Pinterest Tactics: How to Grow Your Pinterest Following and Your Traffic

Do you post on Pinterest?

Want to shake up your strategy?

To discover what, how, and when to post on Pinterest, I interview Jeff Sieh.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Jeff Sieh, founder of ManlyPinterestTips.com and host of the Manly Pinterest Tips podcast. Jeff also oversees Social Media Examiner's Pinterest account.

Jeff will explore proven tactics to grow your following and your website traffic with Pinterest.

You'll discover what's new with Pinterest, including promoted pins.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Pinterest Tactics
What's new with Pinterest

After about a year and a half of testing, the do-it-yourself option for promoted pins (Pinterest's ad product) is now available to all small businesses in the United States. Features include a bulk editor, so you can add a lot of pins at once, and more forms of targeting.

For example, there were only 30 possible interests to target when promoting a pin, and now there are 420; instead of targeting someone interested in men's clothing, you can be as specific as men's shoes.

Pinterest also added keyword targeting, so you can combine interest and keyword targeting. It's a great way to find a specific audience when you promote a product or blog post.

Promoted pins are just like regular pins, only you pay to have them seen by more people. They perform just as well as, if not better than, organic pins.

The promoted pins in your feed are based on your interests and activity on Pinterest. They also take some off-site data, collected for Pinterest's ad partners. In your home feed, you will see suggested for you or sponsored by pins. If you don't want to see something, tap the X beside it and click on Hide this Pin. Pinterest uses that feedback to make sure you see relevant, promoted pins in the future.

More people see your promoted pins. Plus, you get an extra 20% boost, because you only pay for the first click. For instance, let's say Jeff promotes a pin that points back to his website, and you click on it and repin it. Then, someone else pins it from your board to their account. Jeff does not pay for the secondary repins. He only pays for that first one.

When I asked Jeff about entry level price points, he says he thinks you have to start with at least $1 a day. Jeff has seen results by spending $5 a day, and believes it's worth testing, especially with the new targeting features, to see how much traffic you can get to your website.

Pinterest also has customer targeting, which allows you to upload your email addresses. This is called matching, and is currently only available to Pinterest's Developer Partners. If you have a store with a newsletter that's already driving traffic, you'll be able to upload that list to Pinterest and send promoted pins to that specific audience. They are rolling it out, along with the promoted pins, now.

Listen to the show to learn when they opened up promoted pins for everyone in the United States.

Social Media Examiner's Pinterest plan for third-party content

Jeff explains how on Social Media Examiner he starts by finding good, third-party content (posts that we don't publish on our website) on marketing and social media to share with our audience. He uses Feedly to gather articles on Facebook's breaking news and other top websites, and goes there once a day to review the posts.

When Jeff finds an interesting article, he clicks the link to make sure it's quality content and a fit for our audience. He then checks for a good, pinnable image; one that is engaging and also has a text overl...