Getting consistent traffic to your food blog isn’t easy. While paid advertising can help you reach more readers, it’s often too expensive to be a sustainable strategy, especially if you’re just starting out or working with a limited budget. That’s where Pinterest comes in.
Unlike many social media platforms, Pinterest functions more like a visual search engine, helping your recipes get discovered long after you publish them. With the right Pinterest strategy, you can drive a steady stream of targeted visitors to your food blog without spending money on ads.
In this guide, you’ll learn why Pinterest is such a powerful marketing tool for food bloggers and discover practical tips for using it to grow your traffic and reach more recipe lovers. We also cover the best content to market on Pinterest as a food blogger.
Let’s get started!
Why Pinterest Marketing Works for Food Blogs
Pinterest advertises itself as a search engine for everything from home decor to daily outfit inspiration to easy weeknight dinner ideas. As of Q1 2026, Pinterest reported 631 million monthly active users worldwide, making it one of the largest visual discovery platforms in the world, and a major outreach channel for food bloggers.
Food-related topics consistently generate high interest on Pinterest. Recipes are one of the most-searched categories on the platform year after year. Take a look at this chart:
As a food blogger, you can start sharing your recipes on Pinterest right off the bat. Since many users are actively looking for new cooking ideas and discovering recipes, it’s a great place to grow your following.
Other social media platforms, like Instagram, don’t let you promote external links directly on posts. This makes it difficult to use them for marketing your food blog. However, every pin can be attached to a link back to your food blog website making it easy to funnel visitors from Pinterest to your food blog.
Here’s how Eat Up! Kitchen does it:
Another reason it makes sense for food bloggers to use Pinterest for marketing is because there are many ways for users to discover your content through Pinterest. For example, users can browse their home feeds or search for your specific food niche.
Pinterest also groups related pins in its More like this section to help users find what they’re looking for:
Ultimately, Pinterest can be an effective platform for both beginner and established food bloggers. So, if you want to expand your audience and drive more traffic to your food blog website, you can start creating custom pins or enabling social sharing on your website. This way, more people can discover your recipes through Pinterest.
How to Use Pinterest to Grow Your Food Blog (2 Methods)
Now that you know the benefits of marketing recipes on Pinterest, let’s discuss how to get started. Here are two ways you can use Pinterest to grow your food blog:
Method 1: Customize Your Recipe Pins
After visitors land on your food blog, they may want to save one of your recipes to Pinterest.
Many users create boards to organize recipes by meal type, cuisine, dietary preference, or special occasions, making it easy to find them again later. When someone saves your recipe to one of these collections, they’re more likely to return to your food blog when they’re ready to cook it.
Like any social media platform, Pinterest has its own way of displaying content. Each pin has a featured image, title, and description:
When your content is shared, you’ll want these details to be attractive to new users. This can dramatically increase click-throughs to your website.
Using Recipe Card Blocks, you can easily control the way your recipe is shared. Our recipe plugin lets you set custom Pinterest images and descriptions to make your content more appealing on Pinterest:
First, install and activate Recipe Card Blocks. Then, go to Recipe Cards → Settings → Miscellaneous and scroll down to the Pinterest section:
With either the premium or free version of the Recipe Card Blocks plugin, you can enable the Show Pinterest button in recipe card option. This adds the Pin button to each of your recipes so visitors can quickly save them to Pinterest. Here’s a preview:
By default, the pin will use your main recipe image. However, Recipe Card Blocks Pro lets you select a dedicated custom image for Pinterest per recipe. This is particularly useful if you want a tall, vertical Pin graphic that’s different from the horizontal recipe image shown on your food blog.
In addition to this, you can set the pin description to be the recipe title, recipe summary, or fully custom text.
After you save these changes, open a recipe. In the Recipe Card block sidebar, fill in the Pinterest Custom Image and Pinterest Custom Description fields:
Keep in mind that Pinterest recommends:
- A 2:3 image aspect ratio (1000×1500 pixels works well).
