What good is Pinterest marketing if all the traffic leading to your website doesn’t convert? That’s why it’s important to optimize your entire funnel, both on Pinterest and off. One of the easiest and most important parts of your Pinterest marketing funnel to fix is your blog posts.
More often than not, a blog post will be a Pinterest user’s first point of entry to your website, and they have great potential to convert to subscribers, sales, and inquiries! But that’s only if you optimize your blog posts for Pinterest.
How to Optimize Your Blog Posts for Pinterest
It’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the different best practices and “how-tos” for blogging. You have to think about SEO and your audience and linking to other blogs and now you have to add Pinterest to the equation?
Don’t let the idea of optimizing your blogs keep you from writing blogs in the first place. After all, blogging is the first step to Pinterest marketing success! Whether you’ve been writing blogs already or are planning to start blogging, this blog post optimization checklist will help you create content your Pinterest audience will absolutely love!
What is a Pinterest-optimized blog post?
Before I tell you exactly how to optimize your blog posts for Pinterest, let’s talk about what makes a “good” blog post in the first place. These tips will help you make the most of the Pinterest traffic you’re sending to your site, boosting both your conversions and your Pinterest performance.
A Pinterest-optimized blog post is a blog post that…
- Is easy to read (and skim)
- Answers the readers’ questions
- Doesn’t assume anything about the reader’s knowledge
- Reminder: your Pinterest audience is “cold” to you, so inside jokes or niche information might not land the same!
- Anticipates what they’ll want next
- Includes calls to action and encourages engagement
I know those are all kind of vague, so let’s go through the checklist for some tangible tips on improving your blog posts for Pinterest!
Optimizing Your Blog Posts for Pinterest: A Checklist
When writing blogs for your Pinterest marketing, make sure you’ve got these things covered:
You have a Pinterest-friendly image in the post
This is the simplest way to improve readability, increase engagement with the blog, and boost your Pinterest performance. By including a Pinterest-friendly image in the text of your blog post, you’re breaking up the wall of text and giving users a way to save the image (and post) for later.
Generally speaking, a Pinterest-friendly image is any vertical image, but I particularly recommend including some sort of infographic or diagram, as that image offers additional value and isn’t just promotional. Pinterest marketers will often recommend having a blog post cover-style image available for readers to save, but I see this more commonly with content creators than with other business owners.
The how to optimize your blog post checklist above is a great example of the kind of Pinterest-friendly image I’d love to see in more blogs!
You use headings and bullets to make it skimmable
Making your blog posts skimmable is good advice for blogging in general, but especially when considering your Pinterest audience. Pinterest users are typically looking for specific info, so you should make it easy to find instead of hitting them with a wall of text and making them scroll forever.
There are lots of different ways to break up your text and make it easy to skim, including using plenty of headings and sections, adding bullet point lists, changing the text style, adding images, and more!
You have links to other blog posts and resources throughout the post
Internal links are a standard SEO best practice for optimizing your blog posts, and it also makes it more likely users will stay on your website and get to know you. This is one of the biggest benefits of linking your Pinterest pins back to your own website instead of to a third-party platform or other social media site.
Once a user clicks from Pinterest to your website, you have a captive audience. It’s your job to provide them with the information they want and need. Whenever possible and relevant, link to other related blog posts or resources that your blog reader might be interested in! And if you do have any external links in your blog — links that lead to a website other than your own — make sure they open in a new tab so users can come back to your blog.
Linking to other blogs and resources, or even products, will also help increase conversion from your blog posts. I recommend including at least one linked call to action to a lead magnet or product/service in each blog to optimize your blog posts for conversion.
You include calls to action to get readers to join your email list
Now that you’ve got the Pinterest user on your site, take every opportunity to continue that relationship with your audience! Getting a blog reader into your email list is the number one way to foster a relationship and nurture that lead, a step that’s particularly important for service providers trying to sell high-ticket 1:1 services.
