How Ordinary People Like Me Make Money with Pinterest

Hello, I’ve been away for a while and I’m just going to give you a quick refresher in case you’ve forgotten or you’re new here.

My name is Angela, I’m a 33 year old Illustrator and Blogger that lives in Bangalore, India with her 2 gorgeous dogs. I start websites and grow traffic to them and sell them when I want to start new ones.

I make a full-time income from my blogs and I mostly teach people how to do the same.

I’m so grateful to Pinterest because it’s the one social media where I don’t have to post reels, videos, or show my face to make money.

Pinterest didn’t work overnight.

It takes time to pick up.

It is really slow and requires a lot of patience. Honestly, that’s why it works for people like us.

This post is about how very ordinary people (like yours truly) make money on Pinterest while living very normal lives.

I started a new blog in mid-February, 2025.

I’m not going to reveal the URL, because I’ve had people steal my content. One person went so far as to just copy the entire website, all 200+ blog posts so, bear with me.

By May 2025, (that’s three months of building traffic via Pinterest), I joined the Ezoic ad network. I made $55 in June via ads and by September, I was making $500-ish a month. 100% of my traffic comes from Pinterest:

In my case, it took 3 months to build the baseline and get to about $2 a day in ads and another 2 months to peak nicely so that I get about $15+ per day.

I’ve rinsed and repeated this method several times for multiple websites.

If the niche is interesting, I’ll start more websites in the same niche. So, since I run a few of them together, I’m able to make a full-time income from the blogs.

Today, I want to talk about how ordinary people make money on Pinterest.

But, here’s my free email course if you’d like to learn more about getting traffic from Pinterest.

Okay, before that really quick, let’s get the affiliate disclaimer out of the way.

This post may include affiliate links, which means clicking on them might result in me making a commission at no extra cost to you. This allows me to run this blog ad-free and make content accessible for you for free. I also use this to pamper my beloved pups.

1. Ordinary people don’t try to be Pinterest famous

I start my Pinterest accounts with 0 followers and grow very slowly.

You don’t need a lot of followers to start gaining traffic.

You just have to put your head down and pin.

Don’t chase follower counts. Don’t obsessively refresh analytics every 10 minutes.

Because ordinary people are doing something way less exciting: They’re sending Pinterest traffic to boring but useful blog posts.

Think:

A blog post that answers one very specific question
A recipe that answers “how to make a vegan coconut cream pie?”
A checklist, printable, or guide that fixes one small problem

Now, Pinterest doesn’t care if you’re charismatic.

It cares if your pin matches what someone is already searching for.

Which is great news if you are introverted, tired and actually answer people’s questions.

2. Most Pinterest income comes from content you made a while ago

I once published a post called “How to Make Peace with Aging” because I was scared of turning 31. I thought it would be something people were interested in.

For 5 months, it brought me nothing.

And then slowly, I noticed that it had 100 outbound clicks, which soon turned to thousands!

It caught on slowly but went viral once the views started coming in.

That’s what I need you to understand: Pinterest is not Instagram.

It doesn’t reward BIG IDEAS.

It rewards consistency over time.

Ordinary people win here because:

We’re okay with letting content sit and compound
We build libraries instead of feeds

You post it once.

Pinterest tests it quietly.

Then one day you check your dashboard and think, “…wait, why is this post suddenly making money?”

That moment never gets old! It still brings a smile to my face when I see an old post catching on!

And when it starts to catch on, you eventually notice a trend and you can capitalize on it.

In my client’s blog, she noticed that her chocolate recipes were becoming very popular, so she started doubling down on them.

Chocolate is always a winner.

For instance, if you notice a particular topic taking off, consider adding more of those blog posts to your blog.

3. Nobody is reinventing the wheel (and that’s the point)

My Pinterest eBook has been my best-seller for the last two years, and I keep getting emails/comments telling me that the methods are working.

If you’re looking to make Pinterest work for you and you love writing blog posts, get this eBook. It explains everything to a beginner and will work even if you have intermediate to advanced knowledge of Pinterest.

Once something works, repeat it!

