Since then, all the way to some day in 2016, Pinterest made a big decision again, announcing that they allowed affiliate or sponsorship links for its affiliate marketers. The specific reason why they made up their mind back supporting affiliate marketers is unknown, but it seems anyhow it’s a sweet news for affiliate marketers and online earners.
Time has passed by to now in 2018, it feels like it’s somewhat late talking over the topic because it doesn’t seem a very fresh news any longer, but today I just decided to write this post “Make Money With Pinterest” for some people who haven’t kept up-to-date with the change of Pinterest’s policy over affiliate link distribution and also, who want to know in details how to make money with Pinterest along with affiliate marketing!
What’s Pinterest?!
Make Money With Pinterest!
Pinterest is a visual search engine and also a social platform that 200 millions monthly active users use on a hobby basis or for marketing and business branding purposes.
What distinguishes Pinterest from all other social media platforms would be, first of all, its image based search engine feature and the curation function where each Pinterest user’s contents are displayed, shared and interacted with other Pinterest users.
Specially, all posts in Pinterest, usually called “Pins” as the Pinterest term are made of visualized graphics (images or infographics etc ) or videos or GIF files that are the most favorable and optimized forms for showcasing visually appealing products and stuff like fashion, food, crafts or arts etc. That being said, recently it’s not limited only with those niches, but it starts being diversified of the popular range of niches in Pinterest, such as digital products or financial or real estate or whatever people like to see, show and share with other 200 millions people in the giant community!
Most of the contents pinned on Pinterest are also compatibly searchable from Google or other major search engines. And that helpfully drives a huge more traffic from the other sources outside the social platform. It’s firmly proven that Pinterest is an awesome traffic source for online marketers. It plays a greatly important role in achieving a huge volume of online traffic and catching lots of eyeballs, getting a great number of exposures!
To stress it more, it’s a really loved social platform by online marketers as well as hobbyists, who are working on branding and promoting commercial products or are engaged in affiliate marketing for affiliate commissions. What they love the most about the social platform is high quality free traffic (Mostly from The U.S) and the high conversion rates that Pinterest favors their marketers to make money online. And this is something we’re going to talk about today! – “How To Make Money With Pinterest Pinning with Affiliate Links”.
How To Make Money With Pinterest, Just Pinning!
Make Money With Pinterest!
As briefly mentioned, our method to make money online is a Pinterest account coupled with affiliate products. And.. no pretty much more!
Like you all know now, Pinterest’s now allowing direct affiliate link insertion in the social platform and we don’t need a blog or any other web pages just in order for affiliate link placement. So it basically means you don’t really need your website or blog to start out affiliate marketing on Pinterest. I know building a website is a lot of jobs and care. It’s even really a long and tedious way to go. And I do know how great it is of being able to do affiliate marketing and make money without a website! Well especially for real naked beginners!
So get to the point, How we make money with Pinterest?
Well, like you might guess what I’m gonna say if you ever experienced in affiliate marketing, we’re going to promote affiliate products of your choice. Through where?! “Pinterest” which I bet has the highest possibility to make good money with affiliate marketing, better than anywhere else across all other social sites or traffic sources! (Especially if you do affiliate marketing without your own blog or website.)
The whole process of this and this “make money with Pinterest method” is so simple! Honestly, no many words needed to explain the whole thing.
It’s just simply pinning on Pinterest, with your affiliate links that you choose to promote, and the giant community of Pinterest or even people outside of Pinterest, just using Google image search would find your pins. And then they probably click on your affiliate links when they get interested, then for few of them are finally reaching the final spot of purchasing what you promote through your affiliate links.
Then you will get the agreed percentage of commission from the vendors (Original providers that sell the products) and this is actually a very simple way to make money using affiliate links and Pinterest.
So that’s it! The brief process for the whole is like so. However, arming yourself with every detail in your knowledge and properly know about how to prepare in each segment section is what you have to deal with now! And that will lead you to finally grabbing real-life hard cash, not a waste of time and energy!
