Pinterest As A Traffic Source: A Top Ten List

Top Ten Ways To Use Pinterest to Market Your Website

Did you know you can use Pinterest to increase traffic to your site? It's actually quite simple. Here is a list of ways to use visual marketing on Pinterest to reach people and get the word out.

A marketing strategy should include as many social platforms as possible. Pinterest is one of the top ones because there are over 125 million Pinterest users from the U.S., and 2 million users worldwide save shopping pins to boards daily. Here is my strategy to use Pinterest for marketing.

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1. Use Keywords: Do keyword research to find out which ones you want to be associated with your business. People will find your account by searching for the keywords. Use them in the board titles and in the description. Your pins can be tweeted. The description is used in the tweet so make it short and relevant with the keywords. Add up to 20 hashtags in the description. 


2. Use Vertical Images: I create images that are up to 735 pixels by 1102 pixels. This will help get your image noticed and pinned. You can use Canva to create custom graphics with your branding on it. 


3. Build Links Back to Your Site: Add a link in the description. Then edit the pin to put the link in the source for the pin. 


4. Embed Pins On Your Site: You can create an embed code on the Pinterest site. It's a good way to get repins, and it will improve your sites appearance. You should have a pinnable image on every blog post or web page. 


5. Share Your Pins On All of Your Social Media Accounts: This will get you more followers and repins. 


6. Use The Analytics From Your Business Account: You can see which pins are performing better and share them on other boards and other social platforms. 


7. Use Rich Pins: From Pinterest: “Right now, there are five types of Rich Pins: movie, recipe, article, product, and place. To get started, you’ll need to prep your website with meta tags, test out your Rich Pins and apply to get them on Pinterest. If you’re not technical, you might want to ask your developer or site owner to help get you going!” 


8. Use Relevant Boards to Build Authority: You'll gain followers that will look forward to your new content. That will help you get traffic and sales. 


9. Use Tips Boards: Create interest with tips for your niche. This will also help with authority. People will think of you as an expert. 


10. Use Collaborative Boards: You can get your pins in front of new eyes by using group boards. This can get you followers and traffic fast. Find group boards and leave a comment asking to be added.

Instagram Is So Hot Right Now!

   Instagram is one of the best sources for traffic at the moment. It is a great way to build your brand and create an engaging audience. There are several ways to get started with this. There are bots that you can use. Which you'll have to be careful with or you could get shadow banned. That just means your posts won't show up in your followers feeds. There are a couple organic methods as well. I'll discuss some bots first.

Automating Your Account:

   I use a couple of apps. One called Crowdfire which I use to schedule posts. It also helps to find articles and images to post on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. Another is CCSoft+ that I use to auto follow and unfollow accounts. I follow followers of my competitors accounts. Then after a few days I'll unfollow them. This is a good way to get followers in the beginning. You'll want to be careful not to follow too many people in too short a time. You should only follow about 700 accounts a day. I have it set to unfollow 30 accounts every 25 min. and follow 26 every 25 min. This has gotten me over 30k followers in about a year.

Powerlikes:

   If you want to do this faster it will cost more. You can buy Powerlikes and Comments from services. There is a strategy to this that will help your posts go viral. You can get thousands of followers a week doing it this way. The first step is to find a video on the Instagram Explore page. Look for ones that have 1 mil+ views or 10k+ likes. You can get an app that will allow you to download and repost videos. I use one called Video Downloader.

Here are some Powerlikes services:

1. Goso.io

2. BoostUp Social

3. Fuelgram

4. NapoleonCat

Hash Tags:

   You'll want to do some hashtag research as well. Use the maximum of 30 hashtags if you can. I use an app called Lee Tags to find my hashtags. When adding hash tags I put them at the bottom so they don't distract from the post caption. Use a period and hit enter, repeat five times then put in your hash tags. Hash tags will help get your post to show up in the explore page. You can use them for Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest as well, just use 2 tags for those though.

When to Post:

   Timing is also important in posting. Use your account analytics to determine when your followers are most active. You can download an app called Iconosqaure to get better analytics. Crowdfire also will automatically schedule your posts at the best times. I general posting at 5:00 AM from Tuesday to Friday as people check their phones when they first get up. Also between 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM during the weekday people check there phones around lunch and in the afternoon. Sat around 11:00 AM is the best time on the weekend. Sundays seem to be the worst. This is also dependent on your target audience. I've gotten good results on Sunday before.

