Pinterest: the free channel we own and have never used

Read this on the way to work. It is written in plain words. At the bottom there are six decisions only you can make — answer those and I can build the whole thing.

1. Where we actually are

You uploaded 8 pins in August and then nothing. Here is what those 8 pins have done in six weeks:

2. What we already own

This is the part that makes Pinterest worth doing. We do not need to make anything new.

All of it sits on littletailorbooks.co.uk, which is the domain already claimed in your Pinterest settings. That matters: claimed means every pin is credited to your account and you get the stats.

3. How posting works — and how we avoid getting banned

I write a spreadsheet, you drag it into Pinterest once, and pins publish on their own for the next few weeks. That drag-and-drop is the only part a human has to do, and it takes about ten minutes, once or twice a month.

The five rules I’ll build to

1. 10–15 pins a day for the first fortnight, then we can ease up if nothing goes wrong.
2. No two pins share a picture, a title or a description. Duplicates are what the spam filter looks for.
3. Every pin points somewhere genuinely different. (Section 7 explains how the tracking work solves this for free.)
4. All pictures served from our own claimed domain. Pinterest fetches them itself — a broken link is a silently dropped pin.
5. Only books that are actually on sale. 16 of our 26 story pages. Pinning a book nobody can buy wastes the pin and annoys the visitor.

4. Three tiny tests before anything big

There are three things nobody has ever actually checked, and each one could waste a whole batch. Each test is a spreadsheet with two or three rows and costs nothing.

All three run in one upload. You drag one small file in, we wait a day, we look. That is the whole test.

5. The posting plan

Six boards

Boards are what Pinterest actually searches. So they get keyword names, not clever ones. A board called “Our Stories” is a shelf with no sign on it.

What goes out, and when

6. Should we advertise the free sample, or the £37 book?

Your worry, and it is a good one: “if we advertise free, more people will click but fewer will buy, and our numbers will look worse.”

You are right that it happens. You are wrong that it matters. Here is why.

The rate is not the thing to watch

Imagine two adverts.

Advert B has a much worse-looking percentage and makes you nearly twice the money. The percentage is vanity. Money per pound spent is the only score.

What I recommend: free hook, honest price

Lead with the free preview — but put the price in the words. Something like:

That keeps the hook that gets the click, and quietly turns away the person who was never going to pay. Best of both. It is also simply true, which is how we do everything else.

And crucially: we track the two kinds of visitor separately (next section), so a free-preview campaign can never quietly poison the numbers of the rest of the business. That was the real danger in your question, and it is fixable with tracking rather than by choosing the weaker advert.

7. Knowing where customers came from

You said you were torn about asking the customer, and that asking at the free-sample stage might scare people off. I agree. Here is the design, and it does not add a single step to ordering.

Part 1 — the invisible bit (this is the important one)

• Every link we post anywhere gets a quiet tag on the end — ?utm_source=pinterest&utm_campaign=xmas.
• When someone lands on the site, we quietly remember that tag (and which website sent them) and attach it to their order.
• The customer sees nothing, types nothing, and is not asked anything. Zero friction.
• It works for everyone, including the 7 in 10 who never buy — which is exactly who we need to know about.

Part 2 — one optional question, at the right moment

• Not on the order form. You are right that that is friction at the worst possible moment.
• On the thank-you screen instead, after the order is already safely in. One line: “Out of curiosity — how did you find us?” with five buttons: Facebook or Instagram · Pinterest · Etsy · Google · A friend.
• Skippable, and it costs nothing if they ignore it, because the order is already placed.

What gets built

1. Capture the tag and the referring site when someone lands; keep it through the visit.
2. Save it with the order, and add it as a column in the Orders sheet next to the others.
3. Add the optional one-tap question to the thank-you screen.
4. A small monthly summary: where the leads came from, and which sources actually turned into paid books.

My estimate: half a day. And it is the thing that makes every future decision measurable instead of guessed.

8. What good looks like — and when to stop

The honest truth from your own books, checked today:

Pinterest is free, so anything above zero is profit. But “free” still costs my time, so here is the scoreboard:

The number I will report on is saves, then clicks, then preview requests. Not views. Views are the number Pinterest shows you to keep you happy.

9. The six decisions — only you can make these