How to Drive Traffic During Pinterest’s Busiest Time of the Year

You probably hear up, down and sideways that Pinterest can drive mega traffic to your website. While it is true, it’s triple-y true for the last three months of the year! Are you ready for it?

Last year, 38 MILLION PEOPLE pinned holiday content. In fact, from August onward, the number of holiday-related pins went up with an average increase of 41% each month. With 170 million holiday decor pins, 3 million ugly sweater pins (say what?!), and millions of other seasonal pins, Pinterest is the one-stop shop for holiday ideas big and small.

Those stats only include the major holidays. However, people are also pinning fall and winter topics, weight loss tips (for that fresh January start), and even cold and flu remedies. And they’ve been pinning holiday-related content since AUGUST, ya’ll. AUGUST.

While you may scoff when your nearby Target has holiday crap on the shelves three months in advance, when it comes to Pinterest, you shouldn’t scoff at all. In fact, you should be taking advantage of it to start (and keep) driving traffic to your content through the rest of the year.

No matter what time of the season you end up reading this post, you need to DO SOMETHING NOW to start driving traffic. Like these things…

Start Pinning Old Seasonal Posts Now

It doesn’t matter if your post is one year, two years or five years old. If it’s relevant, pin it!

I know you might look at old posts and think “UGH that pinnable image is ugly.” But let me tell you something. Pin it anyway. If you don’t have time to jazz up the graphic it’s okay! At this point it’s more important to get the content out there. You can always add a better graphic later.

Here’s a look at the major holidays or events:

October

Peak Activity: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday

Trending: Christmas, New Year’s (yep, already!)

November

Peak Activity: Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas

Trending: New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, Super Bowl

December

Peak Activity: Christmas, New Year’s

Trending: Valentine’s, Super Bowl, Mardi Gras

What if you don’t have old seasonal content? Well, the truth is people are pinning more of EVERYTHING this time of year, so still pin your content (and perhaps get some ideas from the rest of these tips)!

Also, consider what’s relevant to your audience during this season. For example, family photos are huge for holiday cards so a photographer could pin content of poses, outfit ideas, and so on.

Use Pin Descriptions with Seasonal Keywords

More than followers, more than boards, more than just about anything… good pin descriptions are going to help you show up in Pinterest search and on people’s home feed as “picked for you” content.

Since Pinterest is truncating pin descriptions in the home feed now (it’s a rolling update so you might not see it yet), try putting your main keyword towards the beginning of your pin description. Your full description should still be optimized for search because all of it is used to help rank your pin.

We made choosing keywords for the holiday season easy peasy for you with a free holiday season keyword guide. “We” being me and Anna Luther from My Life and Kids, who teaches Blog Clarity’s uber popular Pinning Perfect course (over 1000 students and counting).

Grab this FREE Holiday Season Keyword Guide for over 240 “hot” words for the holiday season. Even if you don’t blog about these exact highly-searched topics, you can still use them to build ideas for your niche and drive that traffic.

For example, “Fall Fashion” for someone who writes about parenting might be fine tuned to something like “Fall Fashion for Tweens.”

Pin products using affiliate links

Yes, you can use affiliate links directly within Pinterest! People not only use Pinterest to find things to make, cook, or create, they also look to Pinterest to help them find things to buy. In fact, 87% of people have bought something because of Pinterest.

While pinning images with affiliate links won’t drive direct traffic to your blog, it can drive income! To do this, upload a product image (or create an image yourself), save it to a board, then once it publishes, select “edit” to add the URL. Then you can put whatever link you’d like into the pin.

You can even create a board of “Gift Ideas for _[him, her, tech-junkies, etc]__” and pin relevant products to that board. While you can’t use Amazon affiliate links on Pinterest yet, some popular affiliate programs include Rewardstyle, Commission Junction, Share a Sale (affiliate link, yo!), and individual affiliate programs. If you want the low-down on affiliate links in general, read this post about earning income an affiliate.

Create at Least One Gift Guide

Pinterest users are pinning gift ideas like they’ve got a gazillion bucks to spend. And no matter WHAT you blog about, gift pins are a great way to build brand awareness (heck ya, you’re a brand!) and drive traffic.

Earlier in the season, they’ll be “saving” gift ideas (i.e. repinning) as they virtually window shop. As it gets closer and closer to the actual holiday, they’ll actually start clicking those gift guide pins more often to see the actual post and where to buy the product.

The term “gift guide” sounds super overwhelming and like a lot of work, but it doesn’t have to be. Just create it as a blog post with images of the products you’re recommending. Consider an buyer archetype… gifts for her, gifts for coworkers, gifts for teenage girls.

If you’re a food blogger, your gifts could be for the foodie or the Food Network addict.

If you write about green living, you could create a guide on zero waste gifts.

If you’re an author, what about favorite _[insert genre]_ books? (Pssst… Include your own!)

As someone who writes about blogging and social media, the typical holiday pins don’t apply to me. But I created gift guides in past years, including a Gift Guide for Social Media Geeks and Gift Ideas for Creative People.

Create at least one round up post of holiday ideas

Doing a roundup is perfect if you don’t have a lot of time or if you want to tackle a popular topic that you don’t have content for.

Don’t have any posts about ugly holiday sweaters? No problem. Round up some options and put them in a post. Want to share homemade ornament ideas but you only wrote about that once? Round up some others and build a post. Just be sure to get permission from the image creator before including it (product photos are typically fine to use). You can also embed pins if you don’t have time to get permission from everyone.

Which one will you try?

You want the extra holiday traffic, now make it happen! Which idea will you tackle first to drive traffic?