How To Get More Pinterest Followers For Your Food Blog

 

Pinterest isn't just a great place to find ideas for how to makeover your bathroom. The site is a marketing powerhouse, offering businesses and blogs alike the opportunity to connect with millions of users. If you run a food blog, Pinterest is an ideal marketplace to market yourself as recipes and tutorials are some of the most popular content on the site.

Whether you want to get more traffic for your blog or your hope is to get enough exposure to one day create your own cookbook, getting more followers on Pinterest can help you. Here are just a few tips on how to get more followers on Pinterest for your food blog:

*Pin Great Content*

The first step is obviously to pin awesome content that your users will love. This should be a mix of your own content and other valuable content that you find. You want to promote your site, but you don't want your account to be all about promoting yourself, or users won't have a reason to follow you.

Find a mix of great content with stunning, pin-worthy images and share them regularly with your users. You will amass a number of new followers very quickly as word of your quality content gets around.

*Pin a Ton of Content*

You may have the most amazing cheesecake recipe or idea for repurposing mason jars ever on your profile, but if you don't have much more than that, your users won't have much reason to continue to follow you. You need to offer them a lot of valuable content so they have a reason to continue to come back to your page and stay awhile.

The more content you pin, the more time users are likely to spend on your page and the more likely other users are to stumble across your content on the site. All of this makes it more likely that they will learn about your blog and will gamble a visit -- maybe even stay awhile and become a subscriber.

*Pin Regularly*

Don't spend a few hours at the beginning of the week pinning all your content. You'll flood your users' feeds with your content and then they won't see anything else from you all week. You might end up alienating users and causing them to unfollow you.

Instead, pin your content regularly over the week. Pin a few items here and there throughout the day and throughout the week so you show up regularly in users' news feeds but don't annoy them.

*Write Good Captions*

Your captions are what help users find you on the site. Instead of writing things like "Great idea!" or "This is amazing!" write captions that talk about what is in the photo (or the link attached to it) and indicating why your target audience should pay attention to it. Be sure to use keywords and hashtags, as these will help your content appear when users are searching for information. The more of your pins that new users find, the more followers you are likely to get.

*Share, Like and Comment*

Pinterest is a social network, so in order to be successful on it, you need to actually be social. By sharing (or re-pinning), liking and commenting on others' posts, you create more exposure for yourself on the site and invite others to check out what you have to offer. The users you interact with or those who see your activity are more likely to visit your profile page, and if they like what they see, they will follow you.
 

*Host a Pin Exchange or Linkup*

You can get more exposure for your Pinterest profile (and more followers) by networking with other bloggers. You can do this by hosting a pin exchange or linkup. In a pin exchange, you join other bloggers and agree to pin each others' content. This gets more of your original content on the site without you risking being too self-promotional. With a linkup, you can get others to share a link to your Pinterest profile (in exchange for sharing their link), helping you to get more exposure (and more followers).

*Host a Pinterest Contest*

Contests are a great way to build buzz. You can offer up a great prize and ask participants to follow you on Pinterest or to share your content as a method of entry. The better the prize, the more followers and pins you are likely to get.

Pinterest is a great way to get more traffic and exposure for your food blog, but you have to first get noticed on the site. These simple tips will help you to get more followers on the site so you can start driving more traffic to your blog quickly to meet your goals.

Are you on Pinterest? Tell us how you get followers in the comments!

 

About the Author:

Bridget Sandorford is a freelance food and culinary writer, where recently she’s been researching culinary schools in Miami. In her spare time, she enjoys biking, painting and working on her first cookbook.