Pinterest is a social media platform representing a massive opportunity for marketers to build a steady revenue stream from affiliate sales of products, programs, and services. The platform is the fourth most popular social media channel, with 450 million monthly active users. It is primarily a visual search engine where people get ideas, plan their purchases, starts making buying decisions, and more. 

That makes Pinterest a sustainable channel for affiliate marketers looking for additional revenue through a high-value affiliate program. As a brand, publisher, or content creator with some graphic design knowledge and exciting products to share, you can use Pinterest as a powerful distribution channel for your affiliate content. Affiliate marketing on Pinterest can be relatively more accessible and cheaper, but it will require focused strategies and conscious effort. Pinterest can be one of your site’s best sources of free traffic and generate conversions for a long time with some care and maintenance.

In this article, we’ll explain how to use Pinterest for affiliate marketing and practical tips and best practices to help power your affiliate marketing strategy.

Here’s how you can get started.

Why Should You Use Pinterest for Affiliate Marketing?

Pinterest is a social media network and visual search engine that has grown steadily since its inception in 2010 and shows no signs of slowing down. Due to its unique function and user profile, Pinterest is a valuable affiliate marketing resource. Compared to other social media platforms, it has less competition in affiliate marketing and a more ready-to-buy audience.

With 450 million active users, Pinterest ranks among the most popular online platforms. Regarding Pinterest’s demographics, it’s worth noticing that over 60% are women, and over 45% of users have a household income of over $100,000. Moreover, the first largest age group is 35-49, and the second largest is 18-29.

As an affiliate marketing tool, Pinterest allows marketers to increase their reach by building brand awareness. It’s also an ideal platform to showcase the products you recommend in a way that inspires platform users and encourages them to make a purchase. Because Pinterest has its SEO, it also allows you to create much more targeted posts, which makes it one of the best ways to build an affiliate income stream because pins have a long shelf life. 

While a tweet’s life is measured in minutes or hours, a pin’s life can measure in months or even years and still appear in search results for the targeted keyword. All of which makes Pinterest should be at the top of your priority list if you’re an affiliate of visually-intensive products. 

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work On Pinterest?

Affiliate marketing is a popular marketing strategy businesses use to drive sales and generate revenue through online referrals. Affiliate marketing on Pinterest is the activity of promoting other people’s products or services on Pinterest to earn referrals.  You will find good affiliate marketing products or services related to your audience on Pinterest from networks such as Amazon Associates, ClickBank, ShareASale, or companies that provide affiliate programs. 

Then, you get unique affiliate links that help track clicks, click sources, commissions, etc. Finally, you create Pinterest pins and promote them to your audience to earn money. Pinterest is beneficial if you work with visually-intensive products. The most popular niches on the platform include travel, recipes, fashion, health and fitness, home decor, health and beauty products, DIY and crafts, workout ideas, etc.

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You can use Pinterest for affiliate marketing in two main ways:

Create pins that drive traffic to your website.

In this method, you can use Pinterest as an affiliate marketer, creating pins that get good exposure and drive clicks to Pinterest-friendly content on your site to drive traffic to your affiliate content, whether it’s blog posts, affiliate landing pages, or YouTube videos. Users save these pins to their boards as a virtual mood board for ideas, products, or inspiration. When you create a nail, you need to insert your link that leads to highly relevant content on the product they are interested in.

It’s essential to build trust by creating exciting and shareable links and not take every opportunity to try to drive traffic to your site.

Create Pins That Drive Traffic Directly To Offers, Products, Or Services.

If you aren’t going to link to your blog or website, you can add your affiliate links directly into each pin’s URL box. Get your affiliate link from your affiliate program and place it as a link for your pin where it says “Enter Website.”

Remember to add an FTC disclaimer about the affiliate links and verify that it is an affiliate program that complies with Pinterest’s terms and conditions. Once all that is done, you’ll earn affiliate commissions every time someone clicks on one of your affiliate links on Pinterest, reaches the product landing page, and makes a purchase.

But please note that placing your affiliate links directly on Pinterest will ultimately build your affiliate business on it. You have no control over what goes on with this platform in the long run.

