11 Ways to Make Money on Pinterest as a Side Hustle
When I first heard about Pinterest, I spent the next umm 8,000 hours of my life pinning all. the. things. Things like waterslides that go from your bedroom closet to your massive indoor pool below. I filled it with my wildest dreams. Chances are, you know what I’m talking about. Pinterest is a real addiction in the best way. Which means, it’s a great place to be if you’re trying to make some side hustle money on the side (or even full-time but that’s beside the point). So many people are not aware that this is an option, so I’ve compiled a list of 11 ways you can make money on Pinterest and spend even less time on it than you do now!
*This post contains affiliate links. I may earn a commission on recommendations at no cost to you.
The benefits of Pinterest
I think I covered the major benefits of making money on Pinterest a little bit already. In fact, it’s estimated that 250 million people use Pinterest every month. Talk about reaching a wide audience!
Better yet, there’s a good chance that you have a general understanding of how Pinterest works which means you won’t be going into this thing totally blind.
I’ve got 11 awesome ways to boost your income with Pinterest plus tutorials to help you along the way!
23 Pinterest Statistics That Matter to Marketers
Making money with Pinterest
Here’s the breakdown of 11 different ways Pinterest can be a great money making side hustle.
Promoting a current business
If you have a current business (big or small) you are definitely going to want to hop on board with Pinterest! Here are some quick ideas on business that can benefit a ton from well-planned Pinterest use:
- Photographer – You can share your photos and use specific descriptions and hashtags to locate potential customers in your area! I wish I would have known the advantages of Pinterest during my photography career.
- MLMs- If you want to promote your oils, face creams or fitness shakes, putting together a few good photos and quality pins is a great way to attract people to your product or site!
- Selling goods – When you have a shop or store that sells particular items, Pinterest is a great place to reach a wide audience that might be interested in what you have to offer.
- Graphic Designer – Promote yourself, your designs or your digital products through Pinterest (which we will dive into more).
Sell and promote a course
Online digital course creation is on the rise (so don’t feel out of the loop if you haven’t heard about it yet).
Basically, online courses allow anyone from anywhere to teach on anything they want…to anyone in the world! And Pinterest can help you promote and make sales!
No clue how to start an online course? I started with Teachable. It’s super easy to follow the program and you can start for FREE!
Drawing traffic to a blog
If you are a blogger, like I am, then you probably have heard about the insane benefits of Pinterest when it comes to drawing traffic to your blog posts!
Using Pinterest for my blog helped me improve my ad income, affiliate sales and sales of my digital products! See How to Make Your First $1,000 Blogging.
In fact, my Pinterest page views are currently hovering at around 3 million! BUT I in a post, I share the strategies I used to make 1.8 million page views per month!
Getting more YouTube views
When you are trying to grow your YouTube channel, especially if you are monetizing it! Pinterest can be incredibly helpful especially now that they allow videos to be pinned!
This can bring people to your YouTube to improve ad revenue OR help promote sales you might be making with your YouTube channel!
Pin affiliate links
Affiliate links with Pinterest are a really awesome thing and a great way to make passive income meaning you don’t really have to do anything to make money.
In her course, Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing, Michelle will walk you through how to find and create affiliate links for your blog but these can also be done directly on Pinterest!
Affiliate companies for beginners
To learn everything there is to know about affiliate marketing check out some of the best courses available online.
Pin your e-commerce store
People are making crazy amounts of money today with e-commerce stores and Pinterest is a huge help.
We’ve all seen those pins with a cute gift, nice jewelry or super cute boots. Right? I mean maybe that’s just what Pinterest show ME, butt you know what I mean.
Those pins could easily link back to an e-commerce store that is helping them make sales without doing anything but spending a few minutes a day managing their Pinterest strategies.
Sell Etsy products
Just like you can redirect pins to an e-commerce store the same holds true if you already have an Etsy store set up!
Using Pinterest to help promote an Etsy side hustle (or full-time gig) is a genius idea. Just get good photos of your items, create SEO friendly boards to pin them to and it will instantly help people start finding your beautiful creations!
What is SEO friendly?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It just means creating quality descriptions for your pins, your Pinterest boards
Promote your other digital products
If you know how to make a Word document, then you know how to make your own digital products. Personally, I love selling mine on the blog. However, I have gotten several sales from Pinterest as well!
Ideas for digital products:
- Photo presets
- Organizational planners
- Ebooks
- Cook Books
To sell these all you have to do is take a few photos, make a few pins and make sure to link to your product!
Teach Pinterst classes
If you are a
Teaching classes might not be the most passive way to make money on Pinterest, but you’d be helping out others learn how to be successful with their businesses and learn to make money on Pinterest!
Become a VA Pinterest expert
Mastering Pinterest is easy. If you haven’t done it yet, I highly recommend you learn how to use Pinterest for business, and then start pinning for other people’s businesses and get paid for it!
You can get paid for being on Pinterest all day! I mean, you probably already do that anyway!
What is a VA?
A VA stands for Virtual Assistant. It’s a great way of making money from home and you can find a variety of jobs based on your particular skill set. Many businesses need help with emails, social media and Pinterest and they are willing to hire people to do this work virtually!
Is Pinterest a passive income source?
For the most part, yes, Pinterest is very much a passive income source. You do the work and create the pin, Pinterest can do most of the work from there.
The most important step to making Pinterest a passive income source is to learn how to set up automatic pinning so you are not spending all of your days pinning trying to make money. Just set up your strategy and let it do the work for you!
How to set up automatic pinning
There are a few steps that I always follow when setting up my automatic pinning.
- Create solid pins with clear writing (sans fonts do the best)
- Have at least 5 quality boards to pin to for each pin
- Set an interval schedule for your pins and space them at least 12 hours apart
- Take advantage of Tailwind loops to get your best pins going to your best boards without you having to do anything! Get a 30 day FREE Tailwind trial now
I know this can sound confusing if it’s not something you’ve done before, that’s the main reason why I laid out my Pinterest course the way it is. Being a hands-on, visual learner myself, I wanted to create a how-to Pinterest course for other hands-on learners.
Learn more about the Pinterest Basics course.
Pinterest vs. Google
Lastly, how is Pinterest different/better than Google?
Well, I can’t say that Pinterest is better than Google, BUT it can offer you a wider variety of options for making sales and bringing people to your site.
Main differences:
- With Pinterest, you can create visually enticing materials
- You can create a variety of headings to suck people in
- There is a lot more you can do to get your pins seen (on Google it takes a lot more work)
- BEST PART? People shop on Pinterest! They are already wanting to buy stuff which means it’s a great way for you to make money! Let them come to you.
Pin this!
