I can’t underestimate the importance of Pinterest for bloggers.
Pinterest is the #4 source of traffic to my blog, after organic search, Facebook and Twitter. Its significance is even more important on my cooking blog.
You see, Pinterest acts like bait. Pinterest addicts users scroll through, looking at images that grab their attention. When they see something they like, they pin it to one of their boards for later use. I use it primarily as a way to do research and save recipes I later want to try for my cooking blog, but I also use it extensively to save social media infographics that I use later on my blog or FB page.
It’s incredibly important to make your blog as “pinnable” as possible. Basically, you need to remove the barriers and make it as easy as possible for people to pin your stuff. Once your item is pinned, you never know where it might go–like a Twitter RT, it could be re-pinned thousands of times.
In order to make your blog more “Pinterest Friendly” you need to:
- Include an image with every single blog post (even if it’s a graphic, not a photo)
- Make sure you have a “Pin it” button on every single blog post (there’s a WordPress plugin “Sharing” if you are WP Hosted)
- Write content that people will want to save and share (duh!)
But I just discovered a new plugin for self-hosted WP blogs that makes pinning even easier. It’s called the JQuery Pin It Button, and despite its weird name, it rocks. Basically, it turns every single image on your blog into a “Pin It” button.
When you hover over an image, the image goes transparent, and a “Pin It” button appears on the image. You can choose where you want the button to appear–on the top or on the bottom, and you can also create and upload a custom “Pin It” button. You can choose which page you want the Pin to source back to: your blog in general, your “about” information, or the page the post appears on. Finally, you can set it to only pin images of a certain size. So, for example, I have thumbnails in the sidebar of my blog that under 200 px. No one is going to pin my “Hootsuite Certification” badge, so I set my default to only add the “Pin It” button to images over 200 px.
It’s really great–it works like a charm.
My only complaint about it is that if you go to rebeccacoleman.ca, and choose to pin something that’s on the front page of my blog, it will pin the link to rebeccacoleman.ca, not the specific blog post. However, if you’ve clicked on the blog post, and pin it from there, it will pin the blog post. Ideally, I would like it to default to the post 100% of the time.
Still, an awesome plugin. Install it on your blog today!
Love this plugin! Awesome! Thank you for sharing.
You’re welcome! I gotta share stuff this good! 😉
Thank you Rebecca! This is great, I’m going to add this to my blog right now. I’ve wondered how people got that on their photos!
Know where I can find this button for non-WordPress sites?
Yeah, Pinterest just recently introduced this. It’s called a Pin It Hover button.
You can create it here: http://business.pinterest.com/widget-builder/#do_pin_it_button
I thought that was for a single image… I’m looking for something more dynamic that can be applied to an image gallery rather than a one-off image.
As far as I know, you can only post single images to Pinterest. It’s a 1-1 relationship, because each image links back to its original source/blog post.
Awesome post, was looking for a widget that does all that. Oh, by the way, can you please tell me the name of the widget you use for social sharing? I like the look of it. Thanks!
It’s just the built-in WordPress sharing widget. I know a lot of people like Sexy Bookmarks, though, or Digg Digg.