Why Your Face Is the One Thing Killing Your Pinterest Traffic

You’ve probably posted a nice photo of yourself somewhere, the kind with good lighting and a genuine smile, expecting it to pull people toward your blog the way it does on every other platform you use. Then it just sits there. If you’re building an online business through content, that mismatch is worth paying attention to, because one specific platform runs on a completely different logic than the rest of social media, and most bloggers never figure out why their usual approach doesn’t work there.

Why does Pinterest behave nothing like the rest of social media?

Every platform has a lifespan for the content posted on it. A tweet is functionally dead in about twenty-four seconds. A Facebook post has maybe ninety minutes, a few days at the outside, before it’s buried under everything posted after it. Pinterest runs on an entirely different clock, six months and counting, sometimes far longer. A single pin released once can keep generating repins well past the point where a Facebook post from the same day would be completely forgotten.

That’s not a minor technical difference. It changes the entire logic of what’s worth spending time creating, because a platform where content keeps circulating for months rewards patience and search-friendly setup over speed and constant output.

Why does your face actually hurt your pin instead of helping it?

Here’s the part that trips up almost every blogger who first tries this platform, because it runs against everything they’ve learned about building a personal brand everywhere else.

Pinterest is not about your pictures, basically, it’s not about your face. It’s not.

Pinterest isn’t a place where people scroll to feel connected to a specific person the way they do on Facebook or Instagram. The official description of the platform says it plainly: it’s a bookmarking tool that helps people discover and save ideas, and the overwhelming majority of the people using it are there specifically to search for something and, more often than most bloggers realize, to buy something. A pin with your face on it competes for attention against a clear, curiosity-driven headline on a clean image, and the headline wins nearly every time. Save the lifestyle photography for the platforms built to feature you personally. On this one, the content itself, not the person behind it, is what gets found.

What turns a random pin into one that gets found for months?

Bloggers and Pinterest work together for a specific reason: “bloggers and Pinterest goes like peanut butter and jelly.” Pinterest runs on the same discovery logic as a search engine, which means the same keyword thinking that goes into a blog post has to go into the pin itself.

• Put a clear keyword in the pin’s title and description, the same way you would in a blog post
• Build a curiosity-driven headline directly onto the image itself, since that’s what stops the scroll
• Give every board at least a handful of pins before expecting anyone to follow it, since an empty board reads exactly like an empty profile
• Credit the original source whenever repinning someone else’s image, since skipping that reads as taking credit for work that isn’t yours

A single well-optimized pin, released once and never touched again, can go on collecting well over a thousand repins on its own, months after it was posted, simply because it keeps surfacing in searches from people who were never following the account in the first place.

How do you get other people’s boards working in your favor too?

Pinterest has its own version of a Facebook group: shared boards that multiple people pin into together. Joining a handful of active ones, and pinning a genuine mix of your own content alongside other people’s, gets your material in front of a much wider circle than your own following alone ever could. The same restraint that makes any community work applies here too: mostly share other people’s work, occasionally add your own, and never treat a shared board like a dumping ground for your own links.

That one habit, plus consistency, pinning daily instead of in occasional bursts, compounds in a way that’s easy to underestimate at first. A blogger who builds this out properly can end up pulling the majority of their blog’s total traffic from Pinterest alone, not from a single viral moment, but from hundreds of pins quietly still working in the background, month after month, long after they were created.

The full session covers the exact image sizing, tools, and scheduling workflow used to run this consistently. Watch it in full, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

And please welcome to the stage, Anna Zubarev. Hi. So, welcome back, guys, to Sunday. Thank you so much for being here again, right?

It's important to be present for the important things in your life. And I found to, there's this quote, right? If we stop learning, we stop growing. So, today, guys, I've came prepared, and I'm going to talk about something that I'm really passionate about.

You know I'm passionate about social media, right? But Pinterest, guys, I could talk about Pinterest as much as I could talk about my children, right? It's like, it's never enough. So, bloggers' ultimate success with Pinterest.

