10 Ways to Make Money on Pinterest

You may know Pinterest as the place you go to find DIY crafts, dinner recipes, and decor ideas. However, Pinterest is also a powerful social search engine with more than 475 million active monthly users! That equates to more than two billion searches performed on Pinterest each month by people trying to find information and making buying decisions on topics of interest to them.

With these numbers, it’s no wonder that Pinterest has established itself as a favorite marketing tool for bloggers, content creators, online businesses, and larger companies looking to attract new people to their brand. Pinterest is always changing up its algorithm to provide a better experience for its users, so you’ve got to keep up with the correct strategy and trends if you want to be successful. 

If you’re looking for a way to make some quick cash this week, then Pinterest probably isn’t the place for you. However, if you’re looking to build a long-term money-making asset that you can continue to leverage for years into the future in a 100% legit and non-spammy way, then keep reading. 

How to Make Money on Pinterest

No matter what your interests and skill sets are, I’m confident that you’ll find a strategy here that you’re excited about implementing today. 

1. Affiliate Marketing 

Affiliate marketing is when you promote a product or service of a different company and then get paid a commission when someone buys that offer using your link. It’s a form of online word-of-mouth marketing that has the potential to make you money.  

The very best way to make money on Pinterest through affiliate marketing is to start a blog. The idea is that you’ll create multiple informative blog articles on topics related to the affiliate offers that you promote. Then you’ll look for opportunities within those articles to talk about and link out to your affiliate offers. 

Affiliate marketing on Pinterest works best if you choose affiliate offers all related to a singular topic or niche. Your blog and articles should focus around this one niche. This will help people trust your expertise and suggestions and makes it easier to promote your blog posts on Pinterest. 

Pinterest is a visual search engine rather than a traditional social media platform. This enables you to attract people to your blog that 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 cooks, and finance aficionados, that almost any blogger can find their target audience through Pinterest marketing. 

The process of attracting a potential buyer to your blog through Pinterest looks like this: 

1. Choose a niche for your blog that has related affiliate offers available to promote. 
2. Write blog articles – using Pinterest as inspiration – on popular topics related to your niche.
3. Find spots in your articles where it naturally makes sense to promote your affiliate offers and insert your affiliate links. 
4. Create a Pinterest account and optimize it for the keywords and phrases you want to be found for on Pinterest. 
5. Create multiple Pins for your blog posts and post them on Pinterest, linking these Pins back to your individual blog posts. 

Once your Pins are live on Pinterest, other Pinners have the opportunity to see some of your Pins when they search for a related keyword. Ideally, your Pin will catch their eye and they will click through to your blog article and buy one of the affiliate offers that you talk about in it. 

While blogging may not be the quickest way to make money on Pinterest, it is extremely scalable. Many bloggers make anywhere from a few hundred dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars per month using this method. 

If you enjoy researching and writing on topics related to your chosen niche, then blogging may be a great way for you to make money on Pinterest. If you put in the work upfront to write multiple blog articles and create the Pins, you’ll have a system set up that can create a regular income from Pinterest traffic for the long term. 

See Also: 11 Ways to Make Money on TikTok

2. Sponsorships 

If you already have a Pinterest account with a large number of followers and good monthly reach, then partnering with a brand and promoting their products on Pinterest for a fee may be a good option for you. Companies will pay a flat fee for a specific number of sponsored Pins that you post on their behalf. 

Like we talked about in the affiliate marketing section, it’s best to keep your Pinterest account focused around a singular niche. This makes it more likely that brands related to your niche will reach out to you and that you’ll be successful in promoting their products on your Pinterest account.

While brands may reach out to you directly, you can also be proactive in creating partnerships. Try contacting companies directly to ask for sponsorship or, if you have a blog, you can offer a sponsored blog post which you’ll then heavily promote on Pinterest. 

3. Become a Pinterest VA 

Many bloggers and online business owners know about the power of Pinterest marketing, but they simply don’t have the time needed to implement a Pinterest strategy on a regular basis. That’s where becoming a Pinterest virtual assistant comes in! 

