9 Effective Ways to Drive Traffic with Pinterest for Dropshippers

How would you like to get 46% of your traffic from a social media channel? Sounds awesome, right? Today, I will show you the right techniques on how to drive traffic with Pinterest.

The steps on how to use Pinterest to drive traffic to your website are:

Create a business account
Use the right image sizes
Maintain superb image quality
Post regularly
Join a group board
Automate your posts
Add links to your posts
Use effective copy
Watch your stats

But first, why should you even use the platform?

Why Is Pinterest Traffic Important And Effective?

Pinterest is one of the less-traveled roads in content marketing—especially by a dropshipping store owner who focuses most of his attention on Instagram and Facebook.

What many do not realize is that Pinterest is the second biggest traffic driver among all social media channels.

Pinterest is no longer an online scrapbook. Over the years, it has grown into a massive search engine, with more than 300 million active users every month. Half of the users are in the United States, and there are more than 2 billion searches done per month on the platform.

Here are some cool statistics about Pinterest:

It is the 3rd largest social network in the United States
More than 600 million searches in the platform are visual (hint: your products are visual, right?)
Over 2 billion searches are done on the platform every month
85% of people who use Pinterest, called Pinners, are on mobile
More than 66% of Pinterest users are women—mostly mothers and 8 out of 10 mothers are pinners
Half of the users are in the US, and half are outside the US—a good balance to find your ideal target market
High-income households are more likely to use the platform than low-income ones (which means they have disposable income—they can buy!)

So, what is there not to like about getting Pinterest organic traffic?

9 Effective Ways to Drive Traffic with Pinterest

In this section, I will take you through some of the best practices on how to increase impressions on Pinterest, resulting in a boost in your blog or store traffic.

1. Create a business account

Like Facebook, you have a Pinterest profile and a business profile. Your business account embodies your store, and this is the channel where you are going to post pins to drive traffic.

To create a business Pinterest account, go to business.pinterest.com. Click on Join Pinterest or Sign Up at the upper right section of the site, and complete your registration.

With a Pinterest business account, you can create ads, display your business name instead of your first and last name, and you will also get access to the platform’s business features such as:

Rich Pins – pins where you can add more details such as a favicon or a link to your product or blog. Without a Rich Pin, your post is just a photo or video, and your viewers have no means to go to your store.
Promoted Pins – these are pins that you advertise, similar to boosting a post on Facebook.
Pinterest Analytics – you can view how your pins are performing, and see which ones have the most impressions and link clicks. With the analytics tool, you can see what types of content drive saves, link clicks, and engagement.

Here is an example of Pinterest Analytics:

You can also view other metrics as shown in the screenshot below:

And if you scroll down further, you will see more details about your pins.

You can sign up for a business account, or just create a personal one and then convert it into a personal account. After this, you have to verify your account and connect your Pinterest business profile with your website.

This option is easily seen under your business hub. Just click your business name and then select Business Hub. Scroll down, and then you will see the connection options.

2. Use the right image sizes

The ideal size of a pin is 1,000px by 1,500px or an aspect ratio of 2:3. The 1K by 1,500K pixel size is the right size to make our pins visible—it is the minimum. You can pin your post with smaller or bigger images, but bigger pins will be truncated so stick to that size.

Take a look at this screenshot, and you will see that the one I highlighted is too small and may not get attention.

This one, on the other hand, is too long and is truncated on a mobile device.

What is a 2:3 ratio? What it means is that the width is two times the original unit, and the height is 3 times the original unit.

Here is a diagram that explains why 1,000px by 1,500px is a 2:3 ratio.

To get a 2:3 ratio, just multiply your basic unit by two for the width, and multiply it by three for the height.

3. Maintain superb image quality

Pinterest, like Instagram, is an image-based platform. However, it is not just a social media platform, but a search engine. Think about it as something like Google Search for Images.

As such, your images must be as clear and crisp as possible. People who use Pinterest generally scan their feeds. Any blurry image will not get attention and will be passed up as the user scrolls down.

Take a look at this example:

This image is too blurry, and I will not have the motivation to read it.

Now, take a look at these photos. The green one outshines them all.

Pinterest does not put limitations on the resolution or size of your images, so take advantage of this. Use clear photos, no matter how heavy they are. Use the original image size on Pinterest, but reduce the image file size before you upload the same photo on your blog.

4. Post regularly

Like blogging, posting regularly is the key to getting impressions—and consequently, traffic—from Pinterest.

Despite your attempts to make your titles and copy SEO-friendly, and no matter how beautiful your images are, you have to remember that Pinterest is home to billions of posts. Just like any form of content, your consistency is key for the algorithm to get more impressions.

According to experts, the maximum effective number of pins you should do is 30 per day, and the minimum is five per day.

“What the heck? How will I do this?” you say.

There are social media tools you can use to auto-post your pins, which we will talk about later. These tools, however, cost a lot. What I do is to post the hard way. I only once per day, but I do not have to do it manually every day.

I sit down for a day and schedule my posts on Pinterest itself, so I do not have to go back to it daily.

