How to get Pinterest traffic to your videos

Carey Martell's Pinterest Profile

At first it doesn't seem obvious how Pinterest can be used to generate traffic for Youtube videos. If you simply pin your videos to the service and do nothing more, you end up with the same problem we have on Youtube; our pins get lost in the sea of other submissions and it is difficult to stand out from the crowds.

However the problem is many people use Pinterest in an ineffective way, pinning all day long without doing any actual marketing of their pins. Youtubers are no exception, and in fact many users just pump out video after video to their channel without even considering that they should embed the videos on other websites.

It's easy to get the tunnel vision because many Partners focus exclusively on thinking their only product is their video content. So they don't have a website, they don't market any products and they attempt to make money solely off the ad overlays on their videos.

This is the wrong approach.

Instead you should be trying to use your videos as part of a larger offering of content and products. Youtube views shouldn't just be about how much ad revenue you make-- the views are more valuable for their ability to drive traffic to websites.  Anyone who wants to use Youtube for business purposes should be taking full advantage of this fact.

While I have a network of websites I control, my main focus of late has been on RPG Fanatics, a wiki database of games that also has powerful community engagement systems. One of the unique things about us is the way we display game box art and Pinterest gives us an excellent way to take advantage of this to market our site.

So I'll take you through the process I use to create my Pinterest boards in order to capture search engine traffic (which is how the site should be used!)

For deciding what keywords to tag our boards with, we once again turn to Google's AdWords Keyword Tool.

The keywords I decide upon are,

• "game cover" - 135,000 searches
• "boxart" - 60,500 searches
• "game covers" - 60,500 searches
• "games covers" - 49,500 searches
• "video game box" - 14,800 searches
• "game box art" - 6,600 searches
• "video game covers" - 6,600 searches
• "vg box art" - 4,400 searches
• "video game box art" - 2,900 searches
• "video game boxart" - 1,900 searches

Based on the number of searches for these keywords and the lack of boards using them, I decide to create my board with the title, "Video Game Covers and Boxart".

Using these keywords means that if I can get my board to the front page of Google Search then it has the potential to reach around 67k people every month.

To make things easier on myself I install the Pinterest button add-on for Chrome. I've got hundreds of box art images on my site so I need to quickly be able to index them all.






I then created a copy macro for pasting the keywords "Video Game Cover / Boxart" after the name of each game.

After an hour of this I end up with 416 pins to my video game box art Pinterest board. I can now plug this board as a link, just as I would with any other article.

You see, I already have a modest network of game related blog articles built up on various websites, so I can add this board as a back-link to any of those articles with the anchor text using the keywords I listed above. This will send signals to search engines that they should be ranking my board for searches involving game cover art. Additionally, users on Pinterest who like the images will re-pin them to their own boards BUT the URL for my website will remain. The re-pinning is really great because it allows you to tap into audiences other users have been building with their boards.

One thing you might do is create a board for you and many other Youtubers to have your videos pinned to. For example, I've got this board titled, Videogame Videos on Youtube which my friends and I pin our videos to. I do the same back-linking with it to help it rank highly in search engine results.


The important thing to realize about Pinterest is that the boards are just an article of images with backlinks to whatever website the images are hosted on. So you could make images of cooking recipes or schematics for hacking iphones-- whatever it is your Youtube channel is about, you could make a Pinterest board to help advertise it -- but only if you have a website for your Youtube channel that is hosting the images.

So if you haven't made a website yet, go make one!

Update: I've made another article pertaining to Pinterest, this time about an app called Pinvolve that integrates with your Facebook Pages. If you plan to use Pinterest you NEED to be using this app!

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