Last Updated on September 24, 2021 by scottkandh

At the current time (June 12th, 2021) I have 20 pins that don’t have any social shares. That’s not too bad of odds considering that overall I have 218 total posts.

In today’s post I’m going to share with you a good habit that as a new blogger you take into consideration ASAP. Which is don’t forget to add your “featured image.” And to add to that one item you should add to your checklist before publishing your post is to add a Meta Description.

All too often I pour a lot of energy into a post, do my research, check to ensure that the post has good spelling and no grammatical errors. Chances are good that you too may want to fall into the same trap that probably a lot of other bloggers do which is to publish your post. And then say to yourself that you’ll add your pins the next day or so.

What tends to happen is that if you do this too often you’ll have posts that people won’t know exist because you’re not fully promoting them by adding a featured image and then adding that featured image to your Pinterest account.

To illustrate how this can increase your blog’s traffic we’ll look at exclusively at the metric of social shares.

By the simple act of adding a featured image to “every” post on my blog and that pinning that featured image to a relevant post, my social shares increased to 142 shares for 17 different posts averaging to almost 9 social shares per post.

To recap, when your done with your post make a habit of adding at least one pin as your featured image. You can always come back to the post later to add more pins. But by leaving it blank you’re just hurting yourself.

I normally try to have at least 10 pins for each of my blog posts. I’m normally tempted that I want to publish my post to let everyone know it’s good content. But the history shows that if there’s not at least one featured image the blog post isn’t getting any traffic.

Heeding my own advice, I’m just going to develop one pin for this post and then I’ll come back to make the other 9 or 10 pins.