Here we are at blog post number two in the PinIt series for Authors. I want to talk about why Pinterest is the number two traffic driver behind Google. This is in general and for my website as well. Back when I started writing before I published my first book I blogged twice a week. For nine months before I published Breathe, I wrote blog posts about my journey, about my book, about my life, and about my English Bulldog, Brutus.
I also pinned my blog posts to my Elena Dillon blog board on my Pinterest account. I noticed that not too many other authors did this. I know we all complain about blogging. We complain about having to write something other than our books. We also complain about never knowing what to write about on our blog. It gets tedious. The sentiment is not totally wrong, but the one thing I noticed was the one thing we need. Blogging and pinning created: Traffic.
I got hits to my blog from Pinterest. As a matter of fact, I got a lot of hits from Pinterest. Like all the time. More than Facebook. This surprised me. More than Facebook? Even more than Facebook when I paid to boost those posts on my page. Huh.
And Pinterest, my friends, is free. Okay, that got my attention. I get traffic by pinning my own stuff, and it’s free. That was awesome. I spent some time looking into why Pinterest was working so well. And I told my writer friends about it. Strangely even to this day with as many times I’ve spoken about it, taught it in a class, given a workshop, and told my author friends about it, very few of them have jumped on board.
The problem I think comes from thinking that it’s going to take a lot of work and time they don’t have. There’s a yes and a no to this. The yes part is the steps you have to do to get it set up and going in the right direction:
Make sure your Pinterest account is set up as a business account
Write a good description
Decide what you’re going to pin
Create your boards
Write good descriptions for your boards
Start creating pins from your website
And that’s all you have to do to get set up.
The no part comes in when you get going. It becomes second nature and so easy to create a pin for a post and stick it on a board. Every few days repin it to other boards and guess what? Traffic!
From there you have to have a plan, but that is true for your author business anyway. You should be blogging about your books, your characters, your setting, some of your hobbies, especially as they relate to your writing, etc. And then you create a pin for each post, preferably more than one, and start pinning.
I’m here to tell you the traffic will come. Start pinning stuff about books and reading. Start pinning stuff about writing. Start pinning stuff about the location or genre of your books.
And watch the magic happen.
Let me know what you think in the comments!
Next week? The Pinterest Experiment!
