Why Pinterest Marketing is Good for Business

Pinterest marketing can be a wildly effective business promotion strategy for creative entrepreneurs. It can bring a bonanza of traffic to your online creative business. In fact, it's possible Pinterest marketing alone could bring enough visitors to get your online business off to a strong start.

Can Pinterest Marketing Help my Business?

Pinterest has always been good to me. 

I've been on board since the early days when you needed an invitation to set up a Pinterest account. I remember networking with my most in-the-know friends to share Pinterest invitations. I've always loved Pinterest for both personal and business use.

Pinterest has been sending readers to my website since 2011. At first there were just a few. Now there are enough to fuel a business even if I didn't have visitors coming to my site from other sources.

Despite the mutual love Pinterest and I have shared for years, I didn't realize the full potential of Pinterest until recently.

Pinterest is a More Powerful Business Marketing Tool Than You Might Realize 

I had always thought Pinterest was a nice, secondary source of traffic to my site. But search engine traffic - and by that, of course I mean Google traffic - was always the holy grail of online visitors.

Of course, I'm not dismissing Google as an important source of visitors to an online business. I will happily welcome all the readers Google will send my way.

But Pinterest can bring a bucketful of traffic to your online business. And, in my experience, you can see results from Pinterest marketing pretty quickly.

Joining the Mediavine community of bloggers made me realize what a powerful force Pinterest has been in growing some people's businesses.

Mediavine is an ad provider that doesn't accept just anyone. You have to have a solid number of visitors coming to your site - at least 25,000 sessions in 30 days as measured by Google Analytics - to even be considered.

25,000 sessions in 30 days is nothing to sneeze at. It's a big accomplishment that only a small number of bloggers achieve.

What amazed me when I joined Mediavine, was the number of people in that community who have managed to build an online business quickly, and almost entirely from Pinterest traffic. It made me realize that although my traffic from Pinterest was already pretty respectable, I could be getting a lot more readers to my site from Pinterest.

How Effective is Pinterest Marketing to Drive Traffic to a Blog?

Let's take a closer look at those bloggers who get at least 25,000 sessions every 30 days through Pinterest marketing. 

How impressive is that achievement?

If your blog had 25,000 sessions in 30 days, it would almost certainly be in the top 1% (maybe even the top .5%) of all active websites on the entire internet!

Here's the math: 

Netcraft releases monthly surveys showing the number of active sites online. The April 2019 Netcraft survey shows there are almost 185 million active sites online (184,741,720 to be precise).

If your website is in the top 1% of all active sites, that means your site would have more readers than 183,150,000 active websites have.

Loosely speaking, if you have that many visitors to your site, it means your blog has competed with almost 200 million other websites, and it is in the top 1% of that competition.

That's a big accomplishment, especially for a solopreneur. Most sites with that much traffic are run by a team of people or owned by large corporations with big budgets.

SimilarWeb measures website data. They estimate that my site is run by 10-50 employees. Nope! It's just me by myself running the whole show over here.

That level of website traffic can be achieved with Pinterest marketing.

I'm not saying you shouldn't work on getting visitors to your online business from other sources like Google. Visitors from Google and visitors from Pinterest can be quite different, and it's always better to diversify and avoid relying too much on a single source for customers.

What I am saying, though, is that it is possible to use Pinterest to get enough traffic to build a business that makes a respectable income.

Pinterest Marketing Can Show Quick Results

I've recently invested a lot of time working on a big Pinterest business growth project. The number of readers on my site grew quite fast in response to that work. It was easy to see the direct effects of my efforts in a way that doesn't typically happen so quickly on Google.

Again, I'm not criticizing Google, but, it's been my experience that Google traffic is more of a slow growth. It's easier to build an online business faster with Pinterest marketing.

Also, I don't mean to imply that you can build a business overnight with Pinterest. It helped that I already had over 300 pages and thousands of images to promote on Pinterest. It probably also helped that I had a well-established Pinterest business account. 

I already had a foundation in place. I just had to work on the promotional part. If you're starting a brand new online business, of course, it will take time to establish that foundation.

What is Pinterest Best For?

Pinterest is great for building traffic. It's not great for building connections.

Pinterest is often lumped together with social media sites like Facebook, but it is more of a visual search engine than a social media platform. Pinterest is great for bringing traffic to your website, blog, or online shop. 

People can comment on your pins, but few do, so Pinterest is not the platform you want if your goal is to build connections with customers.

If you are a creative entrepreneur who wants to bring more traffic to your online business, Pinterest marketing is probably a smart fit for your business.

Take Heed: Don't Rely on Pinterest for Everything

You can accomplish a lot with Pinterest, but it shouldn't be everything to your business.

I've had an online business since 2006, and I've learned a thing or two in that time. 

One of the biggest lessons I've learned the hard way is that it's a big mistake to put all your eggs in one basket. As much as possible, you should avoid relying on a single way to bring customers to your business (or visitors to your website).

If your business is completely dependent on a single platform that you don't control, then you don't have much control of your business.

If you let any one of those forces have too much power over the success of your business, your business is left to the whims of a single factor outside your control.

With that warning in mind, please be aware:

When I say it is possible, with Pinterest marketing alone, to build an online business that makes a respectable income, I'm not saying you should ignore other sources of visitors to your site. I am not recommending pursuing Pinterest business marketing to the exclusion of everything else.

Pinterest marketing has massive potential for creative entrepreneurs to build a business online. It can help you grow a good-sized audience fairly quickly, but, ideally, it should be one piece of the puzzle in your creative business growth.

Pinterest traffic can fluctuate just as any other source of online customers can. So while it's a great place to start, at some point, you should also develop a plan to grow your online business in other ways.

Pinterest Marketing is a Great Place to Start

Successful Pinterest marketing can be very freeing and motivating for creative business owners. You can build an audience on Pinterest with a small amount of money (but a large investment of time). 

Once you've had some success there, and your business starts to earn some income, you may feel more free to invest time and money grow your business. It's a good way to get the snowball rolling.