How to Use Pinterest for Affiliate Marketing Now They Allow Affiliate URLs in Pins Again

How to Use Pinterest for Affiliate Marketing Now They Allow Affiliate URLs in Pins Again

So I'm with Webgains affiliate network and I've been with them for about 10+ years now. Every now and then they'll send me something I might be interested to know about regarding affiliate marketing. Well today I got one such email from them regarding Pinterest and that Pinterest are now allowing people to pin affiliate links once again. They stopped allowing people to post affiliate links to Pinterest about 18 months ago as it just got ridiculous and looked untidy and these kinds of links break quickly so it created a bad user experience for Pinterest users. Well they've now decided to ALLOW people to pin things to Pinterest using affiliate links again. How long this lasts is anyone's guess but while its allowed there's money to be made on Pinterest using affiliate links in pins again!

Now that Pinterest Allow Affiliate Links in Pins How Will You Use it to Promote Your Affiliate Links?

Well the first thing to say is that Pinterest is a visually pleasing site of eye candy and they demand the most highest quality and visually pleasing images be posted (pinned) to it. So anything that looks ugly or isn't very visually pleasing isn't going to do well. People go to Pinterest for ideas and inspiration so don't pin dull boring images and use only those that are showing something that is being used in action like actual high res photographs. Your Pinterest boards are a reflection of what your business is about and show your business's personality. So make sure that you pin only those things which are relevant to your followers and show it the same care and precision you show on all of your other business's social media channels. Your followers follow for a reason. So keep the same voice going they first followed and stick to same identity they're used to.

How to use Pinterest to promote your affiliate links?

Since Pinterest covers just about everything in life from A-Z quite literally, there are an A-Z of ways you can use Pinterest to promote your affiliate links. Provided the image you are pinning is of super high quality and visually appealing, you can pin that to one of your boards or more with your affiliate link as the link. Then when someone visits that affiliate link from that pin and makes a purchase you make a commission. That much is obvious and is all there really is to it. But you will need to have a Pinterest account/profile and have boards first to pin to. And having a bunch of active followers will help as well of course. So if you already have a Pinterest profile and boards on it but have only ever been able to link to your site or another landing page where your links are in those pins, you can now pin affiliate links directly. So this means, you can pin say, peoples services here on SEOClerks with YOUR affiliate link in them. Or perhaps, an affiliate link for some fashion website or some food affiliate thing. Fashion and food and furniture are about the most searched for things on Pinterest and you can find an affiliate for those sorts of things pretty easily you can join with and promote on Pinterest.

Are you or your business on Pinterest yet?

If you don't yet have a Pinterest account, you will have to create one and create some boards for it that you can pin to. You should create boards that are perhaps the same name as your sites categories or something related to your business or even related to your own personal interests, passions and lusts. You can use Pinterest as a personal user or use Pinterest as a business. If you use it as a business, you'll get access to a few more tools for business users and you can use Promoted Pins but you must have a US or UK based business account to use Promoted Pins which can be very helpful if you're starting out but can also end up quite expensive as well in the long run. You can use it just the same with a personal account though and still make just as much money.

Tip! Already have a Pinterest account? You could edit the URLs of your current old pins (which are currently getting you traffic) and swap them with your affiliate links. This is a practice many will do but don't go too mad with that if you decide to do that (don't change them all at once). It's a bit of a sneaky method but not unethical or illegal, hey this is business right!? You never heard that from me! ;)

What sort of things do best on Pinterest and have the best conversion rate?

Food, fashion and furniture are about the three top converting types of things and pins for woman. Think cupcakes, cakes, pies, handbags, dresses, lipsticks and tables. For men its food (of course) then technology and cars, sports, gardening that sort of thing. Here are some of the top pinned things for both men and women on Pinterest.

The most frequently pinned things for women are;

• Food & Drink
  
• Fashion & Clothing
  
• DIY & Crafts
  
• Home Decoration
  
• Holidays & Events
  
• Gardening
  

The most frequently pinned things for men are;

• Food & Drink
  
• Cars & Motorcycles
  
• Men’s Fashion
  
• Technology
  
• Gardening
  
• Sports
  

Okay so what does this all mean to me?

It means that you can use Pinterest to send Pinterest users to your affiliated products and services using your affiliate link directly instead of having to send them to your own website or landing page first and then hoping they click your affiliate links on that page.

