You might know Pinterest as the place to go to find crafts, dinner recipes, and decorating ideas. However, Pinterest is also a powerful social search engine with over 475 million monthly active users! This equates to more than 2 billion searches done on Pinterest each month by people trying to find information and make buying decisions about topics that interest them.
With these numbers, it’s no wonder that Pinterest has established itself as the marketing tool of choice for bloggers, content creators, online businesses, and large corporations looking to attract new people to their brand. Pinterest is always changing its algorithm to provide a better experience for its users, so you have to keep up with the right strategy and trends if you want to be successful.
If you’re looking for a way to make some quick cash this week, Pinterest probably isn’t the place for you. However, if you are looking to create a long-term asset that you can continue to profit from for years into the future in a 100% legit and non-spam fashion, keep reading.
How to make money on Pinterest
Whatever your interests and skills, I’m sure you’ll find a strategy here that you’re excited to implement today.
1. Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is when you promote a product or service from a different company and then get a commission when someone buys that offer using your link. It is a form of online word-of-mouth marketing that has the potential to make money.
The best way to make money on Pinterest through affiliate marketing is to start a blog. The idea is that you will create multiple informational blog posts on topics related to the affiliate offers you are promoting. Then, you’ll look for opportunities in those articles to talk about and link to your affiliate offers.
Affiliate marketing on Pinterest works best if you choose affiliate offers all related to a single topic or niche. Your blog and articles should focus on this niche. This will help people trust your expertise and suggestions and make it easier to promote your blog posts on Pinterest.
Pinterest is a visual search engine, not a traditional social media platform. This enables you to attract people to your blog who are actively searching for specific keywords or phrases related to your offers. There is such a wide variety of content on Pinterest for anyone, including animal lovers, aspiring chefs, and finance enthusiasts, that almost any blogger can find their target audience through Pinterest marketing.
The process for attracting a potential buyer to your blog through Pinterest looks like this:
- Choose a suitable niche for your blog that has affiliate offers available to promote it.
- Write blog articles, using Pinterest as inspiration, about popular topics related to your niche.
- Find places in your articles where it naturally makes sense to promote your affiliate offers and include your affiliate links.
- Create a Pinterest account and optimize it for keywords and phrases that you want to be found on Pinterest.
- Create multiple pins for your blog posts, post them on Pinterest, and link those pins back to your individual blog posts.
Once your pins are posted on Pinterest, other pinners have a chance to see some of them when they search for a related keyword. Ideally, your pin will catch their eye, and they will click through your blog article and purchase one of the affiliate offers you are talking about in it.
While blogging may not be the fastest way to make money on Pinterest, it is highly scalable. Many bloggers are making anywhere from a few hundred dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars per month using this method.
If you enjoy researching and writing about topics related to your chosen field, then blogging could be a great way for you to make money on Pinterest. If you put in the work up front to write multiple blog articles and generate Pins, you’ll have a system set up that can generate regular income from Pinterest traffic in the long run.
2. CareIf
If you already have a Pinterest account with a large number of followers and a good monthly reach, partnering with a brand and promoting their products on Pinterest for a fee might be a good option for you. Companies will pay a flat fee for a set number of sponsored pins that you post on their behalf.
As we talked about in the affiliate marketing section, it’s best to keep your Pinterest account centered around a single niche. This makes it more likely that brands related to your niche will reach out to you and that you will be successful in promoting their products on your Pinterest account.
While brands may reach you directly, you can also be proactive about creating partnerships. Try contacting the companies directly to request sponsorships, or, if you have a blog, you could submit a sponsored blog post, which you will then heavily promote on Pinterest.
3. Become a Pinterest VA.
Many bloggers and online business owners know the power of Pinterest marketing, but they simply don’t have the time to implement a strategy on a regular basis. This is where becoming a Pinterest virtual assistant comes in!
Pinterest’s virtual assistants complete tasks such as:
- Optimize your Pinterest accounts for keywords.
- Do keyword research on Pinterest.
- Graphics design for the new pins
- Automate and schedule the installation process.
- Promoted Pins (paid ads)
- Track Pinterest traffic and other stats
By becoming a Pinterest Virtual Assistant, you become an expert in a very specific skill set that is in high demand. By keeping up with the usual algorithm changes at Pinterest, you will be seen as a valuable team member that your customers may want to work with in the long run.
Being a Pinterest VA is a very flexible job that allows you to work from anywhere, even using your phone for some tasks. The amount you can expect to make varies, but on average, making $50 to $100 or more per hour is typical. Depending on your client’s marketing budget and scope of work required, between $300 and $1,200 per month is a typical rate range for ongoing account maintenance, pin generation, pin scheduling, and keyword optimization.
