Why do you need Pinterest for business? And what the heck do hashtags have to do with Pinterest?

Excellent questions.

Love it or hate it, the truth is that Pinterest can be an AMAZING tool to grow your blog or business, if used correctly.  I get around 80% of my blog traffic from it.  80%.

So just think about that, if you could increase your following by 80%, wouldn’t that be a game changer?

I thought so.

So let’s talk about Pinterest. I’m going to share three ways to leverage it for your business, but first I’ve got an incredible tool for helping you with Pinterest, The Little Black Pinterest Hashtag Book.  So if you haven’t downloaded that yet, be sure to grab your copy!

Let’s get down to the nitty gritty, shall we? So way number one to leverage Pinterest for your blog or business is to have a Pinterest share button on your website.  This can be done with a plugin on your site as well as an add-on for your web browser.

It’s incredibly important to have this button on your site so that people can just click your images and save straight from your blog posts.

Remember, the easier you make things for your readers, the more likely they are to do them!

Secondly, you need to have an image that is specifically meant for sharing on Pinterest in every blog post.  Meaning it needs to be the optimal size, have text on the image, and be ready to go so that a reader won’t hesitate to pin the image.

If you go through my blog posts, you’ll notice that I have one of these specific images on every single one.  You want to make it as easy as possible for your readers to share your images to Pinterest and get them circulating around the Internet, so that other people will see it and drive traffic back to your site.

And finally, I think this is the BEST way to leverage Pinterest for your business. . .

Use. Hashtags.

Pinterest discouraged the use of hashtags for a good while there, but now hashtags are here, and they’re important.  Why? Because when someone searches a hashtag now, the freshest pins with that hashtag pop up.  Hashtags are chronological, as opposed to just regular search which is displays pins by relevance according to the Pinterest algorithm.

Another great thing about hashtags is that when you do a hashtag search, you can designate whether you want to look for all pins, your pins, product pins, people with that hashtag, or boards with that hashtag.  Lots more choices now.

Here’s another key thing: because pins with hashtags are displayed as the freshest pins first, you don’t need to (and probably shouldn’t) go back and put hashtags into your older pin descriptions.  Because those are not fresh pins, it won’t necessarily do any good adding hashtags to them now.  Just make sure you’re adding hashtags to pins from here on out.

Wanna know a secret? I talked about this very thing a couple of weeks ago in my Facebook group, Blog Boss Babes.  So see, if you were a member, you would have known about this already! Head on over and join, we’d love to have you!

And while you’re visiting other pages, check out my compilation of more than 200 Pinterest Group Boards to join!

The post The Three Most Effective Ways to Make Pinterest Work for Your Business appeared first on Beauty Chaos.