How I made my first affiliate sale in 2017 With Pinterest

How Bloggers Can Make Money Online With Pinterest

Well before I got into blogging, the notion of “affiliate marketing” became a huge trend in the online world and a great way for bloggers and influencers to earn passive income by promoting certain products or services they love.

Ever since I launched my own blog, I’ve been looking for ways to implement the free advice that is out there about affiliate marketing in the hopes of making my first affiliate sale. But nothing seemed to quite work for me.

Until I decided to accept the fact that you need to spend money in order to make money. And what better way to invest in yourself and your blog than to pay to hear what an expert has to say. And that’s exactly what I did.

Disclaimer: This article also includes such affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission, at no extra cost to you, if you make a purchase through a link. Please read my full disclosure if you are interested to know more.

How does Affiliate Marketing work

💎 WHAT IS AFFILIATE MARKETING

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept of “affiliate marketing”, I’ll start by giving a brief explanation of how this works and how you can implement in on your blog, youtube channel or even your social media accounts.

First off you need to join some affiliate programs. Almost everything that is selling products or services online has an affiliate program or scheme that you can apply to. Simply google the name of the company or shop + “affiliate program”.

Affiliate networks like Share A Sale or Affiliate Window partner with thousands of advertisers and merchants, so finding something worth promoting on your website shouldn’t be hard. Amazon has its own affiliate program as well and it’s a great place to start looking for products to promote (ones that you actually use). The Ultimate Bundles team arms you with everything you need to promote their products (even stunning Pinterest graphics)!

For more affiliate networks recommendations make sure to grab a copy of my Affiliate Programs Masterlist or read my post on 5 High-Paying Affiliate Programs For Bloggers.

Even though this post is about how to make affiliate sales with Pinterest, I highly recommend starting a blog first. This will improve your chances of getting accepted to affiliate programs (some of them even require it) and will give you an extra platform to implement your affiliate links.

💎 HOW TO IMPLEMENT IT

The next step after you have been accepted into these programs is to use the custom links that they give you (known as affiliate links) and add them to your posts. This way, they can track any purchases made by your referrals and you get a small commission for each and every sale.

The beauty of it is that it doesn’t cost the buyers any more money if they were to find the product on their own, but you get credit for directing them to make a purchase.

And they don’t even have to purchase the item you link them to. If the browse around the shop looking for an apple, but purchase a kilo of oranges instead, you get a commission for that too. How awesome is that?!

My affiliate marketing strategy

The secret of affiliate marketing is that you can’t just drop affiliate links everywhere and hope for the best ( Trust me! I tried that and it didn’t work). You need to create an implement a strategy. And once you do, it’s an automated process. Which means you put in the work once and the passive income will follow.

So what did I do and how did I score my first affiliate sale in 2017?

As I mentioned before, I had joined all the affiliate networks I could think of and started posting links on my blog, but nothing came out of it. So I knew that I had to think outside the box and invest into getting a professional point of view on this matter.

So I began searching…

I soon came across an ebook called “How to Make Your First Affiliate Sale in 24 Hours Using Pinterest” worth only $25 and I took the leap to purchase it because:

• It promised to teach me exactly what other bloggers were avoiding to share
• It promised (almost) instant results
• It brought to my attention a big piece of the puzzle that I was missing (I had no idea you could use affiliate links on Pinterest as well!)
• It was only $25. I figured if it worked, I would make the money back eventually. (And I did! Not only that but it was a big part of how I made my first $100 blogging and helped me lay the foundation of my affiliate marketing strategy that earned me over $1000 in affiliate sales already!)

How I actually made my first affiliate sale in 2017

First of all, I devoured the ebook. I took three pages worth of notes, I created a strategy of my own and I started implementing it right away.

If you are really interested to know more about that, I highly recommend buying the ebook. I don’t think it’s fair if I share the author’s knowledge for free, since there was clearly a lot of hard work and experimentation that went on into writing it.

My next step was to become an affiliate for the book since I truly believed that what I was going to promote will be valuable for others (and the fact that I managed to actually achieve the results the ebook promised.

I did that by creating an account with SendOwl, an online tool many small sellers use to manage and pay their affiliates. If you don’t have an account with them, set up one now for free. It will come in handy down the line!

RELATED POST: 3 Ways Bloggers Can Make Money With Send Owl

💎 TURN TO PINTEREST

Pinterest was the core of my strategy and has, to this day, brought me over $1000 in affiliate sales already. If you are just now starting your Pinterest account, I highly suggest reading my post on Getting Started With Pinterest – A Guide For New Bloggers.

If you want affiliate links to work on Pinterest, you can’t just wing it! You have to know how Pinterest works. So read my post above or enroll into this free video training now!

But my strategy for my first affiliate sale went something like this:

I started by pinning an image provided by the seller to my Pinterest and added the link created via SendOwl to redirect people that click on it to the landing page where they can make the purchase. (You add the link by going to the pin, clicking edit and in the website field you add the custom affiliate link. This is an extremely important step and you can find a full tutorial on it in the ebook I mentioned!)

