Pinterest is a great marketing channel, but it has limitations. It only works in certain niches, like fisicx said - food, lifestyle, fashion, crafts (diy, nitting, applied arts) AND maybe (maybe) some art like paintings or photography.
If you're not in any of these or some related niche, it's probably a better idea to use a different channel.
A small case study:
I wrote this article around an year and half ago:
Earthships - The Ultimate Green Homes - (it's interesting, but you don't have to click it)
It's about: architecture, construction, sustainability, alternative energy sources, renewable energy, green building, low impact living. See how none of these fit into the above topics ?
When I started out, I set up a Pinterest account and had the habit of adding every image I post into pinterest with a backlink. In time I developed boards around some of the topics just because.
I also did that with this article. In the first year, I received around 400-450 visits from Pinterest to my URL, which I was stupid to not track or even pay attention to.
Then a few months ago, I revisited and edited my article, also including many more images (that you know see). I also made a
traffic post in Bored Panda with the hopes of getting some juice and social shares on my big post (sadly I didn't even generate more than 200 visits, from the bored panda post.)
Also, I uploaded my
entire gallery to Pinterest, with all relevant tags I could think of, and backlinks for both articles.
I generated to this day ~150 visits from Pinterest to my prime post at Medium. (from ~450 to ~600 since I started to track them) "GRAND" success.
So yeah, It took me 10 minutes to really setup, but the returns also were not spectacular. I'd say USE Pinterest, but don't give it too much time, unless you're doing anything of the listed topics.