So, a little quick reminder. This is… A theme, guys. A slide share that I prepared for you guys.

It is for bloggers. If you guys are into paid traffic, or you Facebook marketing, or maybe Instagram marketing, but, like, talking about paid traffic, this perhaps may not be for you. It is for bloggers. Because bloggers and Pinterest goes like peanut butter and jelly.

Simple as that. So, if… I'm very… Visual.

So, let me start. So, what is Pinterest? Everybody knows that Pinterest is a social media platform, but it's really not. The official terminology of Pinterest, it is a bookmarking tool that helps you discover and save creative ideas.

That is the official title of what Pinterest is for. Why do you need Pinterest? Why do you need Pinterest? So, number one, right?

Pinterest is the fastest growing social network, right? Pinterest is a visual tool for customers. It builds SEO, keywords, hashtags. I mean, it's all related.

So, when you apply your SEO strategies with Pinterest, peanut butter and jelly goes really well. Allows you to enhance your brand's image. Pins created from your site link back to your page. You can pin anything.

You can pin anything. You can pin anything. You can pin anything. Image or any video or any slide share.

Share your brand's story with boards and pins. Display your products. Drives more sales. Integrate with other networks.

So, these are stats from 2015 that I pulled it out. So, I just wanted to introduce them to you as well. So, in 2015, we had… Pinterest had 100 million active users.

80% of those traffic comes from mobile traffic. So, what that means, basically… So, what that means, basically… people are pinning from their phones, so it's easy, guys, so also, and I'm going to get to explain to you why, so two-thirds of those pins from business websites, 96% of pinners use Pinterest as a searching tool, 93% of users go to Pinterest to shop, right, to buy stuff, and 87% of those pinners bought something on Pinterest while seeing it on Pinterest, right, something to think about here, right, thoughts running in my head, right, a little bit more stats, 5.7 billion pins are related to food, right, 1.3 pins are related to money management, 30 million boards are related to education, 36 million, pins are related to technology, 604, 604 million pins are related to heated to holidays, hmm, typo, not stressing about that, but it is what it is, 300 million boards are fashion related, and why am I sharing this with you guys?

Three important stats, points, right, one, Pinterest is now active community of more than 100 million people, and number two, the fact is 70% of these 100 million monthly users don't just spend, they would end up discovering something to spark their interest and buy, Pinterest is a fantastic place to grow your business, guys, so social media facts, so Lawrence was mentioning everything goes really, really fast on social media, Twitter, 24 seconds, Facebook, 90 minutes, maybe a few days, right, Pinterest, six months, plus, so what that means, guys, there, I personally have experienced some pins that I've released in January that got me over 1,000 repins, just from one pin, over 1,000, that means it's ongoing traffic, it's constantly going, going like a bunny rabbit that it really never stops.

So I'm going to go over with literally bullet points for you guys what you need to do to get started. So for those of you that, again, are interested on Pinterest, feel free to take screenshots of that. So any social media profile requires for you to have a picture. Just like what John Ox explained to you.

Just a beautiful facial expression, right? Don't hide your beautiful face. Optimize your name with related keywords. So optimize your name.

I'm Anna Zobaroff and I'm a Pinterest expert. That's what I'm known for. That's what I have on my Pinterest profile. In settings, make sure to connect your Twitter and Facebook, but also make sure, guys, not to set it up that way.

So it's going to go on. on Facebook newsfeed. So whenever you be pinning, it's going to show up on your newsfeed. It's going to be really annoying.

So make sure not to do that. And in your bio's description, the same thing. Explain who you are in a real quick way. Explain who you are, what you do, what your passion is, right?

How people can get to you. Like give them a reason why they would want to follow you. You have to always lead by value and give them a reason why they would want to follow you, right? So you would want to create a really detailed bio, but in a 240-character way.

