Can Pinterest and Affiliates Have a Happy Marriage?

A few days ago I got an affiliate agreement update from a merchant saying “Submitting affiliate links to social sharing sites such as Pinterest, Reddit.com, Digg.com, Twitter, StumbleUpon.com, and others is prohibited”.

I put up a tweet about it and Scott Jangro expanded on it a bit and I figured it was a topic worthy of a post here. Also Eric Nagel wrote up a post about affiliates and Pinterest yesterday and I have heard from a few people it was a good point of conversation at Affiliate Summit this year.

If you don’t know Pinterest is one of the latest social/curation sites out there. Generally speaking it is a place for women to post recipes, fashion ideas, home decorating ideas, and stuff like that they find on various sites and blogs all in one place. It can be a very useful tool for someone trying to decorate a baby nursery for example. Rather than bookmarking dozens of pages from various blogs you can just “pin” an image to your Pinterest board.

Or say you are looking to organize all the recipes you want to try sometime in the future. I know I will look at a recipe online and think it is something I want to make sometime and then leave and forget where I found it. With Pinterest you can just pin all those recipes to a board and have them all in one place for when you need them. Of course people can follow your pins, repin them, like them and so on so there is a pretty decent social aspect to the site as well.

But what does this have to do with affiliate marketing? 

Well, pretty much every platform like this has been abused utilized by affiliate marketers with varying detrimental effects. Generally speaking, if there is a place to post a link you can bet there are affiliates out there who will post as many as they can.

With Pinterest it really wouldn’t be hard for an affiliate to take a merchant datafeed, write some sort of auto-pin script, and flood Pinterest with thousands or even millions of pins. It wouldn’t take long before Pinterest becomes useless.

So that gives some great justification for the merchant mentioned earlier prohibiting affiliates from posting links on social sharing sites. If users were to see tons of links all sending them to one merchant the backlash would be at that merchant, not the affiliate. I can’t blame that merchant at all for updating their terms of service and I fully expect to see many more merchants follow suit.

Does that mean that Pinterest can’t be used by affiliates? Of course not. There are many ways affiliates can effectively use Pinterest. Here are a few ideas I have thought of. Of course I am not the rule maker for Pinterest and you can do whatever you feel comfortable doing but these were just some thoughts I had as I figure out how to use Pinterest myself:

1. Don’t be a tool – This applies to nearly all forms of social media. If you go in and start pinning everything on every site you have you might be a tool. Space your pins out, don’t just blindly pin all the pages on your site, and try to use Pinterest as the makers intended.

2. Create some topical boards for your pins – Here is an exampe: I have a site selling Seahawks gear. There are probably 1,000 products on the site. Rather than just post every page I want to break it down a bit and create some more topical pages. Since Pinterest is slanted towards women right now (I think 70+% of the users are women) I wanted to make something that could relate a bit more to them. So I created a board dealing with decorating a bedroom with Seahawks gear. I then went and pinned a few items from my site. http://pinterest.com/drcool73/seahawks-bedroom/. Eventually I will go in and add some more products from other sites so everything isn’t just coming from my site.

But rather than just throwing all the Seahawks stuff on that site on one board I want to break it down so people will follow my specific boards and repin specific items.

3. Think like a woman – Since the main audience in Pinterest is women you need to think like a woman. What would a woman want to share? What are they interested in talking about? What are they likely to re-pin? For some of us that is hard but for many of you it will come pretty easy.

4. Engage other users – Just like any other form of social media you need to engage others. Repin stuff other people post, follow others with similar interests, and connect with users just like you would if you were to use Facebook or Twitter effectively. If you can get some of the heavy hitters to share your pins that can be a good generator of traffic.

5. Be careful about direct to merchant links – Rather than linking direct to a merchant site make the links go to your site. It would be very easy for Pinterest to decide they want to make money and start overwriting affiliate links. And currently some of the direct links don’t track properly. Some like Amazon do but just to be on the safe side I want to send people to my site and not directly to the merchant when I can.

6. Make yourself worth following – If you just pin garbage nobody will share your stuff. To really be effective on Pinterest you want other to follow and repin your pins. So make sure you are posting stuff people are interested in.

Those are just a couple ideas I thought of off the top of my head. I (like most people) am just starting to use Pinterest and I am sure as it grows and matures the rules will change and there will be new ways to use it to generate traffic to your affiliate sites.

I think Pinterest and affiliates can co-exist very well assuming both parties are responsible. If Pinterest decides to just flat out ban affiliate links or starts overwriting tracking codes that would be bad. If affiliates start auto-pinning everything under the sun that is bad. Both parties need to act responsibly and sooner rather than later.

So how do you use Pinterest? Do you see it as an effective way of generating traffic to your sites? Is it just a waste of time? Leave a comment and let me know.