Want to start generating FREE Shopify traffic and sales in 2020? Here’s how to get started. In this new video I’m going to show you exactly how I made $432 in Shopify sales using free traffic from Pinterest, how to automate the entire process and it all takes less than an hour to set up.
I actually stumbled across this Shopify free traffic method by accident the other day when an old Shopify store I own started making sales seemingly out of nowhere. I logged into the Shopify site and looked into the analytics to find that almost 90% of the traffic was being driven by Pinterest. I found that over time we generated over 1.2 million impressions and 25,000 clicks, all from these pins.
It also turns out that where the Shopify store itself didn’t have the authority to rank in Google for certain search terms, Pinterest did. So Pinterest was acting as a catalyst so to speak for Google search traffic. Pretty interesting.
But though that, I’ve also discovered a way to double down on this and found a way to drive tons of free traffic from Pinterest on demand to your eCommerce business. And this isn’t just limited to dropshipping and Shopify. You can use this free traffic method to drive sales on your affiliate links, CPA offers or maybe just drive traffic to your YouTube video or blog.
The first thing I recommend doing is obviously creating a Pinterest profile for your business, creating all of the appropriate boards and manually posting the first pins for each of your products. If you’re using this free traffic method to promote a Shopify store you should also enable buyable pins by verifying your website on Pinterest and adding the Pinterest sales channel in Shopify.
Now here’s where the real magic happens and how I generated just over $507 in sales on a brand new eCommerce website using nothing but free Pinterest traffic. I chose to sell these gold bubble letter style pendants. These are not only impulse buy items but they have huge profit margins and are fashion items that perform exceptionally well with Pinterest users. Pinterest, after all, is a buyer’s social network.
Next, I downloaded all of the relevant product images I could find and added them, to a folder and set up an automation tool/bot to post these continuously to a new Pinterest account I created. Personally, I use FollowLiker, but you can use any tool you wish. There’s even a handful of free ones available online.
Over the next couple of weeks, FollowLiker posted just under 1,000 pins onto the profile which generated 800+ clicks and just over $500 in free sales. To say the least, I was pretty surprised at just how effective this was and my mind started racing with possible ways to scale this up. You can take this same method and apply it to dozens or even hundreds of Pinterest accounts all sending traffic to your business.
It’s important to make sure you take the time to set everything up properly as you only need to do this once. You can use what’s called spintax formatting to have FollowLiker write literal thousands of custom captions for each of your pins. I go over this in-depth in the video. Also, be sure to research and use the appropriate hashtags in each pin to get even more exposure to your posts.
The one roadblock I ran into was getting FollowLiker to pin the same images over and over again. It turns out that every time FollowLiker posts an image it places it from the original folder into a “history” folder AND it won’t post an image with the same file name more than once.
To solve this, I simply set up an Apple Automator script to move the files back into the original folder and give it a random name each time. This allows the bot to post the same images again and flood Pinterest with thousands of posts about your product(s). Automator comes on every Mac computer for free and it can quickly become your new best friend for automating basic tasks like this in the future. If you’re using Windows, there are some equivalent solutions you can install and use on your PC.
To make your life a little bit easier, you can just copy the script I created in the video or just download the pre-made Apple script I’ve uploaded by clicking here
Disclaimer: Always double check what Pinterest’s current limits are before automating anything on your account. Never use a tool like FollowLiker to do anything that goes against Pinterest’s terms of service. Not only is this wrong to do, but it can result in your account being banned or frozen.
I hope you guys found this video useful and maybe have a new way of generating massive amounts of passive free traffic to your Shopify store, affiliate products and anything else you’re trying to promote online.
🎧 Music: “A Great Day” by Johnny Rock
Video Transcript:
In this video, I’m going to show you exactly how I made $432 on Shopify with free Pinterest traffic. It only takes one hour of work. Now, believe it or not, I actually came across this method by accident when one of my old Shopify store started making sales seemingly out of nowhere. I logged into the dashboard and saw that 80% of the sales were all coming from Pinterest. Now, all we did in the store was make a couple of boards, pin all of our products in the appropriate categories, and let it sit, and it’s been like that for years. Now, I found out that there’s actually two methods of getting a ton of free traffic from Pinterest. There’s a very passive way and an active way. In this video, I’m going to show you how to do both. The passive way I could explain really quickly, then we’re going to jump right into how to set this all up.