I don't need to tell you that gorgeous, original and unique images can go viral on Pinterest. You don't always need a lot of followers (or any) for that to happen since things you pin will be available to anyone on Pinterest searching or browsing the timeline. However the more followers you have, and the times you get that pin repinned, then the more chances it has of getting seen by more people and even going viral. Pins are indexed by Google and can rank high on their own. So it means not just Pinterest users will be able to see your pin but search engine users also. Also, some boards are highly indexed fast and ranked high by Google too. Some of the big community boards have many many thousands of users and can send you floods of traffic from your pins to your affiliated products from them. If you can get access to those boards you're onto a winner and these only get stronger and stronger over time.

Also remember, a Pin is a public web page just like any other. You can do SEO and Pin ranking on Pins just like anything else to make it rank higher in the SERPs. There are lots of ways of doing Pinterest pin ranking. There are TONS of Pinterest pin ranking methods out there if you search Google for it. One good way of helping it along would be to get that pin lots of repins and likes, this would boost it on Pinterest and in the eyes of Google also as pins with a lot of repins always rank higher than those that don't.

How to Join and Setup Pinterest?

You can join Pinterest by email or by logging in with your Facebook or Google+ account. If you login with your Facebook or Google+ account you'll still be asked to enter an email address anyway so you may as well create one using your email address.

You'll have to enter your First and Last name and age as well of course. After this, you'll have to choose some interests by following at least 5 topics so Pinterest can build your homepage for you with all the things you like!

Bippity boppity boop and bang you're in. The next step is to edit your profile. Click on your Profile button in the top right hand corner of the screen. Then click the Edit profile button to open the panel to edit your details. Make sure that you set an easy to remember and catchy username instead of the default one that's set for you. Write a small description about yourself such as what you're about or what you're into etc and put your website URL in the website field.

After this, your profile will be created and you'll have set up your Pinterest account. You will not need to start creating some boards though that are named after the sorts of things you'll be pinning to Pinterest. For this account I created for the purpose of this tutorial, this guy Blake will be into his motorbikes and things so I'll be creating lots of boards of the different popular motorbikes like Harley Davidson Motorbikes, Suzuki Motorbikes, Kawasaki Motorbikes, Ducati Motorbikes, Yamaha, Honda, Aprillia etc etc.

As you can see here, you will want to create a board using some of the keywords you are wanting to target so if it was Amazing Motorbikes you would put that as the title and use those words a couple times in the description as well. Obviously adapting it for your keywords for whatever you're creating a board about. Click the red Create button and your board is now created and will have its own URL for it.

Obviously the thing to do now would be to populate this board with some pins. You can start pinning your affiliate URLs/images to it straight away but it's best to populate this with some pins from Pinterest at first. Just search Pinterest for those things that your board is about and from there you will be able to pin them to the board.

Oh just in case you didn't know, this is how you pin stuff to your board(s).


Now if you're using a new Pinterest account, you're not going to see much success overnight. But if you keep at it, keep adding new boards, keep pinning (repinning) pins to those boards from Pinterest and other places from the web. And keep following other people, engaging on their pins etc etc. Eventually you're going to be able to build that Pinterest account up into quite a big account with a lot of followers and repins. When you get to this level, you should then start to pin your affiliate links to your boards. Don't just pin your affiliate links only from here on out though, continue repinning other peoples pins so that they all blend in together. But do keep a note of your affiliated pins and then do pin ranking on them using repin services from SEOClerks that I showed you before.

Also you can do SEO on pins as well to help them rank higher in the SERPs. There are many great ways you can do that by sharing it on other Social Media sites and building links to it as well so that it has a fighting chance of ranking high in the SERPs.

You should optimize your profile, boards and pins by making sure they contain the keywords in them you want to rank for. Be sure to always add a good keyword and people friendly description to a pin when pinning something and use the occasional #hashtag in them as well. Not all of them though, too much hash is good for no one.

Now that Pinterest has reenabled affiliate links in pins, it opens up a whole world of potential to earn a lot of money. Before they stopped allowing it, some people were making big big money on Pinterest by linking directly to affiliate products. After they stopped, people were forced to link to their website or landing page instead. This was good in a way because it meant more traffic for your site, but the 2nd step people had to take to click on the affiliate links on your site decreased conversion rates. Now though people can be sent straight to the affiliate product or service directly from the pin itself which will improve your conversion rates once again. All you have to do is find the right thing to pin that is vivid and alluring and send them to that from the pin.

Pinning SEOClerks Services to Pinterest

You could pin other peoples SEOClerks services to Pinterest using your SEOClerks affiliate URL. You only have to make some small changes to the URL first. So let's say you wanted to promote my Pinterest Pins service (by the way I'm paying 15% extra commission on that atm ;)). You would take the URL of that service, then add in your affiliate URL number into it and you'll earn a commission on it for any sale you make.

