Tag Archives: Pinterest

Self-Care, Honeymoon Plans and a Blog Update!

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If I’m being honest, I struggled after Christmas for a little while – The Black Dog and anxiety reared their ugly heads without any warning and I spent a little bit of time consciously focusing on self-care and busying myself with little projects to keep my mind occupied. I’ve become a little obsessed with the Hygge movement, albeit a little later than everyone else it seems, and it really helps. Thankfully, it slowly dissipated and by the time New Year arrived I was feeling a little better. Continue reading →

Set Your Blog for Success in 2017!

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Boosting blog trafficDo you want to increase engagement and traffic to your blog? Increase your following? Build your social media profiles?

Elena and I have teamed up to bring you a MASSIVE set of unbelievable offers that could help you boost your blog in 2017, with two advertising packages and an amazing course bundle that will help you to boost your Pinterest and Twitter following and engagement. Continue reading →

A Post-Christmas Catch-Up, a Facebook Launch and a Pinterest Promo Opportunity!

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I always find this a strange time of year – between the two main celebrations. Christmas is over but the decorations are still up, the turkey has been eaten but the party plans are being made, the sales have hit but everyone is broke…

I’ve taken a few days to try and catch up a bit and yet seem to have made little progress. Christmas was nice – we sat around the table and ate the food that my VERY heavily pregnant sis and my brother-in-law cooked, accompanied by a crying Dougal (my other sister’s pug), who looked very fetching in his Christmas jumper. We had races with the wind-up penguins that were in our crackers, then sat and chilled out for the rest of the afternoon while the dog fell asleep on my mum’s lap.

The family
Dougal
Mum, my sis and me
Dougal eyes up a profiterole
Poppy was really pleased when we got home!

Continue reading →

How BoardBooster Helped Me Triple My Pinterest Traffic

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Board Booster

One of my biggest blogging regrets is that I didn’t set up an effective Pinterest account as soon as I started Suzie Speaks in 2013. In fact, it took me two-and-a-half years to discover just how fantastic it is for promoting my posts and boosting my traffic, and even then I spent weeks aimlessly pinning things that I thought were pretty, which had no impact on my blog whatsoever.

It was only when a blogging friend, Elena from Blog Share Learn (among many things), took me through various hints and tips of how to use Pinterest successfully that I started to see an increase in my referrals, particularly when she told me about BoardBooster, and she was kind enough to take me through it on a step-by-step level. Continue reading →

Why I Won’t Be Writing Any More Blogging Advice Posts

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imageYesterday, during #SundayBlogShare, a single tweet got my attention. It was a simple statement without a link – I can’t find the actual tweet now but it went something like this:

A blog post that isn’t about writing a blog post.

In the last twelve months or so, I’ve seen a huge increase in this type of content. Indeed, Pinterest and Twitter in particular are littered with them. There are entire blogs who are devoted to the complicated and time-consuming art of blogging. It’s the one type of post that any blogger can do, and fits with any niche or theme.

I’ve done a number of posts myself that I refer to as ‘Blog Advice’ – hints, tips and guidelines on everything from increasing traffic, understanding the insignificance of how many times a WordPress post is liked, replying to comments, and using hashtags and group boards to build a following and community – and I have based these on my own experiences of what has worked for me. At the time, it always feels like these sorts of posts always get more traffic than any other – there’s usually an immediate and positive response that is accompanied by a number of social media shares and comments.

However, upon closer inspection, they aren’t as successful as they initially appear. Indeed, within my ten most successful posts of all time, there isn’t a single blog advice post – my most popular posts are ones where I have shared a personal story or thoughts on teaching (and quitting it), relationships, pets and emotional intelligence. There aren’t even any in the top fifteen. It isn’t that I have done any less promotion on them than any other post, but it seems clear that, while they may be useful at the time, my readers aren’t as inclined to share or revisit them – once they’ve read it, they have the information they may feel that they need and don’t return to it again. Or, potentially it could mean that they thought it was complete nonsense, and were too polite to say anything… Continue reading →

How To Use Pinterest Group Boards to Increase Your Blog Traffic

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Pinterest group boards

When it comes to Pinterest, I’m still very much a newbie. A good bloggy friend of mine, Elena from Fabulously 50 and Living With Batman was (and still is) the biggest influence on my Pinterest activities – after achieving a monumental amount of success with her own account in a very short space of time she very kindly analysed my profile, boards and activity and then gave me a detailed list of things that I needed to do to start gaining traffic to my blog.

And oh my gosh, it works! Within just four months I have gone from receiving 100 views for the month of September 2015 to at least 100 views a day in January 2016. In fact, by the end of this month I’m set to reach 4,000 views just from Pinterest alone. Yes, it’s hardly taking the blogging world by storm, but think about this over the space of a year – with no increase this would mean 48,000 extra views to the blog with minimal effort.

