How to Track Your Website’s Content on Pinterest

Ann Smarty is a search marketer and full-time web entrepreneur. Ann blogs on search and social media tools. Her newest project, My Blog Guest, is a free platform for guest bloggers and blog owners. Follow Ann on Twitter @seosmarty.

Pinterest is now one of the most efficient traffic sources, in some cases even surpassing networks like Twitter. Naturally, a lot of social media marketers are embracing Pinterest to increase social media reach and to drive traffic to their sites.

In order to track what is being pinned from your site, and to engage with those pins further, try funneling that Pinterest content into a handy RSS feed.

For starters, see what is being pinned from your own site by using the following URL:

http://pinterest.com/source/YourWebsite.com/

As simple as it may seem, the trick is actually pure gold. By checking the URL often, you can give your site pins more boost.

• Always Like and sometimes comment on pins from your site to give them better ranking and increase their reach.
• Repin some of the most interesting and unique images. You can even repin user comments.
• Follow your promoters (those who pin your pages), encouraging them return to your site.

SEE ALSO: How to Track Traffic From Pinterest in Google Analytics

While it's a great tool for bloggers and marketers, the "source" page can be limited. The major drawback is that it has no RSS subscription option, which would make tracking much easier. So, let's create one!

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Feed Your Domain "Source" Page from Pinterest

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The Feed43 tool can turn any page into an RSS feed. Register an account at Feed43 and provide your blog source URL from Pinterest to scrape.

Then, in the "Item (repeatable) Search Pattern" field, provide the following.

<a href="http://pinterest.com/pin/{%}" class="PinImage ImgLink">{*}
<p class="description">{%}</p>{*}
<a href="{%}" title="{%}" class="ImgLink">{*}

This will extract the following repeatable information from the page.

• The pin page unique ID
• The pinner's comment on the image
• The pinner's username and Pinterest profile URL

Finally, in the "RSS item properties" field, define the following structure of your feed (replicate the screenshot below).

You're done! Previewing your feed should give you the following.

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Play with Your New RSS Feed

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If you're not sure what to do with your new RSS feed, try these cool ideas.

1. Import RSS Feed into Your WordPress Blog Sidebar widget: Invite your blog readers to like and repin your content on Pinterest. It has the potential to increase your reach and traffic dramatically.

2. Archive Pins from Your Domain: Your pinterest.com/source/YOUR DOMAIN HERE/ URL is fun to look through. You can repin and comment on your pins right from there. But the bad thing is that there's no way to search through the pins that originate from your blog. It is also unclear how far back the archive will ultimately go — will Pinterest save your source archive forever?

Archiving your site pins with Google Reader allows you to do two things: Save your archive forever (from the moment you created it), and search through your pins (e.g. find all pins from any of your pages).

3. Create a folder for your Pinterest RSS feed and install Google Reader's "Next bookmarklet" to your toolbar. This is especially helpful for actively pinned websites.

Now, whenever you have a moment, just start clicking that bookmarklet to see pins from your site load in the browser one by one (in the reverse order).

Similar to StumbleUpon's "Stumble" button, click "Next" whenever you want to go to the next pin of your site. It's a great way to spend an idle minute or two checking what is being pinned from your site, and sharing those pins further.

Can you think of any more cool uses of the Pinterest "source" page? Please share them in the comments.