How To Make Money On Pinterest Without A Blog: Step By Step

by James Sowers | Last Updated:  November 19, 2019

This post may be sponsored or may contain affiliate links, which means we may receive a commission, at no additional cost to you, if you make a purchase through a link. Read the full disclosure.

If you’ve been wondering how to make money on Pinterest without a blog, then you’ve come to the right place.

After I published my last post – How To Make Money On Pinterest: 6 Smart Ways, I got a ton of requests to explain more about the method #2 which was about using direct affiliate links.

I understand not everyone wants to start a blog, which is why I’ve prepared this little guide for you to learn how to make money on Pinterest without a blog.

Let’s dive right in.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

First of all, it’s important to know what Affiliate Marketing exactly is.

Affiliate Marketing means referring someone to a product and earning a commission whenever that “someone” goes on to buy it.

The amount of commission you earn per sale depends upon the affiliate program/network you’re part of. Some of them pay 50% of the price, some pay lower and some pay much higher.

Most of the products you see online has an affiliate program that you can sign up for and earn commissions.

Are Affiliate Links Allowed On Pinterest?

Back in 2015 Pinterest banned the use of affiliate links on their platform due to the rising number of spammers. It was a huge blow for people who were depended on it.

Also read: 13 Epic Work From Home Jobs: Earn Money From Home Today

Thankfully, after a year they lifted the ban because they found a way out to tackle the spammers. Pretty cool!

So in short: Yes, affiliate links are allowed on Pinterest.

NOTE: Even though affiliate marketing on Pinterest is not an objection anymore, it is always good to follow the rules and use the platform as a human being. Say NO to spamming!

How To Do Affiliate Marketing On Pinterest Without A Blog

Probably the part you came for. Affiliate marketing using Pinterest without a blog is a pretty straightforward process. I’ve tried to keep it as simple as possible with the below steps. Here we go:

Step 1: Setup your profile

I am assuming you’ve already signed up for a Pinterest business account. If you haven’t, head over to business.pinterest.com and hit the sign up button.

After you’re in, fill out your name, bio, display picture and everything else that completes a profile.

Keep in mind that you need to stick to one niche. Don’t just go on and promote anything and everything. Some popular Pinterest niches include:

• DIY
• Beauty
• Weight Loss
• Travel
• Food
• Fitness
• Fashion

Whatever niche you pick, make sure to fill out your profile in a way that is relevant to your niche.

For example: if you picked the Pregnancy niche, you’d want to have some keywords related to Pregnancy in your name and bio. Also have boards related to Pregnancy.

A great way to make sure you do these things correctly is to observe other profiles in your niche. Stalk them and take inspiration.

Let me show you how:

Head over to Pinterest and search for your niche keywords.

Now instead of selecting “All Pins”, choose “People” so that you only get displayed the accounts.

Now you have a list of accounts related to your niche.

Click on the ones that have a lot of followers and observe how they’ve structured their profile. Check this:

Notice something? This entire profile is properly stuffed with niche-related keywords.

Now, when I dig deeper and check the boards of this profile, here’s what I see:

Everything related to Pregnancy and babies. This helps Pinterest and its users identify what your profile is all about. Very important for getting your pins seen in front of the right audience.

You need to do something like this for your own profile. Once you have your profile and boards set up correctly, you need to fill those boards with third-party pins.

If you’re new to Pinterest you won’t have any pins of your own to share on the platform. (We’ll get to that later)

For now, just fill those boards with others’ pins. Keep in mind to not overdo things. Don’t pin 20-30 at once. Keep it slow.

Assuming you have at least 20-25 niche-related boards created, it’ll take some time to fill them up with a decent amount of pins.

After you’ve done that, jump on step #2.

Step 2: Join affiliate programs in your niche

Finding affiliate programs/networks for your niche is not the toughest job. In fact, a simple search query like “(Niche) Affiliate Programs” or “(Niche Affiliate Networks” will land you an entire list.

Keep in mind, most of the affiliate programs will require you to have a blog/website. If you like an affiliate program and they require you to have a blog, then you can always start one of your own by reading this article.

If not, there are still a lot of programs/networks that DO NOT require a website. Two of them are:

1. ClickBank
2. JVzoo

You can sign up to those and grab your affiliate links for the products you’d like to promote.

