Like any other social media freak, Pinterest is probably your go-to platform for ideas or inspiration for your favorite pastime or projects. You could also be one of those who are into inspiring others. What if we told you that businesses use Pinterest for marketing purposes as well?
Besides being a social networking platform, Pinterest is also a powerful search engine, and promotional tool brands use to run marketing campaigns. Businesses are aware that many people use the Pinterest search feature to look for specific subjects. That’s why many brands have started using affiliate marketing on Pinterest. Affiliate marketers also use the platform to feature their affiliate website or link their Pinterest posts directly to their affiliate offers.
Pinterest affiliate marketing has taken the world by storm over the past few years. However, it is not that simple to use Pinterest affiliate marketing to benefit your business to its full potential without considering a few crucial factors. Affiliate marketing on Pinterest is a way to make money on Pinterest from the comfort of your own home. But do not forget that everything takes either time, effort, money, or all three!
First and foremost, you need to know Pinterest affiliate marketing so let us look at that.
What is Pinterest Affiliate Marketing?
Pinterest affiliate marketing is the act of using Pinterest as an intermediate source between you and your customer to sell your products. This is done by adding a link to your website or social media profile to boards and pins on Pinterest. This way, anyone who searches for anything will be directed to your page in some way or another. Thus, increasing traffic on your page. In essence, affiliate marketing on Pinterest is the act of inserting a subtle stream for traffic onto your site. Hence, adding a comparatively rare marketing channel to your marketing campaigns.
Image taken from Niche Pursuites
If you have been using different platforms for social media marketing, you might wonder how Pinterest affiliate marketing is different from promoting your products on Instagram. On Instagram, the primary way of marketing a product is by sharing your product photos.
On the other hand, Pinterest saves content uploaded by other Pinterest users. That’s why Pinterest is a more suitable place for affiliate marketing, whereby you take the pictures uploaded by the brands that you're an affiliate of and share them on your Pinterest profile. If you can get a large number of engagement metrics on your shared content, you’ll be able to make sales and earn a commission on every sale.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
If you have a business account on Pinterest, you can do Pinterest affiliate marketing even more effectively. Business accounts allow you to run Pinterest Ads. These are a form of native advertising that directs those who click on the ads to your specified landing page.
8 Ways to Effectively Use Pinterest Affiliate Marketing
Listed below, you will find our top picks for ways to make money on Pinterest.
1. Use Multiple Pins
One of the best things about Pinterest affiliate marketing is that there really is no limit. This is your queue to refrain from acting stingy and use multiple pins for the same post. Experiment in all ways that come to mind, like using pins of words directly linked to your topic and related words. For example, suppose you want to redirect the audience to a page through the use of Pinterest affiliate marketing. In that case, you can add pins of words like ‘marketing’ or words like ‘aesthetics’ as it often comes up when someone is talking about Pinterest.
2. Utilize the Rich Pins Feature
Rich pins are an advanced version of regular pins. They provide the audience more information than usual regarding the post they are viewing. This can come in handy when using the platform for Pinterest affiliate marketing because it has higher chances of grabbing the viewer’s interest Descriptions added to images will always give them a better idea of the usefulness of the product rather than the image alone.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
3. Enter Group Boards
It is essential to actively use group boards to help you open up your posts and pins to the group members’ audiences, in addition to your own audience. Common sense will multiply the benefits you gain from affiliate marketing on Pinterest because chances of finding potentially interested customers will be boosted. Furthermore, through networking, you will find more customers as well.
4. Build an Emailing List
The thing about the Pinterest platform is that people do not usually visit the site with hopes of making a purchase. They just visit it to plan their distant desires or future buys. So, it often becomes difficult to get Pinterest users interested enough in your product to buy it with just one view or click. That is why follow-ups hold great significance in Pinterest affiliate marketing. These follow-ups can occur if you place a prominent email-list button on your site to redirect your audience using Pinterest affiliate marketing techniques.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
5. Focus on Quality of Visuals
At the end of the day, Pinterest is all about the visual appeal of the posts. Visual appeal makes people visit the site, which separates the Pinterest platform from others. So naturally, if you want to be successful in Pinterest affiliate marketing, the visuals in the posts you add pins need to stand out and be worthy of a second look by whoever is viewing them. The rest of your tactics regarding how to use Pinterest affiliate marketing gain you benefits.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
6. Frequently Use Infographics
Infographics are the entire package. They are visually appealing, include valuable information in the image or post, and are easy to read and understand. A deadly package when it comes to Pinterest affiliate marketing. Do not let this tool go to waste, and make sure to utilize it as much as possible per your business needs. When your audience realizes that you are willing to aid their convenience, they will be more inclined to return the favor and take a better look at whatever site you wish to redirect them to.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
7. Partner Up with Third-Party Tools
Everybody needs a little extra help to excel in whatever they are trying to achieve. Similarly, if you want to make money on Pinterest, you will have to use reliable third-party tools to gather the optimal keywords regarding the niche of your business. Do not be hasty in figuring out which tool(s) will be the best fit according to your habits and needs. Then make sure to use them in a way that can help you find large volumes of valuable keywords to aid your Pinterest affiliate marketing journey.
8. Stay Clear of Link Cloaking
This is an important factor regarding optimizing your Pinterest affiliate marketing results. However, it is more of a warning on what not to do instead of what you should be doing. Link cloaking is the act of disguising your affiliate links or making them shorter by hiding the actual affiliate ID. Instead, it appears like a shorter and random set of characters. This way, users remain unaware of the site they are being redirected to or how much commission they will get from their clicks. This makes your affiliate activity shady and untrustworthy, reducing the chances of viewers wanting to click on your links or revisiting your site later on.
Bonus Tip
An essential aspect of conducting digital marketing is integrating your preferred platform with other marketing channels to promote your content. In this case, when you do Pinterest affiliate marketing, of course, your Pinterest posts will direct the users to your website. But what about driving traffic the other way round?
You also need a mechanism that brings traffic from your website to your Pinterest content. This can easily be done by adding a Pinterest icon on the footer or another dedicated section of your homepage.
If your website is built on a user-friendly web development platform, this is just a piece of cake to do and won’t require you to change your site’s programming or rewrite any code. On Strikingly, we provide our users with tons of features that help them build, run and integrate their marketing campaigns across all the digital platforms that they use to attract traffic.
These feature-rich and easy-to-use characteristics of Strikingly are the reason behind the exponential growth of our website building platform over the past couple of years.
