Eight Ways to Make Money with Pinterest
Acquiring customers and generating revenue via Pinterest is totally possible if you do it the right way. Pinterest makes it easy for both individuals and businesses to reach and engage with prospective customers. Here are some ways to make money with Pinterest that you can take advantage of if you’re willing to put in just a little work.
1. Create Product Pinboards – If you sell physical products, make a pinboard of them. You can make a board for each category of product. Be sure the images are high quality and look as good as they would in person. This can actually also work if you’re selling services. Simply find images that represent your service and use words with the images to get the attention of viewers. Link the images to information pages on your website or directly to your product shopping cart or a contact request form.
2. Create Memes using Motivational Quotes – Fill a pinboard with motivational quotes and have them link back to your website when people click them. People love to read and share inspiring image quotes and this can be a great way to drive extra traffic to your website or blog. On your site you can relate the quote to something that you sell. You can use software such as Canva to help you create your memes.
3. Hold a Contest to Gain More Email Subscribers – Contests on Pinterest are a fantastic way to build your email lists. There are a number of ways to run a content on Pinterest. The easiest way to plan, execute and manage a contest correctly is to use third party software from providers such as Wishpond.
http://corp.wishpond.com/pinterest-contest/
4. Build a Portfolio Board – This is a great approach for service providers, photographers, designers, artists and others who benefit from showcasing their work. As an example, if you design websites, you can use screen capture software like Snagitput to take screen shots of the websites you’ve built then pin them in your portfolio board with a link back to your website. Almost any type of work can be showcased visually. Browse Pinterest to get some ideas of how others are representing their work then get creative!
5. Create a Pinboard with Testimonials – As you receive testimonials from clients, use Canva to turn them into image quotes. Place your clients photo to one side (get their permission first of course) with an excerpt from their testimonial next to it in quote form. Link these image quotes to the area of your website containing information about the products or services the customer purchased.
6. Pin Affiliate Products – This is a tricky technique and you need to be very careful when pinning links to affiliate products. To prevent abuse of their awesome platform Pinterest strips out your affiliate codes and may even terminate your account. Fortunately for you affiliate marketers there are ways around this. First off, before you even start adding links to affiliate offers I recommend building out a solid Pinterest profile. Add as much contact info as possible. Build some boards with quality content and useful links to non-affiliate sites. Re-pin from other boards related to your niche. Follow some other pinners. Most all, have fun and BE REAL. Once you’ve done all this you can start interspersing some monetized links into your pins. The easiest way to do this is with a URL shortening service such as Bitly. https://bitly.com/ Note – always read Pinterest’s terms of service before engaging in any kind of direct linking strategies.
You can also use a redirect on a domain you own. If you know how to use redirects that’s great. If not you can check with your hosting company for detailed instructions. I will also be making a video soon on some of the more technical aspects of Content Marketing. Note: You can do redirects with every major hosting company but my current recommendation for the best hosting is currently Hostwinds.
Personally, I don’t like direct linking to affiliate offers from social media sites. Besides the fact it can get you banned, things change fast. Affiliate products go away or better ones come along. You need to control the platform from which you link. When you do you can update links as things change. You also get many more opportunities to market to your traffic. If you’re going to take the time to use Pinterest or other social media site for affiliate marketing you should take the time to setup a blog on your own domain. Then you can drive traffic to the blog and in turn to your affiliate links. A domain costs $10 or less and a solid hosting plan at Hostwinds costs $4.50/mo. at the time of this writing. It only takes a few minutes to open a hosting account and then a few minutes more to install WordPress and start blogging. Get that step out of the way then read Content Marketing blogs such as http://contentincome.com.
7. Share Pins of YouTube Videos That Promote Your Products – Video is an awesome way to promote your products, services or even affiliate products. You can make a how to, demo or review video and include an affiliate link or your sales page link in the description of the video. That’s an extremely simplified example because YouTube marketing is a category unto itself. It’s also something about which I’m very passionate and will soon be writing about here.
8. Pin Images from Promotional Posts on you Website – When you write a blog post that is promotional or informative in nature, include an awesome image of the right size and shape so that you can then promote that pin on Pinterest. There are Social Media WordPress plugins for easily sharing your posts out to social media and those “share this” buttons that show up on your site aren’t just for your visitors. You should always be the first one to share your content with the world.
Implement some of these money-making ideas as soon as possible and you’ll quickly see for yourself that it’s possible to make money with Pinterest. As with everything, the sooner you start the faster you’ll see results!
