You're approaching Pinterest wrong

Pinterest is a fantastic traffic source, but you must tailor your content to what interests users. Taking an article that you wrote for SEO purposes and simply posting it to Pinterest is a recipe for disaster.

Find Popular Pinterest Topics

The best way to make Pinterest work is to create content users search for. In general, Pinterest users are very visual. Articles with a lot of images tend to do very well. Plus, they give you more images to use when creating Pins.

Pinterest users are also in a different mode than Google search users. Pinterest users tend to be looking for entertainment. Google search users are usually looking for information. Keep this in mind when developing your content.

Use the Pinterest Trends Tool

How do you find topics that Pinterest users are interested in? One tip that I have is to use the Pinterest Trends tool. This tool gives you information about how the topics are trending on Pinterest. You can see weekly, monthly, and yearly changes.

Select the category most closely related to your topic from the sidebar. Then, on the right side, you’ll see popular topics and how they are trending. You can see if they are increasing or decreasing in popularity. Try sorting by week, month, and year.

Examine the topics. Look for ones that are trending in a positive direction. Then you’re going to want to write content on your site related to this topic.

To find specific pins for that topic, click on the topic. This takes you to the trend page for that topic. You’ll see a graph at the top showing the trend. One thing to note is that just because a topic is trending, that doesn’t mean it has significant volume.

To see how popular a topic is, you can add related terms. The more broad, the more popular it will be. You can see the graph change.

I selected “fall party ideas”. Then I added “summer party ideas” and “party ideas” (for more broad terms). You can see summer and fall are seasonal as the graph spikes and falls off. The broad term is more steady. These keywords look good to me, though, because the broad keyword graph is not dwarfing the others.

Now, scroll to the bottom and see the content type of other posts. This is where you can get ideas for your content. Examine the pins. Take a look at the titles and images. Click through a few websites and see how the content looks.

Use these websites and pins as inspiration for your content.

I’ll explore these topics in more depth in the future, but this is a good place to start.

- John Ward