When I looked into it a little bit further, I found out that Pinterest was acting as a catalyst for Google search traffic, so where the Shopify store didn’t have the authority to rank in Google for those product terms, Pinterest, however, did have that authority. So simply posting all your products on Pinterest can drive a lot of free passive traffic, but if you look at the graph right here, the method that I’m about to teach you was enabled right about here, right towards the end where you see those big spikes, very similar method that I taught you guys about a year, or so ago on Instagram. You can automate your Pinterest account to drive literal thousands of visitors to your Shopify store, your affiliate marketing offers, CPA offers, your YouTube channel, whatever it is. Just because I use e-commerce in this example, it doesn’t mean you can’t use this to drive traffic to anything that you want
The great thing about Pinterest is it’s a buyers market. People go on Pinterest for ideas, for different things to buy, in particular fashion items. So let’s hop into my computer, I’m going to log in to Shopify and show you how I set this all up, but by the way, make sure number one, you smash the like button for the YouTube algorithm. It really helps out this channel, it helps out more people learn how to make money online. Plus make sure you watch until the end of the video because there is a roadblock I ran into that I’m going to show you guys how to overcome. So if you really want to make this work for you, make sure you watch the video until the end. All right guys, so here we are in the Shopify dashboard for that website I set up as the example for this video. We’ve actually made a sale of $159 today. As I’m recording this, we have one person on the website and we’re showing $432 in sales over this period. Now, we had one large sale right before the graph starts right here.
This one right here was actually kind of a mistake. I found out the infinite product options app I was using allowed people to get products for a little bit cheaper, but I fixed to have bug before we continued driving traffic. After that we had another sale of 99.99, 53.98, 99.88 and today we had that sale for $159. And as you guys could see right here, 90% of all the traffic coming to this website is coming from Pinterest. So Pinterest has generated 858 visits to the website, which resulted in about $597 in sales. And as you guys can see on the bottom right here, what we’re selling on this website are these custom bubble letter gold jewelry necklaces. This is actually something I want you guys to keep in mind from here on out, when you’re setting up a drop shipping business, try and find products that have these big profit margins.
I mean, not only are you obviously going to make more money, but once you take this after free traffic and you want to scale to paid advertising, you’re going to have a lot of wiggle room to experiment and a lot of profit leftover. The person who spends the most to acquire a customer wins in the marketplace, so keep that in mind. So I set up this really simple little website right here, I called it 2020 gold. These images are straight off of AliExpress, which, listen, obviously if you don’t actually want to do, if you’re taking this seriously, but for an example, and just to test this product, they absolutely worked. If we go up here, as you guys could see bubble letter necklaces on AliExpress, you can purchase every one of these products for around $7 I actually found some listings that let us do it even cheaper. So for this entire amount right here of around $600 in sales, we actually only spent about $40 of that to purchase the product. So again, you guys want to go out there, try and find products with really high profit margins.
Right here we had the different chains that come with them, they have gold, silver, rolls gold, you choose later on here. I use a Shopify app called Infinite Product Options, which allows the customers to choose what they want. They could purchase individual letters or there’s listings on here too, where you would have their entire name written out or whatever different word they want, maybe it’s their name brand, something like that and those are the products that we used for this example. Now, as you guys already know, all this traffic was completely free and it came from Pinterest. So if you guys look over here, we’ve had 32.1000 impressions on the pins posted to this profile, 96 saves and most importantly in this time period, this is recording 210 clicks to the website. And all that came from posting these simple little pins. This one right here has almost 600 impressions, nine clicks on the website, and again, these are all just the stock photos from the supplier.
Obviously, if you guys are going to take this seriously, you want to spend a couple bucks and get your own products, you have an incredible quality camera right inside of your pocket today and go and post some great images. If I go over here to pins, you’ll see that this profile has actually posted 967 pins within the last couple of weeks. In fact, every single post that you see on the screen right now was only posted within the last hour or so. And if you look closely you’ll see they’re actually really starting to generate a couple of impressions which hopefully will translate into clicks, which will then translate into more sales. Now, the craziest thing about all this is I haven’t spent a single minute posting any of these onto the profile. All I’d done was I saved all my product photos into a folder and used my automation tool to automatically post every couple of seconds with the appropriate hashtags, on the appropriate boards, even down to the captions that are written inside of the pins. This is actually a custom written caption using Spintax, which I’m going to explain in a little bit.
