How to Use Pinterest Affiliate Marketing: A Comprehensive Guide to Pinterest Affiliate Marketing in 2024

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

Introduction to Pinterest Affiliate Marketing in 2024

What is Pinterest?

Why use Pinterest for affiliate marketing? Pinterest is a powerful visual search engine (don't confuse it with a social media platform!) People use it like an online idea board, pinning images and videos linked to external sites. They use it to plan, gather ideas and get inspiration for things happening in their life. It's the perfect place for people to research and discover new products.

Exploring Pinterest Affiliate Marketing

Pinterest has had a historically tricky relationship with affiliate marketing, and until recently, affiliate links weren't permitted on the platform. This all changed in 2023, and now affiliate pins with links and products are able to be shared. Sales generated from clicks can earn the content creator commissions. BUT there are rules and best practices you need to adhere to, to ensure your account remains active and fully functional. (Pinterest does not want you to spam it with affiliate links!)

Setting Up for Success on Pinterest

How to Set Up and Optimise Your Pinterest Account

Setting up and optimising your Pinterest account for affiliate marketing involves several steps such as creating a business account, claiming your website, choosing a niche and target audience, optimising your profile with relevant keywords and professional photos or logos, and creating and organising your Pinterest boards.

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Creating a Pinterest Business Account

Creating a Pinterest business account is crucial for affiliate marketing. It gives you access to analytics, ads, audience insights, and more. Simply go to business.pinterest.com and click ‘Create account'. If you have a personal Pinterest account you can easily switch to a business one in your settings.

The Essentials of Affiliate Marketing on Pinterest

How to Find and Join Affiliate Programs

Finding and joining affiliate programs is your first step for Pinterest affiliate marketing. You may have some products you use and love in your business, that you recommend to clients and customers all the time. It's worth doing a quick Google search of the products/company with the words ‘affiliate programme' to see if they offer a reward programme. If you can't locate anything, it's always worth dropping them an email as they may have a programme that they don't advertise.

Choosing the Right Products and Programs to Promote

Understanding which products and programs to promote is critical. Keep your audience's needs in mind and maintain alignment between your Pinterest content and affiliate products. Choose high-quality products from reputable brands. Check customer reviews, brand history, and social media influence. Never promote something you feel uneasy about and wouldn't pay money to use yourself – you want to build and maintain the trust of your audience.

View the affiliate program's terms, commission rates, and payment structures. It's not only about commission structure but also access to marketing materials, tracking tools, and support systems from the program.

Crafting Attention-Grabbing Pins

Tips on Creating Engaging, SEO-Optimised Pins

Creating engaging, SEO-optimised pins hinges upon a straightforward strategy. Pins with a clear, inviting image and readable text attract more clicks. Use high-quality and related images. Provide descriptive, keyword-rich captions. SEO optimisation includes using relevant keywords in pin, board and profile descriptions.

Find what resonates with your audience by varying your image styles, text overlays, pin sizes, and more.

Linking to an Affiliate blog

This should always be your number one affiliate marketing strategy on Pinterest. Writing a blog about a product you recommend has numerous benefits over a direct link on a pin:

1. You are building trust with your honest review and opinion
2. Your blog is hosted on your own domain, already claimed and trusted by Pinterest
3. Pins you create linking back to your own blog won't risk being marked as affiliate spam.
4. You won't need to add any affiliate disclaimers to your pins
5. An SEO-optimised blog will generate traffic from other search engines, meaning more affiliate income for you
6. People will be more likely to click on your pin to learn your opinion about the product.

Adding Affiliate Links to Your Pins

It is possible to create and add direct affiliate links to your pins, but you need to ensure you are following Pinterest's strict guidelines for affiliate marketing.

Best Practices & Strategies for Pinterest Affiliate Marketing

Creating Multiple Pins and Boards

Create three (or more) unique, attractive pins to promote each affiliate product. Your pins should be engaging, relatable, and descriptive. The clearer your message, the higher the traffic.

Strategise your Pinterest board to match your content topics. Remember, these boards are where your pins are saved and they help Pinterest to better understand what your pins are about. Add keyword-rich title and descriptions.

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Your board strategy matters. Each board should focus on a single topic to avoid confusion and allow Pinterest to understand what your content is about. It also will boost the chances of interested Pinterest users saving or sharing your content.

