Some influencers make tons of money on Instagram and TikTok, but a truly hidden gem of a platform that has the potential to generate tons of passive income is Pinterest (NYSE: PINS). Many think that Pinterest is just a platform for wedding planning and home décor, when it actually offers a great opportunity because it has around 500 million monthly active users, meaning that whatever you post on it could be seen by millions. Here’s how to make money on Pinterest by leveraging its vast userbase to your advantage.
Creating a Website
Before you start thinking about how to make money on Pinterest, you need to take a look at the pins of anyone who makes money on the platform, like any popular Pinterest influencer. Most of the pins direct people who click on them to a specific website, so if you want to make money on Pinterest, you have to have a website of your own. Creating your own website isn’t a hard thing to do, since you can use websites like Canva.com or Hostinger.com to create a website, but they aren’t your only options as there are many platforms that you can find easily by googling “create a website” and use to create a website that you can use to publish articles that’ll link to your Pinterest posts.
Finding a Niche
You need to figure out what type of content you want to create, because that’s what your website and your Pinterest blog will revolve around. Try to find a niche that people are interested in, but don’t go for something that’s overly saturated on Pinterest, like fashion or home décor. It’d also help you a lot if that niche is something you’re passionate about, so you don’t get bored easily and give up on creating content for it, but instead go on to treat the money you make from it as an extra bonus to posting about something you love.
Creating a Professional Pinterest Account
You need to create a professional Pinterest account. It costs nothing to upgrade your account from a normal account to a professional one, but having a professional account helps you with a variety of things like viewing analytics and managing ads, so it’s definitely the way to go if you want to make money on the platform.
Creating Boards
After creating your account, you’ll need to open Pinterest and start creating boards, and make sure they’re boards that people can actually search for. Most of the time, people using Pinterest will search for boards, so your chances of getting more visitors will be higher if you create a lot of boards. But, don’t go all in at once and create hundreds of boards with thousands of pins, because this can be a red flag to Pinterest and the platform might think that you’re spamming and end up hiding your posts. Ideally, you want a dozen different boards, with each of them having 20 to 30 pins.
Boards are also extremely useful because they will help increase the number of visitors to your Pinterest blog because you can add to them other people’s posts, so you’d get the combined traffic from multiple people’s Pinterest accounts. If you’re wondering how you can find a name for your board that would get clicks, you can simply use the Pinterest search bar to see what people are already looking for. For example, if your Pinterest blog revolves around cooking, you can simply look up “cooking” and you’ll see results like “cooking for one” or “cooking recipes” and that makes it easy for you to know what keywords to include because that’s what people are searching for.
Creating Pins
You should learn to create pinnable images that people are going to actually click on. It’s important to understand that Pinterest works in the same way as Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), meaning that the first pins that come up when you search for something are the top ranking ones, so you’d need to create a pin that’s similar to the top ranking ones. By looking at the popular pins, you’d see what words and colors work well and then you can include them in your pictures when you’re editing them. You can edit and design pins on Canva for free, and Canva even has multiple Pinterest layouts for you to edit and use, so you can easily create attractive Pinterest pins without needing to be an expert graphic designer.
A good tip for creating pins is to save them, after you’re done with the design and edits, with the keyword of the group board, because this will help it rank better in Pinterest, and reach your intended target audience. For example, if you create a picture about a cooking recipe and you want to add it to your cooking recipes board, you should save the picture as “cooking recipes”. Then, you can post that picture to your Pinterest blog, but don’t forget to add in a bunch of keywords so more people can find your post, link the article about the pin from your website to it, and to also add your post to the right board.
How to Make Money on Pinterest
There are two ways to make money on Pinterest, and both of them require you to grow your views to something around a couple of thousand views per month, because having a lot of views may result in people clicking on your pins and actually going to your website, and that’s where all the magic happens.
Running Ads on Your Website
Once your website gets enough visitors, you can go to the Google AdSense website and sign up to allow Google to run ads on your website, which can give you anywhere from $50 to $100 per month if you have around 10,000 viewers per month, or even more, depending on how many people visit your website. Aside from Google, another website that can run ads on your website for you is called Media.net.
While this amount of money might not seem like a lot of money, but think about it this way, if you’re already doing Pinterest and you love using the platform, you can just link your own website to each pin you already post for free, but actually get paid by allowing businesses to run ads on it. Not only that, but once you hit around 25,000 views per month, you can sign up on Mediavine.com, which could help you get better deals when it comes to making more money with the ads that run on your website. Additionally, the income you earn from Pinterest can eventually turn into passive income as your website and Pinterest blog grow, because they will remain online forever for people to see and click on, even if you decide to stop posting on them.
Pinterest Affiliate Marketing
Running ads is just one way of earning money through Pinterest, and it’s the more passive one. But, if you want to earn more money, and have more time to invest into growing your Pinterest blog and website, then you should do Pinterest affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, you basically partner up with companies, allowing them to give you unique referral links to their products that you can share with people, and if those people use your link to buy the products, you get a commission on that sale.
There’s a lot of money to make in it because you can promote multiple products and join multiple affiliate programs for free, and you don’t have to enter an exclusive agreement with just one company, which diversifies your affiliate marketing revenue streams. As for how you’d get paid, different companies have different types of commissions. For example, some companies might just give you $50 for every purchase someone makes through your referral link, while others might give you something like 10% of the sale.
A great tip for starting Pinterest affiliate marketing is that you should start thinking of products that are related to your niche and you want to promote, before you even start creating the content, so you’re able to build the content around the products. The easiest way to get started with affiliate marketing is through joining the Amazon Associates program, which allows you to create affiliate links for any product that’s being sold on Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), and you can get a commission of around 10% when people use your link to buy it within 24 hours of clicking on the link.
Keep in mind that you need to have your own website and personal brand to apply for the program, as Amazon would need to know that you’re legit and won’t just spam the link everywhere, and where you’re promoting the products. If the product you want to promote isn’t on Amazon, you can simply google the name of the product or the company that makes it, followed by affiliate program, and you might be able to find an affiliate program for it. In fact, a lot of affiliate marketers prefer to work with the companies directly, rather than Amazon’s program, because commissions can be higher this way.
Once you’ve found the product you want to promote, you can create content around it and post it on your website, and you can put your affiliate links in the website posts, then link the posts to your Pinterest pins. Even better, you can directly put your affiliate link in the description of the Pinterest pin, which could increase the chances of people clicking on it.
The Bottom Line
It’s important to note that while these two methods of making money on Pinterest can help you make a lot of money in passive income, they’re not really passive at first, since you’d need to invest a lot of time into growing your blog and your Pinterest account. In other words, don’t expect this to make you a millionaire in two weeks, but be patient and stay committed to growing your Pinterest presence, then you can hire someone to do all the work for you, and turn the income you make from Pinterest into a true passive income.
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