If you’re new to Pinterest strategy and don’t know where to start, the online course Become a Pinterest VA Today is a great place to start. This program was created by an experienced and successful Pinterest VA who has now taught thousands of other students to do the same. It is a one-of-a-kind program specifically designed to help students build, launch, and grow a successful side business like Pinterest VA and make upwards of $1,000 to $2,000 or more per month. As you gain experience, you will receive high-quality clients from the program who can help you make a quick return on your initial investment.
4. Start an e-commerce site.
If you are interested in creating and selling products online, Pinterest is a great way to make money. Two of the most popular ways to sell products online are by using Shopify to create an e-commerce website or by listing your products on Etsy. There are quite a few ways you can go about building an e-commerce site, including by creating your own products, organizing a selection of products around a specific niche, or even offering products through dropshipping.
Once the products are available for sale on your e-commerce site, you can start promoting them on Pinterest. This can be done by creating product pins. By using product pins, Pinterest allows your potential customers to view the latest prices and purchase the product directly through the “Buy” button on the site.
You can also try a strategy similar to the one described in the affiliate marketing section of this article, in which you write informative blog articles about your products and pin these articles on Pinterest. These can be seasonal gift guides, style posts, or comparison articles, where you then link to your products within the article.
5. Sell courses
Are you an expert on a particular topic or at least a few steps ahead of a beginner? If so, you can create an online course to teach what you know and then promote that course on Pinterest.
Once you’ve created an online course that’s ready to sell, you can promote that course in a number of ways on Pinterest. The most direct way is to create pins that lead directly to your course sales pages. You can also hire affiliates to promote your course and let them create pins that lead back to your sales page as well.
Another option might be to write a case study blog article about someone you helped or a step-by-step article that teaches you how to do a small part of the entire course topic. You can then promote these blog articles on Pinterest and link to the course sales page in the article as a recommended resource to learn more.
6. Sale of advisory services
If you have some experience and results growing your Pinterest account, you may have what it takes to consult with other online creators and brands who want to grow their presence on Pinterest.
Once your account is successful, consider managing another company’s Pinterest account for a month in exchange for a testimonial and case study for your business. A case study like this can become a powerful way to show big brands and future clients what you can do with their Pinterest accounts.
Even if you don’t want to manage Pinterest regularly, you can make a great income from consulting services. Not many companies understand how Pinterest works, so your knowledge is valuable.
7. Curate boards for major brands
This is an idea that works best if you already have a large, engaged audience on Pinterest. The idea is for you to sponsor a board that is co-branded with the niche of your Pinterest account in exchange for payment from the brand. This allows the brand to leverage your large audience of followers and add additional boards on the topic to their account.
One of the nice things about this type of partnership is that you get a flat fee for creating and managing your shared board, with the potential to gain new followers for your account in the process. You should be able to attract larger, higher-paying brands as your following and reach grow.
8. Joint promotions
In a cross-promotion, pinners will create Pins to post on their Pinterest accounts to promote the brand’s products. Depending on the brand you partner with, they may be interested in placing the product on your actual Pins, links to desired product pages, or even Pins that lead to your blog articles with information about their products.
This type of partnership usually works best when the brand and products are tied to your niche. For example, a Pinterest account focused on travel might partner with Airbnb to increase their brand awareness on Pinterest.
9. Shop the look pins
If you’re promoting products you use or wear, requesting access to Shop the Look Pins is a great idea. These pins allow you to tag products that can be seen on your boards and get a commission when someone buys the product.
This strategy works best if you use beautiful or interesting images to create your pins, which other pinners will naturally want to save on Pinterest. By strategically positioning your product within these pins, you can create a widely shared PIN that will also generate sales for your products or affiliate offerings.
10. Display ads on a blog.
If you’re already committed to creating a blog to help you make money on Pinterest, adding display ads to your blog is a great way to increase that income. By signing up with a company like Mediavine or Google AdSense, you will earn money every time someone visits your site.
This is a great strategy to use with affiliate marketing because you will need both to create blog content that can be promoted on Pinterest. Display ads will give you a nice boost in income for the work you’ll already do to drive traffic from Pinterest.
The best tips for making money on Pinterest
Are you ready to grow your Pinterest account and start making money? Here are the best tips for making it happen:
Sign up for a business account.
Of course, to start making money on Pinterest, you need a Pinterest account! You’ll want it to be a business account so you can get access to all the right features and stats. If you already have a personal account, you can switch it to a business account, or you can start from scratch on the Pinterest Business website.
