Pin To Profits: My Journey With The Pinterest Platform
By: Lakshmia Marie
Do you think that Pinterest is only used for recipes and wedding inspiration? If so, you are losing out on a great revenue stream. In this article, I’m going to break down some simple, yet effective, ways to generate more income from Pinterest, with just a few minutes a day!When I started using Pinterest, it was by accident. I was a struggling Lifestyle Blogger. I was trying to get more than the 20 hits a week for my blog so that I can monetize like the bigger influencers that I read about. However, I had some obstacles in my way.
- I had NO money. I was also starting to ramp up my agency at the same time as the blog. So, no money for ads!
- Promoting my blog took up too much of my time for a small result. I would spend countless hours in Facebook Promo Groups, sharing on Twitter, even begging my friends and family to share my blog in hopes of it going “viral”.
Just when I was thinking about giving up, someone told me to install a share plugin to my site. I did just that and thought nothing of it.The next time I checked my stats, I had over 1K views, from the past day alone! I checked the source of these numbers and saw that 90% of this traffic was from a platform called Pinterest. In order to make sure that it wasn’t a fluke or a fake bot, I checked the platform out.Once I checked it out, I was in love!It was a beautiful place! The beautiful boards, photos and articles were amazing yet overwhelming. From that point forward, I learned to focus on that platform only.Since I was getting at least 1k views a day, I started joining affiliate networks and programs that were related to my niche.Once I started writing blog posts about these products and services, I started getting little notifications every month. Little notifications that would signal that I earned some more money and/or credits from things that I shared.Soon, I started averaging 450K hits a MONTH on Pinterest alone! Out of those hits, 45% went directly to my blog and email list. Now that is how you start monetizing! So even if you don’t have those numbers, here are some tips on how to monetize quicker than I did in my journey.
Join Group Boards
Group Boards are a lifesaver. A group board is simply a board that allows contributors in a specific niche to post on. Usually, these boards have TONS of content! Plus, members of these boards share the content on them with THEIR network. So a 10 second task can help you can months of traction. Check out PinGroupie, which is a website that checks out Pinterest every 3 days and updates the list of group boards that are current and active on the platform.
Link Your Offers
To The Correct Boards Pinterest is a different type of social media platform. Instead of having friend’s walls, video and things of that nature, they have the Smart Feed. The Smart Feed pulls up content based on your boards, keywords and searches. So, when you create pins, make sure that they get posts to the relevant boards, have relevant descriptions and keywords. That way, when people search, you content comes up and they check it out! When you do this with affiliate offers, once people click on your content, they will be tracked using your link. This also works if you sell products/services as well. How awesome is that?!
Smart Automation Is Important
Pinterest is an automation-friendly platform, within reason. Services like Tailwind, Board Booster, Buffer and others have the Pinterest API integration within their services. So, scheduling out your content will free up your time and allows you to continuously bring your older content back to the forefront. If those posts have affiliate offers, that means you can continuously monetize off of that content. One of my biggest affiliate income sources is from some posts from 2 years ago!I am so glad you read this post! I hope that these tips can help you grow your empire using Pinterest!Lakshmia is the founder of LMF Consulting Group, a Digital Marketing Agency. Using her 12+ years of experience, she leads a team of creatives and marketers that implement creative strategies to local, international and national business to foster their growth and development.