“How to Sell Affiliate Products on Pinterest” plus 1 more

How to Sell Affiliate Products on Pinterest

Posted: 21 Aug 2012 01:00 PM PDT

This guest post is by Krizia of CreateProfitableVideos.com.

Since I'm not a creative entrepreneur or blogger, I'm not able to benefit from the great opportunity to sell my products on Pinterest.

I define “creative entrepreneurs or bloggers” as the jewelry designers, accessory designers, interior decorators, kitchen supply shops, and photographers who are dominating Pinterest and have seen their sales skyrocket.

I could feature some of my online training programs, coaching sessions, and service packages, but that just isn't as sexy or interesting as many of the hottest products sold on Pinterest.

Pinterest encourages commerce on the site, and that's a rarity among social media platforms. They make it easy for you the vendor to market a product and they also make it easy for users to find products they might be interested in buying.

So I decided to repurpose a feature that my assistant was already adding to each new video interview on my Women Entrepreneurs HQ online show. For the show, I interview successful entrepreneurs. When we feature them, I always ask for the last book they've read, and the book that was the most instrumental in their lives.

My assistant features those books via my Amazon affiliate link. We use those Amazon features on Pinterest, and because I've asked my assistant to add the price of each book, all my additions are now part of the Pinterest Gifts page—and they’re categorized by price.

This is a brilliant way for non-creative bloggers and entrepreneurs to take advantage of Pinterest's commerce-friendly features.

I know it might sound complicated, but I can assure you that adding affiliate products to Pinterest is super-easy. I've removed all the guesswork for you by detailing step-by-step how you can add your own affiliate products to Pinterest to boost your affiliate commissions.

Before I get started, I want to show you where all the Gifts are featured on Pinterest, because this will give you a good idea of the power of this feature.

Where to find gifts featured on Pinterest

When you sign into your account, you'll want to click on the Pinterest logo to land on your homepage, featuring the latest pins from people you follow. On your homepage, you'll notice a Gift tab at the top of the Pinterest site:

When you click on the dropdown button, you can select gifts by price range, or you can click and select to view all the latest products for sale added by users:

You'll notice that all products have price tags. This means users know the price of a product before clicking on the photo to find out more (I've added red arrows to show you where the price appears):

How to add your first affiliate product to Pinterest

Now, let's take a look at how you can add your own affiliate products to Pinterest.

1. Categorize your affiliate products by creating separate boards

Right now, I have one board for my Amazon books and another board for products related to video marketing and I intend on adding more boards as I add more affiliate products.

2. Add a new board

To add a new board you'll first need to click on the Add button at the top of your homepage.

3. Select Create a board

4. Name your board

Make sure the name is search engine friendly. It might be tempting to use a "cutesy" name, but remember that Pinterest is a search engine, and optimized boards can show up on Google search results. I've selected to name my board Books for Success.

How to optimize Pinterest to get more traffic and clicks to your affiliate product

6. Add your URL

Don't forgot to always add your URL to everything you pin on Pinterest so people can find your blog. Since each additional pin contains my affiliate links, I've added the URL to one of my main sites in the description box.

Upload your affiliate product to a Pinterest board

7. Upload a pin

Instead of adding a pin (because you need to include your affiliate link), you'll need to upload a pin—that is, a photo—from your computer:

8. Select the right board

You now need to select the appropriate board … in other words, the board you just created for all these affiliate products. So I'll select the Books for Success board:

10. Add a description and URL

You now need to add a description and add the URL to where you want people to land or your affiliate link. Although you're allowed 500 words, keep the description short and sweet because you want to make sure your affiliate link or the link to your main site shows up:

11. Point people to your blog via a URL and hide your affiliate link behind the image

In order to add your affiliate link behind the image, you'll need to go back and edit the pin you just uploaded. You can add your affiliate link inside the description box, but if you do, you'll want to make sure it's "cloacked" (aka masked) or you'll want to use the services of a link shortener like bit.ly.

