6 Ways To Use Pinterest For Blogging / Hints and Tips

Whilst on Twitter the other night I happened to mention my love of Pinterest. This set off a flurry of responses from my blogging friends, some of whom were already using it and a couple who confessed to not really knowing how it all worked.

I’ve found Pinterest to be incredibly helpful since I started blogging both as a source for inspiration and as a tool with which to improve and grow my blog, so I thought I’d share some of my favourite uses and tips!

When someone ‘pins’ an image, they are actually providing a link to a
page or post which you can click on to find out all the information that
the image represents. This could be the recipe behind a delicious
picture of a lemon meringue pie, or the paint used to create the
stunning bedroom that you stumble across in your search for ‘loft style
bedrooms’, or a source of information, like this post.

Think of it as a virtual pinboard onto which you can pin any page from the web, displayed as a photo of your choice. You don’t have to stop at one board though, you can create lots of different ones and categorise and organise your pins however you want to. When you click on the picture, it will link you to the website page that it was pinned from.

Another way to look at it is a beautifully visual bookmarker for all your favourite links.

1. Search and pin from other boards

The simplest way to use Pinterest is to browse through the vast collection of other user’s pins. When you see something you like, you select the ‘Pin It’ button on the image and choose which of your boards to pin it to. If you want to you can change the description / comments on the pin to make it personal to you.

I’ve recently started to edit my photos to add text, so one of my favourite searches in Pinterest is ‘free fonts’. I also love finding new recipes on Pinterest; food pins are very popular!

You can discover a vast collection of brilliant blogs this way too.

2. Create inspiration/mood boards

When I’m about to photograph something and am not sure of the best approach, I go to Pinterest and search using keywords relating to what I want to photograph. Then I pin my favourite shots and study them! What angles were used? What’s in the background? How have accessories been used? I’ve learned so much already this way and it has encouraged me to experiment with my photos.

For example, you may have seen my recent Valentine’s Day smoothie post. The styling was inspired by Pinterest research! 

Please remember though: 

DON’T copy other people’s work.

DO take inspiration and use this to create your own something wonderful!

3. Create a secret board with restricted access…

When you create a board, you can choose to make it secret. This means that only you and people you choose to share it with can view and edit the content.

I recently had a custom blog template designed for me and as part of the process I was asked to fill in a form to describe what I wanted. Well, the thing was that I didn’t really know what I wanted, I just knew the sort of thing I liked! I set up a secret mood board and which was viewable only to myself and the blog designer. That way she could see all of the images and colours that I’d pinned and my comments. It was so much easier than using emails.

4. …or to store prep for upcoming posts

I picked up this tip from The Blog Market (whom I found via Pinterest!).

If I’m using pictures sourced from the web or am including links in my post, I can store them all in one place on my secret board.

I also use the private boards to save tutorials on things that I want to do for my blog but that I wouldn’t want anyone to know about before I’m ready.

5. Pinning from websites

You don’t have to just pin from other boards within Pinterest however, you can create your own pins. Some sites (such as mine) include a hover ‘Pin It’ button on pictures to allow readers to easilly pin the content. (I wrote a post on how to install this here!).

Many websites don’t have a ‘Pin It’ option. You can pin from the web manually within Pinterest, but this is a bit fiddly as you have to copy and paste the URL and go to Pinterest to paste it.

The easiest thing to do is download an add-on for your browser which allows you to create your own pins directly from any web page. (You can get this here).

I use this a lot!

For example, whenever I find a tutorial on how to tweak/improve the coding on my blog, I pin the page in my ‘Bloggers hints, tips and codes’ board. That way if I ever need to do the same thing again, I have an easy way to reference back to exactly what I did.

Last but not least…

6. Promoting your blog and creating your own Pin worthy images

I have read that Pinterest can be a brilliant tool for increasing traffic to your blog. I’ve only just started pinning my own blog posts so I haven’t seen any results yet, but it’s early days.

Tips:

• Make sure your board and pins have a clear description to help pinners find you in searches. Think: “If I was searching for this, what would I type?” I bet you’d search for Recipe for Southern Fried Chicken rather than ‘Finger Lickin’ Chicken’!
• Pin regularly.
• Pin portrait images. Vertical shots are displayed in the optimum, larger viewing size on boards and make them more ‘click worthy’. All of my early blog photos are landscape, so now I try to remember to take a mixture of both in order to get some pinnable shots.
• Include some keyword hashtags.

So that’s my round up of how I use Pinterest for blogging. I hope you found this helpful… maybe even a bit Pinspirational!

If so please do go ahead and pin or share it, or ask me any questions if you want to know more about anything I’ve talked about.

You can check out and follow my boards at:
pinterest.com/lovedbylaura

Please do share yours here too so that we can spread the blogging love and find inspiration!