Growing Your Blog with Pinterest: Follow Influential Pinners

Growing Your Blog with Pinterest: Follow Influential Pinners

Growing Your Blog With PinterestIn the process of pinning your favorite bits of the web on Pinterest, you’ll inevitably come across items other people have pinned.  And if you like these pins, the logical thing to do for yourself (and your own followers!) is to repin them on your own pin board.  But how can this help you grow the readership on your own blog?

This post involves a little reconnaissance work, but it’s going to pay off for your blog.

Following Other Pinners to Grow Your Blog

When you follow people who have great taste in pins, you’ll have the inside scoop on what’s hot on the Web at any given time.  By repinning their best pins, you’ll build credibility with other pinners who think know you have amazing taste.  As people recognize the quality of what you’re pinning, you’ll start to amass your own following on Pinterest.  You’re building a social community that will give you a platform to share the best of your own blog and drive traffic to *you.*

Now – this isn’t to say that you shouldn’t be pinning your own favorite images from around the blog world.  But just as you should be following the best bloggers in your niche to keep on top of the latest trends, the name of this game is becoming an intentional follower so you can be a great leader.

Doing Your Homework

If you see a fantastic pin come across and think to yourself, “Wow, that pinner has impeccable taste!” it’s time for you to do a little espionage.

Closeup of a Pin's Meta Information | The Blog MavenWhen you click on an individual pin, you’ll get a pop-up with the image of that pin plus a lot of other information about it (just beneath the image).  The first box is called “Pinned onto the board…” and at a glance, you can tell whether you like the other pins on that board.  If they’re right up your alley, you’d probably want to start following that pinner anyway.

But let’s take it a step further.

When you click the name of the pinboard (on my image, “Jewelry and Such”), you’re taken to the board itself.  At the top right of the board, you can see how many followers that board has.  If it has lots of followers, chances are, you’re on the trail of an influential pinner.  Click the pinner’s name (top left) and you’re taken to ALL the boards maintained by that pinner:

Closeup of Pinner's Wall

2,065 Followers?  Yes, please.

{Follow}

When I follow this pinner, I’ll now have their inside scoop on the best of the Web, and I’ll be able to share that valuable info with my growing group of followers.

(by the way, if you’re the crafty type, I highly recommend following Kimara’s well-stocked pin boards on Pinterest…and her beautiful crafting blog, Wee Folk Art.)

The Best Bloggers are the Most Influential Pinners

If you’re looking for the most influential people on Pinterest, you shouldn’t forget your favorite bloggers.  In the crafting world (following the above example), Made has a huge following – over 23,000 RSS subscribers at the time of this post.  Sure enough, when I check out her Pinterest board (by following the link on her blog):

Closeup of Made Pinterest Board

17,000 followers?  This woman clearly knows what’s hot right now.  If I’m a crafting or sewing blogger and I follow Dana, I’ll have the inside scoop to pass on to my own followers – which, in turn, will draw more people to start following *my* pinboards.

(Follow Dana’s pinboard here and her outstanding blog here.)

Follow to Lead

If you want to grow your blog, you have to stand out as someone who has valuable experience, knowledge or opinions you’re willing to share.  (That’s why people should follow your blog anyway, right?)  By following the most influential pinners, you have access to the very best of what’s out there in your niche and you can establish yourself as an authority by sharing this on your own Pinterest pinboards.

Once you’ve started amassing your own following, you’ll have an amazing platform for promoting your own blog.

…and I’ll tell you how to do that in the rest of this series.

[box]This post is part of the series Growing Your Blog with Pinterest: the Ultimate Guide.  Read the rest of the series here.[/box]

Leave a Comment:

10 comments
stacy of ksw says

Hi Jeni, you have such a nice and informative space here! Found you via … Pinterest 🙂 and had to say Hi. Off to follow you now.

