Making Money with Pinterest Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to earn passive income. What makes Pinterest different from other social media platforms is that pinners have strong buying intentions.

Pinterest always influences pinners to look for new ideas, inspiration, and products. Around 87% of pinners have purchased something on Pinterest.40% of pinners has a household income of $100K or more. Compared to other social media platforms, in the present time, there is less competition for affiliate marketers on this platform. So, there is enormous scope for affiliate marketers to make money on Pinterest.

Affiliate marketing on Pinterest is very beneficial because millions of pinners love to save pins of their interset and spread those pins to fellow pinners. Moreover, Pins stay for a very long time on the Pinterest platform. It may take a few months to get viral, but once a pin becomes viral, you may get bumper sales.

Pinterest is making tremendous efforts to make it more user and customer friendly. Day by day, it is becoming a popular social selling hub. The new developments like shop the look and carousel pins are in the same direction.

The visuals, in comparison to a text, have more attractive power. Unlike other social media platforms, Pinterest is a popular visual search engine. Pinners directly search for products using the search bar. Pinterest gives high priority to the pins in the search results that are more useful and beneficial to the users.

Therefore to become a successful affiliate marketer, you should know the basics of making your pins more searchable and reachable. To make pins Pinterest friendly, you should also focus on keyword research and SEO.

Before you decide to promote your affiliate products on Pinterest, you should know in advance about the basics of Pinterest marketing, your target audience, and how to use affiliate links effectively. If you are not on Pinterest yet, set up a business account or convert the existing account into a business one.

If we look into history, Pinterest had banned the use of affiliate links in 2015 because of spammers. Every social media platform hates spam activities. Even Facebook allows affiliate marketing but always keep eyes on spammers.

In the last few years, Pinterest has developed the capacity to detect and punish spammy behavior by putting in place automation tools and techniques. Now it again allowed affiliate links.

While using affiliate links on Pinterest, affiliate marketers need to abide by terms and conditions. Otherwise, they may risk their Pinterest account.

When you add an affiliate link, you should disclose that it is an affiliate pin. FTC mandated that while promoting a product or brand, you should mention your financial relations with those products or brands. You can add the #affiliate or #sponsored word in the pin description.

There are 4 ways to use affiliate links for generating sales.

Make money with Direct affiliate links

The simplest way to promote an affiliate product on Pinterest is by creating a new pin with the same product picture and web link provided by the affiliate network.

Suppose you signed up for the Share A sale program and want to promote your loving products on Pinterest. You can use the same picture available on the product page for creating a new pin. You can use the affiliate link as a destination link for the pin. When any user clicks on the image or destination link, Pinterest directs him to the product page.

So, in this way, you can directly promote affiliate links without writing any product reviews, articles, or having any blog. Some affiliate programs do not require a blog or site for approval. By sharing affiliate links directly on Pinterest, you can also earn handsome money without having any blog. The benefit of direct links is that you can promote affiliate products that are not in your niche.

You can add pins many hundred affiliate products on your boards, but using too many affiliate links may look like a spam activity. Neither Pinterest nor your followers will like spamming. You should strategically push your products by having the right mix of your and other pins on your boards.

Not all the affiliate programs allow posting of affiliate links on Pinterest. For example, Etsy does not allow affiliate links on Pinterest. Even you should be more careful while using affiliate links on Pinterest for the amazon associate program.

Some affiliate networks also do not allow the use of product images on Pinterest. For example, you can not directly use amazon product images on Pinterest. Even if you are using amazon product images on your website or blog, you must use the Site Stripe tool available on product pages.

You may risk your amazon affiliate account if you are downloading images in your computer and uploading them on the blog without using Site Stripe. Moreover, amazon affiliate products have 24 hours of cookie time, which is very less. You may get a good number of clicks, but the conversion rate may be lower because of the very short cookie. So, it is not wise to share amazon links on Pinterest to earn big affiliate money. Before promoting any affiliate product, you should carefully read the terms and conditions of the affiliate program.

Creating your own images for pinning affiliate products may bring more success. Use Canva templates to create great graphics for pinning. Designing your own pictures also help in establishing your unique brand. Use the same font and color to create similar-looking pins. The original images of the products may not be in the ratio of 2:3. Let us not forget that Pinterest is a visual search engine; pins must have the right size, design elements, fonts, color combination for better performance. The ideal size for a pin is 600*900 pixels. Before creating graphics for affiliate products, you should also check for the permission with your affiliate managers.

This approach of posting direct links looks easy, but it is more like a quick money making method. It may work but certainly is not the right strategy for long term affiliate marketing business. The right approach would be to derive traffic to your blog, educate your audience about the products, build trust, and then make offers.

