9 Steps To Starting an Affiliate Marketing Business Using Amazon and Pinterest

Money is tight lately, so you’ve been looking for ways to earn extra income. You’ve heard many people make money online so you did your research and lo and behold you are now overwhelmed with many options you can do to legitimately earn money online. Some people say do eCommerce, other social media marketing, yet some advise to start an affiliate marketing business. If you’ll ask me, my wealth builder tip for you is to start an Amazon affiliate website and promote it using Pinterest!

How Amazon Affiliate Website Works?

Why Create An Amazon Affiliate Website?

1. Amazon is a known and trusted online retailer

Amazon is the largest e-commerce retailer (by online revenue) in the world with over 197 million people around the world getting their stuff from Amazon each month! It also has about 126 million Prime members in the U.S. alone – that is almost 40% of the U.S.’s population! This is big because Prime members are said to spend twice as much compared to non-prime members.

What this means for us affiliate marketers is we can be sure that there will be people who will be buying our affiliate products that we are promoting. Even better, the chances of them buying the product from Amazon is great because they know the name and its great and reliable service.

2. You can promote hundreds of thousands of products with just one affiliate program

On top of the whopping customer base of Amazon, the company sells products to almost every market niche imaginable. Amazon is said to have an inventory of over 12 million products!

This is great because no matter what our blog niche is in, we can be sure there are products from Amazon that we can promote that can generate income for us.

Why Promote Using Pinterest?

1. Pinterest’s monthly average users is growing

Now, Pinterest is NOT the “Amazon of Social Media”. It is not even half as famous as Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Nevertheless, don’t underestimate Pinterest’s efficiency in converting a cold lead into a paying customer.

According to bussinessofapps.com, Pinterest still sees a strong MAU quarterly growth (see below graph)!

What does this mean is, the platform is nowhere near its maximum potential. Unlike Facebook which seems to have plateaued in growth or Twitter which have quarters where its MAU is negative, Pinterest is consistently going up. This means you can be rest assured that you will not run out of people to promote to and a s a matter of fact, you can be assured that you will have more people to promote to every month. Finally, if you start promoting your Amazon affiliate website on Pinterest now, then you will be able to establish your authority today for a bigger marketshare for tomorrow.

2. Pinterest Users are Active Buyers

Pinterest is different from other social media mainly because of how it functions. Many social media are used as a platform where one can flaunt his or her life for everyone to envy. On the other hand, Pinterest is used as a platform where one can share or get ideas…. “a platform where one can get ideas”!

That is important because when a person decides to do a project or DIY, they can use Pinterest to gather and curate ideas. Consequently, they can use Pinterest to find products that they will use to do their project. In other words, they are active buyers.

What this means to you is you have a higher chance to sell products if you will promote it on Pinterest.

3. You can Share Amazon Affiliate (or other affiliate links) on Pinterest

There are a lot of people who are asking, “Does Amazon Allow Affiliate Links on Pinterest“? And although there are conflicting answers you can find on the internet, I would say yes you can as long as you follow these guidelines.

1. Pinterest cannot be a stand-alone site. You must have another website or webpage for approval that is one of our accepted types.
2. With Pinterest, you must use the “No-Pin” feature in order to stay within spam guidelines

How do I know this is accurate? I emailed them! Here is a screenshot of our conversation.

P.S. I am using Amazon Associates Canada.

I hope this is now crystal clear to you as to why using Amazon and Pinterest is one of the best affiliate marketing strategies!

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Overview: 9 Steps To Start an Affiliate Marketing Business Using Amazon and Pinterest

1. Sign Up with Amazon Associates to Become an Affiliate
2. Choose a Market Category In Amazon
3. Sign Up For a Pinterest Business Account
4. SEO-Optimize Your Pinterest
5. Grow Your Pinterest Followers Strategically
6. Create a Blog
7. Write a List Article and/or a Review Article to Promote Affiliate Products
8. Create Pinterest Pins and Publish It
9. Rinse and repeat steps 7 and 8.

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Affiliate Disclosure – I am an Affiliate of many products promoted on this website and may earn a commission if you purchase something.

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Step 1: Sign Up with Amazon Associates to Become an Affiliate

The first step is to create an account with Amazon Associate. Amazon Associate is Amazon’s affiliate program. It tracks how many people click on your affiliate link, how many ordered through your links, and how much your earnings are.

You can also find affiliate marketing tools designed to improve your conversion. It has affiliate link generator, banners, and widgets. It also provides resources such as Idea Hubs – Amazon-created lists of best seller items in various categories that affiliates can use for content ideas.

One nifty feature that you will have access to after you registered on Amazon Associates is Site Strip. Site strip is a tab that will show up on top of your Amazon account page when you log in to Amazon using your Amazon Associates login info.

What is great about it is you can easily create an affiliate link to virtually every product in Amazon. Here is how!