Pinterest virtual assistants complete tasks such as: 

• Optimizing Pinterest accounts for keywords
• Doing Pinterest keyword research
• Designing the graphics for new Pins
• Automating and scheduling the pinning process
• Running Promoted Pins (paid advertising)
• Tracking Pinterest traffic and other stats

By becoming a Pinterest VA you become an expert on a very specific skill set that is in high demand. By keeping up with Pinterest’s regular algorithm changes, you’ll be seen as a valued team member that your clients will likely want to work with for the long term. 

Being a Pinterest VA is an extremely flexible job that allows you the ability to work from anywhere, even being able to use your phone for some of the tasks. The amount you can expect to make varies, but on average making between $50 to $100 and more per hour is a typical rate. Depending on the marketing budget of your client and the scope of the work needed, between $300 and $1,200 per month is a typical rate range for ongoing account maintenance, Pin creation, Pin scheduling, and keyword optimization.

If you’re new to Pinterest strategy and don’t know where to start, the Become a Pinterest VA Today online course is a great place option. This program was created by an experienced and successful Pinterest VA who has now taught thousands of other students to do the same. It’s a unique program designed specifically to help students build, launch, and grow a successful side-hustle as a Pinterest VA and make an extra $1,000 to $2,000 or more per month. As you gain experience, you’ll even receive high-quality client leads from the program that can help you to make a quick return on your initial investment. 

See Also: 32 Best Gig Economy Jobs That Pay Well 

4. Start an eCommerce Site 

If you have an interest in creating products and selling them online, then 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 eCommerce website or by listing your products on Etsy. There are quite a few ways to go about building an eCommerce site including creating your products, curating a selection of products around a specific niche, or even offering products through dropshipping.

Once you have products available for sale on your eCommerce site, you can start promoting them on Pinterest. This can be done by creating Product Pins. With Product Pins, Pinterest allows your potential customers to view the most up-to-date price and purchase the product directly through a “buy” button on Pinterest. 

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 post Pins for these articles on Pinterest. These could be seasonal gift guides, round-up style posts, or comparison articles, in which you then link to your products within the article.  

5. Sell Courses 

Are you an expert on a certain topic or at least a few steps ahead of a beginner? If so, you can create an online course teaching what you know, and then promote that course on Pinterest. 

Once you have an online course created and ready for sale, you can promote this course in several ways on Pinterest. The most straightforward way is by creating Pins that lead directly to your course sales pages. You could even recruit affiliates to promote your course and allow them to create Pins leading to your sales page as well. 

Another option would be to write a case study blog article about someone you helped or a step-by-step article that teaches how to do a small part of your entire course topic. You can then promote these blog articles on Pinterest and link out to your course sales page in the article as a recommended resource to learn more. 

See Also: 40 Proven and Legitimate Ways to Make Money Fast (Make $100 or More)

6. Sell Consulting Services

If you’ve got some experience and results growing your Pinterest account, then you may have what it takes to consult with other online content creators and brands that want to grow their Pinterest presence. 

Once you’ve had success with your account, consider managing the Pinterest account of another business for a month in exchange for a testimonial and being a case study for your work. A case study like this can become a powerful way to show larger brands and future clients what you could do with their Pinterest accounts. 

Even if you don’t want to do regular Pinterest management, you can create a great income from consulting services. Many businesses do not understand how Pinterest works, so your knowledge is very valuable to them. 

7. Curate Boards for Big Brands 

This is an idea that works best if you already have a large and engaged Pinterest audience. The idea is that you curate a shared board with a brand that aligns with your Pinterest account niche in exchange for payment from the brand. This allows the brand to benefit from your large audience of followers and add additional on-topic boards to their account. 

One nice thing about this type of partnership is that you’re getting paid a flat fee for the creation and curation of the shared board while also potentially gaining new followers for your account in the process. As you increase your follow numbers and reach, you should be able to attract bigger and higher-paying brands. 

