Pinterest Affiliate Marketing: Does It Work and How to Get Started?

Pinterest is a social media platform affiliate marketers shouldn’t overlook. Unlike other platforms, Pinterest users often come with the intent to discover and purchase. They use the platform to plan for future projects, events, and purchases, which makes conversions more likely.

According to Pinterest's feed optimization playbook, 75% of weekly Pinterest users are always shopping, and another report found that 50% of Pinterest users view the platform as a shopping site.

When done right, the combination of high-intent users and a visually driven interface can yield excellent results. But how do you go about creating your Pinterest affiliate marketing plan? Below, we will show you the different steps involved in starting affiliate marketing on Pinterest. If this sounds interesting, keep on reading!

What is Pinterest affiliate marketing?

With Pinterest affiliate marketing, you have two options:

1. Promote your own products

If you have your own ecommerce brand and a network of affiliates, you can take advantage of Pinterest to let your affiliates promote your products there. You need to set up your own affiliate program for this. To do this, we’d suggest using ReferralCandy, which offers a 14-day free trial and all the necessary features for running a successful affiliate program.

2. Use Pinterest to drive traffic to third-party sites

Another option is to use Pinterest to drive traffic to third-party sites, such as Amazon or any ecommerce store that has an affiliate program. If this is what you want, the process involves creating your own Pinterest account, joining an affiliate program, and directing traffic to it.

Once someone makes a purchase through your affiliate URLs, you earn a commission on the sale. To drive traffic to third-party sites, you can either place direct affiliate links on Pinterest or have your own site, such as a blog, in which you explain the topic in more detail and then link to the third-party site.

How well does Pinterest affiliate marketing work?

In 2024, there are a bunch of affiliate marketers who are successful with Pinterest. That is even relatively easy to confirm by scrolling through Pinterest and looking into how many monthly views some of the sites doing affiliate marketing receive.

For example, a Pinterest creator called By Mable Grace is an affiliate marketer who receives over 800,000 monthly views on her Pinterest account.

All of her pins link to her website, where she reviews different Amazon products. Even at a 0.01% conversion rate and an average of $1 commission on every purchase, she would be making $8000 per month.

This is just one example, but there are a bunch of other users doing the exact same thing.

The reasons why Pinterest works so well for affiliate marketers include:

1. Pinterest has an active buyer base: According to Pinterest, their site has almost 500 million monthly active users, which is a large buyer base. The same report mentions that Pinterest's monthly active users increased by 11% year over year, indicating that the platform is more active than ever before.
2. Pinterest users are there to buy: As we shared before, over 50% of Pinterest users view the platform as a shopping site. Users plan future projects, events, and purchases on the platform, which increases conversions.
3. Pinterest is a search engine: Similar to Google, Pinterest is a search engine, and there are certain things you can do to make your pins rank well. The point we want to make is that it’s not based on luck, so anyone can succeed if they do the right things.
4. High-income buyers: One in three Pinterest users has an annual income of over $100,000, one of the highest among social media sites. Pinterest is also the number one social media destination for buying luxury products, which is great news for affiliate marketers who rely on commissions.
5. Ability to get free traffic: Posting on Pinterest doesn’t cost anything unless you use paid ads. This makes it ideal for affiliate marketers who want to get started with minimal investment.

What to know before starting Pinterest affiliate marketing?

Pinterest outlines in its community guidelines different things that affiliate marketers should be aware of before advertising products.

Down below, we’ve outlined the main rules you should be aware of:

1. Don’t create duplicate accounts. You should ideally only operate from one account on Pinterest. This rule doesn’t apply if you have multiple brands, for example in different niches, which is when you are allowed to create multiple accounts.
2. Post only original content. The content you post on your Pinterest account should be original and add unique value. Pinterest is pretty strict about this, and you can get into trouble if you republish someone else’s content from Pinterest or other platforms.
3. Be transparent about affiliate links. You should be transparent about the commercial nature of your content and the affiliate links. The Federal Trade Commission even requires you to disclose affiliate content as “sponsored or “affiliated.” To learn more about the topic, read our article on the FTC affiliate disclosure.‍
4. Don’t try to manipulate the Pinterest algorithm. Practices such as creating new accounts to pin your content to increase your rankings or creating affiliate pins in high volumes are highly prohibited.