A large proportion of these views have come from group boards. Continue reading →

Quick and Easy Nutella Brownie Cake

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Those of you who follow me on Pinterest may have noticed the amount of things I regularly re-pin on my ‘Desserts’ board. In fact, I can quite easily spend hours salivating over beautiful recipes, making a promise to myself that one day, I would actually bother to try them.

Unfortunately, I’m no Nigella, and while I can cook the basics, baking has never been something I have been particularly successful with. The Bloke, however, thoroughly enjoys it and our cupboards are filled with various trays and things that I have no idea what they do…

That is, until I discovered a recipe for brownies that used only three ingredients – a jar of Nutella (which I can eat just with a spoon), eggs and flour. Bargain. However, as I was following the recipe I found that my own attempts looked nothing like the pictures, so I added my own additional ingredient.

Thirty minutes later, I discovered that my ‘brownies’ had in fact turned into the most beautiful sponge I had ever made. Light, fluffy, gorgeous… Even The Bloke was impressed when I proudly presented him with a large piece, smothered in more Nutella and topped with mini-marshmallows and chopped hazelnuts.

I’ve since tried it twice more, and each time I get the same result, so I thought I’d share it with you. Continue reading →

How I Am Building My Pinterest Page

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Building up my Pinterest pageA few months ago my bloggy friend Elena, over at Elena Peters: Midlife Blogger surprised me by doing an analysis of my Pinterest activity. I’d had an account for quite a while, but did little with it, and she very kindly decided to help me out as she has achieved great success with hers in a very short amount of time. Not only that, she created a series of posts, effectively a ‘How To’ guide on developing and growing a readership.

After reading her advice, this is what I did

  • Added my blog link and key words to the description of each of my boards.
  • Changed my account to a ‘business’ account.
  • Created a group board and invited other bloggers to share their posts. I’ve participated in one of Elena’s shared boards and it has been a great way to see more blog posts, so I’ve started my own.
  • Joined several other group boards.
  • Created different boards of things I am interested in: running, hair and beauty (ie, things that I could do myself without looking like a panda), photography, food, motivational quotes, Birmingham… I’ve gone pin crazy adding things that have inspired me.
  • Put the boards into an order that made sense – my blog board first, followed by my group board, followed by my interest boards, with my group boards at the end.

After a little while, I started to develop it even further.

  • I made my pins into ‘rich pins.’ This was quite a complicated process as I am a .com site and not a self-hosted .org like Elena, so I will give more details on this in a later post.
  • I started to created pin-worthy images. For this, I use Canva on my iPad – it’s a free app, extremely easy to use and I have had lots of fun trying out new ideas and styles with it.
Images created with Canva

Some of the images I have created with Canva

  • I have also started putting keywords into the ‘Alt’ section of my images before I publish the post.

And the results? For one, my following has more than doubled, although it has admittedly slowed down recently due to my lack of activity on there at the end of September.

Since Elena’s advice I have seen a steady, but noticeable increase of an extra 100+ views, and my October views are set to be sizeably higher. In fact, they will have tripled in just a few months, which is amazing considering the small amount of time and attention I actually put into the account.

Want to know more? You can find mine and Elena’s amazing set of offers for setting your blog for success in 2017, with brilliant advertising opportunities and a KILLER Pinterest and Twitter course bundle…

Simply click on the image below

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Pin Crazy!

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It took me a while to realise the importance of developing social media accounts to increase the traffic to my blog, and I didn’t do anything other than write and press the publish button for the first year. This suited me – the purpose of the process was for therapy, a way of being able to try and discuss the issues that had been plaguing me for a long time. However, for the last eighteen months I’ve worked hard to build up various areas of social media and effectively use it to promote my posts, with what I would consider to be a success.

However, there is one area that I have consistently ignored: Pinterest.

I have a Pinterest account: http://www.pinterest.com/suzie81speaks… I’ve had the account for months, and I’ve done nothing with it. Continue reading →

Suzie81 Speaks Is On Pinterest!

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My Pinterest Boards

My Pinterest Boards

I’ve had a Pinterest account for about a year and I’ve done absolutely nothing with it – I’ve spent the last six months attempting to build my Twitter and Facebook accounts – but this morning I decided to start developing my boards.

It has been hugely time consuming and I have only created four so far, but I decided to use it as an opportunity to share not only my blog posts, but my photography too. In addition, I have added a board for images that I like, and another for blog posts from my favourite bloggers. I find it fascinating to see how many different topics are available, and I have been able to find some of you guys already!

Want to follow me on Pinterest? Click on the link below.

http://www.pinterest.com/suzie81speaks

Don’t forget that you can also follow me on Twitter and Tumblr @suzie81blog, and don’t forget to check out my Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/suzie81speaks

Feel free to leave your links below!