Pinterest is a free traffic generating machine. Period. Want to know how the engine of this machine gets started? Want to learn how does Pinterest work for business and blog growth?
Well, I use Pinterest to drive over 300,000/mo pageviews to my website. So, keep reading… I will even give you at the end of this post a detailed checklist so you can implement all the steps I use in my process. Stay tuned for the link at the end of this guide.
Before we jump to HOW Pinterest works for business, let me show you quickly some surprising stats you probably didn’t know about the Pinterest audience.
From these stats, you will understand WHY you need to learn Pinterest marketing.
WHY PINTEREST?
- Pinterest has 445+ monthly active million users worldwide, of which about 60% are from the US;
- 30% of all US social media users are on Pinterest;
- Half of Pinterest users earn $50K or greater per year, with 10 percent of Pinteresting households making greater than $125K.
- 93% of active pinners said they use Pinterest to plan for purchases and 87% said they’ve purchased something because of Pinterest. So if you are selling any products – your own or affiliate products and get a lot of Pinterest traffic, your audience has the purchasing mindset.
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Pinterest Users Have Buyer Intent!
- 50% of people make a purchase after seeing a promoted pin;
- An average user on Pinterest has 5 times higher shopping intent than users on other platforms.
- Advertisers get $2 profit for every $1 spent on average;
- 40% of the US households that are on Pinterest make over $100k.
Using Pinterest For Business Marketing
So, what is Pinterest for business? Why is Pinterest so amazing and why do I think it’s better than any social media platform and even Google if you want to drive traffic and leads to a new website?
- Every piece of content you publish on Pinterest can be linked to your website.
Why do I even mention this? Well, because it is not the case on some very popular social media platforms. For example, on Instagram, you can’t link a post to your website from every image or video you publish. You can have one link in bio and that’s all. That’s why I get barely ANY traffic at all from Instagram and I get over 300,000/mo pageviews from Pinterest.
- Pinterest is a combination of a search engine and a social media platform.
And the coolest thing is that Pinterest took the best of both relatives.
So from a search engine, it took the keyword searchability. And search engine optimization for this platform is a lot easier to understand and to implement, than SEO for Google. That’s because Pinterest is still a younger platform, its algorithm is not as sophisticated at this point. And plus, Pinterest is a visual search engine.
This means you don’t need to write a 2000-word blog post to succeed – you only need quality images and good keywords in your pin title and description.
Well… maybe it’s not exactly that simple, otherwise, why would people enroll in my Pinterest SEO Traffic Secrets program with 7 hours of video content, right?
By the way, I also have quite a detailed introduction to Pinterest SEO in another post on my blog, don’t miss it.
- The best part about Pinterest as a social media platform is the viral effect
Remember I mentioned that Pinterest took the best features of a search engine, and of a social media site.
I don’t know any other traffic source that will give you these amazing traffic spikes for free AND will continue driving solid traffic to your website even when the pin dropped the viral effect.
In the old times on Facebook you could get lucky and suddenly get a viral post that could drive you traffic for a few hours or maximum about one day. The viral effect from a Facebook post never lasted longer than this, unless you were ready to pay for boosting your post.
What I love about Pinterest is that a viral post can be viral for a lot, a lot longer than this. And that you can actually revive your old viral posts with new pin images, and this often works wonders with seasonal or holiday content!
Here is my post that got a bit of traction in the first year I published it for Thanksgiving 2017. Here is my traffic growth from the same post one year later.
I literally didn’t have to do anything, Pinterest just picked the pin a few months before the Thanksgiving 2018 and drove me extra ….. pageviews to this post only!
What Creates Viral Pins on Pinterest?
It’s the social part of it: the regular users, your audience will save pins with links to your content if they find it inspiring. Pinterest provides several ways for users to do it – not only while they are on Pinterest, but also when they are browsing through your website. They can use Pinterest browser extensions or your social sharing buttons and save directly from your website to their boards.
