There are multiple elements that make up a great affiliate marketing campaign, and they depend on the platform that’s being used. Some social media platforms lean towards more visual content, some lean towards more data-centric content and others lean towards descriptive, written content.

One platform that stands out from the rest is Pinterest.

Pinterest has often been described as the social media platform ‘without the social element‘ and it’s an important tool to use as a modern marketer. The community on Pinterest is thriving in 2022, with 478 million active users engaging with the platform every month. It’s a wonderfully visual platform, centred around mood boards and visual content.

If you’re an affiliate looking to make a difference with your work in 2022, you need to be working with Pinterest. With the right campaign, it can be one of the most effective tools on the market for grabbing the attention of your audience and driving your revenue up over a longer period of time, too.

To help you out with your next marketing move, we’ve put together this guide detailing everything an affiliate aficionado needs to know about this wonderful platform. We’ve included tips on general Pinterest marketing, best practices for affiliate marketers and examples of useful tools that you need in your affiliate content marketing tool kit.

 

What’s important to know about being a business on Pinterest?

As a starting point, it’s essential to note that Pinterest is very different from other social media platforms- both from the perspective of a user and from the perspective of a business. While many social media platforms rely on engagement in the form of likes or shares, Pinterest is more of a visual search engine instead.

This means that applying your usual affiliate marketing strategy from other platforms to Pinterest may not pull in the final results that you want.

Content on Pinterest revolves around visual mood boards, which people often look at for shopping ideas, creative inspiration or fitness motivation. Posts can be simple images, carousel posts or even videos, and there are branded stories available too. To engage with content, you can save it to a board, share it, like it or leave a comment.

In order to engage with your audience effectively on Pinterest, it’s essential to make sure that you spend some time reading up on their habits and interests. Consider where they might be spending their time on the platform, and what they might be using Pinterest for. Are they students looking for study tips? Foodies looking for inspiration? Use this to guide you.

Another important thing to note about being on Pinterest is that it’s easy to come across as inauthentic, without proper planning. Pinterest adverts should always be very natural, as they’re embedded into a user’s homepage. It’s important to make sure that your content and your adverts have a genuine, approachable tone to them, in order to maintain a good presence.

Generally speaking, Pinterest affiliate marketing can bring in some wonderful results. It’s a very different kind of social media to work with to as a marketer, but with careful consideration and frequent testing, you’re sure to get what you need.

How to set up an affiliate marketing campaign on the platform?

There are a number of different ways to set up affiliate marketing on Pinterest, and it’s important to try out a number of them to see what works best for your brand. Whether you’re promoting your own products and website, or links to products from another platform, it’s good to keep an open mind when it comes to picking the right form of promotion.

One of the best ways to use Pinterest for affiliate marketing is to simply use the built-in advertising tools that the platform has to offer. Pinterest adverts can be created from content on existing websites, new images and videos, or even pins that have already been added to the platform at an earlier date.

Being able to create adverts from images on existing websites is a brilliant way to save time and make the most out of your previous work. If you’re running a website for your services and you’re looking to gain extra traffic via Pinterest, why not turn a few product photos into adverts on the platform? It’s an effective way of showing your audience what you have to offer.

The most important thing to bear in mind when it comes to creating your advert is the link. Where is your pin going to take people? You can add an affiliate link to your advert, to encourage people to swipe up and engage with your work.

Moreover, make sure to look at adding links to your regular pins, too. Creating a standard image and video pins for a business page is effective, but adding in a punchy description and a useful link is a great way to get even more value out of the work. Use the description to let people know more about the work, without being too forced. A personable tone is key here.

To really grab the attention of your audience, try coming up with some unique board ideas and updating them regularly. You could create a board to showcase a collection of products, an abstract board showing the inspiration behind your favourite pieces or a broader post inspired by trends in the community.

Pinterest leaves a lot of room for experimentation, and it’s an ideal platform for affiliate marketers. Make sure to follow up with plenty of analysis on the Pinterest Analytics page, to make sure that you know you’re making the best content possible for your audience. Keep trying new things out, and maintain a record of what’s working out.

 

Best practices when putting together affiliate marketing campaigns

As with any social media platform, there are certain best practices that are worth following up on when it comes to Pinterest. Of course, some of these will work more effectively for some niches rather than others, but they’re all useful to a degree.

To start off with, one of the most important things to bear in mind when putting together your affiliate work is transparency. Make sure to clearly state if you’re using affiliate links, to comply with terms and services on the platform. Not only is this a requirement from the platform, it also shows your audience that you care about being honest and authentic with them.

This also applies to links. Make sure that you’re not using any services to squish the links to your website or product- Pinterest has strict rules relating to link formats, and it’s better to be safe rather than sorry.

It’s essential to make sure that you add some variety to your affiliate marketing on Pinterest, too. If you’ve just been linking to product pages and haven’t seen much success so far, why not try linking somewhere else? You could link to a YouTube video reviewing one of the products that you’re an affiliate for, for example, to provide even more context.

Do make sure to focus on the visual side of your affiliate marketing content, too. Whether you’re working on direct adverts or pins, it’s important to remember that your content will be displayed right next to other pieces in your customer’s feed. Keep it clean and vibrant, and make sure to utilise any accessibility tools like alt text, too. 

Following on from this, it’s vital to ensure that the content you’re recommending is relevant to the members of your audience that you want to reach. This may sound obvious to some, but you’d be surprised at the amount of mistargeting that happens with online advertising.