And once you had that set up, you just leave it on the background, let it run, and you have a brand new source of free passive traffic. Now that you guys understand how the process works, I’m going to show you how to set up an automation tool to automate your entire account and let it run and drive this passive traffic basically while you sleep. Now essentially, what you’ll be doing is flooding Pinterest with hundreds if not thousands of pins of your products every single day, 24 hours a day using this automation tool. Now again, Pinterest is a buyer social media website, very similar to how Instagram is warming up to it, the untaggable products, Pinterest has buy able pins. They actually show the price of the product right inside the pin now if you connect it with your Shopify store.
So the tool that I’m going to be using in this video is called FollowLiker, it’s the one that I’m used to. So I’m going to show you how to set that up in this video but you got to remember there’s hundreds of other tools that you could use. I try and tell you guys all the time, never become romantic about the tools that you use, they’ve inevitably come and go every couple of months and you’re always going to be learning something new. So I use FollowLiker because it’s the one I’m familiar with, I don’t even get an affiliate commission for it, they don’t even have an affiliate program. So if you want to use this one or another one, and I think there’s actually free options out there as well. Or I mean if you really have nothing but time on your hands and you can’t afford to use a tool like this, you can just do it manually yourself.
But with that being said, let’s hop back into my computer and I’m going to show you step by step exactly how I set up my automation tool, so you can copy these settings and put them in whatever tool you’re using to automate your Pinterest account. Now, one more thing to keep in mind too, we’re using a single account for this example, just one account generated almost $500 in sales. But what you guys need to remember is you could take this and really scale this to the moon. I mean you could set up five more Pinterest accounts, a dozen accounts, five dozen accounts, 500 accounts, all driving traffic to your website. So once you set this up and you get the whole process down, you can just take this and continue to scale it. And the great thing is, Pinterest in large part is perfectly fine with this. Like I said, Pinterest is a buyers market.
Another quick tip I have to, before you jump in, make sure you go into Shopify and set up what are called buy able pins. You guys know how to set that up it’s very simple, you could search on YouTube, search on Google, whatever it is. That’s going to actually place a buy button on the pins that fall like you’re just going to be posting or connect it right to your Shopify account. So with that said, let’s jump back into my computer, I’m going to show you step by step how to set up FollowLiker to start automating your account. Okay, so what you guys want to do is go ahead, open up FollowLiker and start a new project. Now see it can be very simple to set up I’m going to step you through the entire process.
Once you have FollowLiker open, we’re going to go right click, going to go new and here we’re going to add our Pinterest account. So this is going to be your email, this is going to be the username of the Pinterest profile and then of course the password for the profile. So I’m going to click on save and now once we have the added in here, I’m going to right click, we’re going to customize settings and then wizard. And this is where we’re going to tell FollowLiker how we want it to automate the account. Now you guys could try and experiment with a whole different bunch of options in here. You could actually have it follow and unfollow other people on Pinterest like you do on Instagram. You could have it like other people’s pins made to get attention back to your profile but the main thing that we want to focus on here is the pin option.
The main thing we want to do is have it Pin all those posts onto our profile. Now I also recommend you click on show advanced options, that’s just going to give you a little bit more customization and we’re going to click on next. And here’s where we’re going to customize the settings on how we want it to pin those photos. Now, here’s the settings I’ve been using on my account. I want you guys to keep in mind if you have a newer Pinterest account, maybe you want to do this a little bit less aggressively and then turn these settings up as you go. So for example, maybe you just want to go one to three posts for the first week or so, if you just created the profile. But for my account, I was actually running three all the way up to eight posts every single time the automation runs. So that means it’s going to post anywhere between three and eight posts every time it shares pins to your profile, the daily pin limit.
This one you could actually crank up pretty high, we could actually go upwards of a thousand to 2000, you’re never really going to hit that limit, but we just want to give FollowLiker the freedom to be able to post as much as it needs to and delay pin. This right here is very important. The settings that I was running with was 200 to 500 seconds, so couple of minutes in between the times it shares those pins. So just to make it look a little bit more natural, right? And then underneath that you want to tell FollowLiker where the folder of photos is you want it to use for those pins. So go ahead, create a folder in your computer, I recommend just keeping it inside the FollowLiker folder just to keep things organized. Go ahead, put all your product photos and all the images you want to share inside that one folder. Go and navigate to it here and click on open. I also recommend you check randomize pin sharing for obvious reasons and we could actually uncheck this box that says ignore photo with no description.
