How to Make Money On Pinterest
What is Pinterest? Pinterest is a visual discovery engine for finding ideas like recipes, home and style inspiration, and more.
With billions of Pins on Pinterest, you’ll always find ideas to spark inspiration. When you discover Pins you love, save them to boards to keep your ideas organised and easy to find.
Pinterest is an online pinboard, a visual take on the social bookmarking site. Unlike other social bookmarking sites, such as Digg and StumbleUpon, content shared on Pinterest is driven entirely by visuals. In fact, you can’t share something on Pinterest unless an image is involved.
Since 2010, Pinterest has been helping people find DIYs, recipes, products they love, how-tos, and thousands of other random things. It’s both a creative outlet and marketer’s dream — meaning you can learn how to make money on Pinterest in several different ways.
But, here’s the thing about making money on Pinterest… Pinterest knows how powerful the platform is, and they have been actively making changes to protect their user’s experience. There have been changes with affiliate marketing, running contests, etc.
Some people who learned how to make money on Pinterest had to adjust their strategies, but the changes have honestly made it better for everyone. The content is getting better, and everyone is experiencing a more authentic experience.
Despite the changes, there are 100% legitimate, non spammy ways to make money on Pinterest. Now if you’re here on this page looking for ways to make money very quickly, Pinterest might not be the best option.
Most of the items on this list will take time to build, but if you’re looking for something quick and easy, online surveys through Survey Junkie might be a better fit.
But if you’re more interested in long-term strategies for making money – read on. There are opportunities for bloggers, virtual assistants, affiliate marketing directly through Pinterest, and more.
How to Make Money On Pinterest
Here are 10 ways to make money on Pinterest in 2021
1. Start a blog
Now there are plenty of items on this list that will help you make money on Pinterest, but blogging has the highest earning potential of them all (and it’s not really close).
Over the years, Pinterest has become a massive platform that allows bloggers to reach millions of people on the internet every year. Now there’s a common misconception that Pinterest is just another social media platform like Instagram, TikTok, and the rest – but that simply isn’t true. It’s much more powerful in terms of helping bloggers make money with their content.
Just like you likely found this article by typing in “how to make money on Pinterest” in Google – the same thing happens on Pinterest. It’s a search engine, but it’s based on images instead of text.
This is why bloggers in many different niches become extremely successful with Pinterest marketing, from food bloggers to personal finance bloggers and more.
Here’s the quick and dirty version of how making money with a blog on Pinterest works:
Choose a blogging niche (food, personal finance, fashion, etc.)
Create content and post it on your blog, and monetize it with ads, affiliate products, or even sponsored placements
Create a Pinterest account
Create a Pin (i.e. an interesting image that shows what your blog post is about)
Post the image on Pinterest
Now there’s more to it than that, of course, but that’s essentially how it works. When a Pinterest user searches for something that matches your blog post, they’ll be able to see your Pin, click on it, and ultimately see your ads or buy products from you.
And the great thing is that it’s scalable – there are plenty of bloggers out there that make anywhere from a few thousand dollars per month to hundreds of thousands per month!
2. Become a Pinterest virtual assistant
Pinterest virtual assistants help bloggers, social media influencers, and online business owners optimize their Pinterest accounts. This includes things like:
Creating pins
Using Tailwind for scheduling
Automating the pinning process
Doing keyword research
Working with Pinterest Ads Manager to run Promoted Pins (Pinterest’s version of Facebook ads)
Creating sales funnels, opt-ins, and more
One of the things Pinterest virtual assistants like so much about the work is that it’s insanely flexible — you work when you want and where you want — and it stays interesting. Most Pinterest virtual assistants have several clients, and they perform different kinds of Pinterest management tasks for each one.
How much can you make as a Pinterest virtual assistant? Each client is worth around $500/month… sweet!
If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, the Pinterest Virtual Assistant Course will teach you how to make money on Pinterest as a virtual assistant. You learn about everything in that bullet pointed list above, plus how to find, land, and retain clients.
The Pinterest VA course is taught by Kristin Larsen, who have already helped hundreds of online entrepreneurs and bloggers grow their businesses.
3. Affiliate marketing on Pinterest
Affiliate marketing is when you partner with companies to promote products and/or services. The company gives you a unique link (affiliate link) that you insert in your posts or pins. When someone clicks on that link and makes a purchase, you’re paid a commission — this is called making a conversion.
Affiliate marketing is one of several different ways that bloggers make money, but it’s also a legit way to make money on Pinterest. You can find affiliates through networks like ShareASale, FlexOffers, and more. Once you have affiliates to work with, you create pins with affiliate links in the text.
Here are a few really important things to know about affiliate marketing on Pinterest:
There are some companies that don’t let you post their affiliate links on Pinterest, so always check with company’s affiliate manager and read the rules of your contract.
Some companies will not allow you to take images from their site to be used when creating pins, even if you are an affiliate. Amazon is one example.
When posting affiliate links, Pinterest does not want you to mask or shorten the affiliate link. They want you to be as transparent as possible.
You always need to disclose your affiliate relationship. This is required by the FTC. The easiest thing to do is put #affiliate or #affiliatelink in your pin.
And possibly the most important point: Pinterest has changed their stance on affiliate marketing several times already. They allowed it in the beginning, banned it in 2015, and now it’s allowed again. I bring this up because when you are making money on another platform, your income is dependant on that platform. A change in Pinterest’s policy could be devastating to an affiliate marketer who was making money on Pinterest alone.
So what to do? I’d start by diversifying your streams of income, and starting a blog is a great one for someone with a large Pinterest following already. There are also other social media platforms that might be good fits too, like Instagram and Facebook.
I still think affiliate marketing is a great way to make money with Pinterest for anyone interested. You can bring a lot of value to your follower’s lives by promoting the products you love. Affiliate income makes up a big part of my blogging income, and I feel really good about the companies and products I promote.
Also see 7 Guides for Securing a Good Job in USA
If you’re interested in learning more about affiliate marketing, whether it’s on Pinterest or through your blog, I highly recommend that you check out my good friend Michelle Schroeder-Gardner’s course Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing. She regularly makes around $50,000/month from affiliate marketing alone, and she’s done it all without selling her soul.
How to Make Money On Pinterest
To be continued.