Figure out the right niche and why they should care, then go from there. 

To make this process easier, you could use existing data from your website or other social media platforms. This could involve trawling through analytics pages and third-party analysis tools, or simply getting to know your customers further. You could use question boxes and quizzes on Instagram stories, to learn more about what people like and want to buy.

All in all, make sure to plan your affiliate marketing content before you set out to conquer Instagram. These tips are not exhaustive, of course, so it’s important to record your journey and expand your knowledge of the platform wherever you can. 

 

The importance of testing on Pinterest

When it comes to affiliate marketing on Pinterest, it’s essential to remember that success on Pinterest can take time. This isn’t a platform for short-term, quick fixes, and it’s essential to keep the end game in mind. 

An element that can’t be left out as an affiliate marketer is testing.

We touched upon the importance of analytics with Pinterest earlier, but it’s worth looking over in more depth, too. The Pinterest analytics page has a number of useful details that are worth looking at in-depth, which include;

• Your platform presence. This section of the analytics platform breaks down your general engagement, looking at your organic, paid and earned statistics on all of your content. It’s a great place to go to analyse your overall performance.
• Your account insights. This particular selection relates to your content and how your audience reacts to it, looking at what people do with the content that they save from each one of your business/claimed accounts.
• Your best content. This section is particularly handy for affiliate marketers. This section of the Pinterest analytics tab looks at your most popular pins and adverts, showing which ones have performed the best over time. It’s perfect for getting to grips with what your audience enjoys seeing and what you should make more of. 
• Your audience insights. Here, you’ll find more information about members of your audience, which can be valuable for your marketing campaign. This section contains details about your audience profiles and gives more information about the different topics and sectors that your customers engage with on a regular basis.

If you’re working with Pinterest right now but aren’t familiar with these tools, we’d encourage you to get to grips with them as soon as possible. One of the best ways to drive affiliate revenue is to listen to your audience and reverse engineer your content, after all, and this analytics tab is perfect for that exact purpose.

There are plenty of other ways to track audience interest and engagement, too. You could release two adverts at the same time, with a slight difference between them- for example, one could have a different format in order to test legibility. To see the preferences from your audience here, all you’d have to do is track the performance of both, and compare them.

Plenty of social media automation tools have built-in analytics tabs, too. If you’re concerned that the Pinterest analytics tab isn’t going to give you enough information about a specific niche or topic, it could be worth looking into any other services or platforms that you use for affiliate marketing to give yourself an extra hand. 

Regardless of the path that you choose to go down with your Pinterest affiliate revenue work, make sure that you’ve always got a way to get details about your engagement and performance. Don’t just settle for one kind of content if you really want to drive your affiliate work. Get involved, try new things and record the performance so you can learn from it.

Useful tools to have at your disposal

Finally, one of the best things about being part of the modern marketing world is that there are countless useful tools to help you drive up your affiliate marketing sales on Pinterest. To lend you a hand with setting up your toolkit, we’ve handpicked a couple of different apps and services to check out. They include;

• Canva. To start off with, Canva is a free, easy-to-use digital design platform that allows you to create simple and exciting text graphics or edits. It’s perfect if you’re looking to add new content to your Pinterest, perhaps repurposing old PNGs or putting together graphics to talk about your latest release.
• Phonto. In a similar vein to the previous point, Phonto is a wonderfully useful app to have if you’re looking to create content consistently on the go. It’s free, simple and wildly effective. It’s ideal for adding visual intrigue to product photos, or for creating content to share for a product collection.  Android  -  Apple
• Tailwind. Out of all the social media automation platforms on the market, Tailwind is truly one of the most unique. This handy platform allows you to set up a post schedule for your Pinterest page (along with other social media pages too) and automatically generate eye-catching designs, complete with analytics and supporting data. 
• Unsplash. An issue that people can run up against when looking to work on very visual platforms is a lack of photography or design skills. With a platform like Unsplash, you’ll never have to struggle for relevant photos again. This platform has tons of royalty-free, high-quality images that are perfect for adding extra variety and intrigue to an affiliate content marketing strategy. 

This is just a small sample of the wide variety of social media tools that exist on the market today. Whether you’re a solo entrepreneur, part of a team or running your own company, there is always going to be a great solution out there for your digital marketing needs. Spend some time researching your options, to make sure you find the best one possible.

 

Work with RevGlue for your affiliate marketing today

All in all, if you’re not utilising Pinterest for your affiliate marketing campaign yet, it’s worth considering. Pinterest is a fantastic way to connect with your audience on a deeper level and to show them the interesting and personable side of your business. It can help them to see your affiliate products and links on a much more human, relatable level.

The main thing to remember with Pinterest affiliate marketing is that it’s essential to know your audience, as we stated above. Do make sure to do your research, and to keep track of what they’re interested in. Record which content works and which content does not then use this to guide your hand while you’re putting together your pieces.

To find more inspiration for your Pinterest marketing efforts, make sure to keep up to date with the latest developments on the platform. Social media platforms are always changing, after all, so it’s important to follow our blogs to stay up to date with the latest updates and algorithm changes.

If you’re looking to find out more about the best ways to up your affiliate marketing game in 2022, make sure to check out our full website. Here at RevGlue, we’re passionate about helping affiliate marketers to make long-term, meaningful changes to their strategy, and we’re sure that you’re going to love the rest of our content. Want to Read More.