On June 30th, I finally decided to try a Pinterest/new site experiment, and so picked up a domain in the fitness niche. The idea wasn't complicated—just an idea I’d been kicking around for a while, to see if I choose a high-ranking niche within Pinterest (fitness) and wrote articles around those high-ranking keywords, how quickly could I grow the site.

The very next day, July 1st, I had my team start publishing content. We published about three posts a day for five days straight. We sort of worked on this site (publishing content) for one week, then worked on our other sites, and then continue to work on this. My hope was to get around around 15–20 solid articles live on the site before we even thought about doing anything on Pinterest. Topics ranged from simple workout routines and stretching guides to a few “Pilates" posts that my wife thought had potential for Pinterest.

So, for the first couple of weeks, the site wasn't really doing anything - just sitting there. But on July 16th, we kicked things into gear and started pinning. At the beginning, it was around five to seven pins a day - we just kept a spreadsheet of the URLs, and then would just go down the list and create a new pin for each URL. If new content was added that day, then you'd work on creating pins for those first.

We’ve since scaled that up to about ten daily pins (7 days a week), which is growing the account fairly nicely.

Obvioulsy, the growth was not immediate. For the first two weeks, impressions were basically flat—almost nothing. But then, right around August 7th, things started to click.

Our impressions began to climb, and traffic followed. By August 14th (30 days into pinning), we’d already logged 800 sessions.

And now, just a few days after that milestone, we crossed the 1,000 session mark, which means we’ve gone ahead and applied to Journey by Mediavine, which requires a minimum of 1,000 sessions.

I’m excited to see if we get approved and can start layering in ad revenue this early on.

What I love about this project is how straightforward it feels. There are no complicated marketing funnels or growth hacks here. It’s literally:

• Write quality content around Pinterest interests/keywords.

• Pin consistently (and experiment with visuals that stand out).

• Let Pinterest do its thing (i.e. rank your content) over time.

The cool part is that this has all been done on a relatively small amount of content and with very manageable effort. We’re sitting at ~55 posts total on the site at the 30-day mark, and we’ve still managed to hit 1,000 sessions in just over a month of getting traffic. That’s encouraging, especially if you’re someone who doesn’t have the time (or energy) to crank out hundreds of posts before seeing results.

I am a little surprised at how quickly it took, since I wasn't expecting to get this far along within a month. But even if you space this out over 3-6 months, it's not terribly hard to see the same results.

If you create an article each day, that's ~2 months to get to ~50 posts. Create only 2 articles a week, and that's 25 weeks (~6 months) to get to ~50 posts. 

Then all you need to do is start pinning, and let Pinterest rank you.

Pinterest, in my opinion, is still a huge underutilized traffic source. Unlike Google - which seems like you can never quite trust what will happen to you - Pinterest has always worked for most of the sites I run. I'm half-tempted to try creating a site in the MMO niche just to show that it can be done. 

Lord-willing, in the next couple of days, I’ll share a more detailed step-by-step breakdown of how we’re finding keywords, creating content, and getting it to rank on Pinterest.

But for now, I just wanted to document these early results as proof that a simple, focused system can get traction surprisingly quickly.

If you’re on the fence about trying Pinterest, my advice is: go for it. Even if you’re brand new, a few pins a day is manageable, and the potential upside (as I’ve just seen firsthand) is absolutely worth it.