That’s probably never going to happen because we are going to put some custom captions in here, but just to be safe, I recommend unchecking that. Now, you’re actually only going to make one single post in here and it’s going to use that same caption every time it chooses a random photo from this folder. So let me show you how to set that up. We’re going to go down here, you’re going to click on new, and now here’s the interesting thing about FollowLiker. You could write custom individual captions for every single post that goes onto your profile. And you’re going to be doing that by writing it in what’s called Spintax formatting. Let me show you how this works. There’s a great tool that you guys can navigate to from LinkCollider, just go ahead and search for Spintax check or something like that. And you’re going to find this tool, which is actually great for testing your captions before you start FollowLiker running.
Now, here’s how Spintax formatting works. You’re going to write this left bracket word one, right? And you’re going to put this little divider right here and you can go word two, and then we can go word three. And you can put as many different variations inside of here as you want, then we’re just going to close it off with that right bracket. Now if I click compile, you’ll see what it does is it chooses a random word from the string inside of those brackets. So basically, what we’re going to be doing for our Pinterest profile for example, is I’m going to go get and then I’ll go left bracket these separate that, are new I can go these new, I’m going to close out the bracket. Then I’ll go space, custom and then we can go bubble letter necklaces and go bubble letter chains, bubble letter pendants, close that out. And now if I click compile, you guys will see what we’re getting at here. So every time it posts a new caption, it’s going to be slightly different. It’s going to pick a random one of one of these words up here.
Now you could do this for your entire caption. So after that I would go from or no. So after that I would go from our website, we can go by clicking the photo, we can go by clicking the pin, something like that. I could also do this with emojis just to make it a little bit more random, a little bit more custom. So I can go in here, let’s say we want to maybe do this diamond emoji because there’s fake diamonds on there and stuff, you can go sunglasses. We can go, let’s say maybe we’ll do like that 100 emoji, we can close that out. So as you guys could see, it’s going to pick a random one of those every time it posts a caption. Now you could also just add a space in here which would be the equivalent of not posting anything, so you can do it just to make it a little bit more random.
And I want you guys to keep in mind, you could also do this with hashtags, which is also going to be important part of this method for getting your pins in front of the right people on Pinterest. So for hashtags, I recommend doing this a little bit differently. I recommend writing two or three different blocks and then putting those in Spintax formatting. So for example, I’ve actually pre-written a block of them here from my other captions I was using, so as you could see, this is one block here, this is another one here, and then there’s another one in between here and it just chooses from one of those four blocks every time. So if you guys want to go ahead and copy something similar, go ahead and do that. In fact, let me paste in the caption I was using for the example store. So as you guys can see right here, click on compile. There’s so many variations here because every single word almost is going to be different. There’s little thousands of different captions you’re going to get from this single block of tech.
And then once you have one you’re happy with, just go ahead, paste it into FollowLiker, It’s going to bring this up a little bit right here and now you’re going to have thousands of different captions every time a pin is posted. Now, under here we have board name, obviously, this is very important. You can choose a very specific board from your Pinterest profile, just make sure you copy the name exactly or if you type in a new name here, FollowLiker will create a new board on your Pinterest profile and go ahead and start posting those photos to it. Now, I recommend doing something like hot deals or bubble letters, jewelry deals, something very general and just have it post all your products to it, under that, very important, the source URL. Now since these are all just random posts about different products, you could drive them right back to your homepage.
So maybe the homepage of your website.com right there, you actually don’t want to choose, set image, you want to let it choose a random one from that folder of photos or you can make separate posts for each individual product. That’s up to you. We’re going to click on save, I’m going to go over here to next. Now, you can let this run 24 hours a day again, if Pinterest starts to limit you or whatnot, you can change these settings a little bit, maybe make it look a little bit more natural until you ramp it up but I’m going to leave everything here as set to its default setting. I’m going to click on finish and then all you need to do is click on start and FollowLiker will start posting photos from that folder. That’s really all you need to do to get this start and just keep FollowLiker running in the background of your computer and you’re going to start getting this free passive traffic to your website.
