Chances are, you’ve heard of Pinterest and therefore Pinterest affiliate marketing, but don’t quite know how it works. The same goes for most people. They know Pinterest. They know affiliate marketing. But putting the two together? Remarkably few people have made that leap yet.

And that is exactly why we should be talking about Pinterest affiliate marketing, because it means there is money to be made there.

If you’re looking for a good way to start in affiliate marketing, or are an affiliate marketing veteran and looking to expand your business: it might very well be that Pinterest is your place to be. When you compare Pinterest with other social media platforms like Instagram or even Youtube, you can see they are already being explored and monetised by thousands of affiliate marketers.

In this article, you’ll discover what Pinterest affiliate marketing is and how you can use it to build your own affiliate marketing income. Let’s go!

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

• What is Pinterest affiliate marketing
• The Benefits of Pinterest affiliate marketing
• How to get started with Pinterest affiliate marketing
• Tips for Pinterest affiliate marketing campaigns
• Examples of affiliate marketing on Pinterest
• Conclusion: is affiliate marketing on Pinterest for you?

What is Pinterest affiliate marketing and how does it work?

Pinterest affiliate marketing is exactly what the name suggests: it’s affiliate marketing, using Pinterest as the platform to promote your affiliate links. The ultimate goal is the same as in all types of affiliate marketing: getting people to click on your links and earning a commission when they take a certain action (like buying a product) on the platform you’re referring them to.

The technicalities are quite the same as with other forms of affiliate marketing. You sign up to an affiliate network or program, generate affiliate links to interesting products or services you wish to promote, and share those links in content you put out.

With Pinterest affiliate marketing, you’ll simply do the sharing in content that you publish on Pinterest.

Every day, millions of people use Pinterest to browse for ideas or inspiration. This makes it an excellent platform to share content that ties in to those needs and promote affiliate deals that fit in with the interest of your audience. The thing is: most affiliates focus on platforms like their own website or YouTube, but don’t leverage this wonderful pool of affiliate potential.

 

Frequently asked questions about Pinterest affiliate marketing

Is affiliate marketing worth it on Pinterest?

Affiliate marketing is worth it on Pinterest for a couple of reasons. First of all: Pinterest is relatively underused as a channel by affiliate marketers. This means that you’ll find relatively low competition for yourself when trying to build your affiliate audience on Pinterest. For marketing visual and inspiration focussed products, Pinterest is definitely worth it.

Can you post affiliate links on Pinterest?

You can post affiliate links on Pinterest by adding them to the description of an image (the “pin”) when adding the said picture to a board. Remember to disclose that it is a sponsored link. Another, less direct way is by using pins to drive traffic to your own website or channel and posting your affiliate links there.

How do you promote affiliate links on Pinterest?

Promoting affiliate links on Pinterest is done by creating boards with visuals (pins) to inspire and engage your desired audience. You can then add affiliate links to the pins you’re making or refer your followers to your own website for more information. On the website they can then find the products or services you’re promoting.

The benefits of Pinterest affiliate marketing:

It’s not just the lack of competition and the number of visitors that make Pinterest an excellent affiliate marketing platform. We all know the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words”, right? Well, in the digital era, that’s perhaps more true than ever. People have such short attention spans, that it’s almost impossible to catch their attention with written affiliate articles. Pictures, however, stand out and are easier to browse. This is why so many people use Pinterest when looking for inspiration for new clothes, a new colour to put on their wall, or the latest trends for their home office.

This means that people go to Pinterest, looking to spend money. What’s more: they seem to have a deeper wallet than users of other social media channels.

Pinterest users are very active shoppers. According to a study done by Shopify, Pinterest users spend an average of $140 per order compared to Facebook users who only spend around $100. Not only that, but they’re also more likely to purchase high-ticket items like electronics and designer clothing.

 

How to get started with Pinterest affiliate marketing?

Getting started with Pinterest affiliate marketing is pretty straight forward. You’ll need to make an account, of course. Then you’ll have the possibility of creating “pins”, which is the name of posts on Pinterest.

These pins will be the centre of your affiliate marketing journey on Pinterest. You’ll group your pins on “boards”, which are collections of visuals around a certain topic.

After you’ve set up your profile, search for keywords related to your product or niche using Pinterest’s search bar located at the top of the page. For example, if you sell hair products, search for keywords like “natural hair” or “hair care.”

It’s important to choose a good niche for you to target with your Pinterest affiliate marketing efforts. What are the types of “pins” that your ideal audience will be searching for? How can you add something new to the platform, connecting to your audience’s wishes? Don’t just go throwing pictures at your boards without a plan, but think about how you are going to attract the attention of your audience.

Create a board that focuses on the type of images that are related to your product. For instance, if you have an online shop selling makeup brushes, you might create boards with names like “makeup brushes,” “makeup brush set,” and “makeup brush reviews.”

Now that you have a board, it’s time to find images that relate to your product. You can do this by going through the suggested boards on the right hand side of the page or searching for keywords in the search bar. Once you’ve found an image, click on the “Pin it” button. This will take you to a new page where you can edit the pin’s name and choose your board before you share the pin with your followers.

Attracting an audience to your boards

Now that your pins are all set up, make sure you’ll reach your target audience by searching for keywords related to your product and adding them to your pins. Just like you would go about affiliate marketing with SEO by finding out what keywords your target audience is typing into the search bar and tailoring your content to those searches.

A good start is taking a look at people that are focussing on the same products as you are. For example, if you’re selling make-up brushes, take a look at boards that also publish content surrounding make-up and attachments to find out what keywords they are focussing on.

When you find a user that might be interested in your products, click on their profile and check out the boards they’ve created. If there’s a board with images that are relevant to your product, repin those images to your boards.