The first thing that I do is to create at least two versions of my blog cover. See example below:

In some cases, I make five versions of it. After that, I post on Pinterest various blog posts and schedule them. See the screenshot below.

If you click on Publish at a later date, you can choose the time and day that Pinterest is going to release your pin. If you sit down one Saturday to five posts per day for the next week, then you have consistency in your pins for the succeeding week.

You can do this once you already have a lot of blog posts. If you have a store, then it is much easier because you have a lot of product photos to schedule for pinning repeatedly over time.

5. Join a group board

A group board is like a Facebook Group. Here, you can post on the board for the board followers to see. If anyone is interested in what you pinned, he can save it to his board, share it, or go to your website.

To find a board, just type a keyword in the search bar and select boards.

Once the search results are on your screen, you will see this:

You can choose a board that you like and then click it. The next step is to follow that board. And then click on Request to Join. If the Request to Join button is not beside the Follow button, then it means that the board creator is not accepting members.

Here is one sad truth: almost no one allows people to join their boards. They only invite people they know.

In this case, you have to create your group board where you can collaborate with other people and lead them, instead of you following them.

To create a Group Board, go to your Business Profile, and then choose a board.

Once you click on a board, you can click on the invite button, and this is where you can copy and paste your Group Board link, and then announce it on other platforms or on Pinterest itself. The other option is to invite someone by email.

As your follower count grows, you will certainly have more people who will follow your board, and you will have more people who will see your pins. Anyone who follows you or your board will get a notification if you pin something new.

6. Automate your posts

Earlier, I talked about manually scheduling posts on Pinterest. There is another way to get this done, but you also need to manually upload your posts on tools, like Hootsuite.

The beauty of Hootsuite is that you can post an item on several social media channels at the same time. And all it takes is one upload.

If you do things the manual way, you have to log in to Pinterest then upload, do the same for Twitter, do the same for LinkedIn, do the same for Instagram, Facebook, etc.

This process is cumbersome. With Hootsuite and other tools like it, you can post just one time, schedule it, and they will post on the different social media channels that you integrated.

Take a look at the screenshot of my Hootsuite calendar below.

They are greyed out because they have already been published. As you can see, I post to FB and Twitter daily. I am limited to two social media channels only because I am using the free version, but you can add more if you upgrade to Pro.

This is what I do every Saturday. I sit down and schedule posts on Hootsuite, and the tool will release the posts on the days and times I selected in the future. I do the same on my Pinterest account, as I showed you earlier.

7. Add links to your posts

While this seems obvious, some people do not add a link to their pins. How will you get traffic if the lead has nothing to click?

Pinterest traffic quality is awesome. It is a search engine for images and videos, so people who see impressions of your pins are interested in what you have to offer in your niche, so make sure you put links that will take your lead to your product page.

Here is the area where you can put a link to your post:

You need to check if your link works. Put that link on another browser and see if it loads. If it does, use it on your Pinterest post.

8. Use effective copy

What is a copy?

A copy is a blurb that convinces a person to take action. Copywriters do this—they are expensive and mostly work for huge corporations via marketing agencies.

In Pinterest, your copy is your headline and the text about your pin. Here is the area where you type the copy of your Pinterest post.

An effective copy must be short and straightforward. Here are two tips on how to do that:

Headline – it must use the four Us. It must be unique, urgent, useful, and ultra-specific.
ADIA – AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action—your copy or text content must have all these four traits.

If you want to learn more, read my blog about copywriting tips: 9 SEO Copywriting Secrets to Increase Your Traffic.

I also highly recommend a book that I got for free from Jim Edwards. It is a physical book about copywriting with techniques that I have used until now. The book itself is free, but you have to pay for shipping.

9. Watch your stats

The last Pinterest strategy for bloggers and e-commerce entrepreneurs that I want to share is to watch your stats. Effective marketers use statistics to their advantage, and it is great that Pinterest has an Analytics section where you can see how your pins are doing.

To access, your stats, just head on to the top left and click on the drop-down arrow for Analytics. You can choose Overview or Audience Insights.

If you choose Overview, you can toggle the date range to the left, and you will see various performance indicators over time, like the one below.

If you want, you can choose other metrics from the drop-down.

If you choose Audience Insight, Pinterest is going to break the audience type for you in terms of age and gender, as shown below:

Explore your Analytics area to see which pins are performing the most. Those that have the most impressions mean that you are using the right keywords, while those that have the most link clicks and engagements are the types of content that people are interested in.

If you want, you can do an A/B testing. Try to use the same copy, but with different product images. Or, use the same product images but use different keywords and text. See how it goes, and you can deduce reasonable conclusions from the stats of your A/B test.

Summary

One thing I get asked all the time is “How long to see results on Pinterest?”

In my experience, it took me months to get positive traffic results. But as I mentioned, I only post on Pinterest once a day. There will come a time when I will have so much content that I can post five pins a day—including tutorial videos that I plan to make.

Pinterest is a free search engine for images and videos. If you are operating a dropshipping store, this is the best place where you can find traffic for your Shopify store and improve your conversion rate.

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