You should ABSOLUTELY be using Pinterest to drive traffic to your Blog. Clearly you are here because you are super smart and you know you need to be using Pinterest Rich Pins. Now you just have to learn how, and well, that’s why I’m here!
What are Pinterest Rich Pins?
Pinterest Rich Pins give you the opportunity to let people know that you have professional content and a professional brand.
This means that the pin will show your branding (favicon), the title of your blog post and description, information about you (the pinner), and a call to action button. Pinterest Rich Pins are essential in getting the most out of Pinterest by creating a funnel to your website.
It provides a direct link to your products or services, which allows you to build clients, not just followers.
There are three types of Pinterest Rich Pins: Recipe, Article and Product.
If like me, you have multiple categories, don’t worry, once Rich Pins are enabled, it will take effect for all three if you need them.
Why use Pinterest Rich Pins?
- Increased click-through rates to your website by 70%
- Increased visits to your Pinterest profile
- Increased repins and likes from your own pins
- Increased brand professionalism
- Increased overall Pinterest followers
Example: Let’s say I’m looking for a sweet looking pair of bright red heels – I go to Pinterest and search for “red high heels”. The results are hundreds of pairs of shoes. I sift through them quickly (because I don’t have all day here), and find a pair I think are great. I click on the pinned image and it takes me to a random person’s blog entry titled ”50 of the latest women’s trends”. This blog post literally has 50 photos one after another that provide me with zero description of who made the shoes, where I can find them and how much they cost.
Now… let’s say you were the shoe company and had pinned the image of the shoes. I would instantly know all of the information I need and clicking the photo would have brought me directly to your website. The second part of that is if someone pins the image from your site to one of their boards, I would still be able to see the source of the original image and get to your website to purchase the shoes pretty easily.
Pinterest Rich Pins vs. Regular Pins
RICH PIN
- blog post title
- author information
- pin description
- two call to actions (Read it & Get more pins from)
- date
- it’s clear that it’s a blog post (article)
REGULAR PIN
- no headline (blog post title)
- no author information
- no pin description
- no specific call to action (only visit not read it)
- no date
Pinterest Rich Pins for WordPress
Praise the lord for the Yoast SEO plug in! Downloading and activating this plug in will not only make you look like an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) wizard, it also makes enabling Rich Pins in Pinterest a snap.
You have heard me say many times before, “Ain’t nobody got time for that” – but you definitely have time for this.
It’s likely going to take you all of 3 whole minutes to make this happen.
STEP 1 – Yoast SEO
On your WordPress Dashboard – go to Plug ins – Add New, search Plug ins for “Yoast SEO” (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/) and then download and activate it.
Now most blog posts about this will tell you to select the “Social Tab”. I did not however see a social tab and after about an hour of reading other people’s posts, I concluded that you must need to pay for the premium plug in to have access to this.
I finally figured out that I needed to enable the “Advanced Settings” under the Features tab to be able to access the Social tab.
Don’t waste as much time as I did… you know what I want to say next but I’ll hold back.
Go to SEO > Social > Facebook and make sure the “Add Open Graph meta data” box is checked.
Now keep in mind that to move to Step 2, you do need to have at least one blog post, or product, or recipe from your website that you have pinned an image from.
I completed the first step and then had to wait a few days before I could test it as I wasn’t finished with my first blog post at the time.
STEP 2 - Rich Pins Validator
Go to the Pinterest Rich Pins Validator and enter a link to one of your blog posts, it doesn’t matter which one or if you only have one. Then click Validate.
Note: You only need to complete this process once and only with one link. Once it’s validated, it will automatically create Pinterest Rich Pins for any blog post completed before and after the link you entered.
STEP 3 –Apply for Pinterest Rich Pins
You will receive a message saying “Your Pins have been validated” – Apply to enable Pinterest Rich Pins.
Make sure all of the information is correct and scroll down.
You will see a box with a link to your website – put a check mark beside “HTML tags”.
Now click Apply now and you have just enabled Rich Pins for your website! It probably took me longer to write this paragraph then it took you to just do that.
Now it can take Pinterest up to hour to approve you for Pinterest Rich Pins, I received an email from them after about 6 minutes telling me that it was a done deal.
And I’m sure yours will too! Good Luck!