Unless you have been hiding under a rock for the past year or so, you will be well aware of the phenomenon that is Pinterest.

And if your WordPress blog is in any way image-driven, you have probably sought to leverage Pinterest as a traffic source. If not, you’re missing out. A Shareaholic study carried out in July concluded that Pinterest is second only to Facebook amongst the social networks when it comes to sending referral traffic.

So it is fair to say that if you want to attract more traffic to your site, you should be making the most of Pinterest. Which brings me to the 14 plugins I am featuring today, each of which offer unique functionality which can help you drive more traffic to your site. Enjoy!

1. Pinterest “Pin It” Button

If you’re looking for something simple and obtrusive, the Pinterest “Pin It” Button will suit you. With this plugin you can add a “Pin It” button to your posts – both above and/or below the content.

2. Digg Digg

If you’d rather offer a “Pin It” button amongst other sharing options, I consider Digg Digg to be the best solution. With it you can display a floating share bar to the side of your content (with a huge variety of social networks supported), and/or share buttons above and below your post’s content.

3. Pinterest Plugin

The name of this plugin doesn’t really give anything away, but in a nutshell, it adds a “Pin It” button to individual images on your blog posts that displays when an image is hovered over. The image’s alt text is used as the description on Pinterest.

There is no way of demonstrating this plugin’s functionality, but you can see a working demo over at its official website.

4. Pinterest Image Pin

Rather than adding a single “Pin It” button to your post, Pinterest Image Pin adds one under each and every image on your blog posts, so that they can be individually shared. It essentially offers the same functionality as Pinterest Plugin, but the button is displayed below the image, rather than on hover:

You also have a variety of button types to choose from.

5. Pinterest for Galleries

This plugin adds “Pin It” buttons to each and every image in a WordPress gallery, in the same way as Pinterest Image Pin does to individual images:

Unfortunately, Pinterest for Galleries doesn’t work with the extremely popular NextGEN Gallery plugin. However, I know a plugin that does…

6. Pinterest Lightbox

NextGEN Gallery has well over 5 1/2 million downloads, and Pinterest seems to be rather popular too. So it’s a good thing that someone saw fit to develop a plugin that brings the two together.

7. Social Networks Auto-Poster

I’m personally not a fan of auto-posting to social networks, but if you are, this plugin is for you. It will automatically publish your WordPress blog posts to various social networks – including Pinterest. The post’s featured image will be used on Pinterest.

8. Pinterest “Follow” Button

The more followers you have on Pinterest, the more likely you are to drive repeat visitors back to your blog. Therefore, it is a good idea to encourage your blog’s readers to follow you.

This is easily done with Pinterest “Follow” Button plugin, which as you might expect, enables you to place a Pinterest “Follow” button in your sidebar:

As you can see from the above screenshot, you get a few button styles to choose from.

9. Pinterest Pinboard Widget

This is the first of three pinboard-style widget plugins that are featured on this list, but they all offer something a little different. Pinterest Pinboard Widget is a simple and lightweight plugin that displays a selected number of recent pins from a specific user’s account:

10. Pinterest RSS Widget

This plugin is similar to Pinterest Pinboard Widget, but offers a few more customization options – namely thumbnail dimensions, and titles:

You can also add a “Follow” button below the images.

11. Ultimate Photo Widget

If Pinterest is not the only source of graphical inspiration for you, Ultimate Photo Widget enables you to pull images from Flickr, Tumblr and Pinterest, then present them together as one source.

This plugin relies upon WordPress’ built-in jQuery scripts to present the images in a variety of ways, including slideshows and tiled. You can see a demo of the plugin’s functionality here.

12. Top Pinned Posts

This is the only premium plugin on the list, and will set you back $29 for a single license at the time of writing.

Top Pinned Posts, as you might expect, allows you to display a list of your posts on your site that have attracted the most “pins” on Pinterest. I’m not convinced that the functionality is worth the premium price, but then I don’t see it being offered in any free plugin, so perhaps I am wrong.

13. WP Pinner

This ambitious project aims to make your WordPress dashboard a hub for Pinterest account management. Check out this video to learn more:

As you can see, some of the options include auto-pinning posts, scheduling pins, and auto-following other Pinterest users.

14. Pinterest Block

Finally, if for whatever reason you want to block certain posts and pages on your site from being pinned, you can use Pinterest Block.

As you can see from the above screenshot, you can setup the plugin to block specific types of posts/pages, or block posts/pages on an individual basis.

All Bases Covered?

Having spent a considerable amount of time scouring both the WordPress.org Plugins Repository and the web in general for every Pinterest plugin I could find, I am pretty confident that I have listed all Pinterest plugins worth mentioning.

However, I may well have missed something out – are there other Pinterest plugins you know of that you think should be on the list? Let us know in the comments section!