How to Use Amazon Affiliate Links on Pinterest Correctly

Let’s assume you have a Pinterest account that has thousands of followers, hundreds of thousands of impressions, clicks and engagements per month.

So your Pinterest account is generating a ton of engagement and a lot of traffic, which raises the question: is it allowed to put Amazon Affiliate links to your pins so your account now generates some money?

The short answer is yes. Both Amazon and Pinterest allow you to place affiliate links on your pins and your account as a way of generating revenue through your account. Doing so will not ban or suspend your Pinterest account, nor your Amazon Affiliate account.

This wasn’t always the case. Back in 2015 Pinterest completely removed affiliate links from their website, and it wasn’t until 2021 that Amazon allowed direct affiliate linking from Pinterest to Amazon.

Since then, times have changed and Pinterest users can once again do affiliate marketing through their accounts.

The real question however isn’t if you can put Amazon Affiliate links on Pinterest, but whether it is even profitable and worth your time to do so.

Set up your Pinterest and Amazon Accounts

The first thing you must do when monetizing a Pinterest account is to set everything up correctly. If you don’t, you risk having your Pinterest or Amazon account suspended.

This is a big deal if your Pinterest account already has a large following, since it can tank your engagement. 

On a similar note, getting your Amazon Affiliate account banned can be problematic, since creating a new Amazon Affiliate account requires a new phone number, since you can’t reuse the old one.

Step 1: Have a Pinterest Business account

Thus, the first thing you must do is convert your Pinterest personal account to a Pinterest business account. This is required as per Pinterest’s Community Guidelines and Terms of Service. 

If you’ve already converted your account to Pinterest Business, so you can skip this step. If not, follow the GIF below or the written step-by-step instructions.

• Log into your personal Pinterest account
• Click the “Cog” icon at the top-right corner 
• Click Account management.
• Under Account changes, locate “Convert to a business account”, then click Convert account
• Click Convert account
• Fill out the fields to Build your profile, then click Next
• Fill out the fields to Describe your business, then click Next
• Select if you want to run ads, then click Next
• Select where you’d like to start or click the X icon to go to your converted Pinterest business account.

After you’ve set up your Pinterest Business account, the next step is to register your Pinterest account URL on the Amazon Associates affiliate program. 

Step 2: Setup your Amazon Associate affiliate account

If you don’t have an Amazon Associates account, then follow this 5 minute step-by-step guide that teaches you how to open it. 

During the setup process, you’ll need to register your Pinterest account so Amazon knows how you are generating the sales. If you don’t do this, you risk getting having your Amazon Associates affiliate account be banned.

Here’s how it should look like:

Note: There is some conflicting information regarding whether you need to own a website to be able to sign up to the Amazon Associate affiliate program. Strictly based on Amazon’s legal wording, a social media account should be sufficient:

The Associates Program permits you to monetize your website, social media user-generated content, online software application, or Alexa skill (referred to here as your “Site”), by placing on your Site (i) links to an Amazon Site.

Step 3: Always disclose that your posts or account is affiliated

Finally, whenever you post a Pinterest pin that contains an affiliate link, you have to disclose the fact that the pin is sponsored by using words such as “sponsored” or “affiliated” in the pin description.

In fact, Amazon’s affiliate guidelines state you must disclose the following:

You must clearly and prominently state the following, or any substantially similar statement previously allowed under this Agreement, on your Site or any other location where Amazon may authorize your display or other use of Program Content: “As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.”

If you don’t do this, you risk having both your Pinterest and Amazon account suspended for breaking the terms of service.

Do note, however, that this requires manual verification. Small Pinterest accounts usually fly under the radar and are ignored by moderators. However, the bigger you get, the higher the chances are that you will be reviewed and penalized.

The same applies to Amazon Associates. The more sales you have, the higher the chance that some Amazon employee will manually review your account and see if everything is in order.

Now that you’ve set up the account, all that’s left to do is to monetize your Pinterest account by posting pins with affiliate links.

4 Methods to monetize Pinterest account with Amazon Affiliate links

Method 1: Add Amazon links directly to your standard Pinterest pins

The simplest and most straightforward method is to just copy and paste an affiliate link (be it Amazon or another site) into your pin. 

