Pinterest Tips & Tricks For 2018

Googling ‘Pinterest Tips‘ will summon a wide range of posts offering you Pinterest tips going as far back as 2012, which may as well be the Jurassic Era as far as using Pinterest is concerned.

Pinterest is constantly chopping and changing their algorithm, so what works at one time may well not work another.

Currently Pinterest is growing at a fast clip with 200 million active users (70% of them Moms.  Speaking of which, see my review of Carly Campbell’s excellent Pinterest ebook ‘Pinteresting Strategies’ if you’re looking for more advanced strategies and concepts.)

And around 80% of people are accessing their site via mobile devices.

If you read a few different posts on Pinterest for instance you’ll see all sorts of numbers being bandied about as good pinning ratios, from 80% of your own content down to 20%.  Pinterest however have confirmed they don’t care, so pin as much of your own as you like!

Others will tell you that you should treat Pinterest like Twitter and strive to gather lots of followers. What do Pinterest say? “It’s not about followers, it’s how many people you reach with your content.”

So whose Pinterest tips should you believe? The following are some of my favorites.

Pinterest Tips & Tricks For 2018

Set Up a Business Account

If you’re planning to use Pinterest to help market your blog or business, you need to create a business account as your first step.

This will give you access to Pinterest Analytics, advertising, and ‘Rich Pins’ (more on them later.)

To create your business account visit this page for instructions.    If you already have a personal account there are instructions for conversion there.

Make sure you ‘Claim Your Website’ in the Pinterest settings menu so that your pins will have your profile picture added next to them, and will give you access to Analytics.

See this article for more details on claiming your website.

Use the Recommended Pin Size

Pinterest is changing all the time, but as of time of writing their ‘optimal’ pin size recommendation is “2:3—600px wide x 900px high.”

I’ve seen some keen Pinterest bloggers maintaining that their longer pins (around 1100-1200px) get more repins, but I think the chance of Pinterest penalizing them for it either now or in the future makes them too risky.   They also risk being truncated.

Safer just to stick with 600 x 900 as Pinterest recommends.

Add Keywords to Your Pinterest Bio & Profile

Many people talk of Pinterest as a social media site but it’s really mostly a search engine.

Thus you want to make good use of keywords wherever you can, including in your bio and profile name.  This will help improve your overall Pinterest SEO.

Note the usage of keywords in both my profile name and bio:

(Tip: Use the ‘|’ symbol to separate the site name from the keywords.)

My Pinterest bio:

Enable Rich Pins

Rich pins include extra details on your pins, look more professional and will automatically update if you make changes to your post title or meta description in the future.

The simplest way to set up rich pins is to do it via a SEO plugin called Yoast.  Yoast is also great for optimizing your posts for SEO so you should probably install it anyway, assuming you aren’t already running a more sophisticated plugin.  (And it’s free!)

Yoast has a paid premium version but that’s only necessary for sophisticated users with multiple sites.

Here’s a good clear description of the setup process.

Add a Pinterest Save Button

The Pinterest Save Button is great for making it easy for people to save pins in your post directly to Pinterest.

To quote Pinterest, “Once you install the button, a clickable Pinterest logo will appear on your website’s images. Visitors can click the logo to save your content straight to their Pinterest boards.”

Use Keywords in Your Pin Descriptions

Next to Google, Pinterest is now one of the world’s largest search engines, so making intelligent use of SEO in your pin descriptions is a must.

Having good keywords in your descriptions will help you to get your pins in front of a lot more eyeballs.

Say for instance you have a health foods blog.  Enter ‘health ‘ into the search bar (with a space after ‘health’ and you’ll see the following:

These keywords are the most popular searched terms on Pinterest, which therefore can be challenging to rank for.

So to increase your chances of ranking you’ll want to dive deeper.

If you now type in ‘healthy food’ for instance you’ll see the following:

Pinterest provides you with ideas in the form of icons to help you to find exactly what you’re looking for.

So you could now click on ‘healthy food photography’ for example and Pinterest provides a new list of suggestions to further drill down into it’s categories.

These are the keywords which will make great Pinterest descriptions.

Use Keywords in Your Boards

Keywords are also very important to have optimized in both your board names and descriptions. People often get creative with their board names, such as ‘Blog-around-the-clock’ or ‘Girl Bosses Rock Beginners’ to name a couple I’ve seen.

Clever or cutesy names like these don’t inform Pinterest what your board is about, and therefore are indifferent or just plain bad for your Pinterest SEO.

Stick to simple names with relevant keywords instead and your pins will perform much better.

For the board description notice how I’ve used keywords related to my blogging advice niche.

This will greatly increase the chance that pins from that board will be found and displayed when a blogging advice-related search is done.

There’s no need to rack your brains or reinvent the wheel for these keywords and descriptions either – just find someone who’s a top performer in your niche and see what they’re putting in their descriptions.

I wouldn’t recommend copying them exactly but you should get a useful idea of some good keywords to use.

Make Your Pins Easy to Read

Making the text on your pins clear and legible is particularly important nowadays with a higher percentage of visitors using mobile devices than ever before.

With people scrolling rapidly past pins you may only have a second or two for your pin to make an impact, so you want your font to be large, clear and easily readable.

So go easy on the script fonts, keep the number of words to a minimum, and favor brighter colors with great pictures.

Remember that on a smartphone your pin will be shrunk to a very small size.  Always check them on your phone yourself to make sure they’re easily readable–if not scrap it and make another.

To sum up, make your pins colorful, clear and simple!

Create Templates For Your Pins

Since most successful pinners claim that you should make at least four to six pins for every post, you’ll want to know a fast way to create new pins.

I personally create my pins in PicMonkey, though others swear by Canva.  I haven’t tried Canva but gather they’re both very similar, and both have excellent free versions.

I create all my pins in a similar style, which works well for branding purposes as well as allowing me to make new ones much faster than otherwise.

Basically the current style I’m experimenting with includes text at the top, a picture at the bottom, and a coloured line at the top, bottom and middle.  I use several different colors and simply save about nine or ten different pictures for each color in a folder on my hard drive.

A few pin examples:

Whenever I create a new post I then save the text separately on a new pin as follows:

1. Load a pre-saved template into PicMonkey.
2. Type in the text for the post in your desired font (I currently omit the word that I want to use in a script font with the same color as the pin.)
3. Click on Basic Edits/Canvas Color/Transparent canvas.
4. Click ‘Apply’
5. Click ‘Export’ and save as a NEW name into your desired folder.

You can then load a new template and choose ‘Overlays’ and ‘Add Your Own’ to quickly copy in your text to different templates, and create as many new pins you want in a short space of time.

Some saved template examples:

Using this ‘Transparent canvas’ method is also a great way to save a copy of your blog or brand name to quickly copy onto all your templates.

Your Turn

When it comes to Pinterest Tips there’s still plenty more to say.  What are your own favorite tips? Let me know in the comments.