So, this is how pins become viral – the more users save them to the boards, the more users interact with your pins, the more people will see it in their feeds. This is a classical viral effect but it lasts so- so much longer!
Did you know that the half-life on content on Pinterest is incredibly long? Guess how long it is? 24 hours? A week or a month? Nope! It’s about 6 months guys!
So if you publish something on Facebook and it doesn’t get traction in the first day, it’s gone and no one will ever see it in the feed again. If you save a new original pin on Pinterest, it can circulate and bring you traffic for as long as 6 months.
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You Can Succeed Even as a Beginner
On Pinterest your domain authority, the age of your website, how many backlinks you have, and how detailed your content is – none of this matters. But you need all of this to rank high in Google search results. The only thing Pinterest wants from you in exchange for targeted free traffic is a lot of quality pins – images or videos. These can be new posts with new pins or even your old posts with new pins for them.
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Is Pinterest Good for Business? (+ Pinterest Business Account Cost)
Business accounts on Pinterest are not only completely free to use, but they also get priority distribution based on the official statements of Pinterest representatives. Pinterest calls business account owners “Content Creators” and treats us as someone who is capable to produce a lot of quality fresh content for their platform.
This is why new pins linked to your verified domain, according to Pinterest, are getting priority distribution in the feeds not only of the users who follow you already but also to wider audiences with similar interests.
Let’s compare this with how Facebook works for example. Facebook made it pretty clear it will always be a network that connects users with their friends and family. And so the content distribution is prioritizing what your friends and family published.
On Pinterest, they use the opposite principle. They want to connect users with businesses and content creators. So this means, they prioritize content from business accounts.
How Does Pinterest Work for Business?
As an online business owner or a blogger, you might want to market on this platform to get the following results:
- Drive targeted traffic to your website or blog;
- Get more subscribers on your email list;
- Get leads to sell your own products and services;
- Sell affiliate products (you can even use direct affiliate links with disclosure on Pinterest, if the affiliate program itself allows traffic from social platforms).
So these were the 5 reasons why I think you have to be active as a marketer on Pinterest. As for the details of HOW you actually get that traffic from Pinterest, I do cover this in detail in my Pinterest SEO Traffic Secrets course. And of course, in the other videos of my Youtube channel. Just look around the channel and you’ll learn how to get more followers on Pinterest, how Pinterest algorithm works, how to master Pinterest SEO and many other awesome things you need to know about this platform.
I didn’t forget about the checklist I promised to help you start driving tons of Pinterest traffic.
GET MY PINTEREST SEO CHECKLIST HERE (FREE)
What is Pinterest Good For?
I often get questions from my course students and readers about the niches Pinterest is good for.
It is pretty obvious that Home Decor, Recipes, DIY, Fashion and some other niches are huge on Pinterest and that in many other niches you’ll be getting a lower volume of traffic.
But the question is how much traffic do you need to monetize in your niche? For example, many websites in the popular niches I mentioned above, are relying mostly on ad income, and that means they need high amounts of traffic.
If you monetize traffic through high-ticket affiliate products, or with your own products and services, it doesn’t matter that much how popular your niche is on Pinterest. Whatever traffic there is, you will get it and monetize it for more $ than you could with a huge traffic volume in popular niches. Don’t forget that popular niche also means higher competition. You would need to create a lot more content to take more space in the Pinterest feed with more pins in a competitive niche. When you are one of the few people who marketing on Pinterest in your niche, you can take all the traffic there is with less content, fewer pins.
How Does Pinterest Work For Business: 5 Reasons To Be on Pinterest (2024)
Instructions
- Every piece of content you publish on Pinterest can be linked to your website
- Pinterest is a combination of a search engine and a social media platform
- The best part about Pinterest as a social media platform is the viral effect
- Is Pinterest Good for Business? (+ Pinterest Business Account Cost)
I’m Anastasia and I’m a full-time blogger, online entrepreneur, and Pinterest marketing strategist. I help digital entrepreneurs and bloggers drive targeted traffic from Pinterest either through my online courses or through Pinterest consultancy.
