How to Drive Traffic From Pinterest – Our Pinterest Strategy

We all know how important SEO and organic traffic is. The true scalable traffic is organic search engine traffic. 

For a website to receive a million visitors or more, their focus should be to rank on top of Google SERPs. 

And when it comes to driving traffic, Google is the gold standard. But getting search engine traffic is no easy feat.

It usually takes a year or two (or even more) to start driving significant traffic from search engines. That doesn’t mean we should through away SEO, but it means that a new blog should have social media strategies going hand in hand with SEO.

Financial Folks being a new blog, I wanted to focus on social media to drive fast traffic while creating search engine optimized content on the background. 

And Pinterest is our social media of choice.

Why Pinterest?

Because Pinterest is highly effective in driving traffic to websites. If it were a brand/awareness building campaign, Instagram or Facebook would been our choice, but when it comes to traffic generation, Pinterest is the king.

In short, SEO = Long-term strategy (best for experienced blogs) and Pinterest = Short-term strategy (best for new bloggers). 

I do understand that Pinterest traffic valleys at a point. It’s not unlimited and scalable like Google traffic. 

And that finance isn’t that popular a topic in Pinterest either. From my observation, many of the popular finance, business, marketing & make money blogs in Pinterest drive around 10K-20K monthly visitors. 

There are blogs that drive hundreds of thousands of visitors as well, but from a quick competitor analysis, I could find that a lot of the blogs I analyzed receives monthly traffic between 10K and 20K range from Pinterest.

Pro Tip: You can use SimilarWeb to analyze websites for their traffic, where the traffic is coming from (social media, search, direct), etc. It’s one of the best competitor analysis tools providing a free service.

The monthly Pinterest views as well tend to be around 1M-2M. Personal finance blogs with 3M+ monthly views were relatively very less.

But on the other hand, were it a home decor or recipe blog, 10M would have been a relatively simple target. That’s how popular those niches are in Pinterest.

One strategy adopted by many personal finance bloggers is to include Cooking and Home Decor pins as well to their profile. This will help improve the traffic and monthly profile views. 

But I wanted to strictly stick to the business and personal finance niche (due to the long-term goals) and adding pins from other niche were not in the cards.

Below are screenshots showing the most popular Pinterest categories and audience interest.

As you can see, Home decor, Arts and crafts, & Fashion niches have an extremely high interest on Pinterest. Food & Drinks also has an interest rate above 50%. 

And the category with the smallest audience interest shown is Finance. 

At a measly 4%, it’s even below animals and gardening!

And if that’s the case, why use Pinterest for marketing a personal finance blog?

Because Pinterest has a total of 400 million monthly active users and 4% is still quite a high number (that’s 16M people showing interest in finance pins).

Obviously, the best niche to start a blog on while focusing on Pinterest traffic is Home Decor or Arts & Crafts. 

But my long-term focus is high-profitability keywords and driving organic traffic from Google. And for those, business and personal finance topics are great.

Of course, personal finance is a highly popular and profitable niche, but probably not so much on Pinterest.

Eitherways, in my case, Pinterest is intended as a short-term but fast traffic generation strategy while I work on SEO and backlink building efforts in the background.

And Pinterest is still really great at driving traffic even though in limited amounts.

The next question was on the Pinterest strategy to adopt. My aim is to reach a stage where I drive 50,000 visitors a month from Pinterest. 

But as we have seen, finance has the lowest interest level on Pinterest.

And that most of the personal finance blogs on Pinterest I analyzed were getting 10K-20K visitors per month. If that’s the case, how do we reach the 50,000 visitor mark?

And the idea I decided to experiment upon is to create multiple Pinterest accounts, with each targeting a sub-niche. That’s the best way to reach more people.

Managing one Pinterest account apart from the blog itself is quite some work. If so, managing multiple accounts would be a huge, time-consuming undertaking. 

It would mean spending a few hours everyday just to update all the Pinterest accounts. 

Pareto’s principle (80-20 rule) says we should move our efforts to activities that pays the most outcome. This led to me to two questions:

• Is managing multiple Pinterest accounts the best use of my time?  
• Or would it be better spend on content creation and link-building activities?

Being a new blog with very little traffic, I believe Pinterest marketing has to be done. As the blog grows and organic traffic kicks in, I should rethink the strategy. 

But right now, I believe it has to be done to reach the goal.

Once the strategy was finalized, the next step was to identify the sub-niches each of the accounts would be targeting. 

Personal finance was the obvious first choice and hence came the Financial Folks account, the primary Pinterest account. 

I also intend to be cover the topics of business & blogging in detail. Thus came the Business Folks and Blogging Folks accounts.

I also looked at the top sub-niches in the Finance category on Pinterest. You can see the image below.

As you can see, almost 68% (2/3rd) of the interest is in financial planning and budgeting. And Savings Folks was created to target this sub-category.

Together, I believe these 4 Pinterest accounts will help me reach the goal of driving 50,000+ monthly visitors from Pinterest.

I understand that we have to be very careful while creating pins and that we should not cannibalize one account by publishing the same content in multiple places. 

By keeping each account separate and strongly focusing on a sub-niche, I will be able to reach the most number of people through the accounts.

But a few confusions still lingered in my mind. A vast majority of bloggers in Pinterest only use one account to promote their blogs.

• Does this mean having multiple accounts is a waste of time and energy? 
• Is it better to divert the efforts to content creation and SEO practices? 
• Are we not allowed to have multiple accounts?

In order to find an answer to the last question, I mailed the Pinterest support team. And this was the answer:

So, there is no issue in having multiple accounts. We can only claim the website with one account (I used Financial Folks account for claiming the website), but are allowed to manage multiple accounts.

In fact, if you check the images below, you can see that Pinterest themselves have quite a lot of accounts. A lot!

And so does the major media websites. See below!

Of course, almost all of them have thousands of employees (it’s easy for them to manage as many accounts as they want), many variations of their websites (with multiple sub-domains) and have millions of readers (it makes sense having these many accounts targeting people geographically and based on interests).

So, there isn’t an issue with managing multiple accounts, but why is it that only the large media companies are doing it and not many of the individual bloggers?

My assumption is that it’s because it is not an effective strategy compared to the time invested. 

Pinterest traffic definitely valleys at a point and it might be more strategic to spend time building content and backlinks over multiple accounts. 

The return on investment (in terms of time and money) probably would be lower for managing multiple Pinterest accounts. 

Anyways, I have decided to test the waters and see how well this strategy works out. And being a new blog, I believe this strategy will serve me good. 

I can rethink the Pinterest strategy at a later time when the traffic valleys and it’s time to completely focus the efforts on SEO and link building.

The core aim is to create SEO-optimized posts and drive organic traffic. Financial Folks being a new blog, it will take some time (probably a couple of years even) before organic traffic takes over. And till that stage, I expect Pinterest to be the major traffic driver. 

But I do hope that publishing long-form comprehensive posts will help me get a lot more backlinks (and quite faster) than short-form posts do. And that the organic traffic kicks in and takes over.

You can follow us on any of our Pinterest accounts to stay updated and see how our experiment pans out!