How to Make Your WordPress Blog Pinterest Friendly

Pinterest (pinterest.com) is a website where users can upload images that they find on other websites. Users create theme-based pages called “boards”, which feature images related to specific topics. In essence, Pinterest is a visual search engine that millions of people use as their “go to” spot for finding inspiration for their own projects. Pinterest is a great place to find all kinds of recipes, for example.

Why should you care about Pinterest? Because if you have something valuable to offer, you can get a lot of traffic to your site from Pinterest. In order to do that, however, people need to be able to “pin” your images to their boards. This tutorial will show you how to make your WordPress site “pin ready” so that your readers can share your images with their Pinterest followers.

If you browse Pinterest, you’ll probably notice that most of the images are high-quality photos that are fit for printing in magazines. Stunning photos are a big part of the allure of Pinterest, so if you want people to pin your stuff, make sure that each post has a nice image that will make your readers more inclined to share it with others.

To encourage sharing, you can put a “call to action” at the end of your post that says something to the effect of, “If you enjoyed this post, share it with others.” Then you can place relevant social icons (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.) underneath. On the image itself, you can put a “pin it” button so that all the reader has to do is click on it and select which board to upload it to.

There are several WordPress plugins available that allow you to add “pin it” buttons to images. One of the easiest to use is Hover Pin-It, which you can download here: http://wordpress.org/plugins/hover-pin-it/

After activating the plugin, you’ll have access to a “Settings” area where you can choose the appearance of the “pin it” button, as well as some other features. In the event that you don’t want the images on a certain page or post to be pinned, you can use the shortcode [nopinit]. If your “pin it” buttons are disabled by default, but you want to allow readers to pin images on selected posts, you can use the [dopinit] shortcode to override the “Disabled” setting.

Pinterest 1

With pinning enabled, the “pin it” button will appear when hovering over an image, as shown below. When the user clicks on the button, he or she will be prompted to log into Pinterest (if not logged in already), where he or she can post the image to a board. If that Pinterest member happens to have a lot of followers, and your photo is unique, beautiful, or interesting in some other way, then you have a good chance of getting visitors from Pinterest.

Pinterest 2

Aside from making your images “pinnable”, there are other ways to make your WordPress site Pinterest-friendly:

1) Add text to your image so that people know what your post is about. A good way to do that is to just put the title of your post in the image. You can do this with any graphics editing program.

2) Add a Pinterest button or widget to your site so that people can follow you on Pinterest. You can use the Widget Builder from Pinterest to create different styles of buttons and widgets. You don’t even have to be active on Pinterest if you don’t want to. There are plugins that allow you to automatically pin your WordPress posts to your Pinterest board, and people can choose to follow you on Pinterest instead of following your blog directly. Some people like to keep up-to-date from one platform, as opposed to having to log into several accounts or check several websites each day. Allowing people to follow you on Pinterest is just one more way for you to connect with your audience, even if you’re not a big Pinterest user yourself.