Pinterest Affiliate Marketing is simply affiliate marketing done through Pinterest. It is super easy to understand and implement when you just follow this step by step guide.
What makes Pinterest different from other social media platforms is that it is considered a visual search engine where users are specifically looking for products and brands. And that is the point, where marketers are using Pinterest for affiliate marketing.
Why Pinterest?
One of my regular visitor asked: Is pinterest good for affiliate marketing?
My simple answer ‘Yes’ didn’t seem to satisfy him; and he kept on asking the reasons. So, I had to do some research and here are my findings that proved pinterest a good platform for affiliate marketing.
Every internet marketer knows the fact that number 1 problem is: How to get traffic to their affiliate product and Pinterest is a source of 320 million monthly active users.
70% of Pinterest users are women and they use this platform for shopping. It means that search intent on Pinterest is not information, but buying products. Using pinterest for affiliate marketing is ideal for marketers.
The median household income of Pinterest users is about $75,000. So they also have purchasing power.
A survey shows that 47% of US pinners find or shop products using Pinterest and 97% of these searches are “unbranded.”
In Q4 of 2019, Pinterest’s active user base grew 26%, gaining 70 million monthly pinners over a 12 month period.
Out of all the social media channels, Pinterest is the most affordable one and also the most powerful tool to attract visitors, get leads, and build loyalty to the brand.
All these factors made it necessary using Pinterest for affiliate marketing.
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Basically, What Is Pinterest Affiliate Marketing?
Pinterest affiliate marketing is a shortcut to earn commissions; a source of unfair advantage!
Affiliate marketing with Pinterest is a lot easier. You just have to recommend products through your pins and when some of your followers purchase these products, you win a commission.
A win-win case for all!
Your followers get the product they want, and you earn a commission.
Affiliate marketing on Pinterest
Before start affiliate marketing on Pinterest, it’s important that you should define your goal. What are your objectives? For instance,
Are you interested in getting more leads? or
Do you want to build a long-term relationship with your audience? Or
Do you want to earn some quick bucks?
So, whatever strategy you adopt at Pinterest depends on your goal.
How to Do Affiliate Marketing With Pinterest?
No matter, how much a process is complex, human brain comprehends it quite easily when it is divided into tiny parts and steps. The same way ‘how to use pinterest for affiliate marketing’ is easy and simple to understand when the process is divided in step by step.
Step 1. Creating Pinterest Business Profile and Optimizing it
Step 2. Doing Research – Niche; Keywords; Affiliate programs
Step 3. Creating and Uploading Pins
STEP 1. CREATING PINTEREST BUSINESS PROFILE
Pinterest affiliate marketing rules describes that if you want to use Pinterest for commercial purpose, you should create a business account.
a. Creating Business Profile
Creating a business account is dead simple. You just need to enter some basic information (email, business name, nature of business, website url) and that’s it!
b. Optimizing Your Profile
To optimize your Pinterest business profile you should include keywords. On a new profile like this one, you shouldn’t generally see many topics.
Add 3 keywords at most, along with some topics of your interest in top bar. This would help pinners searching through profiles to follow on a keyword basis.
c. Benefits of Business Pinterest Account
When you create a Business Pinterest account, the benefits are many.
With a Pinterest business profile, you’ll get access to Pinterest Analytics and other tools – and these tools will boost your results. What’s exciting is that you can link your personal account to these business profiles too. You can link up to 4 business profiles to your personal Pinterest account.
A business Pinterest profile provides many details about your audience which are of great use. You can get a bird’s view and look at your performance here. You can also closely observe audience insights; can gather information about viewers’ age; their device, gender, and location.
STEP 2. CONDUCTING RESEARCH – AFFILIATE MARKETING ON PRINTEREST
a. Research Your Niche
Affiliate marketers generally overthink and keep on searching which niche is best for pinterest? Here are the best result oriented niches:
- Health and fitness
- Lifestyle
- Interior design
- Crafts/DIY
- Graphic design
- Fonts
- Food and drink
- Travel
- Fashion
- Art
- Spirituality
Check how many pins are available for a certain topic.
Look for the quality of pins too.