Reply
    jeni says

    Glad to see you here, Stacy. I was just on a pinning spree a few minutes ago, but I’m thinking it’s time for bed. But maybe just one more pin… 🙂

    Reply
Mick Lehr says

It seems to be the same strategy as retweeting the Top people on Twitter.

Reply
    jeni says

    Sure, it’s about the same thing. The difference is, since Pinterest is more one-sided (and less of a “conversation”), you establish yourself as an authority by being “in the know” and having a big imbalance between your followed (ideally low) and followers (ideally high). You establish a trend of having good taste from the beginning and then at a certain point, this will accelerate the growth of your following.

    Reply
jane says

I think you have some sort of ethical responsibility to remind your readers that it is effectively a breach of copyright laws to pin another person’s work without their permission.

Reply
    jeni says

    Hi Jane, thanks for your comment. I agree with you completely about republishing someone else’s work…but I’m not sure I understand exactly where you’re coming from. Do you think it’s unethical to share someone’s post via Twitter or Facebook without their permission as well? I know there are people who don’t want their images shared, but thankfully there are some tools like Pinterest Block that authors can use to prevent people from sharing. And there’s always the option of stating explicitly on your site (or within a post) that you don’t want things shared, as well. Could you expand on what you mean a bit? It’s something I might write about, if there’s a really solid case for it. Thanks!

    Reply
      jane says

      As you know when you upload content to Pinterest, ie pin someone’s image, you publish an image to the site. With everything you pin you are stating that you are the “sole and exclusive owner of all member content” and further that you have a “worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license.” (Pinterest TOS) Some website owners/bloggers who pay money for photographers so that their site content looks awesome, along with the said photographers, may not be too happy about that, particularly as Pinterest can sell that image (admittedly this is pretty unlikely according to Ben Silbermann). Furthermore, work is protected by copyright with or without a watermark image or attribution, regardless if whether it is published on a website – in layman’s terms, if you didn’t take the picture you don’t own the picture! Providing a link and correct attribution is questionable at best as to whether or not that satisfies copyright law requirements. Also, in my opinion, the onus is NOT on a website owner to encode their sites to discourage (or not allow) pinning (presumably a tenuous legal argument should it ever get that far)- the onus is on the Pinterest user to ascertain whether they have the rights to pin that person’s work (ie ASK the owner!). Many examples are out there on Pinterest where the photo does not link back to the original site, or where that site has expired (which would not be as much of an issue if the pinner asked permission to pin and the owner granted permission making certain provisos, particularly regarding correct links/attribution…) Therefore Pinterest is unlike sharing/RTing on Facebook and twitter respectively (as you suggested) as no such TOS exist on either of those social media services. (Although the case could be argued that uploading images of another person’s work to facebook without their permission is also therefore a breach of copyright…)

      A very concerning aspect of Pinterest (and this is a whole other story/problem so feel free to write abour this too) is the sponsored sites (ie people get PAID) to post images of someone’s work; pin hungry pinners are led to such sites, they pin the images from such sites and Pinterest then directs traffic to these sites. Why or why do people continue to do this. (I refuse to name such sites here at risk of driving even more traffic to them, but they do exist and people are making money from them – ie making money from other people’s hard work) and Pinterest users continue to support this… Not cool I say!

      Anyway, I’m no solicitor – I just don’t like seeing my work all over Pinterest without any link to it for people to do what they like with.

      Jane

      Reply
        Jeni says

        Hi Jane, thanks so much for your thoughtful response. I appreciate you taking the time to add your ideas to the ongoing discussion and if I’m able to incorporate them into a future post, I will. Thanks!

        Reply
Shruti says

I have a question concerning having my pictures easily pinterest-able. Some web sites I visit have images which show a P on the left top corner when you pass the mouse on it. As weel it is done automatically on Feedly for example. Do you know what this implies?

Shruti

Reply
Rhonda says

How much time do you spend pinning each day. I find this job to be very time consuming.
Also, what happens if you are following boards that do not have as many followers??? Can this hurt me??

Reply
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