One thing we’ve learnt as affiliates over the last 12 months is how important it is to diversify our traffic sources. Traffic is not always easy to come by. Well, I’ve got some good news.
Pinterest is a great opportunity for generating a lot of traffic to your affiliate websites. For my own websites I’ve always wanted to try Pinterest but its always been one of them “I’ll get to it at some point”.
Since the Helpful Content Update, now could be the ideal time.
Did you know there are 522 million monthly users on Pinterest at the time of writing this. I always thought that the majority of users are into fashion, decor and food.
54% of Pinterest users are interested in health. That's a massive 261 million monthly users.
A BIG percentage of these would be interested in products that can be found on UberNet.
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If you’re a health affiliate then Pinterest is a perfect place for you to promote your content. It’s not a social platform but a visual search engine, which means users are more engaged and offers more engagement and conversions.
Did you know that 75% of Pinterest users are looking for something to purchase on the platform.
It's said that an impressive 83% of users have purchased something because they’ve seen it on the platform.
The great thing about Pinterest is that it's a visual search engine, which means you can transfer some of your SEO skills across to Pinterest. For example, it's very keyword based, with people searching for specific keywords.
You can optimize your boards, pins and descriptions to target specific keywords. Even using long tail keywords if you’re creating a newer account.
Social media platforms usually have a short lifespan. The great thing about pins is that they can generate traffic for you for months. In fact some can continue driving traffic for years!
All of your pins can be searched for through boards or re-pins. Getting you more visibility on your effective content.
It's pretty tough to find a platform that is friendly to affiliates, at the time of writing this Pinterest is. You can post pins that contain affiliate links or send people to your own website. Making it possible to do affiliate marketing on pinterest without a website.
It's worth noting that some time ago they did ban affiliate links and removed this ban, so there is a chance this could happen again. I would personally recommend sending to your own website.
As you can see there are some great reasons to incorporate Pinterest into your promotions of our affiliate products.
NOTE: Something worth noting is that followers are more of a vanity metric. You obviously want followers but I’ve seen accounts with low numbers of followers but have a high amount of monthly views. The key is engagement on your pins and your boards.
DO NOT do any follow 4 follow services as these simply don’t work.
Below, I’ll go through the steps of getting started;
The first step is to create your account, as soon as you do you want to upgrade this to a business account. It's free but offers advanced features.
By having a business account you’ll have access to analytics, trend data and access to Pinterest Ads.
When you do create an account you want to make sure your account name matches your website's brand. You also want to use your website's logo as the profile picture.
As already mentioned Pinterest is a visual search engine, there are places on your profile you’ll want to include certain keywords. These will help people find your account when searching for health focused pins.
Pinterest Display Name – You want to update your profile name to have your brand in it but then next to it the main niche. IE “Brand Name – Health Tips & Supplement Reviews” Or “Brand Name – Nootropics Tips & Brain Supplement Reviews”
Profile Description – Your profile is where you can tell visitors a bit about you. This is the perfect place to put in some keywords. Don't stuff it but naturally place keywords related to the niche and what you want people to search for to find your account.
You don't want to create all of your boards right away as you don't want empty boards. I did want to go through some key things before you start creating your pins.
Just like your pins and profile, you want to optimize your boards for keyword searches.
First of all take a look at what boards your competitors have, this will give you some ideas.
If a keyword is very competitive, you want to add additional words to make it a little more longtail. This will get you less views to that board but it’ll be less competitive.
For example, if Health Supplements were very competitive. Go for Health Supplements For Men or Best Health Supplements.
Boards can then have a description, helping the viewer to learn what they’ll find on that board. Make sure to fill this out and include your main keyword and related keywords within the description.
Since Pinterest is a visual search engine, you need to create pins that grab attention and encourage clicks. Canva is a great tool for this as they do provide many templates for Pinterest pins.
I’d recommend;
You might want to test out different types of pins such as normal pins, infographics and even video. You can create multiple pins for the same post, just dont post them all together. Spread them over a couple of weeks or months to see which performs best.
Top Tip – See what your pins your competitors are doing and which get more engagement. Use these as inspiration.
Just like we optimize images on our websites for SEO, the same is done on Pinterest. Many users do not fully optimize their images, since they’re doing it more as a hobby. Which means there is a chance for some quick wins.
One thing that many people don’t do is use the main keyword in the file name. Next you’ll want to use your keyword in the title of the pin, within the description and in the alt tag of the image.
With the description, it's a great place for you to get those secondary keywords as well. Just don’t overdo it, make sure it reads natural.
Just like with most strategies, results will not happen right away. It takes time and effort but you can see great results. For long term growth, the key is building your brand on the platform. (Which is also going to help build your brand awareness off the platform as well)
This is a question that is asked on every platform. How often should you pin or post to see growth.
There is no set number. No really, there isn't
The thing that you need to focus on is consistency. Show that platform that you’re taking it seriously.
Since it's a search engine, content is evergreen, so you don't need to be pinning 20-30 times a day. In fact even Pinterest advises that pinning once per week is a good rule of thumb.
I would start with once a week, get into a routine and if you’re able to commit more then increase this to twice a week. Eventually you might have then built up enough content to schedule more on a regular basis.
With your affiliate website, you’ll have your brand colors. This is your brand identity.
You want to use the same styling on your pins. With all your pins aim to use the same style visuals, colors and fonts. This is going to help people recognize your brand, which is going to help build trust.
Don’t waste space by placing your logo on your pins, instead extra the colors from your logo and use these in your pins.
Just like with YouTube, you want to build a community within Pinterest. The best way of doing this is by engaging with them. Be a part of the community.
Find other health niche pins, like, comment and repin them. Build relationships and join community/group boards. This is going to help build your visibility on the platform and ultimately grow your following.
Obviously if you’re just pinning product reviews or the same type of pins, this will impact your followers and you might find growth slows down. Its important just like on a website to pin a wide variety of content from your niche.
This would include;
Finally since you have a business account, you want to make sure you use the analytics. This is going to help you know what is working and what pins/boards are driving the most traffic, so you can double down on them.
There we have it. Hopefully this has given you a little bit of an insight into Pinterest.
Pinterest can be a great way for you to diversify traffic sources and with 522 million monthly viewers, that's a lot of potential traffic.
In fact I have a food pinterest that I’ve not posted to in over 3 years (I sold the website) and that still gets around 21k monthly views. So the potential is there!
It's important now to not just focus on one traffic source, you need to be working on several and build a community/brand around your own content.
If you have any questions about Pinterest or need any support in setting it up or growing on it, reach out to our affiliate managers and we;ll be more than happy to help!
