Just like many social media platforms, Pinterest is highly recommended for ideas and experiences of your history or projects. You can also be one of those people who try to inspire others. What if we tell you that many organizations use Pinterest for marketing purposes?
Apart from being a social media platform, Pinterest is a fantastic search engine and promotional tool brands utilize to conduct marketing campaigns. Businesses have understood that many people use Pinterest to search for different things. As a result, many brands have started doing affiliate marketing on Pinterest. Marketers use Pinterest to showcase their affiliate links or link their posts to their affiliate offers.
Pinterest affiliate marketing has benefitted numerous businesses worldwide in the past few years. Although you can make money on Pinterest from the comfort of your home, you must know it takes time, investment, and effort.
What is Pinterest Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing on Pinterest is the act of using Pinterest as an intermediate source between yourself and your customers. The primary objective of this marketing approach is to sell products to customers. You can execute this approach by adding a link to your website or social media profile to boards and pins on the platform. As a result, anyone who searches for something will be directed toward your page in some way, which positively impacts your website traffic. Pinterest affiliate marketing is a way of adding subtle streams to increase traffic on your website.
If you are using different platforms for social media marketing, you may wonder why Pinterest is different from others when promoting your products and services. If we look at Instagram, the basic way of promoting your products is by sharing product photos.
Image taken from Pinterest
On the other hand, Pinterest can save uploaded content from other Pinterest users. This is why affiliate marketing on Pinterest is a bold move, as you take the screenshots uploaded by the brands to show that you are an affiliate before sharing them on your Pinterest profile. If you can get a vast number of engagement metrics on your shared content, you will make more online sales and earn a huge commission upon every sale.
Image taken from Pinterest
If you have a business account on Pinterest, you can efficiently conduct affiliate marketing on this platform. Business accounts help you to run and organize ads. These kinds of native advertising direct people who click on your ads and end up on your specified landing page.
How to Use Pinterest Affiliate Marketing?
1) Rules of Pinterest Affiliate Marketing
The best thing about Pinterest is that all of its content is evergreen. You can invest time in doing the work upfront, and you will get your desired results with time. Eventually, you will end up with a stream of new website visitors and affiliate income.
R.J. Weiss, founder of The Ways to Wealth, says there is a huge difference between Pinterest and the rest of the social media platforms. As there needs to be constant content production to gain attraction, they have pins on Pinterest from years ago that are still generating traffic and affiliate income.
This is only possible if you understand the rules of Pinterest affiliate marketing. Make sure you familiarize yourself with all the rules of affiliate marketing on Pinterest below:
- Zero cloaking: Many marketers use redirection tools to convert their affiliate links into bit.ly. According to Pinterest's community guidelines, pinners must anticipate where your links will take them.
- Disclose affiliate links: Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has imposed strict rules on disclosing affiliate links. You can label your affiliate content as “labeled” or “sponsored” in the pin description and on the landing page you are directing people to.
- Only use one Pinterest account: Some marketers try to boost their game by pinning content from various accounts. As a marketing person, you should never coordinate with other people to manipulate the Pinterest platform
2) Create Numerous Pins Per Post
It is unlikely that Pinterest users will interact with only one type of pin. You can go through the search results of your industry. You will find a wide range of visual content, from black and white images to colorful graphics.
There is no limit on the number of affiliate pins you can build on a single piece of content. The aim is to build a high-quality graphic board that will stand out from the rest of the competitors. You can use DIY tools, such as Canva, and check out the different pin templates, such as:
- Vertical and horizontal images
- Colored against black and white photos
- Stock imagery and graphics
- Text-heavy and visual
3) Advanced Pin Scheduling
As a marketing person, you can ditch the mental reminder by scheduling new pins in advance. Tools, such as Later and Tailwind, can assist you in cases like these. You can set a custom schedule and add new content. Once the time arrives, it will automatically get pinned to your board.
The best thing about scheduling pins in advance is that it increases the chance of reaching users when they are online. Like most social media platforms, Pinterest shows the newest content on the user's feed. The new content can be seen at 7 am by some users and 5 pm by others.
If you schedule content at various times during the day, you will increase reach and brand awareness by appearing in the feed when your viewers are active.
