Welcome new members of the Traffic Alchemy mailing list! In these emails, I talk about my experiments making money online. I’ve done everything from affiliate marketing, to SEO, to ad arbitrage, and most recently have been diving deep into social media.
Disclosure: I include affiliate links to products that I like and use. If you purchase from these links I earn a small commission.
The Pinterest Experiment
Over the past few months I’ve been experimenting with driving traffic to a website from Pinterest. This site was specifically made for Pinterest and Facebook. It is not optimized in the way you would optimize a traditional SEO site to rank in Google.
I create this Pinterest account at the beginning of this year. I didn’t really post for the first few months. In June I decided to double down and start posting more content. That’s when I started to see results and realized that Pinterest is a numbers game for the most part.
It took some time to ramp up, but the outbound clicks continue to grow
Optimizing Content for Pinterest
I actually started posting some content in April to May, but as you can see in the chart, the traffic didn’t take off until June. I said it’s a numbers game and I do believe that to an extent, but there are clearly ways to optimize your content to perform well on Pinterest.
In June I started optimizing my Pins using PinClicks.
PinClicks allows you to analyze the best performing interests and pins. They also added a feature to track keyword rankings on Pinterest. Think of this like Google keyword trackers, but the first of its kind for Pinterest.
One of the things I like to do with this tool is find Pins that are performing well for the keyword I want to target. Then I copy the annotations for the top 5 or so pins.
Annotations are official entities that Pinterest adds to Pins to tell the system what the Pin is about. I imagine these are both machine generated and edit/added by human annotators.
I filter out the phrases that I don’t want and then have ChatGPT or PinGenerator use those phrases to generate my descriptions.
This allows me to have keyword rich pin descriptions and titles. Remember, Pinterest is a search engine at the core. We want to optimize for their search algorithm, which is different than Google.
How I’m Monetizing the Site
I’m currently monetizing the site with display ads and some affiliate offers from Amazon Associates and Levanta. Nothing to write home about on the affiliate front: I only earned $2.57 in the last 30 days.
However, Journey by Mediavine is proving to be a great potential earning source. I earned $308.41 in the last 30 days with an average RPM of $19.82.
The great thing about Journey is that the RPMS continue to increase. I’ve seen $30+ RPM days. I’ve never gotten more than $4-8 RPM on other any other ad networks that I have used.
I have heard of others getting up to $80 RPM on some of the premium ad networks though.
I also made a free tool that let’s you see sites that were recently added to Journey. This can give you an idea of the types of sites and the niches that are being approved by the program.
These numbers are not life changing, but they show that there is some potential if I keep trying to scale my Pinterest sites.
I’m not some kind of guru. I’m just a regular dude that tries to be real and not give you BS numbers.
A Failed Pinterest Experiment
I’ve tried to use Pinterest ads to drive traffic to affiliate offers as an arbitrage tactic. So far, I am seeing very low conversion rate from Pinterest. I am using Amazon Associates and Levanta for this. The purchase occurs on Amazon for both of these programs.
Here is something I recently realized. Most Pinterest users use the mobile app and the mobile app has a built in browser. When a user clicks my affiliate link in the in-app browser, it opens Amazon, but they are probably not already logged in like they would be in their default browser of choice. Do you even remember you Amazon password?
I think this is crushing my conversion rates with Amazon. I have two potential options to try before giving up:
Target only desktop Pinterest users — My theory is that desktop users are using their browser of choice and they are likely already logged in to Amazon. This should make the conversion easier to capture.
Test a non-Amazon affiliate program — I tend to use Amazon Associates because it’s simple and converts well, but the payouts are also low. Levanta can make this better by paying up to 20% bonus on top of Amazon, but I think I should probably try an affiliate program that is not tied to Amazon to see how it converts.
Wait, Don’t Miss the Next Update!
You won’t want to miss the next email. I’m going to completely change the way you manage your Pinterest accounts by teaching you how to put them on autopilot with this amazing tool I found.