How to Start Affiliate Marketing On Pinterest in 15 Steps?

1.  Familiarize Yourself with The Affiliate Guidelines and Rules On Pinterest

Before you create pins and start sharing your affiliate links, it’s essential to understand Pinterest’s affiliate marketing rules and guidelines. Here are some essential affiliate rules for Pinterest:

-When it comes to paid partnership and affiliate guidelines, affiliate marketing on Pinterest is no different than affiliate marketing on any other platform in this regard. It would help if you were transparent about affiliate links.

-The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is pretty straightforward about what it considers proper disclosure of affiliate links.

-Any promotional content must disclose its commercial nature, such as in the title or description of the pin. 

-Pinterest does not allow you to shorten or hide your affiliate links. In summary, ensure your affiliate marketing Pinterest content is authentic and transparent.

– Use only one Pinterest account in which you promote your affiliate links. “Do not operate multiple accounts or coordinate with others for the purpose of manipulating the Pinterest platform.”

– Pinterest does not allow spamming or engaging in spammy behavior, such as creating or posting repetitive and misleading content, linking to unsafe and untrusted websites, or using automation that Pinterest has not explicitly approved.

For more information on Pinterest’s affiliate rules and guidelines, check out these resources directly from Pinterest:

Pinterest Community Guidelines 

 Guide to Affiliate Links on Pinterest

Guidelines For Paid Partnerships

2.  Choose A Strong Niche

Since Pinterest is more of a visual and demographic search engine, specific niches work best on the platform. Here are the verticals that thrive on Pinterest:

Travel, Photography, Fashion, Home décor, Fashion, Interior design, Food and recipes, Human relations, Personal Development, Parenting, Personal Finance, Health and Fitness, Beauty Products / Personal Care, DIY + Arts & Crafts, and Gift Inspiration.

3.  Create A Pinterest Business Account

Before getting into affiliate marketing, you must prepare your account to perform well.  First, you want to ensure that you have a Pinterest business account. 

Getting a professional account not only makes your account look more professional and legitimate, but it also gives you access to analytics on your account, your pins, and boards, which are essential to adjust your Pinterest strategy and see what’s working, as well as advertising tools.

4.  Create Your Profile

You will want your profile to look professional. People will be likelier to listen to your product recommendations if you look natural, legitimate, and professional. That’s why it’s essential to include a descriptive bio, a high-quality logo or profile picture, etc.

Be sure to fill out all the information fields on your Pinterest profile, especially your username, display name, and description. Pinterest will consider your profile one of many SEO factors when deciding how relevant your content is. Therefore, including relevant keywords in your display name and description is best. 

5.Create Pinterest Pins and Boards

Creating Pins

 Content on Pinterest is known as “pins,” images, or videos linked to an external website. Pinterest offers three main pin formats that you can use to share affiliate links: standard pins, video pins, and idea pins. Each type of pin has a different purpose. 

Standard pins are the “original” pin format that can be great for generating traffic.

 Video pins are very similar but are often more challenging for pinners to click on.

Idea pins are a multi-page pin format that can use images and videos. You can also create slides for idea pins or shoot videos of yourself or the product you are using on Pinterest! Idea Pins help Pinterest creators and influencers grow and connect with their audience and are similar to Instagram Stories.

One of the best design platforms on the market, which you can use to create your pins, whether images or videos, is Canva! If you need help creating pins, you can use pin templates to help you in the design process.

Creating BOARDS

Next, you need to create Pinterest boards. The pins you share and post get organized into boards. You set the subject of each board and the number of boards you make. Make sure your board is relevant to the niche you’re working on to attract your target audience. You’ll need a board for each if your site is divided into multiple categories.

Many successful brands on Pinterest suggest that your account should have at least 15 to 20 boards.  When you create Pinterest boards, giving them names and descriptions related to your affiliate marketing topic is essential. It would help if you also told Pinterest what your board is about by creating well-written descriptions combined with relevant and well-researched keywords and used thoughtfully throughout the report.

