Once upon a time, women shared recipes with index cards that came out of little wooden boxes, young girls and women created collages and vision boards to visualize their future goals and dreams, and we all got our fashion and travel advice and ideas from magazines.
With the rise of the internet, we began to send recipes via email and to browse websites for ideas for fashion, travel, and more. Still, we were left with giant poster boards when we wanted to organize our interests or create vision boards.
Then came Pinterest, the answer, seemingly, to all of our troubles, and more.
Pinterest Is Born
Pinterest blew into our world with a meteoric rise in users that began in March of 2010. When iPhone introduced a Pinterest app later a year later, Pinterest quickly became a household name.
We loved Pinterest for its ability to bring all of our ideas and interests together and save them for us in an organized way we had at our fingertips. You could find a recipe and save it on the app on your iPhone and forever know where it would be.
You could plan your fall fashion look and have it at the ready when you went out shopping. It was brilliant, and it got the attention it deserved. Time Magazine named Pinterest in its “50 Best Websites” list by 2012.
At the same time, the concept of making money from blogs and earning an income from our social media influence was steadily growing.
Before long, those two incidents coincided. Bloggers quickly learned they could create eye catching images, post them on to Pinterest along with a central message, and drive traffic from their Pin to their website and/or blog.
Once you drive traffic back to your website, you can make money in myriad ways, from affiliate marketing to advertisements to driving traffic again to your shop or an eBook. It has been a tried and true way to build a business for entrepreneurs for the last ten years.
The question now, in 2022, is: “is that strategy still effective?”
Popular Uses for Pinterest
In 2021, Pinterest reported it has 448 million users globally, making it the fourth most popular social media outlet. Clearly, Pinterest is still alive and well.
And not only among women. While 60% of users are women, men also make up a healthy portion of those with Pinterest pins and boards. Users find it helpful for a variety of reasons.
A Modern Day Hope Chest
Many people love Pinterest for its online version of a vision board. If you’ve got a wedding coming up, a trip you’re hoping to plan, or a house you’re hoping to renovate, Pinterest is your go-to for finding and saving images you hope to come back to later as your dream gets closer.
Fashion is a common example of the hope chest. You get ideas for how you want your wardrobe to come together, saving bits and pieces of from images to your “Spring Shopping” board, and then when shopping time comes and you’ve got your pocketbook ready, you pull up your board for reference.
An Organization Tool
Along that same line, you can use Pinterest as an organization tool. If you are planning that wedding or getting ready for a home renovation project, you can organize your ideas by laying them out on different boards, labeled, for example, “Bathroom” or “Kitchen” or “Bridesmaids” or “Venue.”
Idea Generation and Inspiration
One of the biggest uses for Pinterest is just to get inspiration. You may be feeling creatively stuck, say you have no idea at all where to begin with an upcoming trip or business venture, you can start on Pinterest.
With a few keywords, “tropical vacations” or “hikes in Southern Oregon,” you’ll be inundated with images that respond to your keywords. You can then narrow your search more specifically can get more inspiration until you find what you are looking for.
Generating Traffic to Blogs and Websites
And finally, bloggers became avid users of Pinterest once the site allowed users to click on an image and be transferred to a different site. “
Mommy bloggers” really saw their heyday back in the early 2000’s, and just when blogging became widely popular on the internet at the end of the decade, Pinterest became a new tool to capitalize on your blog, which has generated hundreds and even thousands of dollars each month to owners of the most visited sites on the internet.
Is Pinterest Still a Good Use of Time in 2022?
But! Can you still do that in 2022? Sure, with bloggers and entrepreneurs who have been on Pinterest for ten years and built up quite a following, money comes relatively easy.
They got in on the ground floor, and their followers trust them enough to buy what they are selling. Is that possible for people starting out today?
If you are new to Pinterest and do not have a lot of followers, the primary value for you will likely be organization and not monetary.
Interest has moved swiftly in the last few years to Instagram and TikTok in terms of influencers and revenue generation.
Don’t get me wrong. Pinterest is still amazing. It is just not likely a great place to start building an income earning business as that is not so much what people go there for anymore.
What About Traffic Generation to Blogs? Can Pinterest Still Be Valuable?
Again, if you’ve been in the game for five or ten years, you will likely still get traffic to your site from Pinterest.
Newer bloggers, however, are likely better off on Instagram or TikTok, or, if you have a professional business, even LinkedIn or YouTube.
It isn’t that people don’t visit Pinterest anymore. It is that they don’t go there so much to shop or find interesting new websites to toggle away to.
So… Is Pinterest Still Worth It in 2022?
The honest answer is… it depends. If you enjoy Pinterest for finding inspiration, for scanning for cool images, or for organizational purposes, yes, it is worth it.
There is no harm, and all of those interests are certainly no waste of time. But if you are hoping to drive traffic to your blog, your website, or you shop to generate income, Pinterest might not be your best, or even second or third best option anymore.
Short-form videos seem to be the wave of the future, so it might behoove you to get in front of the camera and get your message on TikTok.
What do you think? Have you found success in driving traffic to your site from Pinterest? Let me know about your experience with Pinterest in the comments below.
–Sean