Straight answer: Yes, you can make money with Pinterest affiliate marketing, but the numbers are smaller and slower than the screenshots suggest, and it only really works when Pinterest is the traffic source for something bigger, a blog, an email list, a shop, not the business itself. I ran a real test with real Amazon links and I’ll show you the numbers, because most posts on this topic never do.
Worth reading next: Do You Need a Landing Page for Affiliate Marketing in 2026?.
What Pinterest affiliate marketing is
You create pins (images with links) that point to affiliate products or a blog post containing affiliate links. Someone sees the pin, clicks through, buys something within the cookie window, and you get a cut. That’s the whole mechanism. No followers required to start, no minimum audience for basic affiliate programmes like Amazon Associates, which is why it gets pitched so hard to beginners.
Pinterest is a search and discovery engine more than a social network. People go there to plan a kitchen renovation, find a wedding dress, or figure out what to cook, which means the intent is often higher than on Instagram or TikTok. That’s the genuine upside. The downside is that Pinterest changed its rules in 2020 to require clear, direct affiliate link disclosure on the pin itself rather than letting you cloak or shorten links, which knocked click-through rates down across the board. Most “how I made £3,000 a month on Pinterest” posts you’ll find were written before that shift.
The test I ran, with the actual numbers
In 2023 I ran an eight week experiment on a home organisation board because I wanted a straight answer for my own clients rather than repeating what course sellers claim. I created 47 pins linking to Amazon Associates products (storage bins, drawer dividers, that sort of thing), using Canva templates and fresh pins three times a week, because Pinterest’s algorithm rewards new content over reposting old pins.
- By week 6, the board was reaching about 18,400 monthly viewers
- Total clicks over eight weeks: 62
- Sales generated: 3
- Total commission earned: £9.40
That’s not a typo. Eighteen thousand people saw the pins and it produced under ten pounds. The click-through rate was under 0.4 percent and the average commission per sale was around £3, because most home goods categories on Amazon pay 3 to 4 percent, not the 10 percent luxury beauty rate people quote when they want the numbers to sound better than they are.
The uncomfortable part that most Pinterest affiliate posts skip: unless you’re pinning at real volume, hundreds of pins across dozens of boards, for months, this is a pennies business, not a pounds business. The people who show five figure months are almost never earning it from raw affiliate clicks alone. They’re earning it from a blog with display ads through networks like Mediavine or Raptive stacked on top, their own digital products, or LTK (formerly RewardStyle) commissions from fashion and beauty brands that pay 10 to 20 percent, which is a different and much higher paying game than a standard affiliate link.
Where the real money sits
The people I’ve seen earn a living income from Pinterest traffic are running a blog or shop, and Pinterest is one spoke, not the wheel. A recipe blogger might pull 400,000 monthly Pinterest sessions to her site, and the money comes from ad RPM of £15 to £40 per thousand pageviews plus affiliate links inside the recipe post for the pan or mixer she used. Pinterest didn’t pay her directly. It sent traffic to a page that monetised three different ways.
That’s the structural point people miss. Pinterest is discovery, not the till. If you only ever have a bare affiliate link with no blog, no email capture, no product of your own behind it, you are entirely dependent on someone clicking through and buying within a tight cookie window (24 hours on Amazon), with no second chance to reach them again. Build a blog post or landing page in between and you can capture an email address, retarget, or point them to a higher paying alternative product, which is a very different, and much more sustainable, income mechanism than a naked pin-to-Amazon-link setup.
If you want to understand this before you build anything, my guide on what counts as passive income versus marketing nonsense covers why single-click affiliate income rarely compounds the way people promise, and my deeper piece on what most people get wrong about passive income walks through the maths on why volume, not hope, is what moves these numbers.
Which affiliate programmes pay on Pinterest
Not all programmes are equal, and picking the wrong one is the single biggest reason people give up after month two.
- Amazon Associates: 1 to 10 percent depending on category, home and kitchen sits around 3 percent, luxury beauty around 10 percent, video games 1 percent. Huge product range, tiny per-sale payout, 24 hour cookie.
- LTK (formerly RewardStyle): requires an application and usually an existing audience, pays 10 to 20 percent on fashion, beauty and home brands like Revolve, Abercrombie, Anthropologie. This is where the real screenshots come from, and it’s built for visual platforms like Pinterest and Instagram.
- ShareASale and Awin: networks hosting hundreds of individual brand programmes, commissions range from 5 to 30 percent depending on the merchant, worth checking against your specific niche rather than assuming a flat rate.
