While there are many other social media platforms to promote your affiliate business, Pinterest is usually considered as one of the best platforms you can use to create user engagement and awareness relatively quickly.
Promoting Your Affiliate Blog With Pinterest Ads
Just like many other social media platforms, it gives you two ways to promote your affiliate marketing business; paid and free advertisements (through organic means). However, we will only talk about paid Pinterest ads in this article.
While organic results also work great, they require you to dedicate your time and effort first, and the results are uncertain.
Using Paid Pinterest Ads
Another name used for paid ads on Pinterest is Promoted Pins. These pins work just like in PPC (pay per click) method, by having their own bid system.
As far as setting up your paid Pinterest ads is concerned, you can set them up easily if you know how to set up Facebook ads, as these two work almost in the same way. However, the system is so easy that you’ll easily understand it without any prior experience of the same.
In the below mentioned steps, we’ll walk you through the whole process of making a promoted pin on this platform to promote your affiliate marketing business. There are also some tips hidden in these steps which will help you get great results within a short period of time.
The Place Of Paid Pinterest Ads
Whenever you set up paid Pinterest ads on the platform to promote your affiliate blog, these ads then show up in different places when a normal Pinterest user is doing different activities on the platform.
Here are the usual places where paid Pinterest ads show up.
Feed
Do you use Instagram? Then you’ll notice that Pinterest feed is just like the “Explore” page on Instagram. Pinterest tracks the activities of its users, and shows them paid Pinterest ads based on their past usage and activity. It also depends on the type of pins a user saves on his Pinterest account.
Organic Searches
Pinterest’s paid ads also show up on organic search results whenever a user searches for anything or any topic. For example, if you have an affiliate blog, selling DIY gardening tools and you place a promoted pin to promote your store, the pin will show up in the search results of people searching for DIY gardening tools.
Creating A Promoted Pin On Pinterest
You can easily start making promoted pins on Pinterest. However, a Pinterest business account is needed for this process. You can create a Pinterest business account for free by visiting the concerned page on Pinterest.
Once your free Pinterest business account is set up, you can go to the Pinterest homepage, and then go to “Ads”. This will open a drop down menu, from which you can select “Create Ad” to start the process.
In order to create an effectively promoted pin, you’ll have to first choose the main purpose/ Aim of your business. You’ll have lots of different options to choose from.
- If you’re looking to increase the awareness about your brand, you can use the paid ads option to do so. Pinterest will change you money per thousand views/ impressions on your paid ad.
- You can also use these ads for catalog sales. This activity is calculated in the process of conversions for your affiliate blog. These ads are used to directly promote your product inventory.
- You can also use videos to get views on them. This is used like normal brand awareness ads, but it includes videos.
- You can also select the conversions setting for your paid ads. These ads entice the potential buyers to take an action, and have the potential of increasing your affiliate blog product sales.
- Pinterest paid ads can also be used to drive traffic to your website. Users will be redirected to your affiliate blog after clicking the ad, and its underlying link.
However, if you don’t know anything about these options, we recommend using the “Conversions” option since your main goal is getting more conversions. This can be done by installing and using a specific Pinterest tag (this can be done by going to your Shopify admin). Using The “Shopify Pinterest App” for this purpose is highly recommended. You can check out various guides in how to install the right Pinterest tag in your Shopify Admin.
However, if you still can’t choose the Pinterest conversions option due to lack of information on the tag, you should first use Traffic related goal, and then convert it to conversions after getting some sales on your affiliate marketing platform.
Choosing A Goal
So, let’s start by selecting the Traffic goal. Once this option is chosen, you’ll then have to choose how you’ll target your potential audience through your paid Pinterest ads. This system works just like it does on Facebook, and you’re allowed to choose your potential audience by following the mentioned steps.
You can use email lists and any other data collected from ad campaigns run on other social media platforms to customize the paid ads. However, this step is optional, and you can skip it if you don’t have any prior experience.
Selecting Target Interests
The next step in this process is choosing the target interests. For this, you should know the interests related to the products you’re selling on yourblog. This way, Pinterest will show your promoted pins to the potential customers with related interests. These interests are usually niche specific.
Adding The Right Keywords
The process of choosing the right keywords for your paid Pinterest ad is very important. The keyword you choose will determine the type of searches in which your paid ads will show up in.
We’ll mention it again that choosing the right keywords is very important, and that’s because the users searching for a specific product on Pinterest are already more than halfway of their product buying process.
Whenever you try to write a keyword in the given field, Pinterest will show you other related keywords. This gives you more ideas on which keywords people mostly use for buying certain products on Pinterest.
Whenever you’re coming up with keywords, you should use your creativity to find new keywords which have less competition but high potential. Also, avoid using obvious keywords and direct names of your products.
Other Options
In addition to the above mentioned options, there are also options such as the age, gender, language, location and others when creating your paid Pinterest ad. There isn’t any perfect formula here, but you can try different combinations until you reach a formula that works.
There are also some advanced options which determine the placement of your paid Pinterest ad on the platform. You should choose “All” on the next option to maximize the outreach on your Pinterest promoted ads.
Setting A Budget
After all of the above mentioned steps are followed, the next step is choosing your maximum budget to promote your Pinterest paid ads. Usually, you will be best off starting with a budget of 20 to 30 dollars a day. This will allow you to experiment with the ad before finding perfect settings which work for your Shopify store. You can leave the bidding option on auto for the best results.
Selecting The Right Pin
That’s it! You are now done creating your first paid Pinterest ad. The next step now is to select the pins you want to promote on the platform. In the case of an affiliate blog, you can use the video or picture related to the product you are selling.
For the best results, you should choose the pins which are already doing great. However, newly created pins can also be promoted once your ad settings are all set.
To get good results, you should also optimize your pins by adding attractive titles and descriptions to them.
After all these settings and hassle, you can conveniently click on the “Launch” button, and your promoted pin will start working right away.
Conclusion
Since the pins are paid, Pinterest itself gives your ad, and thus your affiliate blog the right amount of exposure. Pinterest is a great platform to promote your affiliate marketing business directly. You should explore both the paid ad and organic methods for your promotion needs.