Just creating pins and linking them to the merchant site may not yield good results. You should also keep in mind the conversion rate. What is the point if you are getting hundreds of link clicks, but they are not converting? You are just wasting your traffic. Achieving the conversion rate of 5% is a dream for many expert affiliate marketers. The best way to increase conversion rates is by providing value through fantastic content to your readers.

Promote affiliate products through Blog posts

Pinterest is a powerhouse for traffic. If you follow pinning on Pinterest strategy in letter and spirit, you can drive massive traffic to your blog or website.

You can make the best use of highly targeted and massive traffic from Pinterest to generate affiliate sales. It takes enormous efforts and time to drive free traffic from Google and other sources. But through Pinterest with the focused approach, you can get substantial organic traffic in less time.

Affiliate marketing is all about traffic, trust, and offer. To generate affiliate sales, you need to drive the right kind of prospects to your blog. The categorization of niches/interest through Pinterest boards plays a crucial role in attracting the right audience.

If you are serious about generating affiliate sales from Pinterest, then you should first decide on your niche and create boards for topics that are related to your niche. For example, if your niche is fashion, you can create boards like women's clothes, women's shoes, etc. Create 15-20 boards in your niche and start pinning other people's pins also. Save pins that are helpful to your target audience.

Your Pinterest account and profile should show that you are an expert affiliate marketer in your niche. If you do not sell products related to health and fitness, you should not have boards related to health topics.

By creating appropriate boards and following best practices for pinning, you can get a continuous flow of targeted audience to your blog.

Educating prospects by writing product reviews, comparisons, how-to guides, tutorials are great ways to build trust. It is a famous saying in affiliate marketing that people do not buy from strangers. Do your prospects know about the benefits of the products that you recommend? Why should they buy your recommended products? You should share your experience with products and how they helped you in overcoming the problems. You should talk about both the positive and negative aspects of the product that you refer to your readers. In this way, you can build loyal customers for long term success.

If you are a beginner in affiliate marketing, you should only focus on promoting a few products. Create engaging and value-added quality content around those products.

It takes time to grow a Pinterest account, but by producing quality blog posts and linking them with Pinterest, you can build a large following.

Even if you do not have thousands of followers on Pinterest, you can still make good money if you have highly targeted traffic. What you need to do is produce some 8-10 killer posts in your niche, embed affiliate links into your posts in a contextual manner, design amazing 3-4 pins for every blog post, and make boards and profile SEO friendly.

Launch an Email Marketing Campaign

An email list is an asset for marketers. It is the most cost-effective marketing method to increase sales conversion. Through an email list, you can send customized emails according to the different needs of your prospects. You can send updates about new offers or discounts to your customers.

First-time visitors are strangers, and almost all of them do not convert in the first visit. They would like to make repeated visits before buying any product from your site. Therefore, it becomes essential to capture their emails and follow up with them multiple times to generate a sale.

As you already know that Pinterest sends you massive traffic if used properly. Pinterest generates more targeted traffic for you in less time. Most certainly, you would not waste them.No serious affiliate marketer would want to lose visitors forever by not capturing their emails. So, creating and building an email list is essential for long term success in affiliate marketing. If you have their emails, you can educate them, build trust, and convert them by sending appropriate newsletters.

One of the best ways to capture visitors is through a lead magnet. A lead magnet is nothing but a free resource(ebook, video) in the exchange of visitor's email id. The visitors sign up to get freebies. Provide lead magnet through an optimized landing page to convert your blog visitors into subscribers. You can provide multiple opt-in bribes on your blog to capture more leads.

When you get a new subscriber, you should start an email sequence that provides more value to your subscriber. The money is not in the email list but follow-ups. Build trust for your business and products that you recommend through the email marketing campaign. Rather than being salesy, you should establish healthy communication and foster the relationship.

Do not let them forget you, so send regular emails. Help them by providing solutions to their problems. Tell them how a particular product helped you and then recommend that by including affiliate links or banners in the email. Take the help of automated email marketing tools like ConvertKit for launching an effective email marketing campaign.

Make affiliate sales through Promoted Pins

Another way to make affiliate sales and money on Pinterest is by launching a paid campaign. It takes time to grow on Pinterest, but if you want quick sales paid marketing can be a good option. Promoted pins help in getting more visibility on Pinterest and generate highly targeted traffic that is more likely to convert in comparison to free traffic. You can better target your audience by creating campaigns for specific groups. For example, if you have a fashion product for women, you can pay for Pinterest ads and launch a campaign to target such an audience. Create Promoted Pins or ads.

Before launching any paid campaign, you should set the goal. Are you trying to achieve more repins(engagement) or clicks(traffic to the site) from promoted pins? Based on the purpose, you should design pins, and CTA(Call To Action) should strongly relate to the goal.

Knowing the audience based on your needs is very important. Pinterest will show your ads to the right people if you rightly target them. Without proper niche audience research, you can not optimize ads. If you know your prospects in detail, you can include profitable keywords in your ad copy.