If you found many low-quality pins and a few related searches, that’s great news. It means the topic you are interested in is still growing.
b. Research to Find Best Affiliate Program
Join a credible or well-known affiliate program. Readers will only buy products if the products and the company or people behind them are trustworthy.
Some of the recipe ebooks I promote, for example, have been featured in People magazine, Women’s Health, and Martha Stewart. This helps your readers a better understanding of how popular your products are and gives them a reason to buy them.
It is essential to do some research about the products and how to select high-paying affiliate programs
Remember when I said you could promote products in any niche?
This is dependent on whether or not you are accepted into that affiliate program. And once you’ve accomplished that, start creating and promoting your affiliate pins.
Shareasale is a good place to get quickly accepted. This platform is ideal for inexperienced bloggers. Other affiliate sites are ClickBank, Warrior Plus, or JVZoo where you can select any product to start your Pinterest affiliate marketing.
c. Keyword Research
Keywords play an important role in your success of affiliate marketing using Pinterest. Spend some time in this phase. Determine your main keywords as well as 2-3 relevant keywords that people might use.
Put yourself in the shoes of your target audience to determine which keywords to use.
What would users search in order to find a solution to the problem?
What are the possible variations to these keywords?
Brainstorm keywords and then search each of them on Pinterest search.
Keep in mind to look for long-tail keywords and not general ones. The reason is that long tail keywords are customer-focused, that is, giving users exactly what they’re looking for.
When you Google, you’ll find hundreds of keyword tools and you can spend hours researching each of them, but I have found KWFinder as the easiest keyword tool to find long-tail keywords.
Keep in mind that you should later add these keywords in your pin description.
STEP 3. CREATING AND UPLOADING PINS
a. Creating Pins With Canva
Once you get approved for affiliate programs and get access to your own unique affiliate link, you’ll be able to start promoting.
Head to Canva – a free design tool, to create a super cute image.
From given templates on the top bar, click “blog graphic” to set dimensions for Pinterest.
Play around and try different combinations on Canva. It’s fun and you may get addicted. Check some of the pins on Pinterest, note some points for inspiration. Using drag and drop facility of Canva, design your image. Here’s an example:
Download the image (button on the top right) and save it to your computer for easy access.
Now that you’ve created your pin and saved it to your computer, now it’s time to upload this image on Pinterest for affiliate marketing.
b. Uploading Pins on Pinterest
Open your Pinterest account and click the gray plus button on the bottom. You’ll see this image:
First, upload the image (you created on Canva) from your computer.
Title of Pin: The title is of extreme importance so spend some time writing the title. It must be enticing enough to grab visitors’ attention. Check some of the pins of competitors and then using your creative juices, write the title of a pin. Never forget to add your main keyword in the title.
Pin Description: Now it’s time to write the description of the pin. While writing your description, you should always add your main keyword as well as 2-3 related keywords. Ensure that your main keyword appears in the pin title, blog post URL, and also in the pin description.
Adding Your Affiliate Link: Go to ‘Add a Destination Link’ and add your affiliate link here. It is important to note that Pinterest does not allow any link shortener; so don’t use bit.ly or Pretty Link.
Make sure to create at least 3 pins to promote each affiliate product. This will help you engage a broader audience. You might want to create affiliate links by yourself.
c. Affiliate Marketing Pinterest Tips
Do not save your affiliate pins to common boards. Instead, save these affiliate pins to the boards you created around the main keywords. When you share a new pin, the algorithm starts its work and figures out what the pin is about.
Doing the pinning yourself manually is a time-consuming and exhausting task. It’s better to automate this using a tool, Tailwind. It makes it possible for you to create pins on a large scale. You can schedule the pins, add them to boards. The tool is so helpful that you can complete a week’s worth of work in a matter of few hours.
Create several boards (preferably 8 to 10). This is essential because people looking at your profile assess that you are genuine and have multiple interests.
While creating boards, spend time and energy to write quality descriptions, using the right keywords. In the Pinterest algorithm, keywords are the main way people find your board. Having relevant and keyword-based board names is a must. Organize your boards in a way that helps users to easily navigate the boards. Use sections as they are useful if you’re running group boards.