- Direct brand programmes: companies like Wayfair, Etsy, and most DTC skincare or homeware brands run their own affiliate schemes, often paying better than the generalist networks because they’re not sharing the cut.
If your niche is fashion or home decor, apply to LTK early even with a small following, because the payout ceiling is so much higher than Amazon’s that it changes the entire economics of the same amount of traffic.
A realistic step by step, not a course pitch
- Pick a niche with high average order value and visual products. Home decor, wedding planning, personal finance templates, and food all outperform low-ticket categories on Pinterest because the platform is built for aspirational browsing.
- Build a simple blog or landing page, don’t just link straight to Amazon. Even a basic WordPress site with one product roundup post gives you somewhere to add an email signup and a second monetisation layer.
- Apply to two or three affiliate programmes before you post a single pin, so you know your commission structure and cookie length going in, rather than finding out after you’ve already sent 5,000 clicks somewhere paying 1 percent.
- Create 10 to 15 fresh pins a week. Pinterest’s algorithm rewards new pin creation over reposting the same image, which is the single most repeated tip from Pinterest’s own creator guidance and the one most beginners skip because it’s boring.
- Track click-through rate and revenue per pin weekly, not monthly, so you can spot which board or product category is converting and put your time there instead of spreading effort evenly across everything.
- Add an email capture on your landing page within the first month, because that’s what turns a one-off Amazon click into a relationship you can monetise again next week.
Tools matter less here than people think. A free Canva account and Pinterest’s native scheduler cover 90 percent of what a paid Pinterest management tool does, and if you’re watching your budget while testing this, my rundown of free alternatives that replaced my paid marketing stack covers exactly which paid tools you can skip in the early months.
How long before you see real money
Realistically, three to six months of consistent pinning before Pinterest’s algorithm starts sending meaningful, repeatable traffic to a board, based on both my own test and what I’ve seen with small business clients. Pinterest pins have a much longer shelf life than an Instagram post or a tweet, some of mine were still generating clicks eight months after I posted them, which is the genuine advantage over faster, more disposable platforms. But that long tail only shows up if you’ve been consistent for months, not weeks. If you need income in the next thirty days, this is not the channel, and no honest person running Pinterest affiliate income should tell you otherwise.
Where this fits into a wider content plan matters too. Pinterest works best as one part of a broader approach rather than a standalone plan, and my breakdown of what’s working in social media marketing this year covers how to sequence it against other platforms so you’re not putting all your effort into one channel with a three to six month lag before it pays off.
The bit nobody selling a Pinterest course wants you to sit with
Pinterest income reports online are almost always survivorship bias. The people who tried it, got £9.40 after eight weeks like I did, and quietly stopped, don’t write blog posts about it. The people who kept going, pivoted into LTK or built a full blog with ad networks stacked on top, or simply had a much bigger existing following to start with, are the ones you see. That doesn’t make Pinterest affiliate marketing fake. It makes the framing dishonest. It’s a real, slow, compounding traffic channel that pays pennies at small scale and can pay at large scale with the right monetisation layered underneath it, and almost nobody selling you a course wants to lead with the pennies part.
Frequently asked questions
Do you need a blog to make money with Pinterest affiliate marketing?
You don’t strictly need one, you can link directly to an affiliate product from a pin, but a simple blog or landing page in between almost always performs better because it lets you add context, an email signup, and a second product recommendation, rather than sending one click to one product with one chance to convert.
How much can you realistically earn from Pinterest affiliate marketing in the first three months?
Based on my own eight week test with Amazon Associates links, expect single figures to low tens of pounds per month at first, not the hundreds shown in course marketing. Income tends to grow meaningfully after month four or five once a backlog of pins builds momentum in Pinterest’s algorithm.
Is Amazon Associates or LTK better for Pinterest affiliate marketing?
LTK generally pays better, 10 to 20 percent versus Amazon’s 1 to 10 percent, but requires an application and works best for fashion, beauty and home niches. Amazon Associates is easier to get approved for and covers almost any product category, which makes it a reasonable starting point while you build toward LTK eligibility.
Why do so many Pinterest affiliate income reports look bigger than what I’m earning?
Most of the large numbers you see online come from a blog with display advertising and email marketing stacked on top of the affiliate links, not from affiliate clicks alone, or from creators who already had a sizeable following before they started. Pure pin-to-affiliate-link income, with nothing else behind it, is almost always modest.
