Obsessed with Pinterest?
Join the club!
If you spend hours each day pinning anyway, you might be wondering: can you make money from Pinterest?
Honestly, Pinterest is so much fun, the idea of getting paid to pin seems like a dream.
But it’s true – you can! I’ve been making money on Pinterest for several months now, and I want to share my tips with you.
If you’re wondering how to make money by pinning, you’re in the right place.
Here are four easy ways you can make money on Pinterest, whether you’re a Pinterest beginner or already have an established account.
And no, you don’t even need a blog!
1. Pin affiliate links
Affiliate marketing on Pinterest is my current favourite side hustle. It’s the easiest way to get paid to use Pinterest for beginners!
Affiliate marketing is when you get paid a commission to send customers to a website or store.
Share products you love on Pinterest with an affiliate link, and you will earn money for every purchase made through your link.
You can find affiliate programs for pretty much any product you want, from ebooks and courses (these work great in the blogging niche!) to clothes and home goods.
One program I love for beginners is MagicLinks because you can create affiliate links to hundreds of different retailers through their easy browser add-on, without having to sign up to individual stores. MagicLinks have huge names like eBay, Target and Sephora, as well as loads of cute niche stores.
This side hustle is completely flexible and it’s a lot of fun! It can also become a passive income business if you’re willing to front-load the work.
Once your affiliate links are out there on Pinterest, they’ll be circulating around earning you money forever! You can keep your Pinterest account active with scheduling tools like Tailwind if you need a break.
I first learned how to make money on Pinterest with this short online course. It’s a simple and actionable guide to making that first sweet Pinterest money fast.
I got it all set up in an afternoon, and started making money a few days later!
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How much can you make?
I personally made about £200 last month from the main affiliate program I promote on Pinterest. I’ve received payments of over £460 in the five months since I started, and my average daily earnings are growing all the time.
According to screenshots posted in an affiliate Facebook group I’m in, some people are earning over $1,000 per month!
Bear in mind this is a long-term game, though. I started off making just pennies a day, and my earnings slowly started to snowball over time. This is pinning several affiliate pins, every single day.
Unless you are lucky enough to have a pin go viral early on, be prepared that it can take weeks or months of consistent daily pinning to see results like this. Watching your business grow is part of the fun!
2. Become a Pinterest virtual assistant
Believe it or not, not everybody loves Pinterest!
Some bloggers, brands and companies don’t understand Pinterest and don’t have time to learn, so they prefer to outsource.
That’s where you come in!
Whether it’s designing pins, seeking out group boards or managing a whole Pinterest account for somebody else, there is plenty of work for people who are great at pinning.
Kristin Larsen from Believe in a Budget started a Pinterest virtual assistant side hustle in 2015, and within six months she was earning $3,600 per month. She now has an online course, Become a Pinterest VA TODAY!, where you can learn how to do the same.
If you don’t want to offer a whole Pinterest management package, you could sell pin templates or bespoke pin design services on Fiverr.
Becoming a Pinterest virtual assistant (VA) is a great (and relatively fast) way to make money using Pinterest if you already have good design skills and a solid understanding of the platform.
It makes a great freelance career, either part time or full time.
Here’s an interview with one student who landed her first client (which paid for the cost of the course) within two weeks. I am really tempted to give this a go!
How much can you make?
According to Kristin, the average hourly rate for a Pinterest VA is $25-$50. It’s also common to offer monthly Pinterest management packages for $250+, so you have the security of a recurring monthly income.
You can see that you don’t need many clients at that rate to build up a successful side hustle income!
You can increase your fee as you become more established and start working with bigger and better brands.
Kristin’s course contains more information on setting your prices, as well as finding clients and defining your services.
3. Drive traffic to your blog or product
This is not exactly a self-contained way to make money on Pinterest. But, if you already have a blog, website, or any kind of product for sale online you can use Pinterest to sky-rocket your traffic, and your income with it!
Pinterest can be a way to drive insane numbers of visitors to your blog or sales page. If you have display adverts on your site, each pageview literally equals money.
Carly from Mommy on Purpose earns several thousand every month from display ads on her blog and her main source of traffic is Pinterest.
Carly has a unique pinning strategy which she shares in this ebook.
My page views almost quadrupled when I started using Carly’s Pinterest strategy – check my review here!
If your blog is monetised through affiliate marketing, you can expect your affiliate income to increase as you get more traffic. If you have If you have a product to sell or you want to get people onto your mailing list, use Pinterest to drive traffic to your landing page.
Don’t have a blog yet? Follow my step-by-step instructions to get set up in this tutorial!
By the way, the same applies if you sell products on Etsy, Shopify, Merch by Amazon, Redbubble or any other marketplace. If you have a store or product anywhere on the web, you can learn to use Pinterest to drive traffic and increase your sales!
How much can you make?
The sky’s the limit! The lifestyle blog Chasing Foxes recently posted an income report of $19,889.04 (yes, in one month!) and apparently most of their traffic comes from Pinterest.
I have seen a huge increase in advertising income and blog affiliate income since I started working on my Pinterest strategies.
It’s hard to quantify since I also get traffic from Google and other sources. But I can tell you that since I quadrupled my pageviews using Carly’s Pinterest strategy, I qualified for a better paying ad network, which brings me an extra $1,000 per month in income from my blog.
Higher traffic has been the key for me that pushed my blog from a hobby into potentially job-replacing money. And Pinterest is one of the quickest and most effective ways to increase your traffic.
4. Be a Pinterest influencer
If you’ve been on Pinterest for a while, have loads of followers and a high engagement rate, brands are ready to pay you to collaborate with them. This could involve repinning the brand’s pins, creating unique pins for the brand, or inviting the brand to a group board so they can piggyback on your reach.
This is such a growing area that Pinterest set up their own influencer program to connect power pinners with brands. The program is very exclusive right now, but there are also influencer agencies like Intellifluence which can set you up with campaigns.
How much can you make?
There are no set fees for this sort of work – you’ll have to negotiate rates with individual brands.
Pinterest influencer marketing is a relatively new thing so I couldn’t find anyone sharing income figures online. But Instagram influencers can earn anywhere from $30 to tens of thousands of dollars per post, so I’m willing to bet some people are doing pretty well on Pinterest.
Do you have any more ideas on how to earn money from Pinterest? Would you give it a try?
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