Organic Follower Growth:

   If you don't have the budget for powerlikes there are some organic ways to increase your followers. They just take longer and more work. The first thing is to find accounts similar to yours. Start following them and like and comment on there posts. Try and make the comments more than just a few words, not just a couple of emojis. Answer other peoples comments. This will help get you noticed by their followers. Dm accounts asking for like and comment for return. When ever someone comments on one of your posts comment back. Basically just be as engaging as possible. There are bots that you can use to automate this but I wouldn't suggest using them. You'll end up liking and commenting on irrelevant posts and your comments will come off sounding like spam.

   I have found the best posts tend to be memes. Funny or inspirational tend to get the most engagement. Make sure when you write your post caption you add a call to action. Put it in the form of a question to get more comments, shares, likes and profile visits. "Did you enjoy this? Check out then link in my profile for more info." is a common one that works.

Instagram Stories:

   Instagram Stories are the next thing you'll want to start utilizing. Once you get 10k followers you can add a link to your stories. When ever I put a link in I add the text " Swipe Up!" to the bottom. If the story is a graphic I created in Canva.com, I'll have that with an arrow pointing up in the graphic design. To get the most views you'll want to post at least 4 stories a day. When posting a story you can swipe up to get more options. Use a hash tag; a mention of a relevant brand; a geo tag; a poll or question will get more engagement. I'll also throw in a Gif if I'm posting an image instead of a video. If you post a Gif to a video you can hold your finger to the spot where you want it and it will give you the option to pin it. That will get the Gif to stay in the same place as your camera or subject moves.
Check out my Instagram account here.

Facebook Pages

  Getting traffic from Facebook pages is really easy. Finding the right topic to make a page about takes some research. You'll want to know what audience you are looking to attract and create content that they'll be interested in. It can be as simple as a meme or a funny video. Videos get the most engagement. You can make a video out of a slide show of pics or memes. There are apps that you can download to your phone to make these. Visit your competitors pages for inspiration and to see what works.

   Once you have your page created you should create a group from that page. You'll also be able to create Facebook ads using your page posts. This is a way to get likes and follows. Once you get likes on a post you can invite those people to like your page. Just click on the post to see who liked it and Facebook will let you click on "invite to like page". To get traffic to your page for free find Facebook groups that are related to your page. Make sure they allow posting from other pages so that you don't get banned for spamming the groups. It's also good to post content that adds to the discussion of other groups. answer peoples questions. Engaging in other groups will help get people to recognize you. As they start interacting with you you'll be able to invite them to your group and page.

   You can create an Instagram account and link it to your Facebook page. You should create one for each of your pages. Just go to Instagram and click on your account in the upper left corner of your phone then click on add account. You'll have to create a free email account using Google or Yahoo or any other free email servers. You can only have one Instagram account link to your phone number. So when you create a new Instagram account link it to a new email account. Check out my next blog post for Instagram tips.

Automatic Backlink Builder

 Building Backlinks

Backlinks are the most powerful metric search engines use to rank a site. The more links you have on other sites pointing back to your site the more popular your site appears to the search engines. For these to be quality backlinks they need to be coming from sites related to your sites niche. The search engine rank of the sites your links are on also helps. To have the best backlinks you'll need to find websites that are similar to yours and ask them to post a link back to yours. This is a time consuming process. Many sites won't want to add your link. Another way is to find other blogs or forums that are related to your niche. Find comments where a person is asking a question and answer it. Quora is a site that people ask and answer questions. Make sure you provide an answer that provides value. Then add your link for more information. This is also quite time consuming.

If you were to Google "auto backlink builder" you'll find several sites offering free backlinks. These aren't good to use as it will hurt your search engine ranking. The backlinks will be from sites with little content that doesn't have anything to do with your site. Also you don't want to get too many links at once. Search engines look for natural link building patterns.