4) Enable Rich Pins
Rich pins are much more powerful than the standard images you see on Pinterest. They show extra information in the pin description, demanding more attention from the audience. Consequently, they help you in driving more traffic through Pinterest affiliate marketing. You can enable rich pins for the following types of content:
- Products: Display updated pricing and availability in your rich pin
- Recipes: Display the cooking schedule, rating, ingredients, and serving sizes in your rich pin
- Articles: Display the headings, description, and author name in your rich pin
The process of enabling rich pins can be complicated. However, the good news is that you only need to do it once. By going through the following steps, you can make sure that all your future pins are rich (if they fall in that category)
- Include meta tags for the pages you want to use rich pins for. For example, you can go for a blog post review of your affiliate product.
- Use the rich pin validator to make sure that the tags are uploaded properly.
- Select the option you consider to add rich meta tags, i.e., HTML, Embed, or Shopify.
- If you are done, click on “Apply” and wait for your rich pin application to be processed
5) Pin to Group Boards
Not all Pinterest boards must be an individual’s mood board. A natural positive of this community-style board is better brand awareness. Users promote Pinterest pins to other audiences.
As a marketing person, you must find relevant boards in your niche to which your affiliate products can fall. For example, if you are an affiliate for tennis products, the “racket, balls, grip, strings” board would be worth contributing to.
You may also find terms for posting new content to a new group board. Some admins don’t like including affiliate links directly on the product pages. You can work on that by using blogs or YouTube videos as your landing page.
6) SEO Optimization
As we have discussed earlier, Pinterest is a search engine that enables users to discover new content. By optimizing your Pinterest profile for search engine optimization (SEO), you can reach people looking for something you are an affiliate for.
The tactic is to use relevant SEO practices while writing your title and description. Make sure you choose your keyword wisely, and your content will go viral before you know it.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
SEO performance is extremely important for your overall Pinterest affiliate marketing strategy. When you are implementing Pinterest SEO, make sure that you consider the following three areas:
- Pinterest profile
- Pin description
- Board description
7) Build an Email List
According to Monica Lent, founder of Affilimate, the best Pinterest affiliate marketing strategy is to capture readers’ email addresses. By managing quality email campaigns, you can promote your affiliate products.
The best way to do that is by including a contact form on your landing page. You can invite all your Pinterest followers to your mailing list by giving them an incentive, such as a lead magnet or discount code. Once they are part of your list, you should continue nurturing them until they sign up.
Add Pinterest Account to Your Strikingly Website
An interesting aspect of digital marketing is the integration of other marketing channels on your platform to promote your content. When you use Pinterest affiliate marketing, your posts will direct the users to your website. However, a certain mechanism allows you to drive traffic the other way around.
![embed pinterest on strikingly](https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/2Uqvcte5DY2bdhKtQz80IElaDScgOg0lb4FpHOOjXOsnLgXy3IIHh-IAaTfaEDwF4YQm2QR2TcbsutL3GAMWTlMq8eOnWCblSFohn-q9jVb52F4DxnNu30iLUU_Mgk960YxxYiRR-r1ZZLI2AT7d3OjIVtXZBraGX-3rBQRQrwJcc7r6HTwaZ6Xr9g "embed pinterest on strikingly" =602x207)
Image taken from Strikingly
This mechanism brings traffic from your website to your Pinterest content. You can quickly achieve this mechanism by adding a Pinterest icon in the footer or another section of your homepage.
If your website is developed on a user-friendly platform with innovative tools, your life will be easier. Strikingly is a website builder that doesn’t allow you to do any programming or write any code. On Strikingly, we provide our users with thousands of features to help them build and integrate marketing campaigns across digital forums. These digital platforms will be pivotal in attracting traffic.
Image taken from Strikingly
These easy-to-use features and tools on Strikingly are one of the big reasons behind the dramatic growth of our platform in the past few years.
Conclusion
Pinterest affiliate marketing is an essential asset for many online businesses worldwide. Your audience must be active on this social media platform before they start investing time in it.
By creating exquisite pins, performing SEO, and driving traffic to your Pinterest account, there is no reason why you won’t get your desired results. With the right strategies, you can make money on Pinterest. As a business owner, you can make this platform an evergreen source of commission with little upfront investment.
