is your blog/business traffic coming from? 35% of my traffic comes from Pinterest (second only to organic traffic from search engines). So, if you’re not using it, you might be missing out on valuable (and profitable) traffic. My website traffic now generates an extra bit of side income for me; you can read about this in my blog post, ‘How to make money blogging’. But, how am I using Pinterest to drive this?
Why use Pinterest Pins to increase web traffic?
Like Instagram, Pinterest is great for website traffic as it presents the user with large, simple graphics to catch their attention. It’s like a huge glossy magazine of articles and images that people have done a search for.
Pinterest has more than 320 million monthly active users (Sprout Social) and (unlike other platforms) the main aim isn’t just to reward nice photos. In fact, Pinterest reported that 89% of US Pinners use Pinterest for inspiration in their path to buying. The platform’s users tends to be looking for a further action. The journey with the likes of Instagram (without the allowance for multiple web links), tends to end at the image.
Canva for Pinterest
I use Canva for pretty much every graphic I have to design. Despite my best efforts, I’m not a graphic designer. That’s where Canva comes into play. The free software package provides you with a wealthy collection of templates for pretty much any large social media platform; blog banners, Instagram posts, Facebook Headers, Pinterest pins. The software is kept up to date with the latest size specifications for each platform, so you don’t need to adjust these down the line yourself. Vertical pins do better on Pinterest (Buffer) and Canva will default to this within its templates.
The Canva templates for Pinterest can be searched by category, giving you a bit of extra inspiration when you’re trying to create specifically for your blog/website niche. For example, if you’re website is about photography, the search will bring up some example set-ups with font ideas and image placement that suits that topic. You can drag and drop your own images into this template, change the fonts using their large font lists and add/remove elements to personalise your pin.
How much does Canva cost?
For a basic account, Canva is completely free and this option works for a lot of people!
However, if you’re looking at building a virtual assistant portfolio or spend a lot of time on the platform, it may be worth upgrading to their Canva Pro package. It’s really useful if you don’t have access to image software like Photoshop, as it gives you extra allowances with resizing, export designs with transparent backgrounds (useful for blog headers), prioritise free images in your stock photo searches and freely use all the premium templates.
Google LOVES a Pinterest post!
I have a good few individual pins that rank well in Google searches and drive addition traffic to my website. Many hardcore ‘Pinners’ see entire Pinterest boards showing up in Google search. To encourage this, I recommend ensuring that you give each of your Canva Pinterest pins a good title. Keep it relevant to your keywords so that it will help people find your content on Google!
Tips and tricks for creating your Pinterest Pins in Canva
A/B test with multiple pins per blog post – For every new post I write, I create 2-3 pins. Why? Despite using Pinterest for a good while now, I’m still often surprised by which image draws the most traffic. Play about with templates, images and fonts. Whilst running a marketing experiment, Buffer found that using mosaic images increased their traffic on DIY and ‘How to’ guides. This hasn’t been the case for my travel posts – but it’s good practice to trial.
Add a call to action – Quicksprout reported that “there is an 80% increase in engagement for pins that contain a call to action.” That’s one hell of an increase! A call to action is a little one liner that encourages people to take another step after seeing your content. For example, “Love this post? Share it!”, or, “Visit our website for more tips about X”.
Create Evergreen Pins – Simply put, Evergreen content is content that is not time restricted and remains relevant. This kind of content is important across Pinterest as the image lifespan on this platform is a lot longer than most. Twitter moves so fast your image might disappear in seconds, your Facebook post will (at best) be picked up for a couple of hours – a day or two if you’re lucky! My Pinterest Pins are still showing up in searches for people years down the line!
SEO research – Just like your website, SEO is important here. Make sure you do your keyword research and upload each pin with its title, description, board and your website URL. The more quality information you give Pinterest, the easier it’ll be for people to find you!
Don’t forget to add your branding – Every pin I create in Canva has my website URL included somewhere in the image. It means that other users can’t claim my content as their own and (more importantly) reminds them where the content came from.
Join a Pinning Group – For those with the time, Facebook ‘Pinning’ groups are a great way to give your new (and old) pins a much-needed boost. Admin rules tend to be strict (to make it fair), with time frames, tagging rules and the expectation that you repin all the other contributor’s pins. There are often up to 300 people in a thread, so this take some serious commitment. My favourite group is the ‘Mappin Monday’ group, which requires bloggers to apply for access and allows only manual pinning.
I’m a real fan of ways to increase organic traffic as my website is only a small part of what I do in my everyday life. I’m simply not one of those bloggers who is fortunate enough to be making a large passive stream of income from my website to justify ploughing loads of cash back into it. And, I’m assuming most of you are the same?
If you’re not already using Canva or Pinterest to increase blog traffic, have a little go using the tips I’ve included above and let me know if it makes a difference to your audience.
