Here’s the pitch they’ve been running since 2016.
Pick a niche you love.
Start a blog.
Write a ton of content.
Get traffic from Pinterest.
Put ads on the site.
Make thousands while you sleep.
Cool. Very helpful.
Here’s what actually happened to everyone who tried it.
Pinterest was basically cheat mode for a few years. If you knew how it worked — the right image sizes, the right keywords, the right posting cadence — you could drive hundreds of thousands of pageviews to a pretty mediocre blog.
I know because I was one of the people teaching it.
We helped hundreds of people get into the big ad networks. Real money. Real results. For a minute.
Then Pinterest changed.
Not slightly changed. Structurally changed. The free flood of traffic that new blogs used to get? Gone. Now you need years of content and thousands of pins before Pinterest sends you anything worth measuring.
The people still teaching the old model didn’t update. Some of them didn’t notice. Some of them noticed and kept teaching it anyway because the course still sold.
I’m not sure which one is worse.
So here’s the actual problem with the old blog model.
You don’t control the offer. You don’t control the audience. You’re renting attention from a platform that can change the rules at 3am on a Tuesday, and you don’t get a vote.
At its peak, one of my blogs did 800,000 pageviews a month.
Then the algorithm shifted.
800,000 became 200,000 became 60,000.
The checks changed accordingly. The years of work didn’t come back with them.
This is what happens when your business model is “hope the platform stays the same.”
Here’s what blogging actually is in 2024.
It’s content marketing for a real business.
Not the business. The marketing.
The blog draws people in. Shows them you understand their problem. Earns enough trust that when you offer something — a product, a service, a recommendation — they don’t immediately click away.
That’s it. That’s the job.
If your blog is the business, you’re one algorithm update away from nothing.
If your blog is the marketing department, the algorithm update just means you adjust where you post.
One of those keeps you up at night.
The formula that actually works is this.
Audience × Offer = Money.
The ad model gives you no control over either variable. Someone else’s ads. Someone else’s rates. Someone else’s traffic rules.
Build your own offer. Sell it to people who showed up because of your content. That’s a business.
A $20 ebook sold to one person from one blog post requires exactly one pageview.
$20 from display ads requires roughly 1,400 pageviews.
Both are $20. One scales. One depends on a platform that just changed its algorithm again.
Blogging isn’t dead.
The “write content and hope for traffic” model is dead.
They’re not the same thing.
The blog is still one of the most effective ways to build enough trust with strangers that they’ll eventually pay you for something.
You just have to know what that something is before you start.
Most people don’t. They start the blog first and figure out the business part later. Then they spend two years writing content for a platform that doesn’t send them traffic anymore and wonder what went wrong.
What went wrong is they started with the distribution and skipped the product.
Start with the product. Use the blog to sell it.
That’s the whole thing.
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