How To Do Affiliate Marketing On Pinterest

Then I found some pins during a search for how to organize my family’s bicycles. Then I discovered what an awesome source of ideas Pinterest is, far better than google regarding my type of problem. After that, I have used Pinterest more and I find Pinterest great for getting ideas. While Google tries to give us the best answer, Pinterest tries to give us many answers. 

Pinterest has more female users than male users, so female topics will have better traction on Pinterest. The male user base is growing fast so you want to consider Pinterest even if you are into a male niche. 

But let’s begin...

Choose your niche

First you need to do is to choose a niche. This is something you will use some time on so you want to choose carefully. You always want to choose a niche that you are interested in. This can be something you know a lot of or maybe there are some topics you want to learn more about? 

Choosing a niche where you are documenting what you are learning can be a great way to start online. You will improve your understanding of the subject when you have to write it down for others to read. And you will teach others what you have learned. 

Many people go for niches that are popular with a lot of great offers, but they have no interest in the niche beside the money. Remember this is not a get rich quick scheme. While you are able to see results fasts, most beginners will use some time to learn everything. If you are choosing something that doesn’t interest you, you will become bored when you don't see the results after some months. Then you will believe this will fail, you will question yourself and stop doing the work that is necessary to get success. There are so many people that have stopped just before they have built enough momentum to see some results. 

So choose a niche that interest you. 

Find affiliate offers that you can promote on Pinterest

The next step is to find affiliate offers. You want at least 2-5 different offers with a mixed price range. While promoting high priced products will earn you more money, you also want a couple of low priced products to people with a lower budget. 

Create your blog

You can do affiliate marketing on Pinterest without a blog, but it's highly recommended to create your blog. 

By creating a blog, you are able to teach your audience why they want to order the products you are promoting and you are giving value. 

Why should people order through your affiliate link if you are not giving value? 

I have many times clicked on a link and discovered this was an affiliate link. If I wanted to order, why do it through their affiliate link? They sort of tricked me to click on the link, they have not given me any value. I had no reason to give them an affiliate commission, so I ordered in incognito mode. 

While other times I have followed a person for some time and I liked the person. So when I decided to order, I used his link to give something back for what he has given me. I have even spent some minutes searching for his link. 

And other times I have ordered through an affiliate link because of the bonus that was offered if I bough. Usually, the bonus was not that great, but it was something to sweeten the deal.

So you want to create a blog to give value to your audience so they want to order through your link. 

One other important reason you want to start a blog is that people can also find your blog posts through searching on the internet. That way you will receive visitors from both Pinterest and search engines like Google and Bing. 

The third reason is that when you are creating your pins, you want to link to a specific page. If you have a couple of affiliate links, you are a bit limited. Even you can create many pins linked to the same page, you don’t want to spam the same link. 

If you have a blog with a few posts, you can now create a lot more links without spamming. You only need approximately 10 posts to have a good basis for daily pinning on Pinterest. 

You can read my article about how to start a blog if you are not sure how to do this step. 

Write content for your blog

You have chosen a niche, you have some affiliate offers you want to promote. Now it's time to write blog posts. 

You want to start with the easy ones, and the easy ones are to answer a particular question in your niche. When you have written some posts, you can go for review posts and compare posts. You want to write posts that target the people who want to order the product but need a little bit more information. Remember that the review post is usually the ones that are hardest to rank for at Google, that's why you want to build momentum by answering easy questions. 

The end goal is to create a blog post funnel. You write review posts to push people to the product you are recommending. Then you want to write posts that are targeting the problem your audience has, that will push people to the review posts. 

You also want to target people that are using other products than the ones you are recommending so you can turn some of them who don’t like the product they are using. That way you can gently nudge them over to your affiliate offers. 

Remember that you always want to write blog posts with the user in mind. Don’t recommend a product only because you are earning money. You want to recommend the product because it will help your audience. 

Add content upgrades and landing pages

This is an optional step, but also a highly recommended step in your path to affiliate success. You want to build an email list so you can further educate and promote to your audience. 

Pinterest can change its terms of service and you are out of business. They can close your account because of an error or you have done a minor mistake. You can try to appeal to Pinterest to get your account open again, and you will most likely succeed with that. But during this time you will receive no people from Pinterest and you no longer have an income. 

Google can change how they rank pages and you will no longer be on page 1 with your articles, then you will receive no traffic from search engines.

If you are using Pinterest and Google to get people to your site, this audience belongs to them and you are only borrowing the audience. So you want to make them your own by giving them something for free so you can collect their email address. 

By using content upgrades and landing pages, you can collect email addresses and build an email list. You will always own your email list and by doing email marketing, you will not be dependent on other services and companies. 

So how do you create a content upgrade? You are adding optin boxes in your articles and popups. Offer templates, cheat sheets, reports or case studies that the visitors can receive is a great beat to use for their email address. 

I’m using Thrive leads to create content upgrades and ClickFunnels to create landing pages. There are many options out there, but this is the ones I use.

Create your Pinterest account and add pins

Go to Pinterest and create a business account. You want to use a business account to get access to Pinterest analytics and other tools. You can read the help article from Pinterest to learn how you can create a new business account or how to convert an existing account from a personal account to a business account.