Improve your profile and make it attractive.
Once you’ve created your Pinterest business account, it’s time to improve your profile. Keywords are more important than ever on Pinterest, and your profile is the first place you can start listing them.
Start by typing some keywords related to your niche into the Pinterest search bar. Find out what keyword phrases Pinterest suggests, and make a list of those that you think are best suited to attract ideal audience members to your account. You can use the top two or three keywords you find to help populate your Pinterest profile section.
The places you want to include keywords are:
- Pinterest display name
- Pinterest username
- bio section of the profile
Choose a profile picture that’s simple, doesn’t include text, and is easy to view on a mobile device. You can also choose a video or photo to feature in the larger cover photo section of your Pinterest profile to help create consistent branding.
Create pin boards that fit your content.
Next, you’ll want to start creating boards for your page. When choosing your forum topics and titles, you should keep two things in mind:
- The keywords and popular phrases suggested in the Pinterest search bar should be relevant to your niche.
- Pin topics you plan to create for your Pinterest account.
By using phrases suggested by Pinterest, you have a better chance of having your pins appear for search queries that are popular with Pinterest users. Ideally, each pin you create will be able to fit on multiple boards.
After creating a new board, it’s a good idea to initially populate it with 10–20 pins suggested by Pinterest to help the Pinterest algorithm start to understand what your board is about.
Create amazing pins.
Designing pins that are visually appealing and get a lot of clicks doesn’t have to be as hard as you think. Online tools like Canva and PicMonkey are two options that help people with no design experience create some effective pins.
Both programs include Pinterest Pin templates that you can use to create your own pins.Just change the text, add an image of your choice, switch up the colors and font, and you’ll have a pin ready to post. You can easily take a single template and make small modifications to it to create multiple pin designs.
Some top tips for creating effective Pinterest pins:
- Choose photos that relate to the topic of your pin. Pinterest can “see” what your image is about and match it to relevant keyword searches.
- Use bold, easy-to-read text that provides more information about what someone will find when they click on your PIN. Use other pins on Pinterest to get inspiration for words and phrases that work best.
- Always keep mobile users in mind, as the majority of Pinterest traffic is from mobile devices. Check your PIN on a mobile device to see if the text and image look fine.
Pay attention to Pinterest SEO.
Pinterest is first and foremost a search engine. This means focusing on Pinterest SEO and your target keywords should be a top priority. You’ve already optimized your profile for SEO and found your suggested keywords on Pinterest to target, so the next step is to use an SEO strategy with your pins.
When you upload a new pin to Pinterest, there are many sites where you want to include your target keyword phrases. These areas are:
Take advantage of every opportunity Pinterest gives you to include your keywords to give yourself the best chance of your pins appearing in other pinners’ search results.
Engage with other commenters.
Pinterest is designed to be a platform where you can interact with other people’s content by saving pins, following other pinners, joining group boards, adding comments, and sharing with others. When you work to grow your Pinterest account, you should share what Pinterest expects of its users.
Use a scheduler for installation.
It can be difficult to keep pinning to your Pinterest account on a daily basis.The best option to help with this task is to use a Pinterest scheduling tool like Tailwind. You can select all the pins you want pinned to your account at once and then schedule them to be pinned automatically throughout the month with Tailwind.
Explore new trends and features.
Anytime a social platform introduces a new feature, it’s a great strategy to be an early adopter. Pinterest wants its new features to be successful and for users to adopt them quickly, so it makes sense that they would prefer the accounts you use.
Currently, Pinterest is pushing “story pins” as a new trend, in addition to “video pins,” which can be as simple as a gif. Creating these types of pins can help increase the reach of your entire Pinterest account.
Follow the rules of Pinterest.
When you are trying to make money on Pinterest, you must follow the rules of the platform. You’ll need to review the Pinterest Community Guidelines to make sure you’re respecting them. If you work with any brands and post Pins to them for payment, you’ll need to be upfront about your business relationship and include appropriate advertising disclosures on your Pins.
Final thoughts
When considering ways to make money on Pinterest, remember that many of these strategies can work in conjunction with other income-generating activities. For example, if you are going to start a blog to do affiliate marketing on Pinterest, you can also consider adding display ads to your blog or creating an online course related to your niche.
Take a moment to think about what you enjoy doing and where you stand with the current size of Pinterest’s audience. Then choose a strategy that matches your interests and goals. Remember, when you create a Pinterest account, you’re playing the long game. Start building your Pinterest audience today; take consistent action, and in a few months, you’ll be so glad you did!
