Social Media Platforms to Help Generate Revenue With a Blog

u/BushyEyes

What social media platforms do you leverage the most for your blog to help generate revenue?

I run a recipe blog and I'm struggling to make more than a few dollars per day, despite getting around 10k visitors to my site per month. I publish a few recipes per week on average, so I'm really active in driving traffic to my site.

I've been hyper-focused on Instagram and have grown my audience to about 6,200 followers, but I don't see much uptick from my efforts. I'm wondering if any bloggers have seen more success from utilizing other networks like Facebook or Pinterest.

I haven't done much with Facebook and only have about 1,500 followers there. My Pinterest gets about 50k viewers per month but only about 1-2k engaged and only 300 followers.
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social media platforms to help generate revenue with a blog

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ShouldBeCruising
I have really good luck with Pinterest. How many pins have you created per post? You have a pretty good amount of monthly viewers vs. your followers. Is that steady or growing?

I've had a few pins go viral for my revenue-creating posts. I mix it up and create new pins every so often for them, and I always see a bump.

What's your Pinterest strategy been so far?

BushyEyes ✍️
The monthly viewers goes WAY up and way down. It's been steady around 50k but was up to about 100k for a few months previously.

This is going to sound so bad, but I really don't have a strategy. I do a recipe and I share a custom designed pin to accompany it..one that has some bright colors, close up shot of the meal, and the title of the recipe.

I'm wondering if I should start spending more time on developing a more robust Pinterest strategy, because right now, it's really just auto-post after I share a recipe along with some hashtags.

ShouldBeCruising
Yes, definitely spend some more time on it! Pinterest isn't actually social media. It's a search engine, but it's more visual.

Create a bunch of pins for each post. Don't just pin each one just once! Don't be spammy, but space them out and periodically pin them to various related boards.

Example: you have a post about frittatas. Post it to Egg Recipes. Then Weekend Breakfasts. Then Recipes to Make With Your Kids. Then your Best of (Your Site) board.

If a pin gets little traction, go back and look at it again with fresh eyes. Was it hard to read? Unclear? Was the description not great? Would you click on it?

Edit: OMG, thank you! I've been on Reddit for absolutely forever with my main (personal) account, and this is my first gold! You made my day!! 😀
BushyEyes ✍️
Thank you so much for the great advice!!
masterecommer
I've been trying with pinterest for a couple weeks now and haven't gotten much, but I'm putting up 25 pins this week and hopefully I'll find a winner. I have this program on Chrome that let's you see the most popular ads and what's going viral right now so I have this pinterest niche store for it.

That being said, I'm putting this advice into effect right now, cheers!
ShouldBeCruising
Hey there, glad you're trying it, but Pinterest is a curious beast. Not sure I know what you mean about this Chrome extension.

A few questions for you:

Do you have a business profile with rich pins?

Do you have multiple boards optimized with keywords from your niche?

Are you pinning lots of content from other sites/pinners in your niche?

Pinterest is a search engine, but it rewards content creators who also curate content for their readers.

Pins that are obvious ads or lead to links that are just ads, no content will fail. That is, unless you pay Pinterest for a promoted post. If you do, it had better be stellar because otherwise no one will click on it.
masterecommer
Yes I have a business profile but only with 10 pins maybe from products I was split testing. I have yet to post all of the other products.

I don't follow other boards or anything I'm fairly new to pinterest. But I do have this paid service that let's you search what pages are putting out the most ads, what products are doing the best, which copy is doing the best and so on.

My site is based off the 5 main categories I see selling the most from this service, so I pick 5 of the best performing products and create a similar ad.

I am new and just testing this out as my Shopify site still has 8 days on the free trial left. I'm definitely going to take into consideration the advice and I appreciate it. Definitely looking for a change from Facebook and Instagram

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Owlbbaking
I absolutely recommend Pinterest! Pinterest is my main source of traffic (90%) and it is an EXCELLENT avenue for recipes especially!

I would agree with all the advice everyone has provided here, and in addition to that, make sure that you are actively pinning other people's content too. Pinterest favors active users. I have written a couple of blog posts on Pinterest and how to make pins (which are on my blog, not trying to self promote, just trying to be helpful and share more guidance than I can type here :) ).

Pixel size of the pin is important (I do 735 x 1500), use of color, and call to action phrasing can all help to boost your virality. I also suggest joining group boards and Tailwind (a pin scheduler, which posts your pins at the highest times of engagement).

Hope that helps!!! :)

BushyEyes ✍️
Thank you so much! This is so helpful! I haven't tried pinning other content before. My husband has been helping me with Instagram so I think we're going to try and switch gears and he'll focus on interacting with content on Pinterest.

Thank you!

yourblogmentor
Facebook & Instagram are getting worse day-by-day for content creators. Their main focus has been shifted to paid ads and reducing the post visibility to a limited audience.

