Blog Tips: Growing Your Email List with Pinterest

Growing your email list with Pinterest

It’s been a while since we’ve discussed the importance of having an email list. If there is one thing that I wish I’d done sooner when it comes to running my blog, I’d be working on building my list.

While overwhelming at first, I was surprised to learn that I was able to get my first 1,000 subscribers in short, 30 days.

Creating an opt-in form and/or an incentive is easy and pretty straight-forward. Once you have a great article and a way for people to sign up for your mailing list, you need a place to promote that post. Pinterest happens to be one of the best places to grow your list.

While growing your email list with Pinterest might seem like a complicated idea, it’s really not. All you need are a few pieces of good content and some determination to put in the work.

GROWING YOUR EMAIL LIST WITH PINTEREST

YOUR DOMAIN AUTHORITY

If you’re running a blog/online business and want to start using Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog, you have to sign up for a business account, verify your website and enable rich pins on your blog. This not only gives you access to in-depth analytics of how your content is performing on Pinterest, but it also helps you verify your website. By doing this, you’re improving your domain quality, Pinterest then sees it as a “safe” place to send its users too, and, you’re more likely to be marked as a “high-quality pinner” by the Pinterest smart feed.

This means more of your content will be displayed for new readers, potential customers and/or subscribers to discover on Pinterest.

UTILIZE GROUP BOARDS

Here’s the thing about group boards that not a lot of bloggers realize: the number of people who follow the group board isn’t as significant as you might think. I am a member of quite a few group boards, some are “bigger” than others, but it’s the small, niche-oriented boards that earn me most re-pins and clicks. At the end of the day, that is the only number that matters- it’s all about the conversion rate.

So, if you are a food blogger and you share vegan recipes on your blog, find group boards that will expose your content to the kind of audience you want to attract. Since Pinterest updated their Smart Feed, they rate your pins based on many different factors. One of them being the quality of your account. If you use a bunch of different group boards to just “dump” your pins, and the articles pinned to that particular board range from topics like fashion posts, to parenting and beauty, while you yourself feature vegan recipes, Pinterest will not see your pins as those of high-quality. The posts in such group boards rarely get any interaction (such as clicks, repins, etc.). Therefore, your chances of showing up in the Smart Feed (which is tailored to each user and their interests) are slim. At the same time, if you are a part of a group board, make sure to follow the rules and share the content of other pinners. Being a part of a group board or a Tailwind Tribe only works when you give as much as you take. Only fair, don’t you think?

If you’re a wellness and/or self-growth/self-care blogger, feel free to shoot me an email if you’d like to be added to a new wellness group board I’m creating. 

MAKE SURE THAT YOUR BLOG IS READY FOR TRAFFIC SPIKES

You might, or might not remember this post I wrote a while ago. I set a blog goal for myself at the beginning of 2017, which was to hit 200k monthly pageviews. My pageviews ended up going up 200,000 before the end of January. Sure, I was ecstatic. But at the time, I was also hosting with a company who wouldn’t work with me when I tried to suddenly upgrade my hosting plan, and my blog went down after the servers crashed. And, it remained so, for almost a week.

After my hosting plan was finally upgraded, my site continued to go down, at random times during day and night even without traffic spikes. At that time I was paying close to $100 a month in hosting fees. Once I finally made a switch to a different hosting company (after literally MONTHS of research), my monthly fees have reduced significantly AND I never experience any downtime. Whenever I have an issue, I get amazing and fast customer support- even if it’s an issue that has nothing to do with hosting. This takes SO much stress off my shoulders. The price that you pay for crappy hosting is pretty heavy- especially if you rely on your blog for income.

Sadly, a lot of the companies promoted by some bloggers are complete shit (looking at you, Bluehost). I talked about all of this in more detail in this post. The point is, when you’re working on growing your blog, you have to be prepared for every scenario. If your hosting company doesn’t offer it, you have to perform regular backups and make sure that your site is safe. You also want to be ready for eventual traffic spikes. Trust me, you do not want to be in the same position I once found myself in- having multiple sponsored blog posts scheduled, which you are contractually obligated to post within a certain time frame, and then have your blog suddenly go down. OR getting a high amount of referrals from other places (like Pinterest, Yahoo.com, Buzzfeed, just to name a few) and your blog suddenly crashing and staying down for days.

GROWING YOUR EMAIL LIST WITH PINTEREST: ADD OPT-IN FORMS

After you come up with a plan to use Pinterest to attract the right audience, you want to make them stick around. If they like what they see, they’re likely to come back. BUT, you have to give them an easy way to come back. You want to make them remember you and your blog.

Make sure that your posts include an opt-in form. Add incentives, content upgrades such as worksheets or printable lists. I’ve had a lot of success with creating a 7-day email course, which is SO easy to do- I walked you through it in this post. Pinterest is how you get people to “click” and come to your blog. Your awesome content is how you get them to stay, your incentives and opt-in forms are how you get them to come back. Of course, when creating your opt-in forms, you do have to keep in mind of changes such as GDPR (which is not as difficult as it seems, if you use a program such as ConvertKit and run a non-e-commerce WordPress blog).

MAXIMIZE YOUR REACH

Once your high-quality content includes an incentive and/or an opt-in form and your Pinterest account is optimized, it’s time to work on maximizing your Pinterest reach. We previously discussed the importance of keywords and why your Pinterest images should include a proper description. Another thing to remember is that you cannot wait for other people to share your own content. Once you hit “publish” share your post to all relevant group boards, a featured board (which hopefully is one of the first boards showing up on your Pinterest account and is also featured on your dynamic cover), etc.

You can also maximize your reach by creating multiple Pinterest-friendly images, all linking to the same post. Branding is important, but you have to keep in mind that over-branding can discourage people from sharing your content on Pinterest. You do not want all of your pins to look the same. Create a few templates, using not more than 3 high-contrast color and font combinations. For each post, you should upload 2-3 different images, linking to the same post. Your fonts should be easy to read, letting the potential audiences know exactly what to expect when they click and visit your blog. To do this from your Pinterest account, click “Create a pin” in the upper right corner, upload your image, add a URL and a description (which should include a few keywords).

When it comes to growing your audience and growing your email list with Pinterest, there are a lot of factors that, when combined, can bring great results. The key is consistency and staying up-to-date with Pinterest updates.

You’ve probably noticed that my posting schedule has been a lot different this year- I would not be able to concentrate on my health while still getting a ton of traffic to my blog if it weren’t for Pinterest. I’ve also been spending a lot of time working on something pretty cool that, coincidentally, is very much related to Pinterest- if you want to be the first to find out what I’ve been up to, make sure you’re subscribed to our mailing list!