If you can, embed an in-line opt-in form from your email platform. If you’re unable to embed the opt-in, you have two other options:
- Add hyperlinked text to your lead magnet
- Create an image that links to your lead magnet
Both are valid options, but I have to admit I have a preference for the second. Designing a simple graphic to simulate a button or embedded form is a great way to add visual interest and draw more attention to the CTA, which might otherwise get overlooked as a simple text link.
Here’s a free Canva template you can use to design your own graphics!
For the “Simple Button” graphic, make sure to either download the image with a transparent background, or change the background color to match your blog’s background color.
And for the cherry on top of this Pinterest-to-blog-to-lead-magnet sundae, make sure you link to a lead magnet landing page that’s hosted on your own website. If you want to know how to do that, you can check out this blog all about lead magnet landing pages.
You’re actually providing enough context, content, and value in your blog posts
Whatever you do, please don’t just copy your Instagram captions from 2021, paste them into your blogging platform, and hit publish. That 5-line caption isn’t going to have enough context or value to truly satisfy the Pinterest audience (or anyone, really).
A lot of the issues I see with business owners not optimizing their blog posts for Pinterest is that the blog content tends to be too “I” focused or personal, too short and shallow, or it isn’t relevant to the business owner or their audience.
You have an optimized footer or sidebar
Consider the typical experience of a Pinterest user landing on your blog post from Pinterest. They likely don’t know who you are or what qualifies you to be giving them this advice. So if all your blog post page looks like is a blank space with a whole lot of text, you’re not giving enough information for that reader to want to stick around on your website and join your email list or become a client.
Adding a sidebar or another section at the end of your blog post to share additional information about yourself is one of the best ways to optimize your blog posts for Pinterest. And best of all, you only have to do it once! Here are some things you could include in that section:
- A short bio
- A picture of yourself
- Email list opt-in
- Most popular blog posts
And here are two examples of business owners who use their sidebars really well.
Where to Start Optimizing Your Blog Posts for Pinterest
Don’t overwhelm yourself trying to do all of this in one go! It’s totally possible that you’ve already checked off a lot of things on this list. If so, give yourself a pat on the back!
If not, take it slow and steady. Once you figure out what you need to create and update, make a plan to get it done incrementally. I recommend starting with low-hanging fruit like updating your blog posts with relevant calls to action or adding pinnable images.
If you’ve got a huge library of blogs and the thought of updating them all makes you want to rot on the couch all day instead, give this a try… Every time you publish a new blog post, go in an update an old one. Slowly, over time, you’ll have an entire catalog of updated, optimized blog content, without having to carve out an entire day to get it done.
Reminder: your blogs don’t have to be perfect before you hit publish
And I’ll stand by that.
Buuuut, there is some truth in the saying “do it right or do it twice”.
Or as John Wooden put it, “If you don’t have time to do it right the first time, how will you ever have time to do it over?”
So while you totally can publish without proofreading (hi, that’s me) or perfectly optimizing your blogs for Pinterest, if you can start blogging with these best practices in mind, it’ll be less work for you in the long run.
Want more support with your blogging for Pinterest?
>> Grab your free Pinterest funnel audit guide to finish optimizing the rest of your Pinterest funnel, website, emails, and Pinterest itself included!
>> Register for the Pinterest Blogging Workshop I’m cohosting with Sara of Between the Lines Copywriting to learn all about blogging from a Pinterest mindset, including what content performs best, how to write better blogs, and how to market those blogs on Pinterest!
If you’re reading this before February 15, there’s still time to buy a ticket and show up live! If not, you can catch the replay!
>> Or if you’d prefer to have someone else tell you exactly what needs fixing and how, that’s what I developed the Pinterest audit for. Instead of just telling you what to fix on the Pinterest platform, I take a look at your entire Pinterest marketing funnel, from your website and blog posts to your email funnels and beyond. Book yours now!