In addition to the four guidelines above, we encourage you to review the Pinterest community guidelines, which outline other guidelines, such as spam and content safety guidelines.

How to start affiliate marketing on Pinterest?

Now that you’re more aware of the rules associated with Pinterest, we can move on to the steps required to take when affiliate marketing on Pinterest.

Let’s get started!

1. Create your Pinterest business account

The first thing you want to do is to create your Pinterest account. And not just any account, but a Pinterest business account.

The personal and business accounts on Pinterest are similar, but the business account provides you with additional features, such as performance tracking.

To create your business account, start by creating a personal account from Pinterest’s home page.

If you already have an account, you can just sign in! To create a business account, go to the “Account management” settings and click on “Convert account.” 

Once you do this, Pinterest will guide you through the process of setting up your business account!

2. Do niche research and choose your niche

Before you start creating pins for your Pinterest account, you should choose your niche. If you don’t already have a niche in mind you want to tap into, you need to do some niche research.

One tool you can use for this is Pinterest Trends, which shows all the recent trends on Pinterest. This is how the tool looks like:

You can select the top trends from different regions and countries, such as the US, Canada, Europe, Germanic countries, Australia, and more.

Once you select your region, you can refine the search further with filters such as trend type, age, gender, and interests.

To do further niche research, you can also use tools like Google Trends, which is a free trend research tool developed by Google.

Once you’ve done enough research on your niche, choose one that best fits your business needs. You should choose carefully since this will determine the affiliate programs you join and the type of content you create!

3. Join an affiliate network or create your own affiliate program

Depending on if you have your own ecommerce site or not, you need to either join affiliate networks or create your own affiliate program.

Let’s go through the process of each. If you want to join an existing affiliate program, almost all the biggest online retailers, such as Amazon have one. If you just Google “Amazon affiliate program,” you will find all the necessary information about it!

You can also join an affiliate program of smaller ecommerce companies, which may earn you more commissions. For example, you can check the top Shopify websites and then see the ones that have affiliate programs. Often, they mention it in their footer section, such as here Toki Mats does:

If you have your own ecommerce site and want to create an affiliate program for it, you can do that easily with ReferralCandy. It allows you to create affiliate links, set up landing pages, send referral emails, track results, and much more.

ReferralCandy customers, including Toki Mats, have generated over $500,000 in referral sales and achieved a 41x return on investment (ROI) through their affiliate program. That’s quite impressive if you ask us.

If you want to create an affiliate program similar to Toki Mat’s, you can sign up for a 14-day free trial with ReferralCandy!

4. Design your Pinterest profile

Making sure your Pinterest profile looks visually appealing and represents what you promote is essential.

Here is a prime example from a Pinterest account called By Mable Grace:

By Mable Grace does affiliate marketing and clearly outlines the purpose of the account (reviewing Amazon must-have products) in its profile description. The logo and the cover image are also clear and represent what they do.

If you have your own brand and a logo, add it as your profile photo. Create a graphic or take a high-quality product photo for your cover photo, and make sure your board covers are branded. A good example of how to do this is from Bev’s Pinterest profile.

Their profile photo is a high-resolution graphic of their logo, ensuring anyone who knows the brand will immediately recognize it. Plus, they’ve added a photo of their product with their signature bright colors that also help to show off a bit of their brand personality.

But they don’t stop there. They also have their board covers branded.

There are two ways to do this: Choose board covers that match your color scheme or upload branded graphics for your board covers. Bev has done the latter, helping to create a cohesive presence that stands out.

‍

Depending on if you have your own ecommerce site or are doing affiliate marketing for third-party sites, the type of design you should go for differs. The above examples can serve as great examples though!

5. Get inspiration for your pins

To generate more clicks and conversions, you need to invest in quality images. On Pinterest, there are different types of “successful pin formats” that are proven to work. 

These “successful pin formats” can be divided into:

• Informative pins
• Video pins
• Catalogs for shoppable pins
• Product in action pins
• Seasonally relevant pins

To understand each of these pins, let’s look into examples of them next!