When you have some boards on your profile, the next step is to follow other profiles in your niche. The aim is to have an authentic profile, and not that one that looks sales-focused or built to sell something.
The second important method is pinning the content that’s popular on Pinterest. By following this strategy you’ll gain a number of followers.
Pin somewhere between 40 to 50 images daily. Do this for 2 to 3 weeks and you’ll see an ascending number of followers in this period.
How to Make Money With Pinterest Affiliate Marketing
Making money with Pinterest is simple and easy. There are 3 methods to earn commissions with Pinterest Affiliate Marketing.
METHOD 1. USE DIRECT AFFILIATE LINK ON PINTEREST
Many beginners ask this question: Can I use a direct affiliate link on Pinterest?
So here’s a Big Surprise!!!
Yes, it’s possible with affiliate marketing on Pinterest, although most of the social media platforms refuse direct linking; but Pinterest has no issues with this practice.
But you have to double check that whether the company (of whom product you are promoting) allows it or not.
How to do direct affiliate marketing on Pinterest? It’s easy! Just add your affiliate link to the pin in the ‘Destination Url’. As this method is described in detail above, to recap, here is just a summary of that:
Create a new pin on Canva > Upload the pin on Pinterest > Write the title of the pin and description using main keywords > Add your affiliate link to ‘Destination url’.
The method, no doubt, is easy but it fails in getting conversions and sales. So there is no point of using this method for affiliate marketing with Pinterest.
METHOD 2. CREATE A BLOG AND DRIVE TRAFFIC TO BLOG POST
Well, you may start writing your blog posts within 5 minutes on using free platforms like blogger, blogspot, or Google Site, (and you should, if you are a beginner) but they lack ownership, branding, and professionalism.
If you are serious in making money through pinterest affiliate marketing, then I recommend NameCheap for both domain name and hosting.
Follow this article How to Create a WordPress Blog in 15 Minutes and you’ll start writing your first blog post in no time and painlessly.
Write blog posts (of about 1000 words) related to the product you are affiliated for; may it be a review post, comparisons of two products, or presenting as a solution to the problem.
For each blog post, create and upload a minimum of 5 pins (related to the topic). Share these pins to group boards you belong. This gives them visibility and ensures higher chances of getting clicks.
Pinterest works like a visual search engine and by creating pins, you can get traffic to your blog posts embedded with affiliate links. Sit back and relax! You are about to witness leads, conversions, and sales.
METHOD 3. WRITE EMAILS FOR EARNING HIGH AFFILIATE COMMISSION
This method generates more commissions than the above two but also demands more commitment and hard work on your part.
The only thing you’ll need is an email list provider with automation features. I personally use BuilderAll as it is 10-in-1 software (saves me a lot of money) and is easy and simple to use than others present out there. Here’s how this method works:
- Go to idplr and download a free ebook you found most enticing for your target customers. The purpose of this PLR (Private Label Rights – you can use PLR books free of cost) is to offer as a free giveaway to visitors in exchange of their email.
- Create a squeeze page on BuilderAll and offer that free ebook that the visitors can download once they opt in and give their email.
- Once you have emails, write a follow-up email series, with 5 – 7 emails. Focus on providing even more value to the subscribers who’ve just downloaded your freebie.
- In the third email and in the last email, promote the product you are affiliate of. Focus on the benefits of the product and how it can help your subscribers.
- How to promote this ebook? It’s the point where Pinterest comes. Design 5 to 8 pins and add the link of your landing page to ‘Destination Url’.
If done well, this method can convert highly.
Final Words..
Just working a few hours to start earning passive income for months or even years, is a pretty good trade-off! If you put some effort, Pinterest affiliate marketing isn’t difficult at all.
Once you’ve mastered it, it’s a great way to sell products and generate decent revenue on your own. It’s not difficult to learn how to use affiliate links on Pinterest, and once you do, it’s a great way to increase your commissions!
Above all, you must show some consistency and perseverance and keep on creating and uploading pins and follow other pinners for about a month – it’s then only you start seeing some positive results.
In a nutshell, earning with Pinterest Affiliate Marketing is an excellent idea for beginners as well as expert internet marketers that result in a revenue windfall.
