3 Pinterest Affiliate Marketing Tips in Post-ban Era

In 2015, Pinterest’s decision to ban affiliate links, redirects and trackers left thousands of Pinners powerless to monetize their marketing efforts. The main reason for such a radical decision was a significant decline in user experience. This social network claimed that there was a wide range of factors, including broken images, spam links and bad redirects that were hurting its reputation. Such a decision greatly affected both small businesses and affiliate marketers.

Luckily to all affiliate Pinners, this Pinterest’s idea didn’t last long. In May 2016, the company announced that they were planning to reintroduce affiliate links. However, this decision wasn’t made overnight. On the contrary, they have improved their spam tracking technology in order to ensure that this kind of marketing doesn’t affect the user engagement experience they’re trying to build. This way, Pinterest wants to make sure that all active users are getting rewarded.

Last year we removed affiliate links from Pinterest because spammers were abusing them. Now that our spam detection system is much stronger and as a result we have better link quality, we believe it is the right time to reconsider our policy and allow affiliate links. – Mike Mayzel, Pinterest’s communicate.

The greatest difference between this new and the old system is in the fact that using affiliate links became even simpler and more organic. All one has to do in order to make money from affiliate marketing is keep doing what they did in the first place – pinning.

How can Affiliate Marketers Benefit from Pinterest?

The reintroduction of affiliate links to Pinterest means one thing – a new chance for digital marketers to further improve their ROI and gain yet another source of revenue. According to Mayzel, this change is expected to contribute to the larger involvement of content marketers:

We think there is a benefit to content producers and publishers getting value from their audiences on Pinterest and as a result they will add more quality content into the service. With more content, Pinners will find more ideas and continue to have a great experience which will in turn deliver more value to partners.

In Pinterest’s post-ban landscape, the entire process of affiliate marketing is based on the fact that you don’t have to link back to a landing page in order to monetize your marketing efforts. All you need to do is link directly to the product or a service by using the pinning system.

With all these facts in mind, here are three crucial tips on how to use Pinterest for affiliate marketing:

1. Educate Yourself on the Pin System

Even though not complicated, the pin system greatly differs from linking affiliate practices that took place on pre-ban Pinterest. This means that there are a lot of mistakes affiliates can make in their ambition to earn more money. Remember, Pinterest had a strong reason to ban affiliate links in the first place and will not restrain from punishing those trying to exploit this new order once more.

A perfect example of this is posting too many affiliate links. Such practice may result in your board losing its value significantly. This impacts one’s authority and lowers it in the eyes of their followers and Pinterest alike.

Additionally, seeing how the way of linking has changed, it might be good to do some research on its technical issues. A pin now needs to be manually added to the board and only then edited in order to include the link. Although simple, this technique is fairly new and therefore probably still obscure even to some veteran affiliate marketers.

2.    Don’t Hop on a Bandwagon

Parallel with the rising number of people pinning products, retailer’s revenue is bound to increase, too.  However, gaining this much attention is not always a good thing for a retailer. Anyone can pin their content, of course, providing this product is related to the content. So, if their link creates revenue, they are due a commission.

Unfortunately, most of the time, manufacturers and retailers won’t have control over who is pinning their product and too many people doing so can significantly increase their affiliate expenses. If we are to believe the latest Pinterest surveys, almost 40% of all Pinterest users have re-pinned a product at least once. When this is combined with the fact that there are almost 176 million registered users and out of them 100 million are active, what one gets is a force not to be reckoned with.

In order to settle this problem once and for all, Pinterest allows retailers to update their affiliate terms, thus prohibiting others from pinning their products. To put it simply, even though it may seem tempting to hop on a bandwagon and start pinning towards the most wanted products, this kind of strategy can often backfire. The result of this may put otherwise a lucrative affiliate opportunity completely out of your reach.

3.    Determine Who to Target

Finally, even though affiliate marketing is back on Pinterest, it doesn’t mean that anyone who seizes this opportunity is guaranteed success. Still, in order to define success in the first place, what you need are some realistic goals, and these goals can be adequately determined only through a quality target market research.

According to a statistic from 2014, almost 85% of all Pinterest users are female, while 42% of all adult women in the US use this social network. This coincides with the stat that 30% Pinterest users have at one time purchased a fashion or home décor product, while 25% of them have bought an item related to fitness or health. On the other hand, no more than 13% of adult males in the UK use Pinterest for any purpose.

What this means is that targeting females of a particular group gives one a larger audience to work with, but it also means a greater competition. Think about it – what are the chances of you being the only one with this statistic? Conversely, there are always those who claim that women use Pinterest more as a wish list, while men see it mostly as a shopping cart. After all, your ROI depends both on the particular niche you focus on, as well as the individual affiliate links in your pins.

Additional Affiliate Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

• Before you start pinning, build a strategy. This is pretty self-explanatory. Before you embark on affiliate marketing on Pinterest, you need to have a solid strategy. This includes a plethora of things, from using right Pinterest tools (PickMonkey, Pin Alerts, Canva) to tracking the success of your marketing efforts by assessing them on Google Analytics or researching your Boards and Pins.
• Increase “shareability” by choosing unique images. The recent research shows that 80% of all Pinterest images are re-pins. So, by posting authentic photos, you are bound to get more shares. The only thing you need to avoid here is broken images, which were one of the main reasons why affiliate links were banned from Pinterest in the first place. Precisely because of that, you always need to choose eye-catching and visually appealing content. Alternatively, if you are planning to promote some physical products, make Pinterest images for the most popular ones and link back to the affiliate product page.
• Don’t forget to add captions. Even a caption added to a photo may increase the number of shares. Most importantly, this entire process is pretty simple. By writing a couple of lines, you may motivate your visitors to click on the photo for a closer look. On the other hand, some affiliates also prefer adding Call to Action to their affiliate code for buyers.

The one thing that all of this teaches us is that nothing is written in stone. Put simply, we can expect to see Pinterest change again in the future. Before 2015, no one believed this platform could ever survive without affiliate links, yet they banned them all the same. Today, they return with the new and upgraded system and it is up to the marketers to catch up with this innovation or get trampled by it. Of course, Pinterest is not against affiliates. After all, they drive sales and these sales are making Pinterest richer, as well. All they tried to do is protect the user experience and, with this new post-ban order, it seems that they’ve succeeded in these attempts.

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