Step 3: Design the pins

Once you have chosen a bunch of affiliate products to promote, the next step would be to design pins for it.

You can make use of this free tool called Canva that lets you design beautiful Pinterest pins with ease. In fact, I use this same tool to design pins for my account.

You can either design one from scratch or choose one of the pin templates.

If you need help with designing beautiful pins that gets you clicks and sales, you need to check out this free mini guide called Perfectly Pinteresting Pins.

Moving on, I’d like to tell you that vertical pins do much better than horizontal or square pins. The reason? Its more popping and easier to read.

When you’re using Canva, you can actually select your desired size by clicking on “Custom dimensions”.

I am currently using 600×1200 for my pins and it’s working well. You can use that too or try testing some other sizes. Whichever works well, keep using that.

Step 4: Start pinning

After you’re done designing a bunch of pins, you need to go ahead and pin those into your relevant boards.

For example, if you have created a pin for Detox Tea, you’d pin that to boards such as:

• Detox Tea Recipes
• Weight Loss Tips
• Fitness Tips
• Health Tips
• Etc.

You get the idea.

Also read: 5 Creative Ways To Make Money On Instagram

Pinterest is a platform that requires you to be consistent. If you pin for a day and tomorrow you don’t, then your reach will most probably go down.

You need to be constantly creating new pins and keep pinning them everyday to your boards.

For example, the Detox Tea pin you designed will go through all of your relevant boards. After it runs out of relevant boards to pin to, you need to design new versions of it and start the pinning cycle again.

This entire pinning process can be really exhausting sometimes if you do it manually. If you’d like to save time and automate the process, you can use a tool called Tailwind.

It is a Pinterest-approved scheduler that lets you upload pins at once and roll them out on the platform automatically on the chosen time.

You can schedule months or years worth of pins at one go and leave it without having to spend time manually doing things on the platform.

Grab The Paid By Pinterest Course

My friend Elise has rolled out a brilliant course called Paid By Pinterest that shows you exactly how to make an affiliate sale on Pinterest within just 24 HOURS!

This entire course is based on her own experience and strategy which helped her close an affiliate sale in just one day. Since then she’s been consistently making money from Pinterest using affiliate links.

This course takes you from the basics of Pinterest and affiliate marketing to advanced strategies like making your pins go viral and increasing sales.

If you’d like to do this whole “Affiliate marketing on Pinterest” thing correctly from the start and avoid all the pitfalls and struggles, you need to grab this.

It’s super affordable and you absolutely don’t need a blog for this strategy to work for you.

Things To Remember When Affiliate Marketing On Pinterest

Since Pinterest is generally a very strict platform, there are a few things you need to keep in mind when sharing affiliate links.

#1 Disclose affiliate links

As per FTC regulations, you need to disclose your affiliate links, no matter where you share it. You can do this easily when sharing affiliate links on Pinterest by just writing #Affiliate at the end of the pin description.

#2 Avoid using URL shorteners

Let’s all agree to this: Affiliate links do not look cool. They’re usually very long and look messy with those tracking IDs and numbers.

Also read: How To Make Money As A Freelance Writer: I Made $461.36 In A Week

Seeing that, most of the people think they need to shorten the links to kind of “beautify” it. The truth is, you shouldn’t because Pinterest doesn’t allow that.

#3 Don’t overdo things

When using Pinterest, you need to keep everything at moderate. Be it pinning, commenting or messaging.

Anything above the moderate level is considered spamming which can get your account suspended.

#4 Create multiple images

Pinterest recently announced that they’re now giving more preference to new pins over old ones.

Which means, you need to design new pins regularly (Maybe 1-2 everyday) to have a good amount of exposure.

Final words

So you just learned how to make money on Pinterest without a blog.

I am excited to know what you think about this method and when you’re going to put this into practice.

Let me know in the comments.

Don’t forget to check out Paid by Pinterest to learn how to make your first affiliate sale within 24 hours.

Meet The Author

Hey there! I'm James Sowers, and I run things around here. My mission is to create 1,000 self-sustaining entrepreneurs...and I'd love for you to be one of them! Have thoughts on this article? Reach out on Twitter and let me know.