My Easy Long Tail Pinterest Traffic Strategy

My long tail Pinterest traffic strategy

We all want the Pinterest super pin that gets 100,000 repins and shovels traffic to our site.

Sadly, it’s rare for that to happen.  It’s a crapshoot as far as I’m concerned.  You may or may not get lucky.

It’s the same with targeting high search volume keywords.  No matter how much promotion you do and how great the content is, there’s a good chance you won’t get to the top spot in Google.

Good thing there’s another way when it comes to Pinterest traffic.

It’s what I call the long tail Pinterest traffic approach.

It’s not much different than targeting long tail keywords for search traffic.

In fact, the long tail Pinterest approach dovetails perfectly with long tail search SEO.

Here’s the process.

Long Tail Pinterest Traffic Process

Step 1:  Long tail keyword research

This is the most important step.  You need to do really good keyword research to uncover easy-to-rank, relevant keywords/topics for your site.

It takes practice and the longer you’re in your niche, the more adept you’ll get at it.

The low competition aspect is primarily for ranking in the search engines.

The more obscure or specific the topic is for both search and Pinterest.

Step 2: Publish killer article with great images/graphics

Once you have a good keyword/topic, you need to publish a great article that extensively and thoroughly covers that topic.

If you’re going to promote and use Pinterest, you need at least one image in your content.  Ideally the pin version is optimize size-wise for Pinterest (735 x 1102 px).

You can have this pin version in your content or set up as the graphic that gets pinned when someone clicks the Pinterest button in your post (using Social Warfare plugin).

TIP: you can create more than one pin per post.  I do this quite a bit, especially if the post has multiple images.

Step 3: Submit the pin(s) to your boards

Once you publish your post, add the pin to a board in the Pinterest account associated with your website.

  • Ensure you have rich pins activated.
  • Write a descriptive description that describes the pin and/or content to which it links.
  • Add in 1 to 4 hashtags.
  • Publish the pin.

Should you cover topics that have no search engine volume?

This is a very good question to which I’m going to give a lousy answer (it’s an answer I wouldn’t like).

My answer is “yes”, but track results.  What you want to see is that Pinterest delivers sufficient traffic to warrant the cost and time of publishing that content.

My general approach is to publish content that will likely get some search engine traffic and view Pinterest as secondary traffic.  However, I’m open to this concept and do deploy it myself.

So the short answer is “yes” it’s worth trying.  The key is obscure and interesting.  You want people on Pinterest to see the pin and just have to click through to read the full article.

It’s akin to clickbait, but the pin text/article title reveals more than classic clickbait which reveals nothing but creates only mystery.  I like to reveal something about what the article on the site is about.

What’s so special about this process – isn’t this what everyone does?

On the surface, yes, this is a typical pinning process.  You probably do it.

However, what makes this an effective process is you want to create pins that promote and link to very specific, obscure, and/or interesting content.

Ideally, these are topics that have not been covered or published about anywhere on the web and certainly not on Pinterest.

There is so much traffic on Pinterest searching for everything under the sun that you can do well with hundreds of pins that drip feed traffic to you consistently.  As you build up your boards and quality pin inventory on your Pinterest account, those many drips of traffic add up to substantial amounts of traffic.

It’s just like long tail keyword SEO strategy.  A few won’t do much for your site, but hundreds of published articles, where each pull in a handful of visitors daily, will add up to thousands of daily visitors.

Example

I can use this site and niche as an example.  A lot of bloggers in this niche create pins focusing on popular topics such as:

  • How to create a blog
  • How to do affiliate marketing
  • Affiliate marketing tips
  • Blogging tips
  • How to do SEO
  • How to get more traffic from Pinterest

Those are fine topics and if your pin performs well it can send a ton of traffic.  I’m not suggesting that you should avoid popular topics.  I’m suggesting that in addition to covering popular topics to also cover obscure topics.

To that end, as we ramp up Pinterest for MyPerfectBlog.com, I create pins for all my posts, most of which are pretty obscure.  Take this post for instance.  Nobody as far as I know has shared this Pinterest strategy. Sure, every blogger on Pinterest writes epic posts on how to get traffic on Pinterest, but nobody ever discussed the effectiveness of using a long tail approach for Pinterest traffic.  I discovered this by being active in several niches and testing tons of stuff weekly.

Swing to get on first, not for a home run

As you publish long tail, specific content consistently each week, you’ll slowly, but surely create excellent boards with pins that promote and include unique content.

You see, for years I failed to create pins for this type of content.  I focused on the same types of content everyone else did in the niche.  I failed to drill down, which was a big mistake.

Yes, I had published some obscure content, but never figured creating pins for that dryer, informational content would do well on Pinterest.

Then, one day I created an admittedly boring pin with a title that while not the most interesting, was a topic that people wanted to read about.

Within weeks that pin was sending a steady stream of visitors to that article.  I was amazed at how effective boring, dry but obscurely informative content could be on Pinterest.

Since then, I’ve created many, many pins promoting the obscure content on my site.  While I still pin the eye-candy, I put just as much or more effort into pins with titles nobody else bothers to cover.

Pinterest is made for the long tail

The biggest challenge with long tail SEO is getting enough content published to add up to significant traffic.  This takes time.

This is not nearly as much of an issue with Pinterest because you can create pins and write a description much faster than you can publish fully formatted articles on your site.

But don’t you need a published article for each pin?

For each published article you can have multiple pins.

But consider this strategy to speed up the long tail Pinterest traffic.

If you use table of contents plus plugin, you create in-content links which means you can create pins for specific sections of your content.  Think about how powerful that is.

For example, for this article, I could create a pin for the section “Long Tail Pinterest Traffic Process” as well as for the “Swing to get on first, not for a home run” section.  Many long form articles have many sections split up with headings – many sections could warrant its own pin.

Final thought:  Pinterest is now a search engine as much, if not more, than a social media network.  That’s a very important development because it impacts how you go about using Pinterest… and that’s why the long tail Pinterest approach can be very effective.

Related:  1.9 million blog post visitors from Pinterest

 

1 thought on “My Easy Long Tail Pinterest Traffic Strategy”

  1. Thanks for the info.

    I started using Pinterest and received some results but unfortunately I didn’t feel that it was a fit for my content.

    But after reading your post I may explore some of the ideas that talk about here.

    The table of contents idea for pins is a good one!

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