 With the latest Google update backlinks don't carry quite as much weight as they used to. They still are important. By focusing on creating relevant content and having relevant websites linking to it is still an important part of a good seo strategy. Using social media to drive traffic to your website is an alternative to building backlinks. The backlinks from social media are nofollow. This means that search engine bots won't follow the link back to your site. Dofollow backlinks are the ones that add rank to your site.

Some will say that manual backlink creation is the only effective way. I disagree. Manual is a good way to start but using an automated system will greatly reduce the time spent building backlinks. I begin by creating content like blog posts, articles and web 2.0 properties. Each with one or two backlinks to my main site. Deep links work well to gain rank for individual pages in your site. It's better to have links to several pages, not just the home page. After I have a fare amount of content linking to my site I then use Backlink Beast to generate backlinks. It is a great piece of software to use to build your site's authority. It is a site that automatically builds backlinks. Sites like Hub Pages are easy to get higher page rank and to show up on the first page of Google. All you need is backlinks to these sites.

 Using Traffic Ivy you write the content and set it up so other people post it on their blogs or social media accounts. This will get you traffic from other blogs. I have seen great results from using this program. It is a simple and automated way to increase page rank and traffic to your site or blog.

Link Wheel

Link Wheel Backlink Building

   A link wheel is a series of links going from one site to another making a circle, with each one also linking to the main site. This technique used to work quite well. Since Google updated it's algorithm it isn't as effective. It still helps to create content and link to your main site. I have a post all about link building strategies that still work.
 Start by writing a unique article for both of theses article directories, GoArticles and Ezinearticles. Link from one to the other. Make your links in your articles hyperlinks with your keywords. Next you'll want to make a Hubpage about your topic and hyperlink it back to one of your articles using a different keyword. Then write a Google Knol using a keyword in the title. Do the same with linking it back to your Hubpage. Start a Blogger blog and link it back to your Google Knol in the same fashion as before. Start a Word Press blog and link it to your Blogger blog. Lastly link to your Word Press blog from your website. All of these sites should also have a link to your main site. You should eventually make a Hubpage, and an article for each of your keywords. Make them all unique and link them to each other as described above. Social bookmark all of your sites to increase their page ranks. You can use an auto backlink generator to do this for you to save time. This is a good way to increase your rank in search engines for your targeted keywords. The last thing I did was create a Facebook page about how to build a link wheel. Check it out to see how I am coming with building a wheel for this post.

Internal linking

Google rewards sites with authority and links that relate to each other. Sites like Wikipedia dominate the search engines because they have both of these. Wikipedia has anchor text linking to other of their pages of related topics. For example if you searched "seo" on the page for search engine optimization you will see many hyper linked words relating to your search such as web site, blog, search engines,search engine marketing. Each of these leads to other pages on Wikipedia. This is internal linking and it is why Wikipedia ranks so high in search engines.

When Google and other search engines send their bots to index your site for new content they read your site map and update their databases. Your hyper links leave a trail throughout your site or blog and search engines will give you a higher rank. The hyper links also tells the search engine what your blog or site is about. The same with bolding, underlining, italicizing your keywords.

Make sure it is well written and not overly stuffed with keywords as you'll get penalized by the search engines. If it flows and reads well people will stay and read longer and this will tell the search engines that you have a quality site.

When writing posts find all of the keywords. Bold them so you can find them easily. Use these to make future posts then link to the new posts from them. This will help you come up with ideas for posts. If one of your keywords fits a previous post then link to that. This will take a long time but if you post a few times a week by the end of a year you could have hundreds of internal links and posts.

It can be difficult to track hundreds of links so you'll want to install a plug in that allows you to search keywords and link them to related posts automatically. They can also give you a site map which will make it easier to navigate.

Get Backlinks from RSS Feeds

To get backlinks from RSS feeds combine your website feeds, article feeds, web 2.0 feeds, profile feeds to one giant RSS feed and submit it to top 20 RSS feeds directories. You'll want to add link juice to the sites the RSS feeds originate from by adding backlinks to them. Here is a list of rss directories to submit to. RSS feeds are a good way to get organic backlinks. These are backlinks that other people create to your site. These are better because they are natural and search engines can tell that they are. If all of your links come from the same IP address search engines won't give them as much weight. Also if you get a bunch all at once they might penalize your site rank.