6.Enable Rich Pins

Rich Pins are more descriptive than the standard images on the platform. The feature allows you to display metadata directly on your pins. It helps draw more attention to an overloaded news feed and increases your chances of generating traffic via Pinterest. Activating rich pins is tricky, but you only have to do it once. 

To activate rich pins on your account, you must add metadata to your site and validate and request rich pins. Once you’ve completed these steps, all your future pins will be rich. 

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Add Meta-Data to Your Site:

Add rich meta tags to the pages you want to use rich pins for, for example, a blog post that reviews your affiliate product. The easiest way to set up meta-data for rich pins is to use an SEO plugin if you use WordPress. Ensure the SEO plugin includes the option to configure with social media platforms (Most do this as standard.)

 Validate and Request Rich Pins

then you need to request to enable Rich Pin Validator. After that, add the URL of one of your blog posts in the validator field, click validate, and wait 24 hours for your rich pin request to get approved.

Create Quality and Eye-Catching Titles and Descriptions for Your Content.

After enabling Rich Pins, images saved on your site will display additional pin information. A description in your Rich Pins comes from the copy you write in your meta description. Without filling it in, your pins will display the first two lines of your post. Use the meta description to write informative, compelling, and eye-catching copy that will entice you to click. Ensure your descriptions are detailed and insightful but avoid stuffing in keywords and only focus on two or three keywords relevant to your post.

7.Have Your Web Site

Having your affiliate website is the most reliable way to do affiliate marketing on Pinterest and the most sustainable. Regarding long-term growth and success on Pinterest, it often comes down to your brand image. A trustworthy brand is more important than a single post that ranks well on the search engine, mainly if you sell products to consumers. With a personal brand, once you become an authority, people can start to recognize your pins and aesthetic.

Users want access to something that adds value. Your website is the perfect place to create valuable and relevant content related to what you are promoting. It can be a product review or an in-depth tutorial highlighting your affiliate product. Using a website, you can link to your blog posts or landing pages rather than a product sales page.

This way, once your pin is re-shared, you can edit it, and if a replicated affiliate link breaks, is changed, or you want to replace it with a link to a better product or program, you won’t lose all the sales made from the re-shared pins. 

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8.Create Eye-Catching Design

 Design pins that are the right size. Pinterest pin images are oriented in portrait mode, with a standard aspect ratio of 2:3. The ideal size for a Pinterest image is 1000 x 1500 px.  Any image that exceeds this size will likely be truncated, affecting the performance of the pin. Try to stick to this size whenever possible. If you need to go bigger for some of your pins, do it, but try to use the recommended size for the majority.

Use the best images possible.

Remember that Pinterest is primarily a visual search engine when creating graphics for your pin. Your pictures need to be eye-catching to entice users to click on them. You’ll need high-quality photos and decent graphics with these graphic design tools to create high-quality pins.

– Choose bright colors – pinners seem to be attracted to these.

– Avoid photos with faces. Faces turn off pinners in pins.

The same imagery that resonates best depends on your target audience. So try multiple pin formats to see which image formats generate the most clicks.

Aim for visual consistency.

There should be elements of consistency and cohesiveness in your pins. Use the same fonts, colors, and design elements for your pins whenever possible. Include your website name and logo in your pins.

Create unique and original pins.

Pinterest wants new pins. Minimize duplicate content and limit re-pinning your pins. Remember that Pinterest prefers natively created pins on the platform rather than using a third-party scheduling tool like Tailwind or Buffer.

Write a catchy title.

The title should tell your target audience quickly what they can get from it and how you will improve their situation. Make sure your text is straightforward to read. Use large, bold text styles. Avoid tiny fonts, scripts, light colors, or anything difficult to read.

9.Add A Link to Your Affiliate Content

Using Pinterest for affiliate marketing is within the platform’s terms of service, but you must make sure your affiliate program allows your link to be posted on Pinterest. There are several ways to promote affiliate products on Pinterest. You can either share affiliate links directly on Pinterest or drive traffic to your website, an opt-in email page, or your YouTube channel and promote your affiliate links there. You can Add your affiliate link under Destination Link. 