Informative pins

People scroll through Pinterest to find ideas and learn ways to use products they’re interested in, so create content that helps them do just that.

Creating infographics like the ones below can be a great way to provide information on your products.

Take a look at this example from Ruggable. Creating a guide that helps potential customers know exactly what size rug will fit well in their bedroom is a great way to help them feel confident in making a purchase.

Here’s another example from The Sill. It includes three top indoor plant picks and their basic care tips, again instilling confidence and knowledge in someone getting ready to buy.

Both pins lead to product pages, making it easy to start shopping immediately. If you would do affiliate marketing, the links could be affiliate links.

Here is one more example from the DIY Lighthouse Pinterest account.

The above account creates and shares informative listicles about different products. For example, the “12 things every mom needs to see” list includes a link to a blog post that has 12 products with affiliate links. Every product includes information about how it can be used.

Informative pins are a great way to give your audience ideas about how they can use your product in their daily lives, whether it’s a piece of home decor, clothing, furniture, fitness or healthy living equipment, etc.

Videos pins

Most pins are static graphics, but you can also upload video pins to the platform as well. Incorporating this type of pin into your posting schedule is a great way to stand out in a user’s feed and grab their attention.

Videos allow you to show off even more of your product than you can in a single image.

Catalogs for shoppable pins

Want to really ramp up your Pinterest affiliate sales? 

Create a catalog that includes products, categorize them, and lead shoppers directly to your website’s product pages.

Here’s an example of Walker Edison’s Pinterest shop. They’ve broken products down into easy-to-navigate categories to make it easy for shoppers to find exactly what they’re looking for.

Outside of catalogs, you can also showcase the products in clear and simple images, such as Smile Direct Club does on Pinterest.

While they’re an ecommerce site, this also works if you’re linking to third-party sites. When doing this, you should ensure that your images are unique.

Creating Pinterest catalogs and clear product sections helps your followers find your products much more easily and increases your social sales.

Product in action pins

Take stylized images that give Pinners an idea of how they can best use/wear your products in their own everyday lives.

This example from Chicwish shows an outfit made up of their products while also linking to their Pinterest catalog. This way, shoppers can buy products they see right in the image or find something similar that fits their tastes exactly.

Here’s another example from The Little Market. Styling kitchen storage solutions right inside a kitchen is a great way to show how useful the product can be.

Seasonally relevant pins

Staying relevant on Pinterest involves staying on top of the latest trends, which includes seasonally relevant content.

When the holidays are coming up, you want to create gift guides and holiday-specific products/content. When it’s warmer outside, share content related to summer activities.

Here’s a great example from superfood blend retailer Golde. Their Pinterest is filled with recipes that can be created with their products. But during the winter months, they switched to sharing popular seasonal recipes made with peppermint, cocoa, or apple cinnamon.

Pay attention to seasonal trends so you can incorporate them into your content. Oftentimes, even just changing up your color scheme to match the seasons can be enough to make an impact.

6. Design your pins

After you've gathered enough inspiration, you can design your own images! To do so, you can use tools such as Canva and Adobe Photoshop. For most people starting out, we recommend Canva since it’s free and simple to use.

Canva has templates made explicitly for Pinterest that you can use to get a headstart.

As an extra tip, you can also find YouTube tutorials on how to create visually appealing pins with Canva for Pinterest!

7. Publish your first Pinterest pin

Publishing your first Pinterest pin is easy. To do so, click on “Create” from the Pinterest home page.

Once you click this, Pinterest will guide you through the process of creating your first pin.

Once you’re adding information, you should also consider SEO implications. Pinterest is a visual search engine, so SEO optimization is important.

The Pinterest algorithm works by connecting relevant keywords with pins, so choose your title and description wisely. Pinterest themselves says in their blog article the following:

• “The text overlay on your pins affects how they show up in Pinterest search. It’s like SEO on Pinterest: If you pick the right keywords, you’ll reach more people.”

But also keep in mind that you shouldn’t do keyword stuffing since Pinterest is smart enough to see through that.

To use the correct keywords, you need to find out what your audience is searching for. You can use Pinterest Trends for this and even third-party tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Keyword Everywhere. 

