I’ve been a blogger for almost seven years. In that time I’ve seen a range of opportunities to gain more traffic and build an audience. In the early days, the technique was to encourage larger sites to link back to you. Then came social media, with sites like Twitter and Facebook providing backlinks and opening up a door for a greater conversation.
Pinterest Invitation
Now there is Pinterest, an online pinboard. This site is all about graphics. You create your own pinboards (scrapbooks if you will) of graphics from all over the web. The cool thing is, all of the pictures have a back link to the site that they came from. As users on Pinterest share and re-pin your graphics on their boards, your links expand as well.
The diagram above shows the flow. If you have an interesting post on your blog that you want to share with your Pinterest followers, it must have a graphic or picture contained within the post. Using the instructions from a previous post, you upload that graphic to one of your Pinterest boards. From there, other users of Pinterest may re-pin your graphics on their boards and possibly share them with their Facebook or Twitter followers.
Any graphic shared on Pinterest retains a link back to the original site. As people share and re-pin your graphics, the backlinks are preserved. Someone clicking on the graphic will have the opportunity to visit the original site. This is a two step process. the first click highlights the graphic on it’s own screen. A second click takes the user to your site.
As a blogger, this is especially useful if you have numerous posts that fit within a category. For me, I created a board called downloadables, to share my posts that had downloadable documents, templates, or card sets. This gave me a great way to showcase visually all of my downloadable content in one place.
Once you click on the boards, larger graphics appear that give your followers a better idea of the original content.
Clicking the graphic from here will open another window highlighting the individual picture. Clicking on that graphic will take them to your site. If they click on the link under the graphic, they will go directly to the page from your blog. Using illustrative graphics on your blog is a must if you want to share on Pinterest.
Overall: Pinterest is a great way to highlight similar content from your blog. Categories like organization, diet, fitness, and fashion are re-pinned often. So when creating a blog post, it’s more important than ever to include a great picture or two within your content. Why not sign up for a Pinterest invitation today and get pinning!
Happy blogging and pinning!
Question: What categories have you found popular on Pinterest?