Gary Arndt figured this out early.
As a travel blogger specializing in photography, Pinterest was an obvious place to build a presence for Everything-Everywhere.
Which he did.
So did Ana White. The Alaskan mom who set up a carpentry blog… and now receives over 6,000 visitors a day from Pinterest alone.
And with a week or two of hard work you could have a board to rival Gary Arndt and Travel Channel.
Seriously… Pinterest is WIDE open for travel bloggers.
Here’s how to get traffic from it…
Step #1. Put High Quality Images on Every Page of Your Blog
Seriously. Put pictures on every freakin’ page. And make sure they’re HIGH quality. The kind others want to share.
Here’s where you can find photos:
- Creative Commons (highly recommended; search Flickr, Google and other places for images you can reuse)
- Paper.li (lets you search Twitter, Facebook and Google + for the best pictures)
Step #2. Choose Narrow Topics and Go Deep
Don’t create pinboards for “Europe”… it’s too wide a topic. Instead, focus on something hyper-targeted (this is easy with a destination specific blog) and become the authority on it.
For example, my wife created this pinboard on UNESCO World Heritage Sites. She could have just listed a few of them, but instead chose to pin all 936 sites.
It’s simple enough to do. So what’s stopping you?
Step #3. Hire Help
Wanna build killer pinboards in record time? Hire someone to help you out.
I’m not suggesting you outsource everything - connecting with other users is still important - but you can definitely hire someone on eLance to pin related images for you.
This works especially well if you’ve already got images on your site. Your assistant could go through and pin images based on category and tag (e.g. “snowboarding” and “Europe” on one board would be highly targeted for Pinterest users).
Note: you don’t need to do this step… but I highly suggest it. Outsourcing is the fastest way to success.
Step #4. Make it Easy to Share Your Content
Include a share button on your site for maximum results. Then encourage people to share your photos on Pinterest within your posts.
Step #5. Build Connections
This is a common theme here. Connections are really what effective promotion is all about… and it’s no different on Pinterest. Make diligent use of the “@” feature - which, like Twitter, sends a message to the user - and the hashtags (#) to label specific topics. This allows your pins to show up in the Pinterest search results (which suck at the moment, but will get better in time).
As you’ve probably noticed, Pinterest is here to stay. Why not jump on it NOW, before big-time companies catch wind and start pinning crazy amounts of content?
Indeed, why not?
About adamcosta
Pretty nice post. I just stumbled upon your weblog and wanted to say that I have really enjoyed surfing around
your blog posts. After all I’ll be subscribing to your feed and I hope you write again soon!
Hey Alex,
Good to hear buddy, the free 24 part course has LOTS more stuff to review.
And I’ll definitely be writing more, so come on back now, ya’hear?
Hi, Adam ~
Great site! I appreciate your information to help us build our travel blogs.
What’s your thought on including our copyright and name on photos shared on Pinterest? I know many travel photographers are reluctant to use the site.
Hi Nancy,
It’s a personal choice, really. I usually give a ton of stuff away for free (eBooks, posts, interviews, etc.) to build goodwill. Putting your photos on Pinterest is a similar approach - for example, you can use it to drive traffic back to your photography blog.
Of course, you can do that with your name/copyright on there, too.
Hi Adam,
I just found this post and even though it’s a year old, it’s pretty useful. I have a quick question - I have lots of people Liking and repinning my photos on Pinterest, but not many people actually clicking through to the blog. Any ideas on why that might be?
Just clicked on to pinterest… thanks so much for writing this, I wasn’t “getting” pinterist, but it sounds like the sort of tool I’ll want to be using!
My travel site has a facebook page but I never give so much thought of creating a pinterest and twitter accounts for my site because I thought it’s a total waste of time plus I don’t have much time updating so many accounts, but now I’m giving it a consideration after reading this post. I’ll give it a shot in pinterest and see how much traffic I will generate. Thanks Adam for this suggestion this helps a lot!