Affiliate Marketing With Pinterest: How to Make Money on Pics and Vids
If you think of Pinterest as some ‘network with random visual stuff’ you are basically right. But did you know it’s also a social network with large volumes of traffic and a search engine at the same time?
Yes, Pinterest is mainly known as a huge collection of inspirational mood boards. How to turn it into a powerful affiliate marketing tool?
We’ll tell you right away.
Pinterest: Facts and Figures
So, what’s basically Pinterest?
It’s a social network a bit similar to Instagram. People post videos and images, called Pins here. They can like and share pins or create boards with pin collections.
For example, if you are interested in home designs, you can create a special board to save the best pins on it — like here:
But how can it help you promote an offer? Easily: you can add a short description to each pin. This description can contain a link to your landing page. So, the workflow is easy as pie!
Here is what your advertising pin might look like:
- A checklist for house cleaning
- A link to your landing page where users can purchase items from this checklist or a pre-lander that leads to an offer page
Still, you need need to know a bit more details before you start.
Audience
So, we consider Pinterest as the traffic source. What kind of traffic it is?
First of all — very attractive one, because of the volumes. According to stats, Pinterest has reached approximately 433 million monthly active users in 2022 — and the numbers keep growing. Sounds already great, right?
The next key point: Pinterest is most popular among young women, mainly coming from Tier 1 and Tier 2 GEOs. Not bad, too! It implies that Pinterest has pretty wealthy users — speaking the professional language, they have a high purchasing power.
Anything else? Here are all the stats you might find helpful:
It’s pretty enough for the first targeting efforts. But what do all these people look for on Pinterest?
Verticals
You now know who loves Pinterest most of all — and it can give you a hint to the offer ideas, too! But let’s make it even easier and just check the stats of the most searched topics on Pinterest:
- Home Equipment
- Home Decor and Design
- Style and Fashion
- Food Recipes and Cooking
- Beauty
What’s the conclusion? The best vertical to use is obviously eCommerce — and it includes luxury goods, too! Besides, you can try Dating, Home Improvement, or Nutra verticals.
Traffic Options
The great thing about Pinterest is that you can promote it for free — thanks to organic search. By the way, it’s similarly efficient when a user searches inside Pinterest or types keywords in Google.
So, if you know SEO (or have helpful SEO masters on hand) — your chances to boost your Pinterest become much bigger!
Another option is to use Google contextual ads — it will be a quicker way to make your account grow.
Finally, Pinterest offers a paid promotion of your pins. It can significantly help you with your efforts, as promoted content has a shorter sales funnel. Look:
- A standard pin is a pic/video with a description. A click on such a pin opens the image and its description with your affiliate link.
A user sees your pin in the feed — clicks it — sees your description and link — follows the link, and sees your offer |
- Pinterest-promoted pins have a special ‘Promoted By *brand* mark.’ A click on a pin created via Pinterest Ads will lead directly to your page — skipping the description step of the funnel.
| A user sees your pin in the feed — clicks it — the offer page opens immediately |
Rules
Before we get to the Pinterest Dos, let’s quickly look at the Donts. Several essentials to remember — nothing too difficult, but important for keeping your account safe and sound from any bans.
- It’s prohibited to use URL shorteners! Your affiliate link must be visible so that people can understand what site they are going to visit
- You can post a direct link to an offer only if you are the offer owner
- Pinterest doesn’t allow you to publish pins related to iGaming and Adult topics
- You are prohibited to impersonate a brand if you don’t own this brand. If you are promoting some offer, you can only use a link to your own pre-lander or landing page
- Be careful with mass liking and mass following: all the comments to any pins you make must be relevant and original
- You are not allowed to pay people for saving or sharing your pins to promote your Pinterest account
- Make sure you’re posting relevant content to relevant boards and using relevant hashtags.
- Multi-accounting is a no-go and might lead to a ban
Creating and Growing your Pinterest account: Tips and Tools
Okay, we’re done with the theory — let’s dive into the practice!
To attract users to your offer landing page via Pinterest, you need to have a Pinterest account and post some content to it, right? And, pretty logically, your account must be popular enough and have a considerable amount of traffic.
So how to make your account both visible on Pinterest and efficient for your offers? Will you need anything but beautiful pics or videos?
Of course, you will — and we’ll tell you what right now.
Creatives
As you might have already guessed, creatives are an essential part of growing a Pinterest account. It’s a fully visual network, so your goal is to make eye-catching posts that people would want to click on.
