Turning Repins into Website Visitors
Episode #9 of the course How to grow your business with Pinterest by Sydney Wyatt
All right, give yourself a pat on the back.
Over the course of the last eight lessons, you’ve: optimized your Pinterest profile, connected with the right Pinterest users, and set up a strong foundation of content.
Now it’s time to use all that to funnel traffic back to your site.
Funnelling Pinterest traffic to your site essentially comes down to one thing: having a pin go viral. So, while the “how do I get traffic?” question is an easy one to answer, actually making that answer a reality can be tricky.
To have a pin go viral, yes, you should do everything that we’ve covered so far in our lessons. But when it comes down to it, there’s no real checklist to guarantee a piece of content will take off.
I’ve had three separate pins go viral. Here are the stories of each:
• The first viral pin was posted to my WordPress site on March 21, 2016, but it didn’t start going viral until November of the same year. It went viral because it was pinned and heavily promoted by one of the companies I linked to within the post. As a Promoted Pin, it received 486,887 impressions in one week, which resulted in 800 click-throughs and 393 saves.
• The second viral pin was a free downloadable spreadsheet that was posted to my site on April 19, 2016. It started going viral in April 2017. I shared the link to a few people in a Facebook Group I participate in regularly, and they shared it with their readers. Shortly after, two “big-name” bloggers pinned it to their blogging productivity boards, and traffic climbed from there.
• The third pin really caught me off guard. It was a “how-to” post on getting rid of personal belongings. This one was completely organic, in that no big-name Pinterest user pinned it and I did minimal sharing over social media. This is still my biggest traffic driver and was originally posted on November 17, 2016. It started going viral in March 2017. This pin was not promoted. It received 17,729 impressions in one week, resulting in 608 click-throughs and 109 saves.
Here are the things that were consistent about these three viral pins:
• They all had at least four months in between publishing and going viral.
• I pinned all of them to my blog’s specific Pinterest board first.
• All three post images were heavily branded (same font, my logo, picture composition).
• I looped them all regularly and pinned to Group Boards once every two weeks.
• The posts themselves are about 2,000-ish words long.
• My writing in each post is very clear and concise.
And here are the things that were NOT consistent about these three viral pins:
• Each post was on a different topic (Pinterest, productivity, home organization).
• One was a Promoted Pin and the other two were not.
• Only one included a free opt-in (also the lowest performing).
• The other two posts included affiliate links.
All of this is obviously anecdotal, but sometimes, that’s the best information to share.
In the next lesson—our final one together!—we’re going to talk affiliate marketing and making that money.
Ka-ching!
Sydney
Recommended book
Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers by Seth Godin
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