 

Some final tips on starting up

Make sure that your profile is set up as a business/company so that the pins you’re sharing will have clickable links. Pinterest has recently made it possible for users to add clickable links and hashtags to their pins and boards. If you want people on Facebook to be able to click on your pins to go to the site where they can buy your product, set up a business account for your Pinterest account.

Pinterest uses affiliate marketing through their “rich pins” feature. Rich pins look like regular pins but contain extra information including price and a purchase button. Click here for more information. If you want to learn how to implement Rich Pins on your website, click here for more information.

You can also check out this tutorial guide for beginners from Surfside PPC that should help you get started with Pinterest affiliate marketing!

 

Tips for creating successful Pinterest affiliate marketing campaigns:

Here are some basic pointers for getting started with Pinterest affiliate marketing in the right way:

• Create boards that align with your blog’s audience. If you also have a blog, you might use Pinterest as a means to attract additional traffic to then send on to your best articles.
• Use keywords in the board titles and pin descriptions. This will boost your chances of being found when someone is looking for content like you’ve created.
• Use descriptive, long tail keywords in your descriptions. Just as with “regular” SEO, the more precise you are in the targeting of your keywords, the higher your chances that people will find your content.
• Pin products you like, but don’t go overboard. There should be a healthy balance between content and products, otherwise your boards will become too spammy and put off visitors.

And here are some things to avoid:

• Don’t use too many hashtags. Pinterest has recently started cracking down on the number of hashtags that you can use in one pin, so if you want to use hashtags, stick to a maximum of three. Don’t over optimise and don’t make your content spammy!
• Don’t try to market all your products in one pin. Don’t try to cram every affiliate link you’re promoting in the description of all your pins. You don’t have to put in every hairbrush every time you post a picture of a brush. Keep each pin focused on one product or link. A good tactic is to link on to an article on your blog where you review the best of said product, for example: a link to an article about the 9 best hair brushes in 2023.
• Don’t pin too many irrelevant images. Just as with any affiliate marketing channel, it all comes down to trust. If your profile or boards are filled with irrelevant images, no one will trust you enough to click on them or follow you, and you won’t make a commission.
• Don’t use too many affiliate links. The same goes for the number of links you’ll put in a description. If your content feels too spammy, people will soon lose interest and you won’t build up a following of people that are interested in what you have to offer.

Examples of affiliate marketing on Pinterest

According to Pinterest, 463 million people use Pinterest monthly and 45% of people in the US with a household income over $100K are on Pinterest.

But besides the popularity and demographics of Pinterest, publishing pins (both images and video pins) is a great way to drive free organic traffic to a new site. Many affiliate marketers and bloggers have realized that they do not have to wait up to nine months for decent traffic from Google and can get faster results using Pinterest.

Here are some examples of successful marketers who are killing it by getting traffic from Pinterest:

Mommy On Purpose

MommyOnPurpose.com was started in early 2016 by full-time blogger and stay-at-home mom Carly.

Carly started pinning in May 2016, and by the end of August 2016, she was working with AdThrive – one of the top ad networks that require a site to have at least 100k page views per month to be accepted.

“I use Pinterest to get 100K+ page views per month to my blog – with manual pinning!” 

– Carly

She stopped publishing income reports in January 2017, but here are her income figures for August to December 2016, thanks to traffic from Pinterest:

Aug’16 – $483.31

Sep’16 – $3,365.39

Oct’16 – $5,035.17

Nov’16 – $4,768.47

Dec’16 – $5,151.57

Anastasia Blogger

Anastasia tried for at least six months after starting her blog to get traffic from Google but could not get any traction. She decided to switch her focus to Pinterest, and by the end of the 10th month, Pinterest traffic enabled her to quit her 9 to 5 job. 

“I started my blog on Feb 2017, and in about 10 months I was able to quit my day job to become a full-time blogger. Now I get over 300,000 pageviews/mo to my blog! Pinterest drives 90% of all traffic to my blog.”

– Anastasia

Twins Mommy

Elna founded TwinsMommy.com to help moms make money blogging.

Like many bloggers and affiliate marketers, Elna struggled to grow her blog traffic. However, when she started using Pinterest, her traffic increased from 4,000 pageviews a month to over 60K pageviews monthly.

And it did not stop at 60K. The blog currently gets over 100,000 pageviews monthly, and has 55,000+ Pinterest followers.

Whether you have a new blog that gets very little traffic from Google or want to add a new traffic source, as shown in the above examples, Pinterest traffic can significantly boost your overall traffic and affiliate income. And it can help you get into high-ticket affiliate programs or premium ad networks faster.

Conclusion: is affiliate marketing on Pinterest for you?

Pinterest is certainly one of the under-utilised channels when it comes to affiliate marketing. This means that there are chances there for anyone who’s new to affiliate marketing, or looking to expand their existing affiliate business.

The most important factor in whether or not your Pinterest affiliate endeavors will be a success, is focus. You’ve got to choose the right niche, target audience, and keywords and content to target said audience.

This brings us to perhaps the most important question you’ve got to ask yourself when considering starting with Pinterest affiliate marketing. How visual is your topic? Since Pinterest is such a visual platform, it can cover a lot of topics, but it’s a better fit for some topics than others.

You’ll probably see how it would be easier to market furniture on Pinterest than legal services.

On the other hand: the competition for furniture is probably huge, while that for legal services might be much lower. Even though it can be a lucrative affiliate market that is hard to get into with an affiliate website.

It all comes down to your ideas and creativity. If you feel like you have a great idea of marketing legal services via Pinterest, it might just be your holy grail of building your affiliate marketing business.