Create, convert your account into Pinterest for business right away. So for those of you that don't have Pinterest and will be interested in pinning and becoming a Pinterest, basically create your profile and convert it right away to Pinterest for business, because that would enable you to have analytics for Pinterest, and you'll be able to understand more while pinning and while getting repins and getting interactions and engagements. So that way, you'll be able to understand what actually people like from your profile.

So that way, you can recreate and create more of that. So and last but not least, very important, guys. So when you create your Pinterest account, make sure you verify your URL. I don't have time to explain right now, but I'm sure you'll be able to Google that information really quickly, okay?

Brand you with Pinterest. Build your Pinterest profile based on your passion. Create your own persona. Help your followers with answers they are searching for, just like your blog, guys, right?

When you're blogging about a specific niche, right, you're blogging directly and answering questions about whatever it is your niche marketing, your niche marketing. So you're blogging directly and answering questions about whatever it is your niche marketing, your niche marketing. niche marketing. So you're blogging directly and answering questions about whatever it is your niche marketing, your niche marketing.

targeted audience are searching for. Same thing with Pinterest. Don't be all over the place. Create a profile based on your passion, on that specific passion.

If you have several passions, then create several Pinterest profiles. So what your boards must include. Add description to your boards. And again, make sure you add keywords into the description of your boards.

Optimize your board names with keywords. Create your boards with personal interest, create boards with specific niche interest, fill those boards with at least 20 pins right away. One of the things that really is just like an empty Facebook profile, it's the same thing here, guys. When you create a Pinterest account and you start creating boards and those boards are empty, that does not get you anything.

It will not give you the followers. It will not give you their interactions because it's simply empty. There is nothing to look at. So when you create those boards, please add at least 20 pins right away to that.

And of course, pin daily. That's just like a medicine with that. So your pins and repin strategies, 80-20 rule, goes really well with Pinterest as well. So 80% of the time, you pin others' information.

20% of the time, you pin others' information. 20% of the time, you pin others' information. 20% of the time, you pin others' information. You pin stuff from your blog.

Pin relevant pins into relevant boards, guys. So if you have a board that talks about food, pin food images to that. If you have a board that talks about finances, you do not want to add kids' information in there or food information in there. Very easy, right?

So add keywords into description of the pins. So basically, when you create the image or you pin… When you create the image from your blog, make sure that image will be optimized to be pinned. Name that image, literally speaking.

You have to give a name that will have keywords with that. So once again, when people look for certain images on Pinterest, they will be able to find your pin based on the description of your pin. So your images with correctly optimized name will be easier to find for people. And also, if you're repinning someone else's image from someone else's blog and you want to feature that on your blog, please make sure to credit the source where you took it.

Because if you're not going to be given the credit source where you took that image, it will be identified as much as stealing. So you don't want to do that as well. So creating original content. Share your original images, whether from your travels or from the images that you can take from royalty-free websites.

And I'm going to give you a source of that as well in a bit. Create images with Canva or PicMonkey. Those are my two favorite. Canva, to me, is my go-to tool.

So whenever my browsers are open, there's always Facebook, there's always Twitter, there's my email, there's my Canva. So it's always open on my computer screen. Canva is not going to be the number one tool that I go to create anything and everything. So optimize description of the original pins.

Apply keywords in the descriptions. Optimize the best pixels. And I'll go into this in a bit. Download royalty-free images.

Use natural light images. Simple color background for your images. And I'll explain that in a bit. Overlay title on your images.

So this is for example. I decided to take four examples of niche-based blogging. So we have finance, we have nutrition, we have make money from home, right? And we have fitness.

So this is the type of images that get thousands, hundreds and thousands of repins. Why? They are clear on the point and they have call to action. They have headlines that got my curiosity, right?

So create curiosity-driven images. The other thing is, guys, very important about Pinterest that nobody talks about it really. Pinterest is not about your pictures, basically, it's not about your face. It's not.

So don't bother putting your lifestyle pictures in there with your face in it. If you have an image of a beach, right? And you have a headline saying like, this is how I made $5,000 while laying on my beach. That would be curiosity-driven headline.