All you need to do is go to an Amazon product, search result or category and generate the link. 

Then paste the link in your pin and publish. 

Also, use tools such as https://pingenerator.com/ if you want to make pins faster and not spend so much time editing them.

Many Pinterest accounts use this method. As an example, here is a Pinterest gaming account with over 700.000 monthly views that frequently employs affiliate links. 

Another example is this Pinterest account for cat toys, which has 300.000 viewers. 

Note how this cat toy account has an affiliate link in the Pin post.

Unfortunately, this method of directly linking to Amazon has major disadvantage: the Pinterest algorithm will not prioritize your account, so you won’t receive much traffic.

This is because the Pinterest algorithm generally prefers it if an account posts links to a site they own (called a verified site) instead of using third-party sites.

Method 2:Use Idea Pins with Product Stickers

Idea Pins are the more complex and feature-rich versions of standard Pins, and allow for more interesting media formats such as videos, lists, custom text, and, of course, images.

Idea Pins normally don’t allow you to link to a website, however you can add a product sticker that contains an affiliate link to the pin. The person can then click on the sticker and go to the Amazon product page.

Below is an image of what an idea pin looks like. You can also visit the Idea Pin through this link. 

Creating an Idea Pin like the one above is fairly straightforward:

1. Tap the “Create Pin” button.
2. Select Idea pin.
3. Tap the image(s) you want to use in the Idea pin.
4. Select “Stickers” in the option list at the bottom.
5. Select “product” sticker.
6. Paste your Amazon affiliate link. Make sure it’s the shortened one.
7. Make sure the Idea pin is marked as sponsored.
8. Write the copy and text of the pin.
9. Publish the pin.

The advantage of Idea Pins is that the Pinterest algorithm favors them more compared to Standard Pins, meaning they provide more traffic and, thus, sales and commissions.

Method 3: Direct users to your affiliate site

The most successful Pinterest accounts don’t directly link out to Amazon or other major similar sites.

Instead, these successful Pinterest accounts have their own sites, which they verify on Pinterest by claiming them. On top of this, all of the links on their Pins point directly to their site.

The Pinterest algorithm also generally favors Pins posted by accounts that have claimed their site. This means that Pins with links to claimed sites rank higher and bring more traffic.

This makes it very advantageous to have your own site and claim it on Pinterest. By doing so, your account will now become “prioritized” by the algorithm, so you’ll get much more traffic compared to accounts that Post pins with links to sites they don’t own.

The logic here is that sites with claimed websites are seen as more trustworthy and produce less spam.

A good example of best practices for such a site is Love and Renovations. 

Another good example is this pin: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/20758848273877278/

Website Post: https://www.livinginashoebox.com/20-stylish-desk-ideas-for-small-spaces/

In this situation, the standard operating procedure is this:

1. Create an article on your site with affiliate links to various products in a niche (such as cat toys, gaming mice etc.)
2. Create a Pinterest account with nice images and descriptive copywriting.
3. Inside the Pin, add a link to the article with affiliate links from your site.

The idea is that you turn visitors from Pinterest into visitors on your site. While on your site, the visitors might click on your affiliate links and then become buyers who provide you with a commission.

The disadvantage, of course, is that you will inevitably lose some conversions along the way.

It’s easier for a visitor to become a paying customer if they go from Pinterest -> Amazon, instead of Pinterest -> Your Site -> Amazon.

However, what you lose in conversion rate, you make up for through higher traffic to your Pinterest account.

Finally, there is another huge advantage to directing Pinterest visitors to your site instead of directly sending them to Amazon: you can monetize your website using ads.

Once your site reaches high levels of traffic, typically 50.000 sessions or 100.000 pageviews per month, you can join high-paying ad networks such as Mediavine or Raptive. These ad networks pay vastly better than your typical AdSense integration. 

For example, a typical blog with 50.000 sessions on Mediavine can earn anywhere from 15 to 30 USD per 1000 sessions. This means anywhere from $750 to $1500 per month.

How to create and verify a website for your Pinterest account.

