I have been spending a little bit of time on Pinterest during the last week, not because I really like the site (I have enough hobbies already!), but because where there are thousands of users, there is money to be made. This money doesn’t appear to be in the form of selling to users, but the traffic they can provide, and the spread of viral content, especially images.
With any website that grows larger than expected, there are opportunities for both links and marketing, Pinterest is no different. When Diggers were easily manipulated, I was force feeding them front page stories. When Stumbleupon could drive 10,000 visitors every hour, I had a team of people writing and designing graphics. In the last year I’ve turned to long term, more sustainable traffic generation methods, particularly organic SEO and my link building service.
The Pinterest Test
I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on Pinterest if it was going to be a waste, but I also didn’t want to wait another 6 months to see who was monetizing this audience.
Test 1: You need followers, just follow a lot of people. I wrote a small bot in uBot Studio (fantastic if you don’t own it) that would go through a few lists and follow everyone on that list. The bot took me about 30 minutes to write and about an hour of tweaking and running lists through. In total my test account is following 1286 people. It’s been a week and I have 125 followers. That’s only about 10% follower to follow rate, not very good.
Test 2: Buy Pinterest followers. If you’re in need of Pinterest followers, another way would be to buy Pinterest followers. In my tests, this was a quick and easy way to get followers. If you’re building a long term brand and following, this will help. You’ll still need to have a plan to monetize.
Test 3: Pin funny pictures. I have an old site with funny Photoshop pictures that I haven’t touched in a few years. I pinned about 8 of the pictures on the site and did nothing. In the last week, I have received exactly 6 unique visitors from Pinterest. A few of my pins have been liked and repined, but nothing nearing viral by any stretch.
In conclusion, I know there is money to be made and visitors to be had from Pinterest, but it’s not for me. Was this test a waste? Definitely not, I spent at least a few hours thinking about Pinterest monetization and if I didn’t test it, I would still be wondering if I was missing out on a goldmine.
I still think Pinterest is a goldmine, I just don’t think I’m equipped with the right pick axe to harvest it.
Brandon Hopkins owns DiamondLinks.net a complete link building service. He provides consultations and suggestions at no charge and loves to discuss link building.