Last month, I gave a presentation on the Disney Fantasy Cruise on using Pinterest to gain traffic for your blog and increase brand recognition. The crux of my presentation was sharing the discoveries I have made through trial and error pinning food, lifestyle, and  DIY photos for the purpose of driving web traffic.

I cautioned people to learn from a mistake I made last month in trying to make our photo’s pin-able. What I found is that being pin-able does not always translate to being click-able. Which is the goal of most people trying to use the pinterest platform to drive traffic. Mind you, I use Pinterest for many reasons other than traffic building but as pointed out all over the web, for some lucky sites Pinterest now drives more traffic than google +, linkedin and youtube combined.

Case in point are two DIY posts that I orchestrated the social media behind (a relationship that has since ended)

As you can see from the graphic, the Skip The Frosting post was repinned approximately 62,000 times and resulted in 89,000 pageviews while The Lorax Dinner Makeover had a great Pinterest showing of 48,000 repins but only 9,000 pageviews.

Looking at a sample of these two pins it is easy to see why.

The pasta pin tells you everything you need to know in the description. The cupcake pin gives you a reason to click on it to see what is happening in this photo.

One is pin-able. One is click-able.

We can’t control how other people describe our photos when they are pinning but more often then not, people tend to just hit the “repin” button and leave the original comment. Start your pins off right and don’t give it all away in the description. Just a teaser will do if you want to earn the click through to your site!

At Organized Cook we use the Pin It plugin to help us gain a little control over pins generated from our site by allowing us to pre-select suggested images and descriptions. Would love to hear if you have any other suggestions!