There is the immense importance of keywords on Pinterest. The Pinners search products or ideas by typing main or long-tail keywords in the search bar. Pinterest automatically also guides pinners according to keywords in their niche. So, before running any paid advertisement for affiliate products, you should find profitable keywords with the help of free or paid tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, SEMrush, etc.

Before investing heavily in promoted pins, just try to start with a small amount to test your ad targeting, images, and conversion. Try with different pictures, keywords, and bids for a better return.

Not many people are placing ads on Pinterest, so there is no cut-throat competition. If you correctly select affiliate products, research on a niche audience, and keywords, you can get a good return on your investment and earn money through paid ads.

Carefully observe Pinterest analytics to know which pins are performing better. You should promote pins that are already highly engaging to get more exposure.

Dos and Don'ts

Although Pinterest provides an excellent opportunity to earn money through affiliate marketing, you still need to follow best practices to make your affiliate business successful.

Here is a quick, easy to implement, and useful list of best practices for pinning affiliate products.

Dos for successful affiliate marketing on Pinterest

1. Open a business account or convert the existing account into a business one.

2. Your profile should clearly show who you are and what you offer. It should give the impression that you are an expert in a particular niche and provide value-added products.

3. Make profile and account SEO friendly. Include keywords related to your business in the profile.

4. Claim your blog or website. It will increase the credibility and visibility of your affiliate business on Pinterest.

5. You need to pin consistently to grow your followers.

6. Create boards that are strongly related to your niche.

7. Include keywords in the pin description, title, and board name.

8.Repin other people's pins on your boards.

9. Use Canva to create high-quality custom images for your affiliate products.

10. Enable product rich pins that include extra information right on the pin itself. You can pre-sell products by the use of rich pins.

11. In the description, disclose that it is an affiliate pin.

12. Use shop the look pins feature to make ready to buy pins.

13. Use the Carousel feature to include multiple images of the affiliate product.

14. Provide value addition through high-quality blog posts and link them through affiliate pins.

15. Use 3-4 affiliate product images for pinning on each blog post so that your product review blog posts can have multiple pins on Pinterest. In this way, you can reach a broader audience and hence more visibility of the products.

16. Include a clear call to action(CTA) in the pin description.

17. Check with your affiliate managers regarding the policies of sharing affiliate links on Pinterest and usages of the product images.

18. Create fresh pins for your affiliate products. Pinterest loves fresh pins.

19. Use Pinterest analytics to know more about the likes/dislikes or interests of your audience. You can get information like which pins/product review posts are performing better. By using this vital information, you can focus more on creating content and graphics that your target audience loves.

20. Keep an eye on competitors in your niche, and how they are creating their boards, what products they are promoting on Pinterest.

21. Join group boards in your niche. Harness the power of group boards.

22. Use an automated tool Tailwind to schedule the pins.

23. Join Tailwind tribes for more exposure to your affiliate products and building a healthy relationship.

24. Engage with prospects through the comment section. Respond to their queries.

25. Use the search bar, guided search, and promoted pin suggestions for keyword research.

26. Create video pins explaining the usage of the products.

27. Follow brands that are relevant to your niche to grow the Pinterest account.

28. Try to establish your unique brand on Pinterest. Create branded pins that look similar.

Don'ts for better Pinterest affiliate marketing

1. Avoid the practice of clickbait.

2. Do not use the link shortener.

3. Do not compromise with the quality of the images. Let's not forget that Pinterest is a visual search engine.

4. If you are a beginner in affiliate marketing, you should not promote too many products at the start till you master Pinterest affiliate marketing.

5. You should not go overboard while sharing affiliate links. Pinterest hates spammers! Pinterest may block your account or blog/website.

6. Do not create boards that are irrelevant to your niche.

7. Do not add a product pin to the unrelated board.

Conclusion

The peer pressure of social media plays an essential role in endorsing products and services. The recommendations and posts on social media directly influence the buying decision of the consumers. People on social media follow brands for product information, feedbacks about the products, and special promotional offers to make an informed choice.

Being a visual search engine, Pinterest provides an excellent opportunity for affiliate marketers to provide value addition through high-quality images, infographics, short videos, and ready to buy pins. Use statistics or data on pins to demonstrate to consumers how products benefit them.

The user base of Pinterest is vast and increasing rapidly day by day. Moreover, they have more buying intentions and paying capacity that make it more attractive for affiliate marketers. It is known as the buying hub.

Making money with Pinterest affiliate marketing is not difficult if the affiliate marketer uses the best Pinterest practices in a planned way. Start with a few valuable products in your niche, have patience, and build your audience by writing detailed reviews and stories in your blog posts. If you have useful products and value-added content, people would love your pins.