How to Make Money with Pinterest

Imagine if you could create an online strategy that can get you massive traffic and sales?

Stop imagining. It is possible!

You probably already heard of Pinterest, one of the world’s largest search engines for sharing images and videos.

It’s a huge underutilized source of traffic.

In fact, with over 150 million active monthly users, 30% of all social media users in the U.S. are Pinterest users.

Today I’m going to show you how to make money with Pinterest, including how to get your pins noticed.

Let’s dig in!

What’s Pinterest all about?

Pinterest is known as a social network for discovery and sharing, but it’s also one of the largest search engines in the world.

Many people still think that Pinterest is just for finding great recipes that you can save to your own account for easy access.

But it’s much more than that!

Since it’s a social network, you can follow people on Pinterest and they can follow you.

Pinterest gives you the ability to place your posts into categories. These posts are called “pins.” The categories are called boards.

If you were to save a recipe pin to your own board, your followers would also see that pin in their home feed. Now they can follow and share it too!

See how that works?

Your content has the potential to get shared by hundreds or thousands of people.

The good news?

If your pins get noticed and shared by thousands of people, a good percentage of that traffic will click through to your blog.

That’s one key way to get a ton of traffic and make money indirectly with Pinterest.

You can also make money on Pinterest with direct affiliate links and bypass your website altogether.

Now that you know a little about Pinterest and the potential to make money, let’s get into some basics to help you be successful with Pinterest.

How to Make Money with Pinterest for Beginners

I can give you a list of ways to earn money on Pinterest:

• Sell affiliate products.
• Sell a physical product.
• Offer a service.
• Sell digital products.
• The list can go on.

And believe me, people make plenty of purchase decisions through Pinterest recommendations.

But …

Before you can drive traffic to your website or through affiliate links, first setup a good foundation for your Pinterest account. You can’t sell or drive traffic if you have no followers or people sharing your pins. Ask yourself:

How do you create an incredible profile on Pinterest that will interest people?

And how do you gain followers on Pinterest without begging people to follow you?

How do you get people to share your pins or visit your website?

Well, that’s exactly what this section is about so that you can gain an audience, drive traffic and start making some money using the Pinterest social media platform.

1. Set up your Pinterest Account and Profile the Right Way

If you are a serious entrepreneur, setup a Pinterest for Business account. This will help you take advantage of marketing on Pinterest in the best way possible.

Some of the features are different than a personal account. The two most important of those are:

• Access to Pinterest analytics: Helps you understand what’s working and where you need to improve.
• Rich Pins: Show extra information directly on a Pin. The 4 types of of Rich Pins are: app, product, recipe and article.

Be sure to put some thought into setting up your Business profile as follows:

• Setup your Profile Image: Include a great image of yourself that others can recognize from other social media networks. People love to see others smiling and friendly, so make sure your image is!
• Fill in your Name and Description: Do some keyword research so you can include the best terms in your profile description to help others find you on Pinterest.
• Provide a link to an Opt-in: Include a link to your best opt-in within your profile description. This gives readers a chance to join your list if they want to. You won’t get tons of signups this way but it doesn’t hurt to have it there in case someone wants to.

2. Keep your Pinterest Boards well Organized

Many people in this popular social network like to follow specific boards rather your account.

It makes sense that you should organize your boards so people know right away what they are about and if they want to follow.

Take your best and most popular boards and organize them horizontally in the first row. This will make a great impression on those people who find you on Pinterest.

Here’s an example of my friend McKinzie’s Pinterest board. It’s attractive and nicely organized. She’s drives an incredible amount of traffic from Pinterest to her blog.

She put together a 5-day Pinterest Primer course where she shares some incredible secrets too!

Enroll in the Pinterest course NOW for FREE!

Give each of your boards a good, keyword rich description. Your boards can appear in Google search results as well as Pinterest search.

3. How to Gain Followers on Pinterest

One of the easiest ways to get more Pinterest followers is to follow other people. You could just sit around hoping someone will discover your pins and follow you.

But …

If you follow other people’s boards, a good percentage of them will follow you back.

Another technique is to repin the content of other users. This is a sure way to get noticed by the original Pin creator and they are likely to follow you back.

4. Creating Pins that Get Found and Shared

People are always searching on Pinterest for a variety of information. Remember, it’s a huge search engine!

Include keyword rich descriptions for your pin so that they appear in search results.

Coupled with that is creating attractive Pins that compel a person to click it. I know, we aren’t all too creative but there are tools that can help you. Both of these provide great Pinterest templates that you can just edit and make them your own:

• PicMonkey – Create beautiful images with PicMonkey’s powerful photo editing and graphic design software.
• Canva – Use Canva’s drag-and-drop feature and professional layouts to design consistently stunning graphics.

If you like using programs on your local computer, I highly recommend Adobe Photoshop where you can create amazing images!

Remember to make your Pinterest images of the optimal size. When you use the templates mentioned above, they will be the correct size.

If you use something else, stick with 735 pixels x 1102 pixels.

You’ll also want to use beautiful fonts and graphic elements. You can find those in both PicMonkey and Canva, but I prefer resources where I can really explore being more creative. And you can upload your own fonts and images to the aforementioned.

Here are two fabulous resources that also offer free downloads on a regular basis in addition to their paid downloads.

• FontBundles – Get the best high quality premium and free fonts. You can save big on fonts and they also give  a Font Free every week.
• DesignBundles – My new favorite for design elements. You can find quality resources that you pay for as well as free design resources.

5. How to Use Affiliate Links on Pinterest

I wanted to include this section about using affiliate links. Not every Pin needs to link back to a blog post.

This method works well if you want to promote something but not write a blog post about it.

Create an image and then pin it to one of your boards. Write a great description and be sure to disclose by adding “affiliate” at the end of the description.

After you pin the image, click the Edit button and enter your affiliate link in the Website field.

Final Thoughts

In this post I gave you a few tips on setting up a good foundation on Pinterest so you can drive a ton of traffic to your site and make money. Creating a great profile with description, following others and taking care to create powerful pins will all lead to gaining more followers and attention.

To get a more in-depth lesson on using Pinterest to make money, I highly recommend that you take this course from my good friend McKinzie. She is an absolute pro when it comes to everything Pinterest.

Enroll in the Pinterest Primer course NOW and learn the basic in-depth!