Organise your pins into umbrella topics or themes. This helps the audience find content they want, promoting much-needed viewer engagement, and it helps Pinterest to ensure that it shows your content to the right people at the right time.

Leveraging Pinterest Trends and High-Performing Pins

Leveraging trends and high-performing pins can significantly boost your Affiliate Marketing strategy on Pinterest. Here's how you can make the most of it:

1. Monitor Pin Performance: To start, closely track the performance of your pins. Pinterest Analytics, a tool available within your Pinterest Business page, allows you to analyse which pins drive engagement and traffic and which ones need improvement. The metrics include engagement, save, and pin click rates, giving you a deeper understanding of your content's performance.
2. Study Successful Pins: Take the time to study pins that are doing well. Analyse their structure, content, and keywords to understand why they succeed. Then, apply these learnings to your less-performing pins.
3. Be Aware of Trends: Keep an eye on Pinterest Trends to stay ahead. This tool enables you to research what's currently popular and optimise your pins' keywords accordingly. Adjusting your content based on trends is a surefire way to drive engagement, as it allows you to resonate with the current interests of Pinterest users.
4. Focus on Quality: Remember that it's not about the quantity of the pins – quality matters most. The Pinterest smart feed algorithm favours pins based on the pin's quality, the pinner, the linked domain, and relevancy.

These practices will help you to tap into the potential of trends and high-performing pins, and make your Pinterest Affiliate Marketing efforts more effective.

Remember, the key to success is constant monitoring, tweaking, and optimisation. Always stay in tune with what's working for you and what's not, and change your strategy accordingly. In doing so, you will be able to drive more engagement and achieve higher affiliate sales on Pinterest.

Ensuring Compliance with Pinterest’s Rules and Guidelines

To ensure compliance with Pinterest's rules and guidelines while using affiliate links, you can follow several simple steps:

• Avoid using URL shorteners like bit.ly to “hide” your affiliate link. This is crucial as Pinterest promotes transparency about the usage of affiliate links.
• Operate only one Pinterest account for promoting your affiliate links. This is one of the platform's explicit regulations to prevent spamming.
• Clearly disclose an affiliate link when being used. Both the Federal Trade Commission and many affiliate programs, including Amazon, mandate this disclosure by law. Use phrases like “affiliate link”, “paid link,” “sponsored,” or symbols before or near the link such as [aff], [ad], [spon], or hashtags like #affiliatelink, #paidlink, #sponsored.
• Refrain from creating affiliate pins “repetitively or in large volumes” as it may appear spammy, potentially leading to your account getting flagged or suspended.
• Maintain truthfulness in your promotions. Avoid using false claims or misleading images. Same goes for promoting any prohibited content like adult material, gambling, drugs etc. which can result in direct violation of Pinterest's community guidelines.
• Always direct your audience to the original source URL when sharing an affiliate link on Pinterest. Using redirects or link-shortening tools could lead your pins to get blocked or your account to be suspended.
• Share affiliate-related content, such as blogs or videos. This primes the potential customers before they make a purchase, enhancing their buying experience and also maintaining the transparency of your affiliate partnership.
• Read and understand Pinterest's community guidelines and abide by them. These guidelines provide a comprehensive guide on Pinterest's rules for affiliate marketing.

By adhering to these instructions, one can ensure compliance with Pinterest's rules and maintain a clean, effective and legal affiliate marketing method on one of the popular social media platforms.

Boosting Affiliate Income with Pinterest

Utilizing Pinterest for Boosting Affiliate Income

To boost affiliate income on Pinterest, try these strategies:

1. Be Consistent: Ensure you pin consistently. This increases your visibility and opportunities for saves and shares.
2. Create High-Quality Pins: Compelling graphics with clear text overlays garner more attention and clicks.
3. Use Keywords: Craft pin, board, profile descriptions, and title using relevant keywords. This helps your content be discovered during search.
4. Make Use of Call-To-Actions: Entice users to take action with pins featuring CTAs.
5. Diversify & Test Pins: Don't depend solely on one pin type. Experiment with different images, colours and texts. Closely observe which gets the most engagement.

Embracing these tactics gives you a head start in effectively utilising Pinterest for affiliate marketing. The aim: maximum reach, engagement, and subsequently, boosted affiliate income.

This blog is advice only and not legally binding in any way. Before you proceed with your affiliate marketing strategy, please always check the terms from your affiliate marketing platform, and Pinterest to ensure you comply with the most up-to-date rules and regulations.

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