If you’ve never owned a website before, then don’t worry. It’s super easy to buy a domain name and host it nowadays, and it shouldn’t cost more than $12-20 per year in total.

How to purchase a domain and set it up is pretty straightforward too, but it’s outside the scope of this article. You can however check out this postif you want a detailed, step-by-step guide on setting up your website. 

Once you have both a site and a Pinterest Business account, all that’s left is for you to verify ownership of the site.

You can verify ownership of a website on Pinterest by going to Settings -> Claimed Accounts and pressing the Website button.

You’ll then be shown three verification methods, where you basically have to copy paste some code into your website and that’s that.

Method 4: Verified Site with redirection

If you don’t really want to go through the hassle of building a blog for Pinterest, but still want to have your site be prioritized by the Pinterest algorithm, then you can use a redirection method instead.

For this method to work, you’ll still need a verified website. However, you won’t actually need to write any blog posts at all.

It works like this:

Step 1: You create a site and verify it.

Step 2: From the dashboard of your site, you create a custom link, such as www.example.com/go-to-amazon .

Step 3:  You create a redirect so that when the user clicks on the www.example.com/go-to-amazon link, they are immediately sent to your chosen Amazon affiliate link instead of landing on your site.

Step 4: Attach the www.example.com/go-to-amazon link to your Pinterest pin and publish it.

The average user won’t even see spot the redirection. They’ll just land directly on Amazon through your affiliate link.

This is called a 301 redirect and is very simple and quick to do if you own a website, especially a WordPress one.

All it takes is a simple redirect plugin such as Redirection, where you specify the Source URL (www.example.com/go-to-amazon) to redirect to a target URL (such as https://www.amazon.com/mountain-bikes/).

A 301 redirect essentially lets you have the best of both worlds:

Pinterest prioritizes your Pins because it thinks the links in your Pins belong to a verified site you own and you’re able to send users directly to Amazon, without losing them along the way.

Of course, this method isn’t quite in line with Pinterest’s terms of service so you do run the risk of getting your account suspended or having the Pins that break the ToS be deleted.

While having the account suspended sounds terrible, it’s possible to appeal the suspension and get your account back, and it works pretty well since Pinterest is generally lenient.

If you want to play an even riskier game of cat and mouse with Pinterest, you can do some more advanced stuff in your robots.txt or .htaccess files so that they block Pinterest’s crawler.

If the term is unfamiliar to you, a web crawler is an Internet bot that follows links throughout the Internet to create a map of safe and unsafe pages.

Blocking Pinterest’s crawler means it won’t follow the links inside your article, meaning Pinterest won’t know that the link in the Pin will end up on Amazon instead of your verified site.

This of course is even riskier, and depending on your setup isn’t guaranteed to work. However, if you have an extra Pinterest account lying around and don’t mind having it banned, then you can try out this method and see how it works for your affiliate marketing efforts.

Use a brands media kit for free high quality product images

Pinterest is a super visual platform, so if you want your Pins to get good traction you’ll need good photos.

When it comes to products, by far the best way to get high quality images is to just download a product’s media kit / press photos and use those, since those photos are designed to be used by people like you to promote the products.

You can find these simply by searching “[product name] media kit” or “[product name] press photos”.

Another way to find such photos is by going to Amazon, finding products you want to promote, and then track down the media kit for that product on the seller’s website.

As an example, this link takes you to the press photos of the Samsung Galaxy S22.

Use Tailwind to plan your account

If you’re serious about generating affiliate revenue through Pinterest, then sooner or later you will need specialized tools such as Tailwind to properly manage your account.

Tailwind is an automated tool that connects to your Pinterest account and lets you create and schedule Pins. 

This is super important because building a successful Pinterest account requires you to post at least 5–15 Pins per day, schedule Pin posts to certain boards, save pins from other accounts, make comments, etc.

You can, of course, do it manually, but after a certain point, you will either be burned out by the strict scheduling that the Pinterest algorithm demands or lose steam and have the account stagnate.

So even if you don’t want to use Tailwind now, keep this tool in the back of your head and come back to it once your account is ready for it.