Three Ways to Make Money Using Pinterest

It’s new, exciting and on every major news station on the planet. So, how can you use it to make money? After a couple of very exciting months, during which Pinterest appeared nearly everywhere you looked, marketers took notice and the big question now is how to take it to the next level and start making some money with it. To help you do just that, here are three strategies already being used to great effect to make money online with Pinterest.

Drive Traffic to Affiliate Sites – Pinterest is a powerful tool for driving traffic to nearly any site you link it to. That said, affiliate marketers will have a very easy time generating traffic if they produce high quality pinboards that capture attention. Say, for example, you are driving traffic to dog training products with a review site. To promote this, you could pin the cutest, most enticing pictures of dogs you can find. People love cute pics of, well nearly anything.

Pin Other People’s Stuff – Like any social network, the more you interact with others, the more you will get out of Pinterest. So get on the site, start pinning and other people will pin in return. The classic reciprocal relationship of any good social network will develop quickly. If you pin other peoples’ stuff, they will pin yours. You like mine, I like yours and so on. Just make sure you stick to things that are representative of your account and don’t just go on a pinning spree.

Provide High Quality Images to Offer Value – Why bother offering all those images if you don’t spend some time working on them? More importantly, why allow a perfectly good opportunity to provide value pass you by? Much the same as with Google+, Twitter or Facebook, your pinboards must provide value to the people who view them. That means things like infographics, storyboards and interesting content that will attract attention instead of just filling up space. Don’t be another user with 200 pictures of kittens or half naked women. Offer something of real value and you are guaranteed to generate more traffic and better returns on your investment on the site.

Like any good social network, nothing you do on Pinterest will immediately translate to cash in your pocket. The site doesn’t work like that. But if used properly, Pinterest can do three things for you.

• Generate lots of targeted traffic to your sites
• Build relationships with like minded users in your niche
• Provide value to those users and convince them that your products and/or recommendations are worthwhile

If you use Pinterest to its full potential, you will gain all three of these things as benefits and therefore start to earn more money for whatever business ventures you are currently promoting with Pinterest. It’s not a money tree, but with the right approach, the site can be a powerful tool.

Using Pinterest to Generate Traffic for Your New Website

Since it was launched, Pinterest has rapidly become one of the hottest social media sites on the Internet. With its combination of easy to use features, addictive sharing and huge volumes of traffic both entering and leaving the site, Pinterest is a site definitely worth watching, especially if you own a website and want to generate traffic to it.

How Much Traffic Are We Talking?

Like most websites early in the development process, Pinterest isn’t yet releasing traffic data. But we can look at other social networks in their infancy to get a good idea of the kind of growth Pinterest likely is experiencing. Facebook, for example, once it reached the 20 million member mark, generated more than 7 million visits per day with an average of 20.5 page views per visitor. Twitter’s numbers were slightly lower in terms of daily visits per user, but much higher in terms of page views per day (those early numbers didn’t take mobile use into account).

So, we can conservatively estimate that Pinterest members login on average once every 2-3 days and view at least 15-20 pages or boards per login. For someone like you, whose goal it is to generate traffic to your own website, those numbers are very, very enticing.

Why Pinterest Is a Traffic Goldmine

A lot of people make the very good point that despite Facebook and Twitter receiving unprecedented numbers of page views per visitor and an extremely high return visit rate, traffic didn’t always translate off site. Many advertisers complained early on that Facebook’s user base had a habit of staying on the site, to the point that overall web traffic started to fall in some sectors.

Pinterest is different, however. Whereas Facebook is a self-contained ecosystem, Pinterest is designed to showcase off-site content. Boards are loaded with links and users are eager to see new and interesting sites other than Pinterest.

For site owners and entrepreneurs with something interesting to share, Pinterest offers the perfect place to showcase it. In the very truest sense of the word, Pinterest is a global bulletin board and one that every business with visual components – actual or fabricated – should be using.

First Steps with Pinterest

Like any exciting new social network, Pinterest is slightly different from each of its contemporaries. You don’t interact with people or content in the same way you would on Facebook, Twitter or Google+. The goal is to provide the most interesting, share-worthy content on the site, not to show off what you ate for lunch (unless you’re on vacation).

So, when you create your Pinterest account, don’t phone it in. Create a clear marketing plan and generate content that will attract interest from a full range of users – including people in your niche and others alike. Well chosen images and links, along with an active account on which you visit and pin other people’s content will get you much further than spamming your products or services every other day.