I'd agree with everyone else here, that you should focus more and more on Pinterest (Twitter as well). Here are a few tips which will help you to build a strategy –
• Create 5 unique pins per post
• Create Atleast 10-15 of your own boards and rotate your pins in them.
• Add pins from other bloggers to those boards as well.
• Create a board especially for your posts only.
• Join as many group boards as possible and pin not more than 5 pins per day. (Otherwise you can look spammy & they'll kick you out)
• Enable rich pins for your website. (Just Google "rich pin validator")
• Use tailwind to automate your pins using smartloop feature.

Hope it helps :)

BushyEyes ✍️
Thank you so much!!! This succinct list is really really helpful \- definitely the 5 unique pins per post – I haven't been doing that at all.

Thank you thank you thank you!!
THT

I'm curious, I've heard of many of these tips but why create multiple pins per post? I'm starting to up my Pinterest game for my blog and appreciate any and all ideas!

yourblogmentor
Pinterest is not a social media platform. It is a visual search engine. Focus on the word 'visual'. And it loves when you create multiple different pins instead of repinning a single pin again and again. It boosts your profile and prevents you from being spammy.

Hope it helps ;)
THT
That makes a lot of sense, I hadn't thought of it that way. Thank you!

BeatTheLabels
Spend zero time: Facebook and Instagram

Spend all time: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for google, creating content and Pintrist. Occasionally Reddit.

Facebook and instagram will not send very much traffic your way. You could have tons of followers, but your content will be filtered and shown to a small percent of your audience. Instagram you cant even place links except on your profile.

Pintirist will be up and down but consistent. So if you going to do any of them id say pintrist.

How new is your site? Do you get any organic traffic or do you get all your views from social/ paid ads?

BushyEyes ✍️
40% of my traffic is organic I believe. The rest is from Reddit and other social platforms.

My site is about 2.5 years old.

Sounds like I need to focus on Pinterest and pivot away from Insta! Thanks for the advice!

ozsevincc
People in pinterest love recipe blogs. Definately focus on Pinterest.

Good luck!

seemagupta
There are many social media platforms which help you to generate revenue, it depends on you whether you are going for organic or inorganic. If I talk about in terms of revenue then Facebook https://www.Facebook.com/business/ is one of the reliable and affordable social media platform which can help to increase traffic on your blog. Twitter is also effective but it is slightly on the expensive side, if you have a good budget then you can go for this medium.

If you want to increase organic traffic on your blog you can try various social media platforms like Pinterest, Diigo, Myspace, Mix, Getpocket, and some of the other good social sharing websites which increase traffic on your particular post.
PaulaOT
So I have now started to use Steempress.io to post my blogs to the steem social media blockchain. it's rather innovative but it allows me to both earn and to reward loyal users of my site.

Until this, I was using 'traditional' social to grow traffic. I haven't used Instagram as I blog and cant share links so find that useless, although I could be missing out on a lot of traffic. FB traffic gives me a rather high bounce rate. Twitter returns very little traffic for me. I did get a lot of traffic from google+ but they are now gone. however I have noted a good uptick in orgnaic traffic since that closed :-)
pahurricane
How are you monetizing your site now? With 10k visitors per month you might want to check out the ad network https://www.monumetric.com/, I've had really good results with them ($28 RPM).

I don't have much experience with Instagram. I know some people do really well with building a following there, but in general, it's not great for traffic. Pinterest is the best social network for traffic and would be a good fit for a recipe blog. I would suggest putting more effort into Pinterest and I think you'll see the results improve with time. Also, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is definitely the best long-term for traffic and profit.
FrannyCaulfield
First and foremost, I focus on keyword research. I didn't for years and half the articles never get visitors. I used to write with the idea of something going viral and getting a ton of social traffic, but now I've swung the way and am writing for people seeking specific content on Google.

As for social, I know what you mean about Instagram. It's easier to get likes and comments than it is to get clicks that actually take people off Instagram and to your blog.

Pinterest and Facebook work best for me. My Facebook page for the blog gives me good data to crunch for free. Also, it's relatively cheap to advertise, which I have done for timely posts and for getting more likes for the page. My Facebook page is not strictly linking to my own content. I link to other relevant in-niche articles so have tried to brand it as a place to find news about the niche. The bonus of that is I get to see what people engage with, which gives me ideas for content.

Pinterest has been a nice and welcome new find for me this year. I pretty much abandoned my account for a few years (besides haircut ideas, heh). This year, I've gone at it hard and have seen a lot more results. I've also sponsored pins on Pinterest for next to nothing and seen tons of traffic. So going forward, my efforts will be on Pinterest and Facebook and experimenting with advertising on them.
littlelion
Organic social media hasn't provided me with very much, TBH.

I've had the most success with paid ads (but only if you have a product to offset the cost, do not run paid ads to your blog for the sake of traffic unless you have a very high-converting affiliate blog post and are advertising on search engines), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pinterest!

Pinterest has started to decline for me ever since they went public, but I hope they don't get as bad as Facebook because Pinterest used to be an incredible source of traffic for both new and old bloggers!

SEO takes lots of time, but provides me with the biggest Return of Investment (RoI) in terms of organic traffic.

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