Grow Your Substack with Pinterest

Cozy Business Guide to Pinterest in 2025

Remember when you could scroll Pinterest and find dozens of new blogs to read? We can make that happen again. Join me in the fight to reclaim our beloved visual search engine and banish the spammers back to Instagram. This is your cozy business guide to growing your Substack with Pinterest going into 2026.

Pinterest in Late 2025

You might think Pinterest is no longer relevant. You would be wrong. It’s bigger than ever. I pulled the following from Pinterest’s Q2 investor report.

Pinterest continues to evolve from a mood board visual search engine to something more like visual search meets e-commerce platform. As of Q2 2025, Pinterest has a record 578 million monthly active users globally, that’s over 25x more users than Substack.

And a significant portion of this growth is being driven by 2 demographic groups: Gen Z, which makes up 42% of the user base and Gen X at 33% of users.

Pinterest’s silent success is increasingly tied to its shopping features, with 85% of weekly users having made a purchase based on Pins from creators & brands. Pinterest's Pins maintain a longer lifespan, with users collectively saving 1.5 billion Pins every week.

Video content has also seen a massive surge, with nearly 1 billion videos watched daily, holding true to its core function of inspiring users, who are performing 2 billion+ searches every month, with 96% of those searches being unbranded. You see the potential here, right?

Cozy Creator Pinterest Experiment

Let’s see if we can drive Substack growth and digital product sales with a 2011 style Pinterest campaign. I’ll be tracking the stats long term and continue to bring you updates as we go along.

My Pinterest Account in 2025

I’ve had my Pinterest account for over 15 years. My account is starting this experiment with 860 subscribers and monthly views under 1k.

I’m curious to see if Pinterest works at all in late 2025 to drive traffic that converts into subscribers. Substack seems like an excellent test ground because I’ll be able to see tangible results immediately with subscriber growth tracked in real time. Plus, I’m still small enough that even a few percentage points will be very noticeable for me.

Substack Pinterest Growth Plan

Here’s the action plan I’m following.

Posts

All of my posts will get Pins that lead to their respective posts. I’ll A/B/C test and do 3 Pins per post to see what style of Pins convert better. Every post contains a clear CTA to subscribe, share, and my Substack analytics will tell where new subscribers originated from. We’ll be able to see how many came directly from Pinterest vs Notes vs YouTube.

Notes

Here’s where it might get weird. I’ve decided to experiment with creating Pins for my most popular Notes.

My Note as a Pinterest Pin

The Pin link goes straight to the Note, not to a related post or my main Substack page. I want to see if Notes as Pins will attract clicks and sign-ups alongside Posts.

Lead Magnets

I’ll also be creating a few lead magnets to test. Checklists, templates, cozy business template packs — I’ll have a few different freebies to attract new readers & new-to-Substack users over from Pinterest.

Waking Up the Algorithm

I’m beginning this experiment with a dormant account, I haven’t created or saved a Pin in over a year. The algorithm will have to be “woken up” for my account to get momentum again, so I’ll start with just using the Pinterest app on my phone for a few days before I start creating and posting my own pins again.

Are You Using Pinterest for Substack?

Would you if it meant new readers outside the Substack ecosystem could discover your writing without social media? Make sure to subscribe and find out how many of my subscribers are coming from Pinterest.

If you know another Substack writer who would like this post, please share.

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