Can You Make Money With Pinterest? 6 Proven Methods to Monetize
Pinterest Creator Rewards shut down recently, and I don’t want you to fret because there are so many ways to monetize on and off Pinterest. Today we are going to dive into six different ways that you can make money on Pinterest, even without the Creator Rewards Program.
Hi, I’m Heather Farris, and I run a Pinterest marketing agency, a paid membership community all about Pinterest and content strategy, and have been doing this since you could reach the bottom of the feed. So let’s dig into how to make money on Pinterest.
Can you make money with Pinterest? YES
There are a handful of ways to monetize with Pinterest for content creators like myself and e-commerce shops. If you are reading this and have an e-commerce store like WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or Shopify, don’t worry because I will not leave you out.
RELATED: The Ultimate Pinterest Traffic Strategy for Bloggers & E-Commerce Shops
1. Pinterest Inclusion Fund
The first way you can monetize on Pinterest is through the Inclusion Fund. The Inclusion Fund is by application only, and supports small merchants and new content creators. The goal is to help them grow with some cash and ad credit funds, plus other things like learning sessions and strategy support within a community.
The caveat is that the application window is very short every year, usually only a few weeks near the start of May. You need to meet certain criteria, like being U.S. based and be in certain niches within the beauty, lifestyle, or fashion industries. If you sign up for their Creator Newsletter, you’ll be more informed when the next round of applications for the Inclusion Fund happens, so get on that if it is a good fit for you.
2. Affiliate marketing
The next way you can monetize is available to anyone, including e-commerce shops, and this is affiliate marketing. You can simply create standard pins or video pins and put your affiliate link on them when you create them in the pin builder.
Or, secondarily, you can pin to content that is affiliate product reviews, or posts with list roundups full of affiliate products you’re highlighting for the seasons or promotions you have happening. Just make sure to not shorten or cloak your affiliate links, use the original ones you have so that your account is seen as spammy or your pins get rejected.
RELATED: 3 Simple Yet Effective Affiliate Marketing Strategies for Pinterest
3. Partnerships
The next way many people monetize on Pinterest these days is through partnerships. You might think of partnerships as sponsored content on your website, but it is not quite the same. Partnership on Pinterest means a brand partner is paying you to create content on this platform.
Historically, sponsorships have been where brands will pay you to create content on your website. However, brand partnerships are a great way to monetize on Pinterest.
I will link an excellent blog post here that was written by two friends. One of them is an acquaintance, and one is a good friend. You probably have heard of her if you have been in my audience, and that is Jana from Jana O. Media. You can read about brand partnerships on Pinterest in her blog.
4. Selling your products
You can monetize on Pinterest by selling your own products. You can do this through digital or physical products. If you have been here for a while, you know I do a lot of digital product sales through my shop.
You can also do this through physical products. For those of you who are e-commerce store owners, if you have a catalog, you can ingest that into Pinterest, have it show up on this shop surface, and monetize your Pinterest account this way. We have a lot of clients on our roster who make quite a lot of money from their e-commerce shop on Pinterest.
Like affiliate links, you can monetize those product links in a few ways.
- through video and standard pins
- with the catalog
You can link both physical and digital products, including Etsy and Teacherspayteachers, on Pinterest. So don’t fret, and make sure you’re linking those products. People are ready to read, but not everyone is ready to buy immediately.
You should be promoting your products on Pinterest, including:
- landing pages
- sales pages
- funnel pages
- higher ticket programs
RELATED: The Ultimate Guide to Create and Sell Digital Products
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5. Sell sponsored content
Much like brand partnerships, you can also sell sponsorships on your own website, where you create sponsored content. Content on your website would include a sponsorship call out on that post, like “This post is sponsored by…” etc.
Like in brand partnerships, you would be judged based on views, traffic, clicks, etc. So, this is another way that you can monetize. Then what you would do with Pinterest is drive traffic to that content.
RELATED: Why You Need a Content Strategy Before You Ever Begin Marketing
6. Display ads
Display ads are probably my least favorite way of monetization because you are judged and paid out based on how many eyeballs saw your ads. So it’s a CPM model, much like YouTube Adsense. You’re paid out for every 1,000 views.
It’s not a lot of money. Some creators do make quite a lot of money from their display ads. The creators who are making a full-time income from display ads are the ones that get millions of page views. I want to encourage you to research it yourself and see if it would be a good fit.
RELATED: 19 Million Views on Pinterest: What Experts Are Not Telling You
Final thoughts on how you can make money on Pinterest
Just remember every income stream matters. You shouldn’t judge one income stream simply because it’s lower than all the rest. Ultimately, if you’re making money on it and it’s not costing you more to produce content for that income stream, I would say it’s probably worth checking out.
So, monetizing with Pinterest isn’t much different than monetizing with other platforms. So don’t worry too much about which strategy to choose right now. I would just research them and see which is a good fit for you.
At this point, you may be wondering how to craft your own full Pinterest Strategy. Well, I would encourage you to download my free Pinterest Strategy Guide. This will help you walk through the five pillars of your Pinterest strategy and all the things you need to do to craft your own.
It includes workflows and a resource list of the most important videos you should watch in relation to each pillar of Pinterest. I’ve thought of it all. I’ve put it all together for you in one downloadable guide. Head on over and grab that.
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Heather Farris went to school for accounting and worked for years in banking and finance. After finding all of that entirely too boring she started her first blog in her basement in August of 2016. She has started 3 blogs in the marketing, motherhood and travel niches and used Pinterest to grow them all. She quickly became the go-to Pinterest strategist in her peer circles and has been implementing strategies, driving traffic and sales through organic and paid tactics for her clients. On this blog and her YouTube channel, as a renowned Pinterest marketing expert, she educates the public about clear and transparent marketing strategies to help them to grow on Pinterest and in other places online. She created Pin Profit Academy and helps small business owners just like you to master their Pinterest marketing strategy. Heather is now a Pinterest Educator, one of the very few sponsored by Pinterest.
