In 2019, I decided I was going to be serious about using Pinterest to see if I could finally, actually get traffic for my blog. So many bloggers cite Pinterest as one of their top sources for traffic, and before 2019, every time I tried it out for myself, I never saw results. In 2019, that changed: I read a lot of articles about how to use Pinterest successfully, and I put a lot of time into making pins, visiting Pinterest daily, pinning my pins to a variety of boards, etc. The result: In 2019, Pages Unbound got over 9,000 views from Pinterest. In 2020, we got 22,500. That’s more views than some book bloggers get in total on their blog all year.
In 2021, I started devoting less time to using Pinterest because, frankly, logging on all the time to Pinterest, making multiple images to pin for each post, etc. is time-consuming. So our views decreased from 2020, but we still received nearly 17,000 views from Pinterest.
Now, at the beginning of 2022, I’m barely using Pinterest at all. In an ideal world, I would like to get back to using it “properly,” but the time currently is not in my schedule. So my “strategy” right now is mainly making pinnable images for each discussion post or list (anything that’s not a review) and pinning it one time to one Pinterest board.
I admit that I am not seeing much Pinterest traffic to our new posts because of this. However, our older pins are still going relatively strong, so we get a noticeable amount of traffic to things I pinned a couple years ago. We seem to be getting about 15-30 views per day from Pinterest traffic right now. And while that’s certainly a decrease from the numbers I was seeing while I was using Pinterest seriously, it’s also nothing to sneeze at! It means we had about 950 views from Pinterest in January and about 700 in February which, again, for a book blog, is meaningful traffic.
The takeaway? The time I put into Pinterest in 2019 and 2020 is still paying off, even though I spend close to no time using Pinterest right now. So if you’ve been pondering using Pinterest for your blog and you think you have the time to devote to it, I would encourage it.
Check out some of my previous posts on using Pinterest for your book blog here:
- How I Increased My Page Views from Pinterest by 1600% in 2019
- 4 of the Most Important Things I Learned about Using Pinterest for Blog Traffic
- What I Learned about Getting Pinterest Traffic from My Free Trial of Tailwind
Pages Unbound | Book Reviews & Discussions 
I like Pinterest, but it can be annoying, especially when the algorithm changes.
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Yeah, trying to keep up with changing strategies is definitely a time suck.
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I don’t take Pinterest seriously, I just share my post on Pinterest but now I want to change that and see if I see similar result. At the same time I doubt reviews will make much difference there.
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Yeah, I don’t get much traffic on reviews, but lists and some discussions do well.
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Thanks for sharing, Briana.
I’m just starting out with taking Pinterest more seriously and it’s pretty tough going. Still, I’m seeing gradually more traffic and hopefully it’ll continue upwards.
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It definitely took me some weeks of pinning very consistently to see some results, but they did eventually come!
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I started sharing my posts on Pinterest this year. I’m not actually sure I’m doing it right but it’s the only way I know how to do it. I’m also not sure how to tell if it’s helping with the traffic to my blog.
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I had the best luck with pinning very consistently and making sure I logged on to Pinterest every day. Mostly I tracked the traffic by looking at my WordPress stats and seeing how many referrals from Pinterest we got.
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Right now I’m struggling to remember to share the post on Pinterest every time I post. I’ve been doing it in bulk when I think about it. I didn’t know you could see where your traffic comes from on your stats page. Then again I don’t typically look at my stats.
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I admit to being an obsessive stats checker. >.<
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I just wrote a blog post about this because I’m always so surprised how many bloggers don’t use Pinterest. However, I never went full-force like it sounds like you did, and I admire your efforts! I will read your other post about how you increased traffic since I’m sure you explain how often you pinned. I tried to Pin 5 times a day and OMG it was really too much for me. So now I just pin twice a week when I release a blog post. But I’m sure if I did more, I’d see the results. Good for you for getting the results you deserve! And even more amazing that you are still reaping the rewards. Thanks for sharing about this, it’s really helpful! xo
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