Direct affiliate links are easy to use and take users directly where you want them to go. However, some users may be wary of direct links to sites they have yet to learn about. Often, these direct links can lead to pages needing more information, which can drive users away. When linking directly from a pin to an affiliate link, be sure to disclose when using an affiliate link. 

Ensure you disclose when you use an affiliate link and add #affiliate to the description. But when adding affiliate links, consider using links that lead to landing pages rather than direct affiliate links. It should be noted that using link-shortening tools is against Pinterest’s policy.

Creating and adding links to standard and video pins on the desktop is easier. Where it says “Add a destination link,” you can copy and paste your affiliate link. If you are promoting your affiliate links through a blog post, you can insert a link to your blog post here instead. On the other hand, you currently have to use the Pinterest mobile app for idea pins. Idea Pins only allow affiliate links from sites such as Amazon Associates, Rakuten Advertising, and ShopStyle Collective. You will need a way to access your affiliate links from your phone to connect them to Idea Pins.

It would help if you first went to the slide you want to insert the link into to add affiliate links to Idea Pins. At the bottom of the page, click the “Stickers” button. A page of stickers will appear on your screen. Click on the “Product” option here. To utilize your custom affiliate link, click on “Use Link.” Copy and paste your affiliate link into the bar and search. 

The product you are trying to add an affiliate link for should appear if the search is successful. Select the product by clicking on it, then click “Create” in the upper right corner to add the link to your idea pin.

MOST IMPORTANT: Be sure to toggle on the button that says, “This is an affiliate link or sponsored product.” Pinterest must ensure you disclose your link and follow the FTC guidelines.

From there, you can customize your product tag and publish the pin when it’s ready! You can only add product links in idea pins, not blog posts. If you’re promoting affiliate links on a blog post, it’s best to focus on standard and video pins. 

If you include affiliate links in your blog post, you don’t need to have it in your pin, but you should put it at the top of your position and in your blog’s sidebar. Instead, it would help if you offered something of value to your audience on Pinterest. Create an interesting blog post, video, or free guide.

Once you have added your link, you can publish your pin. You can either print the pin immediately or schedule it later.

10. Schedule Your Pins

When starting on Pinterest, you need to be very active. Planning your pin design ahead of time will save you time. By scheduling your pins to go live at optimal times, you will naturally increase your reach and awareness by appearing in the feed when your audience is online. Pinterest’s algorithm displays new content in the user’s feed. It may be 7 am for some users and 5 pm for others.

Depending on your work style, you can spend an hour or two spread throughout the day on Pinterest or use a tool like Tailwind, Later, and Hootsuite to offload this task. Define a custom schedule and add the new content to your queue. It will automatically be pinned to your board when the time comes. So you won’t have to worry about not publishing new content, which allows you to maximize your time and focus on creating your content.

11.Publish New Pins Regularly

A vital part of any pinning strategy is posting new pins. To get your account noticed by Pinterest and get your content in front of users on a more regular basis, you must start creating additional valuable content. Posting at least one new fresh pin a day is a good practice, but some Pinterest marketers suggest posting even more. The more pins you create to promote your affiliate links, the more likely you are to get your pins seen and conversions.

12.Build Your Audience

Once you’ve set up a few boards and posted a few pins, you should start developing your audience. Remember that Pinterest is still a social media site, so connecting with other users is helpful. To grow your audience, you can follow other profiles in your niche or similar niches, reply to comments, reply to relevant posts, comment on other pins, share popular content, or join discussion groups. By following pertinent other people, not only will you see their pins and increase the visibility of your pins, but you may end up being a recommended follow next to them.

Join popular discussion groups related to your niche. Group boards allow multiple people to join and post their pins. Since these Pinterest discussion groups already have a lot of followers, your content can gain tons of impressions. Consider the quality of the board and whether it’s open or invite-only. The best boards tend to be invite-only, but usually, it’s pretty easy to get an invite. 

When you join a discussion forum, all of your followers are added to it, and your followers will be able to see the pins of all the other members and followers of the group forum. So you experience dilution of your subscriber base, but more people can now see your content. Note that most of the better forums do not allow direct affiliate links.

