Want to know how exactly to make money on Pinterest? Find out the exact steps you need to start making money on Pinterest in this article!
Wondering how to make money on Pinterest for free and as a beginner? This is the article for you! Making money on Pinterest is a great way to earn money from home and earn money online! It is one of the best side hustles out there, especially when it comes to working from home. It's perfect for SAHMs, teens, or anyone just looking to make some extra cash on the side. Pinterest is a money-making machine, not just the place you go for wedding inspo and the latest chicken pot pie recipe. Pinterest has been the #1 key to growing a profitable blog for me.
In this post, I will take you through my beginner-friendly and step-by-step tutorial for how to make money on Pinterest. It's the exact strategy I use, and it's foolproof! Avoid all the mistakes I made early on by following my detailed process, outlined for you below. Follow the below strategy, and it's impossible NOT to make money on Pinterest.
This post is all about how to make money on Pinterest.
Step 1- Start a Blog
The very first step in how to make money on Pinterest is to start a blog. The best news, this is straightforward and inexpensive. It takes less than 5 minutes to create a blog and costs less than $5 a month. See my step-by-step tutorial for how to start and grow a profitable blog here. I know bloggers who are making over $50,000 a month with their blogs/Pinterest, and you can too. To be honest, the process is shockingly simple. If you want structured guidance, here's the course that helped me.
The #1 thing to know about starting a blog- you need to have a self-hosted website. This is mandatory if you want to make money on Pinterest! I use Bluehost because it is extremely cheap (less than $5 a month) with amazing customer service. It's extremely beginner-friendly, too! Trust me, I am not tech savvy.
Pick a topic you love to learn about, talk about, and write about! I always say- "Blog about what you can't shut up about!" Register your website on Bluehost, and you are nearly ready to start making money from Pinterest. Download a WordPress theme (or get a fancy theme like I did), and you're almost ready to go.
Step 2- Write A Blog Post
Now that you have your blog set up, it's time to write your first post. This is where Pinterest comes in. Pinterest is a popular search engine whose job is to drive traffic to your website. That's why making money on Pinterest is so key (and so simple!). How do we know what to write about? Pinterest will tell us.
First, download Keywords Everywhere. It costs $6 a month and is helpful for keyword research, but you can start without it. This is the plug-in we will use to do keyword research. After it's installed, go to Pinterest and start typing in topics in your blogging niche into the search bar. Of the words that appear in the drop down bar, pick ones that have at least 1,000 searches per month. For my exact keyword strategy, I learned a lot from this course.
Now, the keywords that you found in the drop down bar are what you're going to write your blog posts about. This way we KNOW thousands of people are searching for the exact topic you are writing about! We know there is demand, it's time to create the supply (blog posts!).
After you've written your first blog post, it's time to revisit Pinterest.
Step 3- Create a Pinterest Business Account
The next step is to create a Pinterest account. Specifically, a Pinterest business account. This is also a very simple step. You can either create a new business account OR convert your current personal Pinterest account to a business account. I recommend just creating a new business account specifically for your blog. It's important not to mix any personal pinning with pins for your blog. This will confuse Pinterest as to what your account is about! We want to make it obvious to Pinterest what niche your account is about.
See the step-by-step tutorial for how to create a Pinterest business account here!
After you have created your business account, create at least 5 boards that are named for the top keywords in your niche!
Step 4- Create Pins
The third step in my foolproof strategy for how to make money on Pinterest- We are going to create pins! This is shockingly easy to do. All you need is Canva. I use the paid version, but you can use the free version! It works perfectly fine.
Sign up for Canva here and you're ready to create your first pin.
Canva is very beginner friendly. For your pins, you want to create a pin that advertises what your blog post is about so that people want to click on it. If your blog post is about "the friendliest dog breeds", you want to have those words on your pin. Look around on Pinterest at the pins you like and use those for inspiration! I suggest you create at least 3 pins per blog post.
Pro tips: Use big and easy to read fonts. For images, use a stock photo website like deposit photos. Don’t grab images from the internet—copyright applies. Use licensed stock (e.g., Depositphotos, Canva’s library), or your own photos. Save the templates of your pins so that you can switch out photos easily and create new pins without having to do so from scratch.