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8. Joint Promotions 

In a joint promotion, a Pinner will create Pins to post on their Pinterest account that promote a brand’s products. Depending on the brand that you partner with, they may be interested in product placement on your actual pins, links leading to their desired product pages, or even Pins that lead to your blog articles that include information about their products.

This type of partnership typically works best when the brand and products are related 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 Looks Pins

If you promote products that you use or wear, then requesting access to Shop the Look Pins is a great idea. These Pins allow you to tag the products that can be seen on your Pins and receive a commission when someone purchases the product. 

This strategy works best if you use beautiful or intriguing photos to create your Pins that other Pinners would naturally want to save on Pinterest. With strategic product placement within these Pins, you can create a widely-shared Pin that also results in sales for your products or affiliate offers. 

See Also: Best Paid Online Surveys

10. Display Ads on a Blog 

If you’re already committed to creating a blog to help you make money on Pinterest, then adding display ads on your blog is a great way to increase that income. By signing up with a company like Mediavine or Google AdSense you’ll be earning money each time that someone visits your site

This is a great strategy to use in combination with affiliate marketing since for both you’ll need to create blog content that can be promoted on Pinterest. Display ads will give you a nice income boost for the work you’ll already be doing to bring in traffic from Pinterest. 

Best Tips to Make Money on Pinterest 

Ready to grow your Pinterest account and get started making money? Here are our best tips to make that happen. 

Sign up for a Business Account

To get started making money on Pinterest, you of course need a Pinterest account! You’ll want it to be a business account so that you have access to all of the correct features and statistics. If you already have a personal account you can switch it to a business one or you can start from scratch on the Pinterest Business website.

Optimize Your Profile & Make It Appealing 

Once your Pinterest business account is created, it’s time to optimize your profile. Keywords are more important than ever on Pinterest and your profile is the first place that you can start inserting them. 

Get started by typing a few keywords related to your niche into the Pinterest search bar. See which keyword phrases are suggested by Pinterest, and make a list of those that you believe are best suited to attract ideal audience members to your account. You can use the top two or three keywords you find to help fill out your Pinterest profile section. 

Places that you’ll want to include keywords are your:

• Pinterest display name
• Pinterest username
• Profile bio section

Pick a profile image that is simple, includes no text, and is easy to view on a mobile device. You can also pick a video or image to display in the larger cover image section of your Pinterest profile to help establish a consistent brand. 

Create Pin Boards That Fit Your Content 

Next, you’ll want to start creating boards for your page. When selecting your board topics and titles, you need to keep two things in mind: 

• The popular keywords and phrases suggested in the Pinterest search bar should be related to your niche; and
• Which Pin topics you plan to create for your Pinterest account. 

By using phrases suggested by Pinterest, you have a better chance of your Pins showing up for the search queries that are popular with Pinterest users. Ideally, each Pin that you create will be able to be placed on multiple boards. 

After creating a new board, it’s a good idea to initially fill it with 10 to 20 of the Pins suggested by Pinterest to help Pinterest’s algorithm start to understand what your board is all about.

Create Amazing Pins 

Designing Pins that are visually appealing and get lots of clicks doesn’t have to be as hard as you might think. The online tools Canva and PicMonkey are two options that help people without design experience create some effective Pins. 

Both of these programs have Pinterest Pin templates within them that you can use to create your pins. Simply change out the text, add a photo of your choice, switch up the colors and font, and you’ve got a Pin that is ready for posting. You can easily take one template and make small tweaks to it to create multiple Pin designs.

A few top tips when creating effective Pinterest Pins: 

• Pick photos that relate to the topic of your Pin. Pinterest can “see” what your image is about and match it with related keyword searches. 
• Use bold, easy-to-read text that gives more information about what someone will find when clicking on your Pin. Use other Pins on Pinterest for inspiration as to the words and phrases that work best.
• Always keep mobile users in mind, as the majority of Pinterest traffic is mobile. Check your Pin on a mobile device to see if the text and image look good. 

