You’ve probably been hearing a lot about how wonderful Pinterest is for promoting blog posts and growing an engaged audience.

And, it’s true!

In fact, ranking well on Pinterest can increase your chances of ranking on the first page of Google!

But, in order to get your site in front of more eyes, there’s a few things you’ll need to do first to make sure your profile is set up for success from the start.

So, what can you do to make Pinterest your traffic bestie?

Let’s take a look at six ways you can optimize your Pinterest profile for more blog traffic in 2019.

6 Ways To Get Your Pinterest Profile Ready For 2019

1.  Apply for a business account

In order for you to get the most out of Pinterest and grow your following, you’ll need to create a business account. It’s free and has all the analytics you’ll need to track your growth, reach and engagement.

It shows you:

• Your daily and monthly profile impressions (views)
• The impressions, saves and engagement your pins get
• Your boards with top pin impressions
• Your audience insights

Creating a business account is super quick and simple 🙂

1. Go to Pinterest for Business & click “sign up.”
2. Enter your email address and a password
3. Complete through steps 1 through 7. 
4. Upload your profile photo
5. Choose your username
6. Add your bio — include keywords that are optimized for search (more on that below)
7. Verify your website (you can find step-by-step instructions here.)

If you already have a personal account, you can convert it into a business account by going to http://business.pinterest.com, click “login,” complete steps 1 through 5 and verify your website.

Then, Pinterest will walk you through the rest of the simple process. It should take no longer than 5 minutes. Easy-peasy!

2. Enable rich pins

Rich pins are like regular pins, except they have extra information – like your website name and icon displayed underneath the pin image – which makes your pin stand out and increases engagement.

Why Rich Pins are so great is because they make a real impact on your click and repin rates.

As you can see, the pin on the right has a lot more information than the one on the left.

I highly suggest setting up your rich pins right from the start because it’ll give you an upperhand, especially when it comes to promoting your blog posts.

Here is a great tutorial by Melyssa Griffin on how to set it up quickly: The easy way to set up “rich pins” on Pinterest

3. Clean up your boards

The boards you have on your profile and the pins you pin to those boards gives Pinterest information on the type of pinner you are.

So, It’s important to check on your boards once in a while to see how they’re performing and if there are any you can clean up.

If you recently switched from a personal Pinterest account to a business account, then you may have boards that don’t align with your target audience.

There is no need to delete these boards though or else you will lose followers. Instead, make them secret.

To make your board secret, go into your board and click the pencil icon on the upper left-hand side to edit your board settings.

Slide the secret option over to make that board secret.

Another way you can clean up your boards is by using Pinterest sections which allows you to break up each board into smaller niche topics.

This is especially helpful if you have a board with multiple subtopics. For instance, If I have a board called “Career advice” I might break it up into sections like “interview tips,” “resume examples,” and “cover letter ideas.”

4. Analyze the group boards you’re in

I truly believe that one of the biggest ways to grow your traffic is to join group boards, especially as a new blogger.

What’s great about them is that you can reach thousands, even millions of people that you wouldn’t be able to with your own boards. This helps establish your brand as a new pinner.

Not all group boards are created equal, though.

Some will actually hurt your profile performance rather than improve it, so choose wisely.

I find that the best group boards are ones with a large following (more than 1,000) and a small amount of contributors (less than 200). You don’t want to join a group board that moves through content too quickly or else your pins will never get noticed because they’ll be at the bottom of the feed.

Pssstt… if you’re looking for some great group boards to join full of blogging goodness, you can apply for mine here.

5. Create board covers

This is one of those topics that a lot of people have divided opinions over, so I’m just going to share my experience.

When I first started on Pinterest, I thought board covers were a waste of time and I wasn’t really sure why I needed them.

However, after a few weeks of blogging, I noticed that I wasn’t getting very many followers. I knew that the biggest reason was because I was new, but I also knew that it was because I didn’t have much unity or consistency with my branding

So, I decided to create board covers and I’m so glad I did, despite being told that it’s a waste of time.

After creating covers for my Pinterest boards, the amount of followers I get each day has increased by 700%, where before I would get maybe 10 followers a day, to now over 80 a day!

Of course that wasn’t the only thing I did to increase my followers, but it was the main one that boosted my follower count. If you feel as though your follower count isn’t quite where it should be, I’d suggest giving board covers a try – what do you have to lose?

5. Do A/B testing

When I was a newbie blogger, I thought that you were only supposed to create one pin for your blog post, leave it be and that would be it.

Let’s just say that I was in for a surprise.

Ever since I started creating multiple pins for each post with different titles (called A/B testing) my Pinterest views have exploded and so has my blog traffic! The program I use to create all of my graphics is Canva (it’s free!)

You never know when you create a pin thinking it’s not going to do well and instead it goes viral. This has happened to me several times now.

So, play around with different pin graphics and see which ones do well. A lot of the times it’s the one you least expected.

6. Keywords

Keywords are the #1 way pinners will find your content when they search or something and you can leverage them to get more followers, saves and clickthroughs.

But, you may be wondering, how do I find keywords?

Since Pinterest is a search engine, you can use their own search bar to find relevant keywords for your pin, board and profile descriptions!

Let’s pretend for a moment that you are a mom blogger and you want to tell other moms about genius work from home job ideas you have.

Well, luckily Pinterest makes it super easy to find relevant keywords!

Using our example from earlier, all you need to do is search “work from home jobs” and you’ll find a long list of suggested terms to choose from.

However, a lot of these first keywords are super popular and can be hard to rank for. In order to dive deeper into search results, you’ll want to click around on some of the titles listed under your chosen search term.

So, for our example, let’s choose “work from home jobs for moms”

As you can see, there are a ton of different tiles to choose from. You could pick “work from home jobs for moms ideas” or “work from home jobs for moms in 2018” and the list goes on.

Once you find a couple of keywords, you’ll want to put them in your pin description, and if you’ve created a related board, you’ll want to put them in there too.

Here’s an example of a description for the board about work from home jobs for moms:

“Whether you are just getting started, looking for a career, or simply want to make extra money, here are the best work from home and online job ideas for moms. “

You also want to use keywords to name your boards. Just make sure that the name you choose is simple and easy to find if someone were to search for it.

Here’s a snippet of one of my boards – Personal Growth. I highlighted some of the key words in the board description.

Final Thoughts

Remember that growing your traffic takes a while and doesn’t happen overnight. But, once you have a solid Pinterest marketing strategy in place and you stay consistent with it, you’ll start seeing massive results!

If you’re looking for ways to grow your blog traffic with Pinterest, check out these posts:

• How to skyrocket your blog traffic with Pinterest
• How to use Tailwind to grow your blog traffic
• 7 Secret Tips to Explode Your Pinterest Growth

And, if you want to connect with a wonderful community of bloggers, check out my Girl Boss Bloggers Facebook group!

Let me know in the comments what you’re doing to rock your Pinterest profile in 2019!

Haylie xx