#Winning on Pinterest

My overview of Pinterest Analytics was just a prelude to this my attempt to drive more traffic from Pinterest to my website. A lot of what I post to Pinterest is other people’s content. I’ve pinned content from my own domain but I never bothered optimizing the images for Pinterest, some of my content is ancient. So I decided to take some of my supposedly best images of all time, re-crop, re-edit, even ‘improve’ some using software to see if I couldn’t in fact get a few more visitors to this website and to this post in particular.

I still prefer to host my photos on Flickr because I think it is relatively cheap and easy especially when you are not behind the Great Firewall, but in order to drive traffic I need to host images on my own domain. The first image I chose to re-crop was this picture of Himeji Castle. I visited Himeji Castle while I was living in Japan.

The next image is also from Japan, this time the Daigo-ji Temple in Kyoto which I visited on the same trip in which I visited Himeji Castle.

The next photo is from Cambodia, it is of Angkor Thom which is in Siem Reap. I enjoyed my trip to Cambodia but it was not easy, I travelled alone and I made sure to do it overland with a backpack. Now it is much easier to see the ruins of the Khmer civilization and I advise you to do so before it becomes even more touristy.

The next photo is taken about ten years later, with a camera that is ten years better, on my return trip to China. It is from the Humble Administrator’s Garden is Suzhou Jiangsu China.

Lastly is one of my better pictures of Shanghai’s skyline though I cropped it be centred on a father and daughter standing by the rail. They were not the centre of the frame when I took the original photo. This photo is the most processed as I had a night time mode set on my camera and I tried to keep the cool blue and may have processed it even more. I really don’t have any secrets my photo editing software has way too many settings I’ve never even tried them all, but I did experiment some on these images. Generally I do nothing except crop and occasionally straighten images before posting them online.

One picture seems to have had trouble staying on the Internet. If I did it all over again I’d make the images slightly smaller maybe 400 by 800 pixels like the one of Daigo-ji Temple. That would make them smaller in size and less costly to host. What I really need to do is find a better job, a much better job.

Did it work?

This experiment has to be deemed a failure but I still think having one image taller than it is wide hosted on my actual domain to pin is a #winning strategy for sharing my blog posts to Pinterest. Some of my images from Flickr are popular on Pinterest, particular one I took over a decade ago in the Forbidden City which I’ve added below using their latest greatest JavaScript embed code.

Pins can be timeless

Pinterest is a lot different than Twitter, old Pins can do well days, weeks, months, even years after you made them and content that has sat un-viewed can suddenly become popular. Twitter users clickthrough more but Pinterest people re-pin more in my experience. Likes seem more popular on Twitter than on Pinterest. I really should pin more of my old blog posts but what I pin and what I blog about and what I tweet about varies from network to network, some of my social media networks are more professional than others. What I share to Facebook is different again because I now the exact 200+ people who will see those posts. Finally I use WeChat the most on my phone, but Pinterest the most on the desktop.

If you have thoughts on pinning or popular content on Pinterest you can leave a comment below. I keep editing my old blog posts to make them better, but after it was banned in China I ceased using Pinterest.

This entry was originaly posted on November 3rd, 2015, it was last edited on April 21st, 2024 and is filed under: Travel and tagged: Analytics, Photos, Pinterest.