How Much Money I Made: I Followed a Tutorial on Automated Pinterest Affiliate Marketing
Several months back I read a tutorial on automated Pinterest affiliate marketing and I followed it to see if I could even come close to duplicating the results.
I had low expectations but I was open to happy surprises. Either way I thought the exercise was a valuable one and I did end up learning a few things along the way.
I’ll post the link to my original article about how I set up the system at bottom. For now, I’m going to get on with giving you the results.
The setup looked like this:
- Upload affiliate products to Wordpress database.
- Set up Wordpress scheduling to post randomly throughout the day which would trigger social shares on sites including Pinterest. I also set it up to share to Facebook and also to Twitter.
- Rake in the visits and accompanying purchase affiliate commissions.
So simple right? It actually was pretty simple to set up. Took me about a week, including affiliate account approvals.
Results:
At first, things were looking interesting on a couple of fronts. I was actually getting traffic somewhere from Facebook though I couldn’t figure out from where, geographically.
It’s not that analytics didn’t show me, it’s just that on Facebook, there was no sign of engagement. But Google Analytics showed a lot of traffic. Bots? I don’t know.
I also started getting traffic from Twitter, which seemed somehow more legitimate.
Pinterest did not send me much traffic, not even after a couple of months. My account was well established with about 900 followers and 10k views a month.
Their algorithm never widely displayed my affiliate products, despite posting to several boards which were well structured. I had several boards set up to receive pins from matching categories in my auto poster so my Pinterest page did have a lot of variety. I tried to keep it interesting and not spammy looking.
I made a grand total of $20.20 so far.