So now that we have all that set up, there is a roadblock. I want to show you guys how to get around that I experienced using FollowLiker. Once FollowLiker posts a photo from that folder it’s going to put it into a history folder and once that original folder is empty in their own the history folder, it’s going to say, hey, I’m out of photos. So I thought this was kind of a simple thing to figure out. I went into Automator on macOS, I set up a folder action that told all the photos in the history folder to go right back into the original folder of contact. So I went back into Automator and after some trial and error I did find out a way to set up Automator so that every time it puts a file back in the original folder, it also gives it an original file name.
Now, yes, Automator does only work on macOS but I’m sure there’s an alternative for windows as well. So either way I’m going to show you guys exactly how to set this up, to get around this roadblock, to have FollowLiker continuously post thousands of pins every single day. And by the way, I did make this even easier, down below somewhere I’m going to post a link to download an AppleScript. An AppleScript is basically a pre made Automator function for your computer, so download it, open it up, choose the folder where your photos are and you’re good to go. So without further ado, let’s hop back in my computer one last time. I’m to show you exactly how I set up Automator to make sure FollowLiker keeps running. I’m going to go over here and open up Automator which comes pre-installed on every Apple computer and again I’m sure there’s some alternative in windows.
If you guys go ahead and search it out, I just don’t really know about it. I don’t really use windows and by the way, this could easily become one of your new best friends when it comes to marketing and automating a lot of parts of your business. What you want to do is go over here to folder action, where to click on choose. We’re going to come up here and go to other, and then all you want to do is navigate into your documents folder, going to FollowLiker, pins, and you’re going to see the name of your project right here. So we’re going to click on the history folder. I’m going to go choose. Now what I originally thought of doing was coming up here and simply renaming those files with the current date every time they’re moved back into the folder and I figured, well that’s going to give them a random file name. The time and date is always going to be different.
But what I didn’t realize initially was it’s not going to replace the date every single time it moves them. It’s simply going to add a new time and date to the end of the file name. So after a while you’re going to wind up with file names that are a million characters long, which is probably going to break Pinterest if you try and post them. Don’t break Pinterest, we need it. So what we are going to do, I’m going to delete that right here, is I’m going to go back over here to rename, but this time instead of add time and date, I’m going to go make sequential. We’re going to go new name and we’re just going to leave this blank, so as you can see it’s going to remove the file name and simply add a number. Then once we have that, we’re going to add another rename block, this time we are going to add the time and date and what I’m going to do is set it to instead of month, day and year, seconds from midnight.
This is going to ensure that every time it moves a file, it’s definitely going to be a random number. So it’s going to add the amount of seconds from the time it’s moved to midnight of the current day. And then I’m going to add one more rename block and this is where we’re going to add the month, day and year. So this ensures that every time we move the files, it’s definitely going to be a random file name. It’s never going to be that same exact date with that amount, seconds to midnight ever again. Now once we had the blocks in place to rename the file, all we need to do is come back over here, we’re going to add a move block and tell Automator to put the files back in that original folder. Once you have this set up and you want to test it and see if it works, we’re going to hit command S, we’re going to save this. We’re just going to title this, Test for right now.
So to test our folder action and make sure it works, I’m going to take one of these photos, move it into the history folder, and as you could see it automatically moves it back and gives it this random file name. So now that we have that set up, that’s going to run automatically in the background of your computer. FollowLiker is going to take all the content from this folder and continuously post these photos to your Pinterest profile. So you’re going to have this nonstop stream of posts driving traffic to your website. And guys, that is pretty much it. So I hope you can go out there and use this method to start driving, maybe even your first Shopify sales, your first affiliate marketing sales, maybe you’re using CPA offers or maybe just driving traffic to your YouTube channel. I think Pinterest is a really underrated source of traffic.
I mean, like I said, go on there, set up your Pinterest account, at least make boards and post every photo from your store on there. This is going to start to rank in Google and you’re going to start to get a lot of sales just using that without any work. And of course, I do recommend do what I just showed you, set up an automation tool and start actively getting this traffic from Pinterest. So guys, again thank you so much for watching, leave a comment down below. I try to reply to as many as I can. Smash the like button for the YouTube algorithm and on top of that too, along with subscribing to get more videos about business, finance and marketing, turn on notifications because I’m starting to do live streams every single weekend. Where you can come on, I’ll answer your questions live and I love just hanging out with you guys for a while. So I’m going to stop rambling, guys. My name is Matthew Sabia. Thank you so much for watching and I’ll talk to you next time.