So let’s break down each step you should know right below! Scroll down!
Step By Step Guide To Make Money With Pinterest
1. Picking Up A Niche
Make Money With Pinterest!
Choosing a specific niche(s) is the first step you should make sure to prepare!
This is because people like it more when they see something fully dedicated to one certain thing. That makes it look like it’s more professional and deeper in expertise, and most importantly, that leads to higher engagement of the audience. (more views, more clicks, more sales and higher revenue after all!) It’s also easier to build a fan base (Audience) devoted for one specific niche rather than all messed around.
There’re probably lots of niches you can choose from. Like fashion and clothing, electronics, travel and tourism, computer, insurance, finance, investment and a lot more and huger!
You can just promptly or spontaneously choose what you feel like though,
if you want yourself more careful to pick the best out for you you should make sure taking this into account:
Think about it carefully! I know you will find what you love to promote!
2. Choosing Affiliate Products
Make Money With Pinterest!
If you’re done picking up your niche you will be dedicated to, then the next step is…
Choosing affiliate products under the niche!
There’re many ways to find affiliate deals though, the most general way how people usually search for them is either using affiliate networks or visiting certain companies’ websites on your mind to apply to be an affiliate marketer or ambassador.
For beginners, its more recommended to use affiliate networks because affiliate network sites are places where hundreds and thousands info of affiliate offers are provided comprehensively in one place. So it’s a whole lot faster to find appropriate deals that fit your niche and audience.
3. Making Pinterest Account
Make Money With Pinterest!
Visit pinterest.com and create your account there.
If possible, it’s preferable to create a business account because it gives you a few more of benefits, such as in-depth account analytics provided.
Even if you already created an individual account there previously, it’s no worries that you can convert it into a business account anytime from the account settings.
4. Participating In Group Boards
Make Money With Pinterest!
This is the core key to making money with Pinterest!!
Perhaps few years ago, back around in 2015 or so. I knew nothing about Pinterest and how to carry out online marketing schemes using the social platform.
Just created an individual account there and made few boards that displayed my customized T-Shirt graphics that I worked on at that time.
I made a few hundreds pins with my graphic works and t-shirt lines. Just sat down and waited for people to come and knock on the door to see my pins by themselves. I thought it would work great and every situation would come just as favorable without me doing anything. Just thinking back now, I was a big fat real naked beginner in the entire social media marketing as well as Pinterest.
A few months passed anyways… The result…? It was just awful!
I just got a few hundreds monthly views and only 1 average engagement which is a too awful performance. It didn’t help at all to sell a single piece of T-shirts(graphics) during the era of darkness.
I almost gave up on Pinterest and left off from it, my account there was almost abandoned for a while.
A couple of years passed since then, and I got a new business and totally a new niche. What’s that? That’s where you’re staying now reading this post I wrote! Yeah this blog, “Live Money Online”. That’s it.
Actually until then, my impression on Pinterest was too bad. I simply thought Pinterest couldn’t help so much to drive my new business forward just as it went with my previous business. But on the other hand, I was like “but at least it wouldn’t hurt it, just keeping an account there and pin it just from time to time?!”
I made a new account for the new fresh start for this blog. Time passed by and I got back to Pinterest to check things out. Then I saw that it got no much difference from how it went with my old Pinterest account with just brutally low engagement at all.
Then One day, not too later since then, I got an interesting proposal from a person in Pinterest to participate in a group board of what seems closely related to my niche.
I thought “Why not? I have nothing to lose just trying it out!”. Then I instantly got in the group and gave it a try posting some of my pins that I was confident to show people in there..
And then? You know what had happened?
BOOM!! BOOM!! BOOOOOOM!!
It was booming like a skyrocket! Lots of followers of the group viewed the pins and clicked on the links directing them in to this blog, it was like more than 100 daily visitors from the U.S since the majority Pinterest users are from The United States, tons of people visited my blog and shared my contents. And that high engagement rate also helped my pins rank high on Pinterest search engine and Google which constantly brings a lot of visitors for a longer period of time!