When you create your first Pinterest pin, the section “Link” is where you can add your affiliate link.

8. Keep posting consistently

Once you have your pins designed, you should start posting them consistently to your Pinterest account. Like Pinterest mentions in their blog article, the more you create, the more chances you have to get discovered.

Most people who are successful with Pinterest affiliate marketing create multiple pins and do it for months without seeing any results first. 

9. Track the results

Using Pinterest Analytics, you can track the performance of your efforts posting on Pinterest. Keep in mind that Pinterest Analytics isn’t available if you don’t have a business account created.

If you plan on creating your own affiliate program with third-party tools, such as ReferralCandy, these tools also include analytics and reports for tracking the results!

7 useful Pinterest affiliate marketing tools

To get the most out of your Pinterest affiliate marketing strategy, it’s important to engage relevant helpful tools. 

These seven tools can help you track performance, create a consistent posting schedule, reach a bigger audience, design engaging pins, and more.

1. Pinterest Analytics

Pinterest Analytics is a built-in insights tool that helps you keep an eye on your pins’ performance. This will help you find information, such as pin engagement, impressions, and reach over a specific time period.

Track conversions, video analytics, and more. With Pinterest Analytics, it is possible to track the performance of all pins as well as pins from your website alone.

2. Pinterest Trends

If you’re looking for ideas of what to share on Pinterest, checking out Pinterest Trends (another free, built-in tool) is a great way to learn what people are searching for right now. If you’re wondering what kind of content would work best at the moment, Pinterest Trends can be highly beneficial.

As you plan your Pinterest content, check out recent trends to discover new ideas and to see if your business has anything relevant to publish. If so, that’s a great way to increase your reach and potentially generate more sales.

3. ReferralCandy

If you want to start your own affiliate or referral marketing program and advertise it on Pinterest, ReferralCandy is one of the best tools for that. It makes it easy to create referral links, referral landing pages, and emails inviting customers to join the affiliate program.

If you want to try out ReferralCandy, we offer a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. You can sign up from here!

4. Canva

Canva is a DIY design tool with templates that can help you to design beautiful, engaging, and high-performing Pinterest graphics.

You can start from scratch or choose from their library of templates. Add in your brand colors and fonts to make sure your content is recognizable on the platform.

Canva’s Pinterest templates are optimal at 1000x1500px, which is also what Pinterest recommends. Utilize their stock photos and other design assets, or upload your own to grab your audience’s attention.

5. Tailwind

Tailwind is a Pinterest marketing app that helps you schedule and plan your content ahead of time. This makes it much more manageable to post content regularly so your audience consistently gets new content.

Tailwind’s tool also provides the ability to create your own designs for your Pinterest graphics, making it a one-stop shop for Pinterest management. Furthermore, you can optimize your posts and find the best hashtags to increase your reach.

6. PinGroupie

PinGroupie is a tool that helps brands find group boards to join on Pinterest. Group boards help you reach a wider audience with your content and products, but it’s important to find ones that are relevant to your brand and the pins you create.

PinGroupie also helps you pinpoint top Pinterest influencers, top pins, and top keywords that are being searched for, helping you be more strategic and reach a wider audience.

7. CapCut

CapCut is a free video editing tool that simplifies the process of creating ads for ecommerce products. It used to be just a tool for making simple videos, but nowadays, it’s a cost-effective tool for making even quite advanced edits. CapCut first started as a mobile app only, but nowadays, they also have a desktop app.

If you prefer to create your Pinterest videos in a video format, CapCut can be a helpful tool for that!

Get started with Pinterest for your ecommerce business

Pinterest can be an excellent tool for affiliate marketing when you implement the right steps.

Start being more strategic in the content you post and how you promote the products to see an increase in impressions, reach, engagement, and sales.

With these tips and tools, you should be able to start affiliate marketing on Pinterest and start earning commissions. If you have your own ecommerce brand and wish to grow it through Pinterest, you can also use our previous tips.

revamp your ecommerce social media strategy in order to successfully incorporate Pinterest and start ramping up your sales.

P.S. If you enjoyed reading this, subscribe to our newsletter where we share our latest articles and helpful resources.