If you are thinking of starting a blog, Pinterest still remains a great platform to drive traffic at the beginning when Google is taking its time to endorse you. With a solid pinning strategy, great pin designs, and magnetic blog posts, you can start seeing substantial results within 6 to 8 months of blogging.
While there are dozen other ways to make money on Pinterest without a blog, having one gives you a whole lot of additional income streams that you can unlock by monetizing the traffic that you drive to your website via Pinterest.
How to Make Money on Pinterest with a Blog
Step 1: Start a Blog
To start a blog, you will need 2 things:
- Domain name (Your blog address)
- Web hosting(To make your website live and accessible to others)
When getting started, you don’t need an expensive and complicated web hosting service, you know, the one where you are in charge of managing web servers. Instead, shared hosting should get you started right away.
For a beginner-friendly interface, yet comes with good support, a free domain, and 99.9% uptime, I recommend you check Bluehost. With our link, you get to enjoy 70% off for your first billing. (Less than $60 a year)
Step 2: Build a Professional-Looking Blog
After you have acquired hosting and installed WordPress, it’s time to design your blog your way.
To achieve this, you will need a powerful page builder plugin like Elementor that enables you to design templates for every part of your website, including headers, footers, single posts, single pages, 404, etc.
Elementor only costs $49 per year, so it’s worth having it. For a theme, choose a light one like Astra or Hello Theme, since you will be adding all the other capabilities using Elementor or Thrive Architect (Another great page builder)
Step 3: Complete Setting Up Your Blog
Of key importance is technical SEO. You just need to do the basics once. To help you design rules for indexing pages and adding metadata to posts, install and fully set up RankMath, a powerful SEO Plugin.
You can also connect your Analytics and Google Search Console Accounts to your website using RankMath or any other SEO plugin.
Step 4: Optimize your Blog for Pinterest
The great thing about starting a blog with Pinterest in mind is that you get to design Pinterest optimization strategies into your blog from the word go.
For instance, if you don’t mind longer images, you can optimize featured images for Pinterest by using longer dimensions, instead of the default landscape dimensions, making sure that the user experience is not affected.
While that’s great and all, you do need a way to assign particular images to blog posts and set them up with Pinterest metadata that gets pulled up when the posts are shared on Pinterest.
The easiest way to achieve this is to use a suitable social sharing plugin. Most reputable premium social sharing plugins have this feature built-in, so be on the lookout for it when shopping for your plugins.
I personally recommend Social Snap as it is built with optimization in mind, but Grow by Mediavine is also great. For a more minimal and lightweight option, you can try Novashare. (which is only 5KB in size)
Step 5: Create a Pinterest Business Account
If you don’t have one already, head over to Pinterest.com and create an account. The process is simple, but a few tips to consider:
- Include keywords in your bio
- Use a high-quality profile photo
- Create a custom profile page cover using a tool like Canva
Step 6: Create Optimized Pinterest Boards
The next thing you need to do is to create 10-15 Pinterest boards that are relevant to your blog niche. Make sure to optimize them fully for Pinterest SEO by
- Including your target keywords in the board name and board descriptions
- Writing in-depth descriptions that include your keywords natively.
- Adding relevant pins to relevant boards
Step 7: Design Your Pins to Promote your Blog Posts
When it comes to your pins, this is where you want to really shine. Create scroll-stopping pins that catch people’s attention. This means that you need to play around with visual elements, colors, Type, and pin title copy.
Don’t worry, you don’t have to be a designer to create pinnable pins for Pinterest. With a tool like Canva, you can easily make unique designs and brand your experience on Pinterest.
With Canva Pro, you get access to millions of design assets such as elements, photos, icons, mockups, etc, that enable you to make your designs really pop. You can try the pro version for 30 days using the link below
Step 8: Start Pinning
When starting, you can get away with doing Manual pinning, however, if you already have dozens of blog posts that need to be pinned, then using a scheduler can help you save time.
Tailwind is still a great option for Pinterest pinning(Use this link to get $15 credit to use if you decide to upgrade to the pro version). Canva also now allows you to schedule pins using their content calendar feature.
Since I’m already using Publer for social scheduling, I opted to use it for scheduling pins as well. I love its CSV import feature, which allows me to import my posts from Excel or Google Sheets and add them to my schedule.
Step 9: Create Fresh Content
So, by now you should know that gone are the days of one pin several boards, rinse and repeat strategy. Pinterest wants fresh pins.
What qualifies as a Pinterest fresh pin:
- Unique Pin Image
- Unique Pin Title
- Unique Pin Description
Back to our beloved https://bneur.com/canva, you can create a template that features 9 or so different designs.
When you create a new blog post, then use this template to create 9 different pin images that you can then schedule using Tailwind or Publer.
For unique pin titles and descriptions, use an AI writing tool. Here are my favorite 3:
- Jasper AI (More accurate and suitable for short and long-form copy)
- CopyAI (Best for a short copy)
- Copymatic (An affordable option to the two above)
Step 10: Monetize your Pinterest-powered Blog
To make money from your Pinterest traffic, you can:
- Run display ads on your blog: Join Google AdSense,( Ezoic is better, and no longer has traffic limitation), and once you have 50K monthly sessions move to Mediavine, an ad management platform that optimizes your ads for better earnings.
- Do affiliate marketing: Write product reviews, product list posts, and how-to guides, and use Pinterest to drive traffic to these money pages. Now if someone clicks through from Pinterest to your website, clicks on an affiliate link, and ends up making a purchase on the partner’s website, you get a commission.
- Make use of other monetization models such as sponsored posts to earn even more money using Pinterest traffic.
You can use these methods in tandem for maximum earnings, just keep track of which one is working the best, and double down on it!