Step 5- Start Pinning
Pin it to win it! It's time to publish your beautiful Pinterest pins. There are several ways in which to do this. Choose whatever works best for you! You will be posting each pin one time to the top 5 most relevant Pinterest boards. To find the exact schedule and strategy to make the most money, I used months and months of trial and error. Want to skip the headache? For the exact schedule I use to make the most money possible, check out this Pinterest course!
Option 1: You can manually pin your pins, meaning you just post them immediately and directly to your Pinterest. It is important you do not post a pin for the same blog (or hyperlink) in the same day. You want to space them out by at least 24 hours so that Pinterest doesn't think you're spam. For this reason, manual pinning can be tedious and cumbersome.
Option 2: Use the free Pinterest scheduler. The Pinterest scheduler is built into the Pinterest platform and is entirely free. It allows you to schedule up to 100 pins at a time, up to 30 days in advance (this changes often but is accurate as of time of this posting). Major pro: It's completely free! Major cons: Very limited in terms of number of pins you can schedule and how far in advance you can schedule the pins.
Option 3 (What I do): Use Tailwind. I have used the Pinterest scheduler, Plannoly, and Tailwind. I now use Tailwind to batch-schedule because I post a lot. You can schedule virtually unlimited number of pins, and you can schedule a year in advance. The free Pinterest scheduler was too limited for me in terms of the number of pins you could schedule as well as how far in advance you could schedule the pins. However, if you're just starting out, I think the free Pinterest scheduler is plenty suitable. However, as your blog grows, I highly recommend investing in Tailwind. My Pinterest strategy only takes 30 minutes a week using this platform. With the free Pinterest scheduler, it took at least an hour. I quite literally would not be able to make money from Pinterest without it.
Step 6- Make Money
Finally, what you've been waiting for! It's time to make money from Pinterest. How is this accomplished? Well, we've set up the blog website, written our first post, created pins for the blog post, and posted the pins on Pinterest! What's next? Rinse and repeat!
You will continue to write blog posts, create pins, and then schedule the pins. It usually takes at least 3 months before Pinterest starts driving traffic to your blog, so settle in, you're playing the long game. Patience is key. Unfortunately, there is no real way to speed up this process aside from writing more blog posts and therefore creating more Pinterest pins. Pinterest loves new content, so the more pins you create, the better!
Pro tips: Consistency is key. Make sure you are posting roughly the same number of NEW pins per week on Pinterest. Pinterest loves consistency! DON'T post 20 new pins one day and then nothing new for a month. Pinterest no likey.
Once you've been posting on Pinterest for 3 months or so, get ready to welcome new visitors (or traffic)! Now it's time to make money. There are 2 primary ways to make money from your blog (and spoiler alert- they're both passive income!):
1. Ads: Sign up for an ad agency. I recommend starting with Google AdSense as it's the easiest agency to get into.
2. Affiliate Marketing: Get a small commission each time someone purchases a product via your link. Learn all about how to make THOUSANDS from affiliate marketing here.
Step 7- Invest in a Course
I wouldn't be where I am in my blogging career if it weren't for courses. They are expensive, there's no denying it, but they are WORTH IT. I would have paid double for these courses because they are just that valuable. If budget allows, invest when you’re consistently publishing and ready to scale. Make it a goal to buy your first course in 3-6 months. I personally cut back on other expenses (sorry Starbucks!) in order to save for blogging courses. Now I can drink all the overpriced lattes I want because I made the investment early, and it paid off in a MAJOR way.
The 3 Courses I recommend are (listed in the order I think you should buy them):
1. Perfecting Blogging by Sophia Lee. This course is all about how to grow your blog and write blog posts that will earn you thousands. Sophia is earning over a million dollars a year, and she goes through her EXACT strategy in this course.
2. Perfecting Pinterest by Sophia Lee. This course is also taught by Sophia, and details how Pinterest can make you tens of thousands by driving traffic to your blog.
3. Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing by Making Sense of Cents. Once you've perfected Pinterest and your blog, it's time to learn about how to make MAJOR passive income via affiliate marketing!
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