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The Best Guide to Pinterest for Food Bloggers

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past few years, then you should know about Pinterest and how useful it can be for marketing purposes. You might have tried to use Pinterest yourself to increase the number of visitors to your website or blog, but most likely weren’t impressed by the results you were able to generate.

If you run a food blog, this article will tell you how you can use Pinterest to drastically increase the traffic on your site. Here, I will be sharing some of my own techniques which you can use to increase your followers and I will also tell you how to schedule pins for optimum publishing.

The truth is, if you use Pinterest properly, you can generate a lot of traffic for your blog or website. One of the benefits of Pinterest is that almost half of the users use it to share food recipes and related content. Thus, you have a great chance of using Pinterest to direct traffic to your food blog.

However, like any other medium, high quality content is what takes off. If your pins have high quality images and content they are much more likely to be repinned by others and go viral.

In this post I am going to share some of the tips food bloggers can utilize to make the best of Pinterest.

#1. Group boards

Group boards on Pinterest are a very useful for any content marketer. Group boards are created to share pins about a specific topic, so you should join group boards that are related to food, which is also among the most popular categories on Pinterest.

By posting pins in group boards, you will be able to reach every member of that board, rather than only being seen by people who are already following you.

Pinterest itself does not make it easy to find good and relevant group boards, because there is no existing directory of group boards. However, you can use the Pingroupie tool to get a filtered list of group boards sorted by number of followers, collaborators, title and descriptions.

The thing about Group Boards is that you need to join them in order to make the most of them and getting into them isn’t always easy. A lot of group boards have invitation instructions, which if followed, will get you in.

If you have just recently started using Pinterest to promote your food blog, group boards will be invaluable in driving traffic to your blog. Don’t simply post recipes as your pins. Write reviews of restaurants and other food related content on your blog and pin them in all relevant boards. Get creative – get noticed!

#2. Use vertical images

You should know that Pinterest supports images that are vertically large, instead of horizontally large. Therefore, don’t bother to pin any horizontal pictures because they will be scaled down and will not be noticed in a feed.

Vertically tall images are the best kind of images to post on Pinterest and you can easily create collages with various images to create a high quality pin. Adding text to images also works and pins with text are seen to work very well.

#3. Add good descriptions to your pins

The description of a pinned image is just as important as the image itself. Ensure that the description you write is about 200 characters and includes keywords related to the topic of the pin. Add extra keywords in the ‘alt’ text box as well to improve your chances of coming up in results for keywords related to food blogs.

If your pin gets repinned, your description will go along with it. If you added a link to your food blog in the description (you should have), you will get a large amount of traffic from Pinterest, via your pins and repins. So be sure to add a good description and also include a link to your blog post.

#4. Create some group boards

If you create a few group boards, your Pinterest profile will give a good impression to visitors. Put your good group boards at the top of the list of your group boards. Be sure to change the order according to the season and any special holidays.

For example, in winter season, you can put the group board ‘hot beverages’ at the top, and in the summer, you can add a group board called ‘cool drinks’ at the top. Also create a group board specifically for only posting your own pins there and linked to your food blog.

#5. Use ‘rich pins’

Rich pins are an extremely useful feature offered by Pinterest. By using rich pins, you can add more information to a pin. For example, if your rich pin is a recipe, then you can add the cooking time, ingredients and the number of servings. You can use a recipe plugin to enter the data about the recipe in a standardized format.

By using rich pins instead of normal pins, you can provide your readers with an instant description of what the pin is about. If it seems interesting, then the readers can click on it to read about it in more detail. In addition to this, the extra text added in a rich pin will be used as keywords for search results.

#6. Avoid posting only your own pins

If you only pin your photos, then you will give the impression of being a spammer, instead of being a legitimate marketer for your food blog. Visit other popular food blogs and repin their pins. You should keep in mind that Pinterest is a social media platform for sharing images. So connect with other popular Pinterest users in the food industry and repin their pins. This will give the impression that you are an active and productive Pinterest user and more people will follow you organically.

If you don’t have the time to create and post new pins every day, you can use one of the freely available scheduling tools to schedule pins to be posted automatically at a predetermined time.

How to get people to follow you on Pinterest

Assuming that you have a food blog as well as a Pinterest account, you will be wanting to know how you can get new people to follow you on Pinterest. According to studies, you can drive almost 70% of traffic to your blog via Pinterest. You should focus on getting these people to follow you on Pinterest. Also make efforts to get followers on Facebook as well.

#1. Use the ‘Pin it’ button

In order to make it more likely for people to follow you on Pinterest, be sure to add a ‘Pin it’ button on your food blog. If someone liked your blog post, they will be likely to click the ‘Pin it’ button. This will take them to your Pinterest profile, where they can follow you.

A good way to place the button is to add a ‘Pin it’ button at the top of your blog post as well as at the bottom of the post. People can use these buttons to repin your pins.

Pin it buttons also work very well on images and there are a lot of WordPress plugins that automatically place the Pin it button on all your images.

#2. Add a ‘follow’ option

You should also add a custom made image that links to your Pinterest profile follow page. Add the follow button somewhere within the post and try to make it less obtrusive to the reader.

#3. Use widgets

Pinterest also lets you use widgets on your website and you can look at their on this page.

Post Pins using scheduling tools

As mentioned above, it is very important that you post new pins every day. However, it is likely that you won’t have enough free time to create new pins every day.

Which is where free Pinterest scheduling tools come in. Using these tools, you can pin images at the times when there is the highest chance of engagement with your target audience.

The two best tools for this are ‘ViralWoot’ and ‘Viraltag’. You can use either of these tools to schedule pins to be posted automatically at predetermined times.

We hope that the tips given in this article will get you started with generating large amounts of traffic to your food blog using Pinterest. If you have any queries, leave a comment and we will get back to you. You should also Browse our packages if you want to join some amazing food group boards without wasting any time.