Pinterest is shaping up as one of the most valuable sources of social referral traffic. The site has mass appeal, and it keeps users engaged. What’s more, with a free Pinterest for Business account, you can even track your Pinterest analytics in near real-time.There are several strategies that you can put into place to help you gain traffic from this social media giant. First, a few things to remember: Pins on Pinterest generally have a longer half-life than do tweets, so you want to post eye-catching, useful content to leverage this trait.

Don’t fill all of your boards up with content that everyone else has access to. Infographics pins have high bounce rates, but are very sharable. Images with titles like, “The Top X Widgets for Doing Y” have lower bounce rates and drive a lot of traffic as well. Produce both types of content.

Content Curation

Like on most other social media sites, one of your tasks on Pinterest is to find and display the best quality content related to your niche. You want to cherry-pick from the glut of content so that you’re always providing your audience useful information.

Do this on a regular basis and you will obtain a massive following. If you have a Pinterest for Business account, however, most of your boards should focus on your brand. You can still curate content on select boards, but keep the overall focus on yourself.

Group Pinboards

Group pinboards are exclusive groups on a specific topic. These boards get a lot of traffic, but you have to be invited to participate. If you’re confident that you can bring in other pinners, it’s a good idea to start your own group.

As the other pinners create content for the board, they will bring their own followers with them, and the board will grow on auto-pilot. It’s in the other board member’s best interest to grow your board for you.

Pin Often

Pinterest users love original content. Whenever possible, create your own images, and share them often. Many marketers take the easy way out, which is to search Pinterest for a specific topic and then go to town repinning. If you go one step further, you can gather up all the traffic they’re missing out on.

Time Your Pins

While pins stay active longer than tweets do, there is still a small window to capitalize on them. Whenever you make a new post, it’s sent to your follower’s “New” page immediately. The window for a pin to become viral from that point is around 30 minutes.

Consequently, you want to post new pins when the majority of your followers will be online. For most niches, the hot-zone is between 6AM and 6PM, U.S. Eastern time. 2PM through 4PM is an especially good time to post.

Make your Images Pinnable

Pins that contain the human face are 23 percent less likely to be repinned, according to Pinterest. Likewise, images that contain mostly text are not repinned as images as often as images that contain at least 40 percent “background.” Using three dominant colors instead of just one makes your pin more sharable by about threefold.

Have you ever wondered why McDonald’s are red and yellow? It’s because these colors spur people to take action. Similarly, the colors red and orange are much more sharable than blue and purple on social media sites.

You can drastically improve your results by incorporating social media into your marketing strategy. If you want access to more powerful and useful marketing tips along with methods for generating conversion-ready prospects on a monthly basis, click here to learn about my done-for-you system.

Till next time

Roger Herbert