I was like “Gotcha!! That’s it! That’s the secret how to roll in and make it boom in Pinterest!”.
Since my first tiny success on Pinterest, that really motivated me to join in a lot more group boards with many followers in order to win more engagements and get this blog on a fast roll!!! I got 5 more big group boards and my build-up on Pinterest is still going on now.
Oh Wait, Look here! There’s a note here that you have to know!
You might be still confused how it works out for gaining good substantial engagements on Pinterest, a little different from other social sites like Facebook and Twitter.
In Facebook or most other types of social media, they tend to run the way like “The more followers you get, the more engagements you win”.
So in those social sites, getting followers or fans for your page is more than essential to scale it up. And that’s a common algorithm applied for the most of social sites.
That being said, Pinterest is uniquely different from them and that traditional way of typical social media places! In Pinterest, how many followers you get on your personal boards is not important as other social media. Not really! Rather, it’s like 100 times more important that how many group boards with a large following base you have joined in!
That means in other words, you don’t have to spend a big portion of your precious time and energy, or even money for some cases, on growing your audience when it comes about Pinterest. It’s simply because starting to work in group boards there as a contributor sharing your pins with the group boards followers means you’re given a massive crowd of audience at once!
Their followers are yours, your followers are theirs within the board. In short, it’s like a killer time-saver especially for beginners that are usually bound to go through some hard time in the beginning to build up a following base on other social sites. It’s just mathematically possible that you win 10,000 viewers a day, 100,000 viewers a day in Pinterest as long as you are approved into big group boards with many followers.
5. How To Participate In Pinterest Group Boards
Make Money With Pinterest!
So let’s go join in good group boards! Excited?! Yeah!
Then the first question popped out is “how?”. How do we find good group boards and apply to be a contributor?
I will explain all about the details right here. It should be very easy for anyone to follow!
A. First Method to Find Group Boards- “Just Search On Pinterest”
You will find the Pinterest search tap in the header that looks like a magnifier. Then type your search terms of what are relating to your niche. I just put some words as an example, “make money online” which is one of my niche phrases. And I could see more than thousands of boards in a mix with personal boards and group boards.
Then how do we proceed it next?! overwhelmed? No worries! I will explain how to distinguish group boards from personal boards, which is so simple!
Have a look at the image up there and get a focus on the number displays on each board. Each board has a different number of pins like some are around a couple hundreds, other some are like few thousands. Among all them, you would notice some outstanding number indications like more than 10k pins above! (like the boards I’ve put red rectangle marks on!)
Yeah most likely they’re group boards! Group boards usually have a high number of pins due to their many contributors working altogether for the boards, so a massive number of updates and pins are published every each hour and each day thus it gets a lot of pins after all. Makes sense?
Hence, when you want to find group boards by searching on Pinterest directly, the number displays of pins are the best and also very simple clues that they are likely group boards.
B. Second Method to Find Group Boards – “Use Pinterest Group Search Tools”
There’s another way to find Pinterest group boards just so easily but more technically. That’s what?
Using Pinterest group search tools!
Few tools known are around the internet, but the best one I guess is PinGroupie.
PinGroupie is a Pinterest group board directory that helps you find a list of all the groups on your search. It provides all necessary info to figure out good group boards like the number of followers, pins and collaborators on each group.
It’s a handy tool by which you can easily discover whatever group boards you want to find like in few seconds. What’s more, it’s just for free. So feel free to use it
C. How To Join In Pinterest Group Boards
There’s no other way than just privately contacting the group board owners to send you an invite into the group.
As for me, how I join in group boards is usually, first visiting the group boards that I’m interested to participate in. Then look up the board description where the group owner puts a word on for new contributor applicants.
Most of them (Group board owners) have a particular instruction of how to get invited for the group as the SS above, usually possible to join in by emailing them or just sometimes filling in an application form or having done a little task required to be qualified for entering the group. (If what they require you to do to enter their groups is not too much, just favor them a little! Once you’re qualified to join in a group board, you would benefit from it much much more than what you just did for them!)