If you’re waiting for a never-before-seen idea, you’ll be waiting forever.

Ordinary Pinterest earners just take what already works and make it slightly more human to get the clicks!

For example:

“How to Save Money” becomes “How I Stopped Overspending Without Tracking a Single Dollar”
“Healthy Dinner Ideas” becomes “Healthy Dinner Ideas for Single Moms with No Time”
“Pinterest Tips” becomes “What Actually Worked After I Failed at Pinterest for a Year”

Pinterest love familiarity.

People love honesty.

That overlap is where the money is!

4. Most of the money comes from unsexy monetization

Making money online is not hard, but a lot of people don’t want to do the same boring tasks on repeat.

This is where people miss out.

Ordinary people are not:

Launching courses every 3 weeks
Selling high-pressure masterminds
DM-ing strangers with funnels

They’re using:

Display ads
Affiliate links
Low-key digital products

Stuff that feels very, very boring. But boring scales beautifully.

A $7 printable.
A $29 ebook.
A blog post with ads that earns while you sleep.

If you look at Stray Curls, you’ll notice that’s how I keep this blog running.

And it’s how I’ve been making money online for the last decade.

You really don’t need 100,000 followers.

You need content that solves a problem and a pin that finds the right person.

That’s it.

That’s the whole system I keep teaching here on Stray Curls.

5. Pinterest rewards patience more than talent

This is uncomfortable to hear, but it’s the truth.

Ordinary people are

Willing to post even when nothing happens
Okay with being bad at the beginning
Not quitting right before things click
Constantly testing what strategies work and doing more of that!

I don’t believe in working hard. I believe in working smart.

Instead of guessing what topics work and what don’t, I just use Pinclicks ( a keyword tool) to help me save time.

If I were to sum up why I love PinClicks, it would be:

I can quickly copy-paste any Pin’s URL and see all the relevant information like the number of Saves, the Annotations Pinterest has assigned to the pin, and when it was created.
I love how I can scrounge the top pins for any keyword and this helps me understand what type of pins people like for those keywords.
But my favorite part is going to Account Explorer and copy-pasting anyone’s account URL and seeing their top pins (by saves) and top keywords that they rank for! As of now, there is no other tool that does this!

Game. Changer.

If you want to learn more about this, check out these posts:

If you want to see for yourself, just take a free trial here.

If you decide to buy this, use my code StrayCurls25OFF to get 25% off!

Pinterest often looks dead… right before it suddenly isn’t.

Ordinary people stick around because:

We don’t expect fireworks
We’re used to slow progress

And weirdly, that’s exactly why it works.

6. The biggest myth: you need to “crack the algorithm.”

You don’t.

You just need to:

Find a trending topic
Write a blog post around that idea
Create 3-4 pins from it
Pin them to Pinterest

That’s it.

Pinterest is very easy to do once you form a pipeline.

Over time, you end up figuring out some shortcuts.

Because I have over 5-6 websites, I’ve tried and tested multiple pin designs/templates on them. I created these pin templates which are eye-catching, so easy to customize, and get lots of clicks!

All you have to do is edit the text and images, and you’ll save so much time.

These pins are extremely high-converting! They attract people, and they get the click – that’s all you want, to maximize your chances of people clicking on them!

Some people ask me what I do when I burn out. I have a simple solution:

If you’re tired of writing content, create pins for older posts.
If you’re tired of pinning, create newer, slightly different versions of older posts.
If you’re tired of both, take a damn break.

You’re already ahead.

Final Words

If you’re waiting to feel “ready,” you are never going to start.

I’ve coached several people who wanted to start a blog but never did because they were waiting for “inspiration.”

If you’re waiting to feel confident, you’ll delay forever.

Most people making money on Pinterest started with nothing. And they just… kept going anyway.

It’s all about being consistent – sort of like exercise lol.

Pinterest rewards ordinary effort done consistently. And that’s something normal people are actually really good at.

If you’re looking for more help with Pinterest, you can get my eBook here, where I explain how to grow your Pinterest account from scratch and talk about pinning strategies that Advanced bloggers use to get traffic.