If you add a long "affiliate" URL that screams "affiliate link!" it's unlikely anyone will click on it:

12. Edit your pin

In order to add an affiliate link behind the image—and one that will be accessible every time someone clicks on the image—you'll need to edit the pin you just uploaded. Once you click on the red Pint It button, you'll be redirected to a page where you can edit the pin:

How to add your affiliate link to Pinterest

13. Add your link

This part’s easy: you'll simply need to add your affiliate link inside the Link box. This will allow the image you uploaded to be fully clickable, and it’ll automatically redirect Pinterest users to any product or service you’re promoting via your affiliate link.

14. Add your product to Gifts

In order to get you product added to the Gifts page, and to get those cool little price tags featured on your pin, you simply need to add the price to the description box:

15. The price appears

The second Pinterest's search engine recognizes you've added a price and the dollar sign, it will automatically add the cool price in the upper left corner of your image:

16. Within a few seconds, your new pin, containing your affiliate link, will be featured on the homepage of every one of your followers:

I've noticed that it's hard to tell how long it will take for pins with price tags to appear under the Gifts category, because there are so many new additions going up all the time. That said, your pin is automatically added to the homepage of your followers!

There are quite a few little steps to adding affiliate products to our Pinterest profile, but as you can see, it's quite easy.

In my example, I've used an Amazon product and I used my Amazon affiliate link, but you can use the same logic for pretty much any product. The advantage with Amazon is that you could actually include the affiliate link as it appears in the description box without putting off viewers, because everyone has come to associate Amazon with quality!

If you haven't yet explored adding affiliate products to Pinterest, I encourage you to get started. It's a great way for bloggers to increase sales of affiliate products, and it's also a great way to increase the visibility of your blog among Pinterest users!

Krizia (aka Miss K), is an Entrepreneur, Video Marketing Strategist, Video Show Host, Video Blogger, Speaker and International Author! Krizia launched http://www.CreateProfitableVideos.com to help entrepreneurs create AMAZING and IMPACTFUL video messages and discover How to Use video to Attract MORE Clients, Sales and Profits!

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to Sell Affiliate Products on Pinterest

What Is Cyber Liability, and Why Should You Care?

Posted: 21 Aug 2012 07:03 AM PDT

This guest post is by Matt Setter of MaltBlue.com.

Recently, here on Problogger, I was discussing the topic of privacy breach notification and how it affects us as bloggers. The article looked at the protection of our site's information and the potential impact that the loss of that information may have on the privacy of our readers and customers.

Today, I want to look at another, closely related, topic—cyber liability. The internet is an amazing medium, providing us an enormous amount of flexibility and affording us nearly the same opportunity as an organisation ten to 100 times our size. But unlike the days of old, the internet landscape is not what it once was.

Whereas in days gone by, we could pretty much write anything, anytime, for any reason, and either no one cared, or if there was a concern, the legal jurisdiction we fell in to was largely undefined or near-impossible to enforce. Fast-forward to 2012 and the law's rapidly catching up, if it hasn’t already caught up.

Now I'm not saying for a moment that we are or should be careless, callous or unthoughtful individuals inconsiderate and unprofessional in our conduct. Quite the opposite: we're professional in our approach, conduct, content, and more.

But from time to time, mistakes happen. There are people around who, potentially, don't share our level of professionalism or may, justifiably, feel that we've wronged them.

However, as in my previous article on privacy breach notification, I don't want to unnecessarily alarm you about these issues. I just want to take a minute or two to let you know about cyber liability, specifically about one key component of it, the infringement of intellectual property and discuss:

what it is
how it may affect you
what you can do about it, if you believe you may be at risk.

What is it?

The intellectual property aspect of cyber liability is quite similar to other fields, such as in computer software, academic papers, books, magazines, and other works. If we infringe on someone's copyright or trademark, then we run the risk of having action taken against us by the other party to right what they perceive as a wrong.

If we, intentionally or otherwise, use a certain proportion of someone's work as the basis for our own, we stand the risk that the aggrieved party may seek to take action against us.