RELATED POST: How To Create Stunning Pinterest Graphics

You can also create your own graphics (I use Canva) if you want to stand out because the sellers and other affiliates will be using the same poster and some affiliate networks won’t provide a graphic for every single product, so making them yourself is an important step.

You can see a few examples of my graphics here. If you want your graphics to really stand out, I would recommend looking into getting access to some stock photos because using “free” photos of Google can get you in legal trouble.

(Read my post on How to legally use photos on your blog to see what I mean and find places to get free photos from.)

There are two ways that you can use Pinterest to generate affiliate links: either create graphics for your affiliate links directly or create graphics that lead to your blog posts where you talk about affiliate products.

While both options work, I found the second one to be more profitable, because your readers will trust you more.

>>> Read my guide on How To Start A Blog In 3 Easy Steps to get started! <<<

💎 HOW TO GET TRACTION ON PINTEREST

As I said before, you can be the best affiliate marketer out there, but if you have no idea how Pinterest works, your efforts will fail.

>> Read my Pinterest tutorial for beginners here

>> Grab a copy of my Pinterest ebook

Don’t forget to add a description rich in keywords (NOT hashtags) for your pin. Hoping people will just stumble across it won’t do and your pin will just get lost in the crowd. Don’t forget to disclose at the end that you are using an affiliate link.

Having a good description for your boards will also improve the visibility of the pin, and you might just gain a few extra followers.

I also repinned my own pin in a few relevant Pinterest groups I am a part of. This is super important because it gave the pin some traction (since I don’t have such a large following anyways) and it reached the right audience.

You can read my post on 8 Ways To Improve Your Pinterest Game here to make sure your account has a strong foundation.

💎 TAILWIND: MY SECRET WEAPON

After a couple of days, re-pin your own pin to increase your reach and help it go viral. I recommend Tailwind for scheduling pins, as it’s such a time saver and it will boost your Pinterest game guaranteed!

Why? Because you can choose the pins destination, schedule them in a queue (that you set up) to ensure they go out at peak times and you can even choose multiple boards for one pin.

Tailwind tribes are another sure-fire way to get your affiliate pins to get some traction because you get to exchange repins with tribe members. But the biggest use I have for Tailwind is to automate the promotion of my posts and affiliate links, which is why I continue to make sales based on what I put in motion months ago, without ever touching it again. (Ain’t that the very definition of passive income!)

Start your free trial with Tailwind and test it out. I guarantee you will see a difference!

If you are unsure of what part Tailwind played in my success, read my post on How I use Tailwind to leverage the power of Pinterest that includes a tutorial of how I use it step-by-step.

💎 BOOST YOUR AFFILIATE EARNINGS WITH PINTEREST

Since I wrote this post, Pinterest has brought me another $1000 in affiliate sales. Some of it is because I found other amazing products to promote but most are due to the fact that I have since mastered Pinterest, grew my account and started to create better graphics.

If you are making pennies with Pinterest at the moment and you’re ready to get into the big league and learn to do all of the above, I highly recommend enrolling into Pinterest To Profits. This course will offer you a bulletproof Pinterest strategy as a hand-out along with amazing bonuses such as Pinterest templates and an entire module dedicated to using affiliate links on Pinterest!

But if you want to master affiliate marketing as a beginner and use it to monetise your blog in the long run, then my new Affiliate Marketing Training Bundle is perfect for you!  For only $57 you will get a step-by-step guide that I used to make over 300 affiliate sales in my first year of blogging, along with video tutorials, a masterlist of affiliate programs you can join and a private Facebook support group.

>>> ENROLL NOW <<<

I can’t wait to help you get started with making your first affiliate sale with Pinterest or your blog (and many more after that!).

In conclusion…

Did it take 24 hours to make my affiliate sale? No. It took about 30. But the ebook delivered on its promise and I have already made back in affiliate sales what I paid for the book (by promoting only one product so far).

Now I can go and implement the same strategy for more products and services that I love (including clothes, accessories, online courses and everything else you can think of), and all I have to do is spend some time on Pinterest. (Hard work? Not at all!)

Is affiliate marketing a new term for you? Or are you already a pro? Share in the comments your biggest question about this topic or how you made your first affiliate sale this year!

And if you need any help, all you have to do is insert your email address above to get a checklist of steps you need to take to earn your first affiliate commission! Good luck!

Ready to start making money online with your own blog? Take my free course and find out how:

💎 RECOMMENDED READS

• How To Start A Blog In 3 Easy Steps
• Getting Started With Pinterest – A Guide For New Bloggers
• 5 High-Paying Affiliate Programs For Bloggers
• How I use Tailwind to leverage the power of Pinterest
• 8 Ways To Improve Your Pinterest Game
• My Affiliate Marketing Fail & What I Learned From It
• How I made my first $1,000 blogging

📌 PIN THIS POST FOR LATER 

How I made my first affiliate sale in 2017 With Pinterest