Free Pinterest Marketing Course

Whether you are blogging for traffic or marketing your own crafts business, Pinterest is an essential platform to use for your digital marketing strategy.

Everyone claims the heydays of easy free traffic from Pinterest is over. Or worse, you have to pay for Ads now that they are a public company and need to general revenue for shareholders.

Well, while all of that is partially true, Pinterest is still the top social platform to generate traffic relatively quickly. SEO and other social digital marketing based traffic generating methods take much longer to gain site authority and a social following respectively.

Pinterest on the other hand, you can attain reasonable traffic within a matter of weeks as opposed to years for other methods.

Yes, Pinterest at this point has worked out all the loopholes that allowed some content creators in the past to get significant amounts of traffic with a few viral pins.

If you were there in the very beginning of Pinterest, yes, you could use group boards to get a large following quickly.

While those days are over, it is still possible to get sustainable ongoing traffic with some diligence and the right strategy.

Here’s an example of what the right pinning strategy can do for you:

I started with a brand new domain with no content in early 2019. Within months, I was able to generate thousands of monthly visitors.

No, I don’t blog about blogging. My site is not about making money or financial advice. I have a crafts and DIY site. If I can do this, you can too.

I did make my fair share of mistakes though so I’d like to help my fellow pinners out too by highlighting some common mistakes.

Common Myths about Pinterest Marketing

It is just ridiculous some of the things written about Pinterest marketing out there. The worst is when some blogger that blogs about blogging sells a multi-hundred dollar e-course on how to pin on Pinterest and gives erroneous tips that get you nowhere.

The irony of this mysticism around Pinterest traffic is the engineers who build Pinterest actually are very open about what’s underneath the hood and how their algorithms work in their Pinterest engineering blog.

Well, I did read their blog and finally put my engineering degree into use (somewhat).

Here are some of my recommendations for what not to do:

You don’t have to pin manually

This one is an oldie but goodie. There’s some skepticism out there on using schedulers and other social calendars to generate and pin your pins.

Yes, Pinterest does track where your pin originated. (all of this available in the underlying code) but it doesn’t make much of a different. This is more to track large scale fraudulent activity. They are not going to de-rank your pin just because you pinned it from Tailwind rather than directly to uploading it to Pinterest.

You need a large following

Some time ago, around the time they IPO’d, Pinterest stopped marketing themselves as a social platform and started focusing more on being an image search and discovery platform.

While you can still have followers on your account, it doesn’t do nearly as much to boost your traffic as it used to. Instead, you should focus more on Pinterest SEO and image quality.

You need to join Pinterest Groups

The rational behind this is similar to the myth about followers. Pinterest is no longer a primary social platform so their social features are less important for them. Pinterest Groups is one of those social features that no longer provides any value on the traffic front.

If you want to still drive traffic from “group” pin for pin type scenarios, try using Tailwind Tribes instead where they enforce pinning between different participants.

You have to run ads

Yes, since they are now a public company, they need to make money to keep shareholders happy. However, ads detract from the quality of the search and discovery experience for their consumers so it has to be a balance.

Pinterest is well aware that a significant chunk of their quality content comes from dedicated content creators like bloggers and eCommerce sites so they need to keep those providers happy and they do so by sending them free traffic.