The Art of Pinterest for WordPress - WordCamp Hamilton 2015

Editor's Notes

1. Start by getting a sense of the room: How many people here don’t have a Pinterest account? How many have an account that they aren’t using it at all? How many here use Pinterest once a week? Every day?
2. In this session What is Pinterest and why you should use it 4 Ways Pinterest will help you improve your WordPress blog and 4 ways to integrate Pinterest and WordPress “Pinterest? I just don’t get it” Clients, friends and family have all had this reaction to my new-found obsession with Pinterest. So let’s talk about it …
3. What is Pinterest? Pinterest is a visual bookmarking tool that helps you discover and save creative ideas. Pinned images link back to the original source website or blog article. Pinterest isn’t a search engine like Google crawling and indexing the web. The only way your website content will show up in Pinterest results is if a person (you or your site visitor) pin it to a board. I like to say that Pinterest is a social discovery engine curated by humans not by algorithms
4. As a visual person I was really drawn to Pinterest. I joined Pinterest early and created interest boards for Art, Home Decor, Gardening … I planned a home renovation, collected images and bookmarked DIY tips. But at first I didn’t anticipate how brands, bloggers and entrepreneurs would use Pinterest for business. Pinterest stats: There are 72.8 million users 85% are women 33% of new Pinterest signups are men The Average user spends 98 minutes per month on Pinterest By looking at some of the ways Pinterest is being used, you’ll start to see the possibilities for your business
5. People share content on Pinterest for different reasons. We may Pin to 1. share information: We find something great and we want to help spread the word 2. bookmark content: so we will be able to find it later when we want to read it in more depth 3. build a reputation: Social sharing can bolster your reputation as an expert in your niche or industry 4. connect with others: To find a tribe or build a following in our niche area 5. create collections – Pinterest taps into our love of collections and the enjoyment many of us get out of collecting things – hockey cards, sports memorabilia, collector plates, stamps. 6. create a virtual inspiration or mood board: Pinterest is helpful for planning a wedding, a home renovation, collaborating on a design project, and for saving quotes and images to inspire you in life, art, or in business.
6. 7. curate content: According to Peg Fitzpatrick Content curation is finding targeted, interesting content to share on social media. She talks about FEEDING THE CONTENT MONSTER. The biggest challenge of social media is finding enough content to share. Pinterest is a great source to find content to share across social media platforms and source of inspiration for writing your own blog posts. BUT Pinterest isn’t just for sharing. An increasing number of Pinterest user choose Pinterest over Google when searching for DIY projects, recipes and more. This past week Pinterest unveiled the upcoming BUY IT button which will be coming soon for Pinners in the U.S.
7. If you haven’t been convinced yet perhaps the staying power of pins will. People who pay attention to social sharing statistics have found something interesting. Sharing your content on Pinterest has a longer reach than on any other social media platform. The useful life of the average tweet can be measured in minutes. Facebook posts may last in users’ streams for a few hours. But a pin on Pinterest will last a thousand times longer. A pin may still be sending you traffic 30 days later and more.
8. Optimizing your blog for Pinterest will help you to improve previously published posts. To make your blog Pinterest-friendly site you need to review all previously published posts to make sure that it has a pinnable image and to ensure content is worth sharing
9. Start with the newest posts and work your way back through your blog. Create blog images that help to tell the story of your post. Tall images are best for Pinterest. I recommend that you use CANVA. Start on Canva with a Pinterest template for the optimal dimensions (735px x 1102px) Develop your own signature style and consistently brand your images. You can add your logo on the pin image itself in a tasteful way that doesn’t detract from the pin. The easiest way is to create one image to use as a brand template, then copy from that image each time you begin a new image.
10. Make sure your old post is worth pinning and sharing and worthy of a new pinnable image. It is okay to edit past posts and make them better. Strive to make your blog posts evergreen content – content that is still valuable a year from now. If the post isn’t adding any value to your blog, delete it. You’ll want to create a 301 redirect so that you aren’t creating any broken links. I have provided a link to my post on how to do 301 redirects in the notes. While you’re there check all links and clean up any broken links.
11. A lot of new bloggers don’t understand how to use categories and tags. You may have a better sense of your blog’s architecture now then you did when you started blogging. The reason to use Categories and Tags to link like content together. A common problem is overusing tags and categories or using Uncategorized. If you’re guilty of this (and few of us aren’t) you’ll want to delete, redirect and merge tags. Whenever you create a category or a tag keep in mind that you are creating a page, an archive page. If you decide to delete or change a category or a tag you will also need to redirect its archive page to avoid creating broken links. Pinterest may help you visualize your blog structure. Look at the Boards you’ve created. Can you have a blog category for each of your main Pinterest boards.
12. If you make social sharing easy you will see an increase is social engagement. What I like about the Social Warfare plugin is you can get your WordPress blog readers sharing your content the way you want it to be shared. You can choose the image that is selected and you can prepopulate a tweet or a pin description. You can set a tall image for Pinterest and a horizontal image for other social media platforms. You can craft your own Pinterest descriptions that will pre-populate pin description a site visitor clicks to Pin. Best of all this pin description isn’t hijacking the image alt tag which should be used for web accessibility purposes not for Pin descriptions. You can add click to tweet quotes in your blog content. It’s brilliant. You can read more and signup from the affiliate link on our post.
13. Following these four step help to make your blog a better resource! You’ll improve the value of old content and make your evergreen content easy to share. Now lets look at 4 ways that you can integrate Pinterest and WordPress
14. A verified website displays a checkmark with the url There is a post on our site that will walk you through verification. You’ll want to use the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin as it makes verification easy.
15. Pinterest offers 6 types of Rich Pins. Rich Pins add extra detail from your blog post, your store product page, your movie review or recipe to the pin. Most bloggers will want to apply for article rich pins.
16. Rich Pins add meta data from your site to each pin. There is a tick box in the Yoast SEO plugin that will enable the open graph code needed for rich pins Rich Pins will display your website favicon – You can use the Jetpack plugin to create a Favicon for your site. I’m not going to cover Rich Pins in detail. There is a post on LearnWP.ca that walks you through applying.
17. You may want to add a Follow me on Pinterest button. You don’t need a plugin to do this I’ve provided a link in the presentation notes where you can build the button, grab the code and paste it into a text widget on your site. An advantage of the Follow me button is that people can follow you without leaving your site and they will be added to all of your boards. If they click through to your Pinterest profile they may choose some boards but not others. On our site we use the Simple Social Icons Plugin to link to all of our social media profiles.
18. Create on board for all of your blog posts Make it the first board Then display this board in a sidebar widget on your site. SO only you own pins will show in the sidebar of your site…. Or if you prefer you can add a board that shows all your latest pins from including what you pin from others around the web. Again you don’t need a plugin for this – just walk through the steps from our tutorial
19. When you’re done your WordPress site will be Pinterest-ready Your blog posts will be shareable and worth sharing