Consider the following examples:

In 1990 music artist Vanilla Ice was sued for copyright infringement over his track "Under Pressure", by Queen and David Bowie. The track appeared on his album "To the Extreme" but didn’t give credit to the original artists, nor did he seek their permission.
The Wall Street Journal reports that in 2008 blogger Shellee Hale was sued for remarks she made in forums relating to a software company. The article goes on to say that by 2007, 106 lawsuits had been brought against bloggers, up from 12 in 2003.
Lotus corporation claimed, in the case of Lotus Development Corporation v. Borland International Inc., that "the structure of the menus by Borland was copyrighted by Lotus."
Oracle is currently suing Google for $1 billion dollars in damages, alleging copyright infringement over the Java programming language, which Oracle acquired when by bought Sun Microsystems in 2010.

How can it affect you?

In this modern day and age, we're no long just bloggers—we’re also publishers. And as such, we increasingly have some of the same legal exposures and responsibilities as more traditional publishers.

But it's not all doom and gloom. A number of countries, including the United States and Australia have what are referred to as “shield laws,” and these are increasingly being extended to include new media workers, such as bloggers.

Those living in countries such as the United Kingdom and other European nations are also, potentially, covered under the European Convention of Human Rights.

According to Out-Law.com, a shield law:

protects "publisher, editor, reporter, or other person connected with or employed upon a newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication, or by a press association or wire service" and a "radio or television news reporter or other person connected with or employed by a radio or television station."

However, checking your facts before you seek to be covered by one of these laws is critical, as Montana blogger Crystal Cox found out the hard way. She was sued by Obsidian Finance Group for $2.5 million and tried to invoke shield law protection.

However, during the hearing, the judge ruled that she was not covered by them because she lacked:

any education in journalism
any credentials or proof of any affiliation with any recognized news entity
proof of adherence to journalistic standards such as editing, fact-checking, or disclosures of conflicts of interest
keeping notes of conversations and interviews conducted
mutual understanding or agreement of confidentiality between the defendant and his/her sources
creation of an independent product rather than assembling writings and postings of others, or
contacting 'the other side' to get both sides of a story."

This goes to show is that although shield laws exist and appear to be becoming increasingly universal in their protection of bloggers and new media workers, they're not universal yet. What's more, they're not a “get out of jail free” pass, nor do they give us carte blanche to say whatever we want.

It pays to double-check the laws before attempting to use them.

What can you do about it?

To keep it simple, ask yourself the following questions and write down your answers to them:

Has what we've published infringed someone's copyright?
Has what we've published infringed someone's trademark?
Have we defamed someone?
Have we invaded someone's privacy?
Have we misused confidential information?
Has someone in our forums posted material that does one or more of these things?
Has one of our members or staff made derogatory comments about a person or organisation?

Did you answer yes to any one of those questions? If you have, then it's a good idea that you take action immediately about it so that you don’t fall foul of cyber liability laws. If you're uncertain or would like professional advice, always remember to consult a legal expert.

Should we feel the need to do so, we can also take out insurance cover against legal action relating to cyber liability. An increasing number of insurers who will do this for us, including QBE and Trafalgar International.

However, looking at the list above, you can see that with a healthy amount of common sense and a professional editing process, we should have nothing to worry about.

Before anything gets published, bloggers should to continue to ensure that:

our content's been checked to ensure that we haven't plagiarised or wholly copied anyone's work
if we make statements, we can and have backed them up
if we've used content, we've sought relevant permission to do so and cited its original sources
we have a fair usage policy in place for commenting on posts and participating in our forums, and that it's enforced
even if we're cheeky and attention-grabbing in the content of our sites, we're not crossing the line and being derogatory or defamatory of anyone or organisation.

You could sum all this up in two words: being professional. If we're professional and use common sense, I don't see that we'll have any serious problems. However, if you're not sure, or you just want to double-check, take the time to seek professional advice.

Summing up

While there's always been, and likely will continue to be, a low barrier to entry for online publishing, that doesn't mean that we can disregard normal, professional, and civilised etiquette.

We need to ensure that when we're publishing content online, we're keeping a professional tone, especially as the web becomes increasingly intertwined in all aspects of our daily lives.

Have you ever been on the receiving end of threats of litigation regarding your blog? Do you often see sites infringing content—even your content? Share your experiences with us in the comments.

Matthew Setter is a freelance writer, technical editor and proofreader. His mission is to help businesses present their online message in an engaging and compelling way so they're noticed and remembered.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

What Is Cyber Liability, and Why Should You Care?

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