If you are a travel blogger who is wondering how they can make money travel blogging on Pinterest, then you are in the right place.
Pinterest is a rapidly growing platform with over 350 million active users on a monthly basis. Therefore, it would come as no surprise that you should use it to drive traffic to your travel blog and make money.
The reason why Pinterest is so popular as a marketing tool is due to its huge user base combined with the fact that this user base uses Pinterest for the very reason of finding and purchasing stuff.
It is one of the top sources on the entire web for people to get inspiration and ideas and decide what to buy. This makes it super important for travel bloggers to take full advantage and use Pinterest as a marketing strategy to get more traffic to their website.
Let’s talk about what Pinterest is and how you can use it to make money as a travel blogger.
What is Pinterest?
Pinterest is a search engine that is used to search for ideas and inspiration in the form of images. It is dedicated to visual search and makes for a pleasing and aesthetic layout.
Pinterest provides you with your very own virtual pinboard to work with. On this pinboard, you can collect images by pinning them. These images are then called Pins.
You can categorize your Pins, add captions to them, and do a plethora of other creative stuff on this versatile platform.
All in all, Pinterest is not just an aesthetically pleasing website. It is also a great place to focus your travel blog’s marketing efforts and reach a wide array of audiences.
Why You Need Pinterest for Your Travel Blog
The thing about Pinterest is that it is both a search engine AND a social media platform. So, not only can you easily find ideas, you can interact with the people behind those ideas as well.
Due to this, your Pinterest Pins are likely to get more long-term engagement than a solely social media website such as Instagram or Facebook.
Several studies indicate that Facebook will hit 75 percent of its maximum marketing potential within the first 3 hours of posting.
Even worse off is a tweet, that reaches maximum engagement within just 18 minutes of posting.
However, Pinterest is way above all that other social media platforms can offer. On average, half of the visits that happen on a Pinterest Pin seem to occur after 3 months.
If you follow Pinterest best practices for posting pins, the platform helps your pins to be rediscovered again and again for months and even years on end. In this sense, Pinterest offers a much more long-term advantage than all other social media platforms combined.
Not just that, most users on Pinterest are there to get ideas and make a purchase. This means that Pinterest can offer your travel blog a lot more in terms of bringing in traffic and new visitors.
How to Set Up Your Pinterest for Business Profile
If you want to use your Pinterest profile for business or blogging purposes, you need to make sure that you put your best foot forward.
There are 3 primary elements to a Pinterest Profile:
- Your Display Picture
- Your Travel Blog Name
- Your About Me/Bio Section
When setting up your Pinterest profile for your travel blog, you need to focus on these three aspects the most.
For example, you should choose an image that is either your travel blog’s logo or your own picture. Make sure whatever image you use is of good quality. You should try and use the same image across all other social media as well to make for consistency.
When it comes to your Pinterest bio, you should make sure that it clearly represents what the user is going to get from your blog. This is a great opportunity to use the right keywords in your text to make your profile discoverable by your target audience.
Lastly, make sure that your travel blog name and Pinterest profile names are the same.
How You Should Set Up Your Pinterest Boards
You need to set up your Pinterest boards in a way that maximizes the representation of your travel blog. The boards you set up are completely up to your niche, which in this case is travel.
It is good practice to save one of the first boards as a “best of” or a master board that is the most helpful for your specific target audience. The rest of the boards could be divided up into their own categories based on things like travel destinations, budget travel, etc.
How to Make Money Travel Blogging on Pinterest
Create as Much Good Quality Visual Content as You Can
High-quality visual content is the first and most important thing that you should focus on to make money for your travel blog from Pinterest. You not only need to create lots of consistent content but also content that is good quality and attracts users.
While it is okay to re-pin old content, you should ideally be spending more time pinning fresh content. According to Pinterest, the optimal number of pins per day is 15-25 pins.
You should focus on creating cool infographics, videos, Story Pins, data visualizations, and whatever else you think works for your particular audience better and makes your profile look more aesthetic.
A good thing to keep in mind before designing any pin is that you want the pins to lure people in to check out your pins and make the content shareable.
Optimize Your Pinterest Profile
Optimize your Pinterest profile to make it look more professional and welcoming. You want to attract the right kind of audience to your profile. Therefore, you need to create something that achieves that goal.
This means having a nice profile picture, a professional profile name, and a nicely written bio.
Create Eye-Catching Pins
As mentioned before, Pinterest is a visual search engine where people come to look for inspiration and ideas. Keeping that in mind, you should be making Pinterest content that is interesting while also welcoming people to engage people with your travel blog.