13.Optimize for SEO

As we instead notice, Pinterest is not only a social networking site. It is a visual search engine that people use to discover new content. So it makes sense to use good SEO practices to optimize your posts and increase the reach of your content within the platform and on Google Search! Pinterest has an algorithm for ranking content published on the platform. Knowing Pinterest’s algorithm can help you improve your content and get higher rankings.

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– Optimize your Pinterest profile.

Check your settings to ensure your profile isn’t hidden from search engines. Include relevant keywords related to your content’s overall theme in your account bio.

-Optimize your boards and pins for Pinterest SEO

Optimizing your boards and pins helps Pinterest understand your content and distribute and rank it where it is most relevant. The more relevant, helpful, and engaging your pins are, the higher quality Pinterest will consider them. The more active and consistent you are in creating and pinning high-quality content, the better. Pinterest uses data from board titles and descriptions, and pins saved to a board to understand your content better.

– Pin description. Be more specific in the keywords linked to each pin.

– Board description. Boards are more specific than a profile but are less targeted than a pin.

Optimize keywords

You can use Pinterest’s algorithm to enhance your content by telling it exactly what your pin is about through keywords. Since most users come to the site to search for something, you need to optimize your posts for those searches. Choose your keywords strategically, and stay consistent—research relevant keywords in your niche by identifying the keywords your target audience uses when they search online.

Remember, if you’re doing affiliate marketing on Pinterest, you’ll want to focus on keywords in the final buying stage, where people are closer to a purchase decision. Optimize your pin by using your main target keyword in critical places like the title and description, alt text, and on the image of your pin to rank well for that keyword.

14.Promote High-Performance Pins 

Sharing affiliate content organically on Pinterest works over time. But if you prefer to see immediate results, put some money behind your pins to reach more people. Pinterest ads can bring great results and conversions if you know what you’re doing. Studies show that one in two Pinterest users have purchased after seeing a promotional pin. 

If you have high-performing pins that generate more traffic, engagements, or conversions, consider launching a campaign to get those pins in front of even more pinners! 

The cost of advertising on Pinterest varies depending on the content, pin style, and the industry you’re in.

If you try to increase brand awareness, you can expect to pay between $2.00 and $5.00 per thousand impressions (CPM).

Increasing online engagement will cost you between $0.10 and $1.50 per engagement.

The increase in web traffic will also cost you between $0.10 and $1.50 per engagement.

Campaigns based on conversion command between $6.00 and $10.00.

15. Analyze Your Pins Performance

An essential step for any affiliate marketing campaign and track and analyze your performance and take informed action. The more you know about your Pins, the more you can refine your affiliate marketing strategy on Pinterest. Find out which pins drive engagement and traffic and which need improvement. Fortunately, pin performance tracking can occur on your Pinterest business page via Pinterest Analytics. 

Pinterest Analytics helps you measure the performance of your pins and boards, number of impressions, engagements, and audience size. You can use this data to optimize your profile accordingly. The key here is to keep pinning your popular pins to your best-performing boards. See which of your pins containing affiliate links is performing the best. Try creating more versions of that pin or create a similar blog post and additional pins for that new concept.

For pins that are not performing well, try changing their design and keywords or even switching to different content that can attract more attention. Alternatively, use other analytics tools like Google Analytics to go deeper into the analysis.

Affiliate Marketing on Pinterest – Conclusion

Hopefully, this post has helped you learn more about affiliate marketing on Pinterest and how to create pins that stand out and optimize them for SEO to drive traffic to your affiliate content.  As a social media platform and visual search engine, Pinterest is a valuable resource for users or customers looking for ideas, referrals, and even specific products or brands.

Pinterest can be an ongoing source to generate more revenue and traffic and expand its reach for many affiliate marketers. So it would help if you did not hesitate to add affiliate marketing on Pinterest to your affiliate marketing strategy by focusing on valuable content that helps your target audience. Do the hard work upfront; the results will pay off over time. You’ll find that you’re rewarded with a steady stream of new visitors to your website and, thus, affiliate revenue.