Blog Baby Blog Week 1: What the Heck are Rich Pins?


First off, I didn’t even know what rich pins were.  I knew eeeeeeeeverybody was talking about them.  I was completely sure I wanted them even if I had no clue what they were.

Why you need Rich Pins on your blog (even if you don’t know what they are!)

So, this is by no means a complete Pinterest tutorial.  I thought about naming this post “From One Pinterest Dummy to Another”.  If you're really interested in learning more about Pinterest, I strongly recommend the Pinning Perfect class from Blog Clarity {<--Affiliate Link. I've got to pay for my newly aquired stock photo habit somehow.}  I signed up for the course during the school year and am just now at a point where I'm been really able to focus on the content and start applying it to my blog.


The first reason you’ll want rich pins is an immediate surface level reason.  Take a look at the pins from my site:


Before you can add rich pins, you have to add the official Pinterest button and confirm your site.  Once you do that, your favicon and blog title will be on every single pin from your site.  Even the ones that are already on Pinterest.  Pinterest is slathering your brand all over their site.  That’s a good thing.


The second reason you need rich pins is for better pin control of the descriptions.  Right now if you have a pin it hover button, it is pulling the title of your post and maybe your blog title, and that's it. (FYI-you probably don’t have a button.  The repository where the code was stored is no longer in existence so everyone’s button disappeared.)

Take a look at these two pins:

Why you need Rich Pins on your blog (even if you don’t know what they are!)

Think of Pinterest as a search engine-which is how most of us use it.  If you want to perform well on that search engine, you need to have a good description on your pins.  Rich pins allow you to front load the description with important words that relate to your post.  This gives you a much great chance of being found in a Pinterest search.

Want to know how to set up Rich Pins?  Click here!


Heads up-there is a lot of coding involved. You’ll need to add the official Pinterest button, remove your old one if you have it, add code to confirm your site, more code to force Pinterest to pull rich pins from your homepage, and even more if the Pinterest button hovering over everything like your header and sidebar bothers you.

Not interested in entering the dark side also know as HTML? Head over to my design site, A Bird in Hand Designs.  You can purchase Rich Pin installation for Blogger sites there.  I’ll be adding Wordpress soon.


Happy pinning!