Use words and images that would appeal to your target audience and make them want to click and check out the whole post.
If you are a beginner, Canva is a great tool to create beautiful graphics for your Pinterest Pins. Canva even has dedicated Pinterest templates, making your job a whole lot easier for you.
Rank Well by Using the Right Keywords
Since Pinterest is a search engine, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) matters a lot for your Pins to perform well on it. You need to use keywords that would make your posts show up in searches.
Any piece of text associated with your pins should contain relevant keywords. This includes your pin description, the boards you pin to, the actual content of the blog post itself that you are linking back to, the pin title, and even on the pin image itself.
You can find relevant keywords by searching the term you want to be shown for in the Pinterest search bar. Look at what Pinterest suggests when you type in those terms. These search suggestions will tell you what people are looking for. This means you should use those keywords in your Pinterest post.
Another tool you can use for this purpose is Pinterest’s own Trends tool. This lets you view analytics related to a certain search term and see how the phrase performs throughout a certain period of time.
Don’t Use Too Many Graphics in a Single Post
Don’t use too many images for a single post. Instead, create two or three pins per post and publish those to your Pinterest profile.
This gives your target audience extra reasons to Pin your posts so they can choose what style suits their needs best.
This also gives you more freedom to gradually Pin to more boards without seeming too repetitive with your Pins.
Use Canva Themes and Templates for Pinterest
Canva is one of the single best tools for creating cool graphics out there. It has one of the most user-friendly drag and drop user interface that makes photo editing a breeze for you.
What makes it even better is that it has exclusive options available for Pinterest only. You can use Canva’s many Pinterest templates or make your own from scratch. This free tool gives you the freedom and ease to do both.
If you are good with editing, you can use Photoshop and other editing tools. However, Canva does the job done in half the time and creates similar – or sometimes even better – results.
Write Effective Descriptions for Your Pinterest Pins
To make money travel blogging on Pinterest, you need to do things that direct more people to your travel blog. One of those ways to generate more traffic is to write effective descriptions.
Here are a few things you should keep in mind while writing a pin description:
- Be funny yet informative.
- Always include a call to action (CTA) whenever possible.
- Use hashtags. But not too many.
- Use good keywords.
- Always include a link back to your blog.
Choose Your Content Wisely
People on Pinterest use the platform for one reason: they want to be helped with something.
Whether it is to get ideas, education, information, or anything else, people use Pinterest to gain some kind of value from it, not to look at personal stories.
Make sure you include a lot of informational content on your travel blog which you can then link back to using your Pinterest profile.
So not only should your pins be beautiful, but they should also provide some kind of help to the Pinterest user.
Use Pinterest’s Analytics and Insights Tool
The analytics and insights tool by Pinterest can take your Pinterest marketing efforts to the next level. It is an extremely helpful tool for the performance of your travel blog pins.
Track your analytics closely and see what kind of posts perform best. Perform actions that you think will be more suitable for your profile and bring in more traffic to your travel blog, helping you make more money.
Engage With People on Pinterest
If you want to make money from your travel blog, you need to find people who are willing to invest in it. And there is no better way for people to build trust in you and invest in you than by engaging with them actively.
Pinterest is, after all, a social media platform along with being a search engine tool. Therefore, make the most of it and interact with your target audience. Answer any queries they may have. Reply to their comments. See what they are saying. Take in any useful suggestions they might have for your travel blog.
Trust me, you will see the benefits!
Join Pinterest Group Boards
It is very important to increase your visibility if you want to use Pinterest to make money for your travel blog. A great way to make yourself more visible on Pinterest is by joining group boards of a similar niche.
It is an effective way of getting your content out there. By joining group boards, you share other people’s posts and they share yours. Therefore, join boards that you think you can bring value to.
Keep in mind that you don’t need to join every single board out there. Avoid boards where everything moves fast as you don’t want your posts getting lost in a sea of other content.
Familiarize Yourself with Useful Pinterest Tools
Finally, to make it on Pinterest as a travel blogger, use the right tools.
Utilizing the right tools can help you get to your goals faster. A few tools that can come in handy in your pursuit of making money from your travel blog are mentioned below.
Tailwind: A scheduler for Pinterest that allows you to manage your Pin strategy.
Canva: Graphic design tool to create Pinterest Pins.
Tailwind Create: Graphic design tool for Pinterest Pins.
Influence.co: A marketing community that allows you to connect with brands and apply for collaborations and sponsored posts with brands.