If there’s no specific instruction seen on the description area, then message the owner or leave a comment on his/her own pins, you might hear back from them!
One more tip over here on how to tell who’s the board leader(owner) just in case you’d have to contact them privately. Look up the image down here!
Focus on the right hand side beside the group board name! You’d see few of round shapes. That means it’s contributors’ accounts that work on the group and the first account in the very left is always the group owner’s Pinterest account like the red rectangle marked there.
Then it’s all enough for you to proceed the rest jobs! Come and say hi! And express how willing you are to work hard on the boards as a contributor! Good luck!
6. Start Pinning With Your Affiliate Links!
Make Money With Pinterest!
If you safely landed on some group boards to promote your affiliate links to the audiences, then most of the preparation is done!
But just the last step, shooting out your pins! Just few minutes away to start making money right?!
At this point, you’ve probably got some affiliate products (and links) in place to promote or at least several of them in your mind. Then get the link(s) in on your pins. How simple?!
I wish that’d be that simple though… There’s one more crucial process left awaiting you! What would be?
Yeah, you gotta make a pin graphic. The more appealing, fascinating graphics or attention-grabbing styles, the whole lot better since Pinterest is visual search engine! Everything in Pinterest is run by visuality! (And the majority of users there are women and no wonder women are more sensible with that, right?! )
I know, I know.. You’d feel lost around this! If you ever haven’t done any graphic things before! As for me? I ain’t good at that as well! But I still make beautiful graphics! How?
Just using Canva.com . It’s a beginner friendly graphic tool which is for free in its freemium version. You can create any type of graphics, posters, infographics not only for Pinterest, but also for Facebook cover photo, twitter, blogs, website, digital advertising materials and hundreds more other design-related purposes flexibly.
Once again, it’s basically a drag & drop style easy graphic maker, you’d become an expert at designing with the handy tool after the few of learning curves just in the beginning.
P.S: If you want to see some examples of my graphic works then visit my Pinterest page and feel free to look around! 80% of pins I have there were created by me!
Live Money Online Pinterest Page! If you got any question relating to graphic jobs just leave a comment on this post I will share with you everything I know!!Then almost done and ready to make money with Pinterest!
Always keep in mind that the graphics should be tidy and catchy and straightforward or informative like infographics, not go too much like overly flashy or loud that might make it look like a cheapie or too light!
One more tip! In terms of the good sizes of pins in Pinterest, it’s always vertically long and skinny post sizes that are generally used for infographics. Personally I prefer 800px * 2,000px or stuff like that, for your consideration!
Alright! Everything seems done! Then go post your pin with your terrific graphic! Of course never to forget attaching your affiliate link on it!
It’s then one more simple job left to complete your awesome pin. “Pin Description”
Make sure filling in the pin description with the focus keywords you want to reach out for to your potential audience, never forget Pinterest is a kinda search engine like Google that gets you traffic all the time by the search terms you put on your pins! So Pinterest SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a badly important factor you have to make sure to get consistent traffic to your pins and affiliate links!
Even if it’s for the same affiliate link, the outcome of performance may vary depending on how appealing your pins look. So try to make multiple pins with different graphics for a particular affiliate link and compare them to see which works the best. And never stop a try and try and try in your experiment. All your hard work will reward you double or triple in the near future!
Personally I like promoting web hosting services or online marketing tools since they all are so lucrative commissions given! Like per single shared hosting sale I make, it’s around $100 commission rewarded for me. Isn’t it great? Hosting server affiliate marketing can also work great on Pinterest with your pins that may contain awesome graphics or badass informative infographic. (e.g: hosting server speed comparison or price comparison or case studies of performances on different hosting firms etc)
The potential is unlimited. The amount of money you would earn out of this method is so unlimited too up to your ability. I just hope you’ll find your best affiliate products you sell the best and obtain a great sense of poster design and Pinterest marketing techniques so you’ll finally reach there!
Let’s make money with Pinterest together! I mean “Make Good Money”!!
Cheers!!