Essential Pinterest Tools For Bloggers
Social media is an important tool for bloggers. Beyond building a community, social media allows bloggers an outlet to send organic traffic (or paid traffic) to their blog. One social media platform that has been huge for driving traffic to ImperfectlyPortillo.com and my other website, BusinessTravelLife.com, is Pinterest.
In fact, Pinterest is the second highest referrals source, behind Google search traffic, for both of my sites. This is no accident. I realized early on that a pin on Pinterest offered a much longer social media lifespan than a Facebook post, Tweet, or Instagram post.
Just take a moment to think about it. When you pin something on Pinterest, it will stay in the searchable database indefinitely. Each time it gets re-pinned, the person who re-pins it is sharing it with their followers. In comparison, the lifespan of a Facebook post is about five hours.
It takes a few extra minutes to make each blog post Pinterest ready and share it on Pinterest, but it is worth the effort. With that in mind, I wanted to share my favorite Pinterest tools for bloggers.
Canva
I am obsessed with Canva. I have been using it since it launched. Not only does it make it easy to design beautiful graphics, Canva has thousand of templates and stock photos that you can access for free. In less than 5 minutes, you can create a Pinterest sized graphic for your blog post using Canva. It is my favorite tool for creating pinnable images for Pinterest. Canva has both a free version and a paid version. After using the free version for a few years, I upgraded to the paid version and highly recommend it.
Tailwind
Tailwind tripled my Pinterest referral traffic for my website BusinessTravelLife.com. In addition to the ability to schedule pins, Pinterest has amazing analytics. My inner nerd loves the analytics that are shown when I log into Tailwind. Tailwind also offers Tribes, which are groups you can join to cross-promote pins.
You can schedule 100 pins on Tailwind for free before you are required to pay for a monthly membership. This is a great way to try it before you buy it. I have a Plus membership which is $9.99 per month (much cheaper than hiring a VA to do my Pinterest for me). I spend one to two hours per month scheduling my pins into Tailwind. You can try the paid membership for free too; Click here for a $15 Tailwind credit.
Pinterest Save Button
The Pinterest Save Button is a free tool offered by Pinterest that makes it easy for your site visitors to pin images on your site. There are different types of Pinterest Save Buttons, but the best choice for most bloggers is the hover button, which hovers over all the images on your site. In the upper left corner of the image above you can see a Pinterest Save button (the schedule button in the bottom left is for Tailwind). The Pinterest save button is free to set up using your Pinterest account.
Profile Widget Builder
The widget builder tool offered by Pinterest is also really useful. You can create a widget in various sizes to add to your website. I created a square widget. You can choose if you want the widget to show your profile or a specific board.
Above is the profile widget that I created, which is also shown in my side bar. The widget builder is free to set up using your Pinterest account.
Rich Pins
Rich Pins are an additional tool offered through Pinterest for your website. It reads the metadata from your article and shows that information with your pin, automatically. You can see in the screen shot of my pin the article title and the meta description (side note: bloggers, this another reason why you want to write the meta description for each article!).
The information shown in a Rich Pin makes the pin more valuable than the average pin. It takes about ten minutes to get your rich pin set up and, here is a great article with the directions. Rich Pins are free to set up using your Pinterest account.
What are your favorite Pinterest tools? Please comment below!
