With search engine traffic being taken over by AI, traffic diversification is now more important than ever. Oodlelife.com, a dog website started by dog expert Chris Allen in 2019, got the memo early and started taking Pinterest seriously in 2023.
At the time, Chris and his VA were spending time creating 1 pin per post on Canva. However, they knew that to see results they would need to create significantly more pins…
Enter Pinterest Automation. With Pinterest Automation they were able to 10x their output and double the amount of traffic they got from Pinterest spending just 20% of the time!
“We knew that creating and pinning more pins would be beneficial but just didn’t have time to create all the pins. There are SO many elements of running a small business and although important, we didn’t have enough resources to do Pinterest properly. Pinterest Automation changed that.” – Oodlelife
The result? An impressive 250 000 website visitors coming from Pinterest in 2023.
250K outbound clicks from Pinterest
Here’s how they did it.
- Post a Mix of Inspirational & Traffic Pins
OodleLife has a ton of cute dog pictures available to share on Pinterest and they use them smartly to both drive traffic to their site and inspire dog lovers.
Inspiration Pin
Traffic Pin
As you can see the same picture is used for 2 different pins, one with text overlay and one without.
These pins have a different purpose. Pins without text overlay are perfect to inspire people, while pins with text overlay will drive more traffic.
You might wonder why you should spend time creating pins that don’t result in traffic… Well, pins without text overlay have a higher chance of getting saved because they fit perfectly on a vision board and many people are using Pinterest to dream and plan. And more saves means a higher chance of getting in front of your target audience who then might decide to look at your other pins or follow your account.
And as you can see, even the picture without text overlay has the website URL on it so whenever someone saves the pin to their inspirational board they still become aware of the brand.
Here’s what Chris says about this strategy:
“We post 10 pins per day. It used to be a struggle to make one to five pins per post. Now, using Pinterest Automation, we easily make 8-15 custom new pins per post. We also pin the images of dogs and puppies that we add to new articles. It is difficult to predict which pin will go biggest for a post, and the volume game is working out great for us.”
Key Takeaway
If you have a visually attractive niche, don’t hesitate to post picture only pins. Luckly, Pinterest Automation makes this super easy with 100+ pin templates with and without text overlay.
Here’s Chris’ advice for Pinterest success:
“Over time, you will learn what is currently working within the niche you make content for. Do MORE of that, and less of what isn’t. It is so important thought to never stop experimenting and try out new pins styles and formats. By trying new templates and reviewing the statistics every few months, we have uncovered some hidden gems that give us more visitors from Pinterest.”
Build a Reputation to Earn Affiliate Commissions and Make E-commerce Sales
OodleLife spends a lot of time creating high quality expert dog content. They share all this information for free. This builds up a reputation and allows them to then also promote their affiliate content such as review posts and link to their own e-commerce products.
When you look over Oodlelife’s Pinterest, there’s a great mix between educational and promotional content.
Looking over the first 14 pins, only 2 are clearly about a product and going to a review article.
The rest of the content is educational.
Pin a mix of affiliate and educational content
This is Pinterest affiliate marketing done right.
Key Takeaway
Pinterest can drive traffic to your “money” articles when done right.
Create pins to your educational content and mix it with pins to your affiliate content.
Pinterest Automation makes it super easy to schedule a good mix of content with the Smart Shuffle scheduling option.
Here’s how to schedule a good content mix in just 4 steps:
Step 1: Generate pins for your blog post
Step 2: Hit “Schedule Pins”
Step 3: Repeat step 1 and 2 for 10 more blog posts
For the moment, all pins for post 1 would be scheduled first, then pins for post 2,… That’s NOT what we want!
Soooo…
Step 4: Hit the Smart Shuffle button
Now you will automatically post different pins to the different blog posts over the upcoming days and weeks.
And remember, you can always come back, generate more pins for more posts and use the smart shuffle button again to mix them in with the previous pins!