Here are some ideas.
- Add high-quality images of the goods you promote
Most likely, you will have some ready pics from the offer owner — try making them even more stylish and attractive:
- Don’t limit yourself to images
Pinterest allows you to add short videos, including the ones from TikTok. Getting back to hairdryers, a simple video guide on how to style your hair will most likely be a win!
- Create infographics and checklists
These are pins people love to save and share! And, some engaging copy like ‘How to dry your hair without spoiling it’ will be another hook for users.
- Get the most out of the boards
If you post pins on various themes, it’s better to organize them on different relevant boards. Besides, there are also group boards, shared by several pinners.
If such a board is popular enough, posting your pin there might give a significant boost to your account! To join the board, you will need to contact its creator. Here is an example of a popular group board dedicated to home decor:
- Keep posting regularly
Don’t rely on a couple of popular pins — Pinterest loves active users and awards them with highly-active loyal subscribers. The best option is to post pins daily — and many experts claim that 30 pins per day are the minimum!
- Use creative tools
It’s not so hard to make bright and catchy pins if you have good tools on hand. Experienced pinners recommend Canva for editing pins and the Tailwind app for scheduling automated posting.
SEO Optimization
Even if you opt for paid promotion, organic traffic will never hurt. In fact, most pinners combine paid and free traffic options, and never neglect the SEO optimization of their pins.
Here are the key practices you can use:
- Search for keywords. You will need them to add to your account and pin descriptions — so be really picky and find the most relevant ones.
- Check Pinterest Autocomplete. Once you have found all the main keywords, try to look for more. Just type the keyword in the Pinterest search bar, and see what the autocomplete will suggest to you:
- Mind your pins’ content. Remember, Pinterest can recognize what’s on your pin, too. It doesn’t just read titles and descriptions — but can also understand the images. If the image contains words, they will also matter for your rankings.
Affiliate Marketing Strategies for Pinterest
So, you have a pretty popular Pinterest account. What’s next? Obviously, you need to send this traffic further and motivate people to visit your landing pages and convert.
How to do it?
Linking the Offers
The first strategy is very simple and obvious: you just publish a link to your landing page, and that’s it. We remind you that it’s not allowed to add direct offer links, unless you are the brand owner, so a landing page or a pre-lander is a must.
Here is what one of the affiliate marketers shared regarding his experience with such links:
I joined five group boards, and the offer I promote via pins gets about 4k impressions and up to 1000 clicks daily. To find an appropriate board, I just typed my offer niche in the search bar and selected the most suitable boards I could join. To boost followers’ growth, I left comments under popular pins related to my offer theme. Now, I get about $400/per month only from Pinterest traffic.
As free traffic is a long-term story, you need to be patient and consistent — but as you see, it pays off if you do things right.
PropellerAds Retargeting
Another option is also easy. It might work out even greater than the first one if you are more used to running paid traffic.
Let’s just show it step-by-step:
- 1. You add a PropellerAds Retargeting Pixel to your landing page
- 2. Your Pinterest audience visits the page, and the pixel marks it with a browser cookie
- 3. The visitor leaves your landing page, but the pixel has already remembered them and added them to a separate audience
- 4. You retarget this visitor using the other ad formats: Popunder, Push, etc.
Scaling Instagram Campaigns
If you are not too familiar with Pinterest yet but know all nuts and bolts of Instagram affiliate marketing, you can simply repost your Instagram content to Pinterest — it’s fully legit.
As a result, you will drive more users to your Instagram from Pinterest — and scale your campaigns with relevant high-quality social traffic.
To Sum Up
The main advantage of Pinterest is that you can get big volumes of free traffic. What are the other pros?
- Large growing audience
- High-quality traffic with ready-to-pay users
- Suitable for promoting expensive offers
- Low competition — not many affiliate marketers actively use Pinterest
Still, don’t forget about the hidden rocks, too — here they are:
- It takes time and effort to make your Pinterest account work for you
- The platform is not very transparent about how to promote accounts, it might be the trial-and-error method
- You are not allowed to have several accounts, and it makes it harder to promote different offers
Overall, it is always challenging to try out new sources — but what if you are missing your chance to drive great social media traffic?
Hesitant? Discuss your concerns with the other affiliate marketers
Or just dive into the colored world of pins 🙂
Right here, in our Telegram Chat!
