A few months back—around late December into early January— My wife and I decided to start (more hardcore) building out our homesteading site. We run on a simple method: hire writers to crank out solid, evergreen content, bring on a Pinterest manager to pin consistently, and see if the traffic and ad revenue would cover our costs (and hopefully turn a profit).
Fast-forward six months, and not only were we breaking even on writers and Pinterest management, but we were also netting real, passive income.
We've been netting passive income the past few months now.
That success got me thinking though - why not try the same idea in a completely different niche?
So on July 16th, I created an all-new fitness site. I got one of my go-to writers knocking out articles in her spare moments, covering anything from quick HIIT routines to beginner Pilate guides.
Meanwhile, our Pinterest manager has been creating three to seven pins every single day, each one pointing back to those articles.
Again, our process is simple - No fancy marketing tricks, just steady, thoughtful pinning paired with solid on-site content.
This morning I checked Google Analytics and found that we've already racked up 107 sessions in under a month!
The beauty of Pinterest is that it’s still this massive, relatively untapped traffic highway if you approach it with consistency and good visuals, unlike Google, which I hardly rely on.
And we’re only at around 10% of the 1,000-session threshold needed to apply for Journey by Mediavine. So my hope and expectation is to be able to apply within the next 2-3 months (if not sooner).
What I love about this experiment is how low-effort it feels right now - we only have 49 articles on the site, which isn’t a huge amount, and pinning a handful of times a day is totally doable.
If you’re curious about dipping your toes into Pinterest-driven traffic, I’d say go for it. It's the quickest way I've seen to grow site.
Feel free to ask any questions about my process, tools, or the way we manage content and pinning. I’m happy to share what I can.
Thats pretty neat just curious though what do you guys kinda publish on Pinterest.
Like what type of content or format. And also how do you come up with content ideas.
Would be cool to test it out myself
@jonathan Good question - We personally use Pinclicks to find our keywords - basically Pin Clicks has scoured through all the interest pages of Pinterest, each interest page shows how many people are looking up that specific thing.
For example, the Fitness Tracker keyword gets ~17K traffic per month to it:
So, if I'm trying to target keywords that are going to get a certain amount of traffic to it (like over 1000 a month), then I know this would be a good keyword to use.
Pin Clicks works similar to like Jaaxy - you can search up a word or phrase, and it will spit out all of the keywords with what you are looking for and the search volume attached to it:
After that, it's pretty much what you already do - write content that is targeting that specific keyword and then, instead of indexing it on Google, you create a image (or in some cases a video) of it, write a good title and descreption (think similar to meta title and meta description for Google), and then publish it on Pinterest.
Here is an example of a Pin that is doing well for one of the accounts we manage: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/772367404880075735/
There is more that goes into creating a Pinterest Pin that I (or @Diane) can go into more detail later if you and others want us to, but there are a lot of YT videos that go into the basics of it.
This is nice, but I'm curious though if you will get accepted on Journey? Are the articles written with ( a lot ) of AI- help, are the images mostly AI? I have been rejected by journey for my Africa site, and it has around 100 clicks per day through mostly Facebook. So that's about 3k per month clicks to my site. (and I am still on Journey with my miniature site, so even that is not a guarantee to be accepted for a second site. Although I think in my case, it is mostly due to the wrong country traffic that I got rejected (trying to change that, ugh), I see lots of people being thrown off Journey because of 'excessive AI' use, without any further explanation.
But I hope so for you guys!
Had discussed this on another platform, and it turns out that Mediavine seems to support heavily original content, and if they see sites 'spouting out' articles, they won't accept you anymore, sadly. So yeah I'm curious 🙂
@ohnoo_not_her Yeah, I was going to say, that if you're not getting traffic from primary countries, then that's a good reason why they'd not accept you. If you want, I can look into seeing what you could try to do to get better primary traffic. You can just DM a screenshot of your top blog posts and your site. There should be an easy enough way to get the primary traffic source up.
I don't think I'm being that excessive with my content. I guess 50 articles in under a month is a bit high, though it's really only about 2 per day that we're publishing. So (and this is my test, sort of), I'm thinking that Journey is really only worried about massive amounts of content that is being produced (i.e. 10, 20 or even 50-100 articles published per day).
Yes, a lot of the content we're putting on is AI generated (not copy and pasted obviously), but I've read of a lot of people still being accepted. The only site that I was terminated was a lifestyle-heavily-recipes-content site, which I'm working on removing a bunch of that and see if we can get re-established with Journey. Which I'll update here if we do.
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