When I first began using Pinterest as an affiliate marketer, I went to YouTube in search of guides. What I found is that there are two types of affiliate marketers on Pinterest: those who use it like any other platform, and those who consider themselves experts on the platform. The latter know branding and SEO for businesses on Pinterest inside out, but still promote affiliate products. The problem with trying to succeed in affiliate marketing through Pinterest is that you have to be an expert at both. You need extensive knowledge of how to do affiliate marketing, as well as be a Pinterest marketing Expert.

The key to success with affiliate marketing on Pinterest is understanding how the platform works. You need to understand why someone would follow boards related to your niche, what makes an effective post versus a bad post, and more. Once this is figured out, creating posts and boards becomes much easier.

There are many guides on YouTube which show us exactly how to go about doing this, but I often find them problematic and incomplete. So allow me explain the issues I see with these tutorials.

Some guides will tell you that one way to get more views on your TikTok videos is to repost other people’s videos. They’ll even tell you how to download the video without the watermark so you can post it as your own. But, in my opinion, simply giving credit at the bottom of the video in the comments section isn’t enough.If we want to maintain a successful business in the long term, it’s important that we build our business on original content, rather than copying from others. If you do need to use someone else’s videos or articles, be sure to get their permission first, and give them the option of refusal if they’re not comfortable with it.

The second method that I think is problematic is following tons of unknown people every day. The purpose of this method is to get more followers by following a high number of users in the hopes that they will follow you back. Pinterest tries to prevent this behavior and if you try to follow too many people every day, your account may be suspended. Pinterest uses your account followers to understand if your new pins are relevant. So, if you have lots of unknown people following you and you add a new pin, just few of them will view your pins and engage with you. As a result, your pin rank will be lower. Real people that interesting in the niche of your account need to follow you for this process to work most effectively.

Some guides promote using automatic tools to increase your follower and view count, as well as save pins. The idea is that you will get points for clicking and saving other people’s pins, which in theory should give you more followers and views from others (automatic or not). However, these are often not real people who are interested in your niche content- resulting in a lower quality account or board.

In the past, one method people used to generate traffic was through group boards. People would join these groups in order to get exposure from other users’ boards. However, Pinterest has recently cracked down on spamming within group boards, so it is not currently recommended to use them.

Finally, Another wrong method is through affiliate offers direct links in pins. Because Pinterest allows you to add URLs to your pins (unlike TikTok and other platforms), you might think that all you need to do is add the affiliate link in the URL that goes directly to the offer. However, this isn’t allowed on Pinterest. Instead, you need to redirect links back to your blog post.

Overall, Pinterest has become a powerful tool for affiliate marketers if used correctly. However, without the right knowledge and skillsets, success may be hard to come by. It’s important to understand all aspects of Pinterest marketing.