1. Find a product on Amazon search bar,
2. Go to “Get Link” on the found on Site Strip tab
3. Click what kind of link (Text, Image, or Text Image)
4. Copy and Paste the link or HTML code on your website.

Step 2: Choose a Market Category (Niche) In Amazon

The next thing you need to do after registering to Amazon Associate is to go to Amazon.com (or whatever Amazon region you are using) and click the shop by category section.

Once you are in, choose a product category you would like your blog/Pinterest to focus on.

Basically, this will be your blog/Pinterest niche so choose wisely!

Choosing a product category/ niche is very important because it will be your “business’ compass”. It will dictate what is the topic of the contents you will be publishing and, consequently, who will be your audience.

Here are questions to ask if you are struggling on choosing what niche you will get into.

Step 3: Sign Up For a Pinterest Business Account

Okay! Doing good so far!

You now have an Amazon Associates account which will be your primary source of income. You now also picked a niche that will be the focus of your blog/ Pinterest Marketing.

Next is to create a business account with Pinterest which will be your audience building platform.

Creating a Pinterest for Business Account is pretty straightforward, but in case you need help, here is a guide about Creating a Pinterest Business Account.

Step 4: SEO-Optimize Your Pinterest

In case you don’t know, Pinterest is not just a social media but also a search engine – the best “visual” search engine as a matter of fact. 

Pinterest, being a social media and search engine, gives you a lot of advantages in terms of marketing. To show Pinterest’s supremacy in creating sales, let me describe to you where Facebook (social media) and Google (search engine) is in the sales funnel.

Facebook’s Place On the Sales Funnel

Facebook is at the top of the sales funnel. Facebook users don’t use the social media to find things they wish to buy nor use it to research for companies where they can spend their hard-earned money.

This means you will have to spend on advertisements that create awareness about your product/business. Then, you will have to spend more on the advertisements designed to convince your cold leads into buying your product.

I guess this type of marketing strategy is great if your product is expensive and you need to convince your audience why they need your product.

To be fair, there is another way to use Facebook (social media) and that is by growing your followers list and then publishing value-adding contents. The success of this method relies on your organic reach (free). If you create quality contents then it can be shared a lot thus higher reach. You can also just rely on Facebook’s algorithm, but Facebook lowered the % of organic reach.

Google’s Place on the Sales Funnel

Google, on the other hand, is near or at the bottom of the sales funnels. Google users specifically use the search engine to find the product they wish to buy. As a digital marketer, your goal is to get your website on the first page, preferably ranked #1, of Goggle’s search engine result page. This can be done through search engine optimization (SEO) or search engine marketing (SEM)

(If this doesn’t make sense to you, please feel free to ask a question in the comment section.)

Pinterest’s Place on the Sales Funnel

Now, since Pinterest is both social media and a search engine, you can use all the strategies mentioned above.

How to SEO-Optimize your Pinterest?

I will explain in step 5 how to do social media marketing using Pinterest later, for now, let me teach you how to do search engine marketing on Pinterest.

Like in Google, you want your content to show on the top of the search engine result page (SERP) because the higher your rank on SERP the more traffic you will get. And the more traffic you get, the more people will see what you are trying to promote. For that to happen, you first need to SEO-optimize your Pinterest

Optimizing your Pinterest for keyword search is easy.

Here is how

1. Have a niche
2. Research niche-related keywords
3. Include niche-related keywords to your user name, to your Pin titles and description, and to your Board titles and description.

That’s it! If you do this, Pinterest’s algorithm will show your Pins when a search is done for a particular keyword because there is consistency.

Important!

I want to reiterate the importance of having a niche and posting content only related to your niche to help Pinterest algorithm determine what your Pinterest business account is all about. Do this and Pinterest will rank your posts higher.

Step 5: Grow Your Pinterest Followers Strategically

Yes, Pinterest is a wonderful visual search engine, but as I said earlier, it is also a social media! 

That means building a following is important because your followers will see your content and if they like it, they will re-Pin (share) it.

Here is how building a large following works

 the higher followers you have = higher the impression

higher the impression = higher chance of link clicks

link clicks = traffic

 higher traffic = higher chance to make money

There are two ways to grow your followers.

The first way is for you to follow an influencer in your niche then follow their followers. This is a strategy that works because the influence’s followers would theoretically like your content since you and the influencer they follow are in the same niche thus publishing similar contents.

The other way is to SEO-optimize your Pinterest (see step 4). As mentioned earlier, your Pins will show up on the top of Pinterest’s search result page if you SEO-optimized it. Pinterest users will then see it and either they will save your Pin, visit the URL, follow you, or best of all, all of the above.

Step 6: Create a Blog

In a perfect world, it would be great if you can create a Pin then directly put your Amazon affiliate link to the Pin’s destination link so your followers will be redirected to Amazon when they click your link.