So this is the original URL

https://www.seoclerks.com/pinterest/450126/Pin-Repin-Your-Website-or-Anything-to-50-Big-Pinterest-Boards

To make it into an affiliate URL you will get commission for you need to place the "/linkin/xxx" part and your affiliate number into it. Mine just happens to be 272 but you can find yours on your affiliate page. Make sure you remove the s from https and put an a instead of the www so that when you are finished it looks like this;

http://a.seoclerks.com/linkin/272/pinterest/450126/Pin-Repin-Your-Website-or-Anything-to-50-Big-Pinterest-Boards

You can now pin that URL to Pinterest. I could explain how to do it but I'm starting to feel a bit lazy at this point so I made a gif image walkthrough tutorial instead that shows you what you need to do. Basically just click the add pin button, choose add from website, paste your URL in and hit enter. Then choose an image to pin, then enter a description etc and choose a board to pin it to or create one if you don't have an apt one already.


What Else to Pin to Pinterest as an Affiliate?

Obviously the best things to pin are as said above. So you'll want to pin those most popular things that the majority of Pinterest users are looking for. You don't just have to pin SEOClerks services (or your own). But you can pin anything you like provided the image is of super high quality. The best thing to do is join an affiliate network of some kind for a super popular brand name fashion website or something. Try to stick to a big brand name that people know and trust. Not just Amazon! And yes you can promote your Amazon affiliate links as well. I use Webgains because they are affiliates for all the biggest online stores and retailers from around the world so you can find some pretty big brand names and some amazing stuff to promote. You'll get an affiliate URL generator, so just find the product you like and create an affiliate URL from it. You can then use this when pinning to Pinterest and it should find any images on that page you can use as the image to pin. You can then promote these pins and boards using pin ranking methods.

Stats and Percentages of Pinterest Users

Knowing the demographics of Pinterest users can help you to know which users you can target and when they're most likely to be online. Here's some Pinterest tips, stats and percentages to help you along the way to Pinterest success.

1. Pinterest has 100 million active monthly users and 1 billion unique users globally.
   
2. 75% of Pinterest users are using mobiles so make sure the sites you send them to are mobile friendly!
   
3. The best time to pin on Pinterest is between 2PM to 4PM and 8PM to 1AM with Saturday being the best day.
   
4. A call to action pin can increase pin engagement by up to a whopping 80%. It doesn't hurt to ask!
   
5. The sites which have images pinned the most are Etsy, Googel+, Flickr, Tumblr and WeHeartIt
   
6. People that pin from 15-30 pins a day spread out every hour get the best results from Pinterest.
   
7. Pin descriptions that have between 100-200 words get pinned/repinned the most.
   
8. Pins with prices on them get 39% more likes and have a better conversion rate.
   
9. 65% of Pinterest users are aged between 16-34.
   
10. 56% are female and 44% are male users.
    
11. 96% of Pinterest users have Facebook.
    
12. 83% have YouTube
    
13. 81% have Twitter
    
14. 81% have Google+
    
15. 62% have LinkedIn
    
16. 60% have Instagram
    
17. 48% have Tumblr
    
18. 33% have Reddit
    
19. 11% of users are aged 18-24
    
20. 23% of users are aged 25-34
    
21. 26% of users are aged 35-44
    
22. 16% of users are aged 45-54
    
23. The rest are OAPs or unknown.
    
24. 58% of users are using Pinterest on a tablet.
    
25. 30% of users are using Pinterest on a mobile.
    
26. 12% of users are using Pinterest on a desktop PC.
    
27. 30% of users prefer to be on Pinterest than watch TV.
    

My Conclusion and Ending Statement

Now that Pinterest are allowing Affiliate Links in Pins again. I would expect that many of the old users that were using it and coining it in before will come out of the woodwork and start hitting Pinterest up once again. It got really bad before and that's why Pinterest decided against them. So how long this lasts for nobody can really say. However while it's available, there are going to be some people making a lot of money out of it again. So whether you're an old or a new user, Pinterest can be a good place to turn to for making some small extra pocket money or a nice little windfall depending on well you do. I for one will be stepping up my Pinterest campaign and pulling out all the stops to maximize the profit earning potential from this photo sharing powerhouse.

What do you think about this decision by Pinterest?

Do you think it will cause a lot of spam by naive desperate marketers?

Was you a user before they disabled affiliate links?

Do you like my post or have any questions about anything?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks and power to you!

Mike.