Making Affiliate Money with Pinterest
Episode #10 of the course How to grow your business with Pinterest by Sydney Wyatt
Here we are at the end!
Thank you for joining me over the last nine lessons. I really hope you’ve learned some great strategies and have already begun to see the results on your own Pinterest account.
In today’s lesson—our final one together!—we’re going to talk about that ka-ching: affiliate marketing.
If you’ve never worked with affiliate marketing before, here’s a quick rundown:
Affiliate marketing comes down to promoting someone else’s product and getting a cut of any sale that goes through your unique referral link. There are many ways to do affiliate marketing; I personally only recommend products that I love and use in my business. That said, others have built entire million-dollar (!) businesses on JUST affiliate products.
Pinterest just so happens to be a playground for creative affiliate promotions.
Back in the day, affiliate marketing on Pinterest was against their terms of service—mostly because they hadn’t yet figured out how to combat the bad affiliate spam. In 2016, they began allowing affiliate links back on the site: here’s the official announcement if you missed it!
There really is a never-ending list of affiliate programs you can use with Pinterest:
• Affiliate programs like Amazon.com Associates, Reward Style, Share-a-sale, etc.
• Tools you personally use, like FreshBooks, Google for Business, etc.
• Other people’s products, like e-books, e-courses, etc.
• Services you use outside your business, like BarkBox, Visa, etc.
Although every affiliate program is different, there are generally two types of payment you’ll receive for every person who signs up through your link:
• Cold, hard cash
• A free month of the service
So, that’s the basics of affiliate marketing. Now, how do you actually make a living from it on Pinterest?
Here are my two favorite (tried-and-tested!) ways:
Product boards. You’ve probably encountered these by now, even if you didn’t realize it at the time. These boards are made up of product-only links, and usually each pin is just the product itself on a white background. When a Pinner sees something they like, they click through to the product page to buy.
Affiliate posts. These come under many forms: recommendations, tutorials, resource pages, etc. In this situation, you’d be writing a full-length post and publishing it to your blog. Within that post, you’d include your referral link to whatever product you’re talking about. Pinners find your post, read your content, and click through to the product you’re recommending.
Neither of these options are better than the other; it really comes down to what kind of affiliate marketing you want to do and what your readers are interested in buying! Fashion bloggers may have better results with product boards, while DIYers or B2B entrepreneurs will have better results with affiliate posts.
It’s time to wrap it up already!
Through the last 10 lessons, you’ve gone from a Pinterest beginner to a seasoned pro. You now know where to find great content, how to create Pinterest-optimized content, and how to leverage both of those things into site traffic and affiliate sales.
You got this.
Thanks for a great 10 days, and good luck with Pinterest, you powerhouse!
Sydney
I built my tried-and-true Pinterest strategies into a free, easy-to-follow checklist—and I’m only offering it to my Highbrow students!
Recommended book
Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content by Ann Handley
Share with friends