Unfortunately, the reality is a bit complicated because some say you are not allowed to use your Amazon affiliate link directly on Pinterest while others say you can.

As far as I know, you can directly use your Amazon affiliate link on Pinterest but with restriction.

Check out my article, “How to Add Amazon Affiliate Links On Pinterest” to learn why I believe you are allowed to directly use your Amazon affiliate link on Pinterest and how to add your amazon affiliate links on Pinterest.

For now, I’ll tell you How to Start an Affiliate Marketing Business Using Amazon and Pinterest the safe way, and that is by writing an Amazon Affiliate blog then publishing a corresponding Pin for it.

Things You Need to Create a Blog

To create a blog, you would need the following

• Domain Name Registrar
• Web-Hosting Service
• Website Builder

How to Create a Blog

 If you have no idea how to start a blog, here are your two options: 

Option 1: Subscribe to a FREE Starter Account of Wealthy Affiliate.com.

Wealthy Affiliate’s FREE starter account is good enough for you to learn the basics of blog creation and they will provide you with some basic tools to set up your blog. I recommend that you try it because its good to get your feet wet.

Option 2: Buy Online Courses

Of course, it is also okay if you want to build your website on your own but it will probably be harder to figure out what you need to start one and how to start one.

Step 7: Write a List and/ or Review Article to Promote Affiliate Products

Hopefully, you already set up your blog. Now, you need to focus on creating list articles or review articles about Amazon products because these are the ones that get a lot of traffic and have a high conversion rate.

Don’t believe me? Just observe your browsing habits.

You are probably more drawn to articles that list gift ideas than a regular blog. In addition, if you are looking to buy, a headset, for example, you will probably look for product reviews to determine if the headset you are thinking to buy is of any good or not.

What to include in a review article: 

• Product name
• Product image
• Rating (star or number) of the product as per Amazon’s rating + the number of people who rated it
• Description of the product
• The benefit of using it
• Pros and Cons
• Call to Action

Additional tips when writing a review article:

• Use AIDA format
• State the problem
• Show how the product solve help the problem 
• Tell your readers what will be the benefit of the product to them
• Include some social proof (screenshot of product reviews of other people)
• Answer the question, “So what?” every time you state what the product can do.

What to include in a list article

• Product name
• Product image
• Rating (star or number) of the product as per Amazon’s rating + the number of people who rated it
• A short paragraph convincing people to get the product for themselves
• Call to Action

Additional tips when writing a list article:

• Think of a topic for the list article
• Only promote Amazon products that fits the theme

Step 8: Create Pinterest Pins and Publish It

Alright! you are now in the final step of How to Start an Affiliate Marketing Business with Amazon and Pinterest. 

After you have written your article, the only thing left is to drive traffic to your articles.

To do that, you will use Pinterest!

Hopefully, you did step 4 and step 5 well and should have resulted to around 4k followers after 4-6 months and you have around 20K+ monthly impressions!

Those are pretty good numbers, so now I would want you to do is to Publish Pins (maybe 3-5 Pins) for each Amazon Affiliate article you write then use the blog’s URL in Pin’s destination link. 

If you didn’t manage to amass that number of followers or your monthly impressions are low, don’t worry because Pinterest also has paid advertisements that you can use.

To do Pinterest Ads, just create a Pin like how normally you would then click Promote Pin to get it advertised.

Step 9: Repeat steps 7 and 8

Yes, that is it. That is all you need to do to Start an Affiliate Marketing Business!

The great news is you only need to to set up your affiliate accounts, Pinterest and blogs once. So all you really need to do is to repeat steps 7 and 8. In other words, just write blog posts over and over again and promote those blog posts on Pinterest.

Here is even greater news! There will come to a point where you will not have to write anything or as much anymore because your articles will get good amount of traffic and will continue to generate commissions!

But, as a brand new site, aim to write at least 100 Amazon affiliate blog post and create at least 3-5 Pinterest Pins for each post. Aim to finish it within 6 to 12 months and I can guarantee you that you will be making money passively for the rest of your blog life.

Summary: 9 Steps To Start an Affiliate Marketing Business Using Amazon and Pinterest

Well, I truly hope that this article added value to your life. If it doesn’t please feel free to give your constructive criticism so I can further improve it.

Hopefully, though it did add value and if so please leave in the comment section what are the things you’ve learned.

Just a quick recap, the 9 Steps to Start an Affiliate Marketing Business Using Amazon and Pinterest are the following:

1. Sign Up to Amazon Associates to Become an Affiliate
2. Choose a Market Category In Amazon
3. Sign Up For a Pinterest Business Account
4. SEO-Optimize Your Pinterest
5. Grow Your Pinterest Followers Strategically
6. Write a Blog
7. Write a List Article and/or a Review Article to Promote Affiliate Products
8. Create Pinterest Pins and Publish It
9. Rinse and repeat steps 7 and 8.

I want to hear which part of the article you love the most!