- Titles can be up to 100 characters.
- Descriptions up to around 500 characters.
When you follow these guidelines, Pinterest users are much more likely to engage with your pins and visit your food blog.
For the full breakdown of every Pinterest feature in Recipe Card Blocks (including Recipe Rich Pins, the Pin button, custom images and descriptions, and how to prevent visitors from pinning other images on your page), see our Pinterest Integration documentation.
Method 2: Promote Your Business Account
To consistently grow your food blog, consider creating a Pinterest business account. Rather than relying on visitors to share your pins, you can build pins yourself to promote your recipes and cookbooks.
To get started, add your food blog’s URL to your business profile:
Once you set up your Pinterest business account, start creating your pins. Be sure to add an image, title, description, and link to your food blog. When you’re ready, you can publish the pin immediately or schedule it:
Now you can use your blog posts to promote your Pinterest account too. This helps establish your brand awareness and grow your follower count.
Navigate to Recipe Cards → Settings → Miscellaneous and scroll down to the Footer Call to Action section. Here, you’ll find options to display a Pinterest call to action (CTA) at the bottom of every recipe.
Add your Pinterest Username (without the @ symbol), then customize the Pinterest Title and Pinterest Subtitle, which will be your call to action.
For example, you may want your followers to share photos when they recreate your recipes. To encourage user-generated content, you can ask users to tag you in their posts:
Lastly, pick a color scheme for the social banner. It’s best to keep the Pinterest icon red (Pinterest’s brand color) for instant visual recognition, but you can change the text color using the color picker to match your brand if you’d like:
After you save these settings, every recipe on your site will display the CTA at the footer, directing users to follow you on Pinterest or tag your account in their own recreations. It will look something like this:
With this feature in place, more users will be able to share your recipes on their personal Pinterest boards. That helps you grow your audience, establishes your food blog as a trusted source, and creates a steady loop of new visitors discovering your recipes through Pinterest.
Bonus: Recipe Rich Pins
One more powerful Pinterest feature worth knowing about is Recipe Rich Pins. These are enhanced pins that automatically display your recipe’s title, ingredients, cook time, ratings, and servings directly on the Pin itself, making your content stand out in the feed and significantly improving click-through rates.
The Recipe Card Blocks plugin enables Rich Pins automatically. Because the plugin generates the proper schema.org/Recipe structured data on every recipe, Pinterest reads it and serves Rich Pins without any setup, validator, or application step on your part.
What to Market on Pinterest as a Food Blogger
Pinterest is ideal for promoting more than just recipes. Here are the types of content that tend to perform best:
- Recipe Pins: Create eye-catching Pinterest recipe pins for every recipe you publish to drive consistent traffic to your food blog.
- Recipe Roundups: Share collections like 30 Easy Dinner Recipes or Best Holiday Desserts to attract users looking for inspiration.
- Pinterest Boards: Organize your content into themed Pinterest boards (e.g. Healthy Meals, Air Fryer Recipes, or Baking Tips) to improve discoverability.
- Cookbooks: Use Pinterest marketing for cookbooks to promote print or digital cookbooks with appealing pins that link directly to your sales page.
- Cooking Guides: Pin tutorials, ingredient substitutions, kitchen hacks, and meal-planning guides to reach readers beyond individual recipes.
Conclusion
Since food-related topics regularly trend on Pinterest, it’s an effective platform to market your food blog.
By creating custom recipe pins with Recipe Card Blocks, you can entice Pinterest users to visit your website. And by promoting your Pinterest account directly in your food blog posts and recipes can lead to more user-generated content and increased engagement.
To recap, here’s how you can use Pinterest to grow your food blog:
- Customize your recipe pins to encourage more saves.
- Promote your business account to grow your Pinterest followers.
Do you have any questions about using Pinterest to market your recipes? Ask us in the comments below!
And by the way, let’s connect on Pinterest! Follow @recipecard for more food blog resources.
