I started using Pinterest in early December. I wasn't the first person on the bandwagon, that's for sure, but I certainly saw the potential benefits of the site for marketing small businesses. My first impression was that it would be great for brand awareness and link generation. While I'm not seeing any change in the results on Google, I am seeing quite a bit of referral traffic.
My time on Pinterest is paying off.
Today I was taking a look at my own Google Analytics. (If you don't do this, you should at least once per month.) I was shocked to see that my activity on Pinterest is driving traffic to my blog! It is my 2nd best referral source for traffic over the past month, and accounts for many of the unique visits I've received. Facebook is still the leader for generating traffic, topping Pinterest by three times the traffic. Additionally, the bounce rate for my Pinterest traffic is lower than that of other referral sources.
I try to use keywords on my pins and boards and links to drive traffic to the source of the content. Because you can pin images and photos from your website to Pinterest, it makes it easy to share your most interesting content with others AND drive traffic back to your website. The key is to mix it up and not make it all about your work/job/career. Throw in a few personal pinboards to show the world you are human!
Pinterest results are common.
I am not the only blogger seeing these kinds of results from a little image bookmarking website. My friend, Todd Schnick, is also getting traffic to his blog - after only two weeks! Jeff Bullas, one of my regular weekday reads, shared the chart below from Shareaholic that demonstrates Pinterest is driving more traffic than LinkedIn, YouTube and Google+ combined.