If you have your face or maybe your feet or maybe whatever, like something that has to do with irrelevant kind of image, don't use that, guys. It would simply not get interactions for you. All right. So this is Canva, guys.

And for those of you don't know, or for those of you that do know, again, this is a free website. You could use this tool for free to create anything and everything. They do have also premium version of Canva, but I still tend to find using this for free. So it works for me.

So in Canva, those are the three optimized sizes that I use, guys. So I use Twitter post, basically 10, 24 by 5, 12 pixels. The sizes are over there. You could take images, screenshots.

And I use social media, which is 800 by 800, and Pinterest graphics. And let me explain why I'm giving this to you. So for bloggers that create blogs without images, it's just like going to a hairstylist and washing your hair without blow-drying them. Simple.

So when I create my blog posts, I always create several images. And I create one for email headline, which was the Twitter post sizes. I create one, the square image for my Instagram account and for my Facebook so I could get to syndicate it in those places, too. And I create, most importantly, Pinterest graphic.

Because, again, Pinterest is extremely important to me. This is where I get 65% of the traffic to my blog, from Pinterest alone. So this is what I do. If you guys decide it is too much for you, and if you still do want to pursue Pinterest, you could just use the Pinterest graphic to do that for you, which you could also actually share in Google+.

But Google is a tricky place to be. So these are the sizes, guys, you could optimize your blog images with. And, again, when you go to Canva, you don't really need to remember this, because it is there already. The templates have been created for you.

The correct size images have been created for you. So it's just there, guys. Everything is in your hands. Now, these are the most popular pins on Pinterest.

Infographics, checklists, tutorials, videos, teasers. Why am I telling you this, guys? Because, once again, when you create images, graphic images for your blog posts, right? You want to, if you can, create that infographic, create that checklist, right?

Even if you have a five bullet point blog post, create a checklist. Go to Canva, create a five-checklist bullet point on Canva, and put it on Pinterest. Pin it. Pin it directly from your blog to Pinterest, so that way it gets interactions for you.

So what should you be pinning, right? What inspires you? What motivates you, right? Content you can learn from.

This is, and I'm talking about, guys, this is for what I do daily. What do I pin to my Pinterest account? These points. Give sneak peek what your business is all about.

And if you're talking about, we're talking about, like, personal development, or we're talking about personal interests or lifestyle, like I said, create an image with your lifestyle, but give a text overlay with that headline. Give a curiosity-driven headline, guys, to that image, and put it on Pinterest. Just optimize the size correctly, right? And educate your audience with your great content, guys.

It's really simple. So another way to drive more traffic to your Pinterest account is to collaborate with others. What that means is entering group boards. So Pinterest has, like, Facebook has Facebook groups, but Pinterest has also groups where you can pin your stuff, and you can invite others to pin it along with you.

So if you have, like, let's say we have, you know, holidays are coming up, you want to create Christmas or some sort of a holiday or whatever other niche you want to create a group, and you want to invite your other group. So highly engaged followers. Just engage them, and just invite them. It is up to them to accept it or not, but once you see them pinning, well, most of them will accept it, because this is another way for them to explore and send out more pins to their blog by pinning it to that group.

So even though they might not have those followers, they could follow that account and see it. So you can see those pins. This is another way I get more traffic to my group, to my pins. Pingroupie.com will give you access for free to many thousands of different Pinterest groups where you can search for the group of your interest instead of just searching it on Pinterest by entering, just, by entering or looking up someone else and going through which boards they have.

This is a simpler way for you guys to find it. So this is where I found several groups where, which I'm part of, and I syndicate more and more of my content there as well. But again, remember the 80-20 rule. Do not just pin stuff in there from your blog.

Pin stuff from just your newsfeed. So that way, people who are part of this group will be able to see it. People who are part of this group will know that you're not just spamming your own stuff. So 80-20 rule goes hand in hand with that as well.