Focus on Pinterest SEO

Pinterest is first and foremost a search engine. That 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 Pinterest suggested keywords to target, so the next step is to use an SEO strategy with your Pins. 

When uploading a new Pin to Pinterest, there are several locations where you’ll want to include the keyword phrases that you’re targeting. These areas are the: 

• Pin title
• Pin description
• Alt text 
• The file name of the Pin

Take advantage of every location that Pinterest gives you to include your keywords to give yourself the best chance for your Pins to show up in other Pinner’s search results. 

Engage with Other Pinners

Pinterest is designed to be a platform where you engage with others’ content by saving Pins, following other Pinners, joining group boards, adding comments, and engaging with others. When working to grow your Pinterest account, you must engage in what Pinterest expects from its users. 

Use a Scheduling Tool for Pinning

It can be difficult to keep consistent with pinning to your Pinterest account day after day. The best option to help with this task is to use a Pinterest scheduling tool like Tailwind. You can select all of the Pins that you wish to pin to your account in one batch and then schedule them to be pinned for you automatically throughout the month using Tailwind.  

Jump on Trends & New Features

Any time that a social platform offers a new feature, it’s a great strategy to be an early adopter. Pinterest wants its new features to be successful and quickly adopted by its users, so it makes sense that they would favor accounts that are using them. 

Currently, Pinterest is pushing Story Pins as a new trend, as well as video pins, which can be as simple as an animated image. Creating these types of Pins can help to increase the reach of your entire Pinterest account. 

Follow Pinterest Rules

When you’re trying to make money on Pinterest, you must follow the rules of the platform. You’ll want to review Pinterest’s Community Guidelines to ensure you’re respecting them. If you’re working with any brands and posting Pins for them in exchange for payment, you’ll want to be upfront about your business relationship and include the appropriate ad disclosures on your Pins. 

FAQ About How to Make Money on Pinterest

We’ve found some of the most frequently asked questions about making money on Pinterest. Here are our answers.

How Can I Make Money on Pinterest Without a Blog?

The best way to make money on Pinterest without a blog is to grow an audience on Pinterest that is large and engaged enough that larger brands have an interest in working with you. Once you have a Pinterest account that attracts the attention of brands, you’ll have multiple opportunities to make money through posting sponsored pins, curating joint boards, and being a part of joint promotions. 

If you don’t have a large Pinterest following yet, you can try creating Pinterest Pins to directly promote affiliate offers through your links. It’s not always the most effective way to do affiliate marketing on Pinterest, but it’s a great way to test your Pin creation skills and SEO strategy. Just be sure to check first if your affiliate program allows their links to be placed on Pinterest.

How Can I Grow a Pinterest Audience?

Growing a Pinterest audience isn’t hard, but it takes time. Pinterest seems to favor Pins that have been posted on Pinterest for multiple months, so the more quickly you can get started, the better! 

To grow your Pinterest audience, first, pick your niche and research the keywords phrases on Pinterest that are popular in your niche. Use those phrases to optimize your account by including those keywords in all available locations in your Pinterest bio, boards, and Pins. 

Start posting and saving content that is engaging, has eye-catching images, and is based on the type of information that people are looking for on Pinterest. Set up your Tailwind account to automatically schedule your Pins. Stay consistent, keep pinning, create new Pins regularly, and your account will continue to grow as you amass a Pinterest following! 

Final Thoughts

When thinking about ways to make money on Pinterest, remember that many of these strategies can work alongside other income-producing activities. For example, if you’re going to create 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 minute to consider what you enjoy doing and where you stand with the current size of your Pinterest audience. Then, pick a strategy that matches up with your interests and goals. Remember, when you’re growing a Pinterest account, you’re playing the long game. Start building your Pinterest audience today, take consistent action, and a few months down the road, you’ll be very glad that you did!

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