As affiliate marketers, we don't use social media just to connect with friends and family. We want to make money online and that means getting more traffic to our affiliate offers. Social media is one of our traffic tools.
In my opinion, every affiliate marketer should be using Pinterest. Right now, it is THE best social media platform for driving traffic to your website or blog. Not only that, it is a great place to post affiliate links directly.
This post is a quick overview of how Pinterest can work for you. This is not a basic Pinterest tutorial, you can find plenty of those online. This post is about how we, as affiliate marketers, can profit by using Pinterest to promote our offers.
Use a Pinterest Business Account for Affiliate Marketing
The Pinterest Terms of Service are clear. If you use Pinterest for commercial purposes, you must have a business account.
That isn't a hardship though. It is easy set up a business account or to convert your personal account to business.
A business account is good for us as marketers too. The analytics are very helpful and, if you want more insight, you can link your Pinterest account to Google Analytics.
Finally, make sure you link and claim your website in your account. That will link it to your pins and help get more traffic.
Pinterest For Traffic Generation
Pinterest can drive waves of traffic to your website or blog with very little effort on your part. Just write your content as normal then link to that content in a pin - or better yet, several pins spaced over time.
I am using my post about building an affiliate marketing website as an example here.
Once the article was done, I used three of the images from it as pins on Pinterest. I edit each pin to make sure the description is different. By using different descriptions you avoid spamming your followers with duplicate content.
Once they are all edited, I use Tailwind to schedule them to post on different days. I will have more to say about Tailwind and the importance of spacing pins out in my next blog post. For now, just know that it is a tool for scheduling pins to post later.
Once you pins are active, you should begin to get traffic from them. Also, hopefully your followers will like your content enough to repin it which will get you even more views.
This method works for articles, blog posts, landing pages and opt-in offers and anything else on your website.
Pinterest For Direct Linking
At one time, direct affiliate links were a no-no on Pinterest. Then, the only way to add a link was to create a post or landing page on your own website and send traffic there just like described above..
Fortunately, Pinterest changed their rules and now it is OK to add affiliate links directly to your pins. That makes it easier to pin links often and makes it much easier for your followers to go to your offers without visiting an intermediate site.
Not all affiliate links will be accepted though. For example, links to Wealthy Affiliate will be refused. In those cases, just use the traffic generation method above. For the most part though, you can put your affiliate links right in the URL tied to the pin.
Doing direct link pins will take a little more work than content linking but still much less time than writing for your website.
The tool I use the most for making pins is Canva. It is free and works very well for the task. Pinterest templates are built right in to the tool.
Open the template and then replace the text and graphics with suitble content from your affiliate.
Below is an example of a pin I just built for the Hostgator affiliate program. Ckick on it to see it full size.
Once the pin is built in Canva, I save it to my desktop then use Pinterest to post it. Just click the create pin button and upload the image you created in Canva. Select the board to pin it to and add your affiliate link in the URL space, and write a description.
Now just click the Save button and your pin is posted. This is the basic method for adding pins. In the next post, I will cover how to schedule pins in Tailwind.
There are a couple other things to keep in mind when using direct affiliate links on Pinterest.
First, don't use link shorteners like Bitly or Google URL Shortener. Pinterest wants you to use the full, actual affiliate URL.
Second, make sure you disclose all affiliate links to comply with FTC rules. I use the hashtag #affiliatelink but there are other ways to do it.
Getting More Pinterest Reach
Putting affiliate links on Pinterest is great but to make any money people have to see and click on them. Whole books could (and have) been written about getting your pins seen. A search on Google will find many articles on the subject if you are interested. In this post I will just mention a few ways to get noticed.
Use Good Keywords
As with any content marketing, keywords are important. You might think of Pinterest as a social media board but it is actually a visual search engine. To get your pins found you need to use keywords people search for.
I have written about keywords before in this blog and you can find those posts at Targeting Low Competition Keywords and How to Use Keywords in an Article.
Make Your Website Pinterest Friendly
Make it easy for your website or blog visitors to share your content on Pinterest and other social media my showing share buttons on each page. The top of this post is an example.
Follow Other People
Getting more followers to your boards can also help you get your pins seen. One way to do that is to follow other boards that are similar to yours. As you follow other pinners, many of them will follow you back.
Pin to Group Boards
Pinning to group boards was once one of the very best ways to get more repins and so get more views but that is not so much the case anymore. You can read more about why that is in this article.
Group boards can still be a useful tool but you have to be selective. It is no longer a matter of just joining every board you can find and pumping them full of your pins.
Next time I will talk about Tailwind and Tribes which are a better way to do group pinning.
Pin Consistently and at Different Times
Pin regularly to keep your content fresh and you account active. Pin daily if you can but at least every few days if your schedule doesn't allow daily pinning.
Vary the times that you pin too. There are plenty of articles that claim to have the key to perfect timing but, the thing is, they differ greatly in what that time is. One solution is to use a tool like Tailwind that will calculate the best times for you based on your actual results.
Repin Successful Pins
When you have pins that are getting good numbers of repins and reach, repin them to the same of different boards. Just be sure to space them out. At least several days between pins to different boards and a month to the same board. That timing depends somewhat on the volume of pins on a board. Boards with few pins will need more time between repins.
What Do You Think
How do you use Pinterest in your marketing? I welcome your comments and look forward to hearing your ideas.