Canva and PicMonkey. Those are the tools. Now, this is what I use to schedule when I don't have time and I'm traveling or spending time with my family. I use Tailwind.com.

Both, it's a free version and there is a premium version as well. Tailwind will be able to, will allow you to schedule your pins for time and time and time. You could do that if you are up to scheduling that stuff. So in BufferUp, I schedule my blog posts to be syndicated to Twitter, to Facebook, to Google+.

This is what I use. Those are my two favorite tools. Number three, guys. Those are my favorite browser extensions.

And I'll explain to you why. So pin a tab for Pinterest. So whenever I'm browsing anything and everything on the net somewhere, right, the browser extension will allow me. And if, let's say, I'm reading someone else's blog post, I don't have to look for where they have those share buttons on their blog post.

I simply click on the image, like hover over the image, and pin button appears. So I could pin it directly into Pinterest. And I can put it into my blog post. Grammarly, yeah, you saw my typo earlier, right, that Grammarly did not pick it up.

I blame it all on that. So, right. So English, it is not my first language. So Grammarly not only does spell check for me, but it also checks grammar mistakes.

Very cool tool, guys. Very cool tool. So Tailwind is, again, for scheduling. Those are my three browser extensions.

Browser extensions that I use the most. And, again, Tailwind, not only I get to go directly there, but also if I see a pin that I like, I hover over the image. Tailwind appears, and I use that to schedule it. Mm-hmm.

Yep. Tailwind. Like a tail and a wind. Mm-hmm.

So Deuce. Create tall pins with lots of image graphics. Create compelling headlines. Very important.

Tall graphics, it's 735 by 1102, up to my size for that. That's for Pinterest. That goes also really well with Google+. Don'ts, guys.

Don'ts. Do not, please, do not design ugly ads. Well, please, don't. Just don't.

Give them something they want. Right. So when I'm in the process of creating anything and everything for my blog post, I create, I walk away from it for whatever time. It could be a date.

It could be a few minutes. But I go back and forth a few times. I become my own editor, guys. Create something, walk away from the screen for, like, when you go back to it and you look at it again and you analyze it, you might find something.

You might find something that maybe could be better for your blog post, for that image. Right. Maybe color would work better or a different font or whatever it may be. Right.

So also when you pin or repin someone else's images on Pinterest, do not waste anybody else's time by pinning stuff that does not have a description. So if you come across a pin that does not have a description and you see the headline. Basically retype it in. Use that headline's image by adding description on it.

That others can find it valuable as well. And it's going to be pinned correctly. And don't pay for traffic without a strategy, guys. So when you have a Pinterest account, a Pinterest account for business, and you have access to promoted pins, don't just play with it.

Right. Don't just play with it. If you have a strategy in mind, just like with paid traffic, right, with anything, guys, right, when you put your stuff out there, have a strategy in mind with anything and everything you do. Plan for after the pin, guys.

So the idea of Pinterest is to drive traffic to your blog. Okay. Don't expect to create an image that will be lead directly into your blog. Directly into your capture page.

You can do that. But that's not what Pinterest is about. So when creating curiosity driven headlines or something as a tutorial or something that can be helpful for someone or something funny even, right, drive traffic to your blog. This is where your home is for Pinterest.

And this is where everything needs to be ready for that person who's going to opt in into your blog. This is where everything needs to be ready for that person who's going to opt in into your website. To your site. Where you could have a site banner or where you could have a pop up.

Have your site ready for that. And also, if you have a good content that you could pin also, make sure to feature that as well. On a site banner as what was your most recent boards or pins or whatever was most popular. So give them more an idea of what else they can pin from your site.

Right. Do have a convert plan as well. Email autoresponder. That's what I'm talking about.

So in a quick recap, guys. Create original content. Curate to build momentum fast. Plan for after the pin.

Be consistent. As consistency as the key. Meaning pin daily. Right.

Quality over time. Share. Syndicate your work. Share others.

Please. Very important. And pin daily, guys. That's it, guys.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, let's please thank again Anna Zuberan.