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Have you seen the guides and studies that promise a massive amount of traffic from Pinterest to any website? Inspired, I decided to get some traffic from Pinterest to Ahrefs blog.
Yet, there was a tiny problem… I knew nothing about Pinterest marketing. So I asked Google “How can I get traffic from Pinterest?”
Google returned about 41,400,000 results in 0.77 seconds, and I started learning. I even went to page 2 and 3 of search results!
The very first lesson learnt was that there weren’t much fresh authoritative guides or studies. The best part dated back to 2014 and 2015 when Pinterest was a bit different.
The second lesson learnt was that tips and tricks to drive traffic from Pinterest show little to zero variety. In fact, having filtered off some nonsense tips (as per my personal gut feeling) and very specific tactics (like the ones for e-commerce stores) I came up with a list of 8 action points:
Sign up for a business account on Pinterest.
Set up relevant boards with keywords in mind and fill them with cool pins.
Apply for Rich Pins for your website or blog.
Grow your Pinterest following.
Get to the relevant group boards.
Use catchy, engaging images.
Pin consistently. Pin a lot.
Show your best pins to the top Pinterest users in your niche.
The plan was ready, and I decided to follow it for 1 month and then analyse the results.
So let me show you what I did, how I did it, and what we got in the end.
NOTE
At the time we started our experiment, our Pinterest account was not brand new. We had a few hundreds of followers already, some boards were in place and we pinned some stuff occasionally. But we never took it seriously, and Pinterest, in return, had never been bringing Ahrefs any noticeable traffic.
1. Sign up for a business account on Pinterest
Nearly every single Pinterest guide started with this tip.
Turned out, Personal and Business accounts had different terms of service. Commercial use of Pinterest is only allowed for Business account. Plus Rich pins, promoted pins, and access to Pinterest Analytics are only available for Business accounts.
Also, there were Buyable pins, but those only apply for BigCommerce, Demandware and Shopify platforms.
Converting to business account or creating a new one is totally free.
Confirm your website
Next you have to confirm your website, so that you can see who is visiting it from Pinterest.
Get a “Save” button for your website (skipped)
The default final step in setting a Pinterest business account is to add a “Save” button to your website.
This can easily be arranged with Pinterest Widget Builder.
However, for the sake of the experiment integrity, I skipped this step.
You see, we were not going to push our existing audience to Pinterest and back. We aimed for the brand new visitors from Pinterest, resulting from our Pinterest marketing efforts.
Besides, Pinterest power users do not need a “Pin” button on a blog, as they’re using browser extensions and tools like Buffer to pin even the unpinnable.
Now Ahrefs had a Business account on Pinterest and I moved on.