As most of you who have hung out on Pinterest, you know that Pinterest strips all affiliate links when you upload a pin, and they don’t accept Bit.ly and other popular shorteners as well.

But there is a way to ‘get around’ this limitation using a different service, here’s how.

Adding Affiliate Links to Pinterest

1. Find a product to promote on Amazon, preferably a product that is interesting/pleasing to the eye.
2. Find the large image version of the product and save it, if there isn’t one on Amazon, go straight to the manufacturer or other merchants.
3. Upload this image as a pin onto an appropriate board. Now you have a graphic pin that goes nowhere (no URL).
4. To embed links, we have to go back to the actual product on Amazon and generate an affiliate link, then copy that URL.
5. Head to Su.Pr(yes, that’s all you need to type onto your browser) and generate a shortened URL.Su.Pr. is StumbleUpon’s proprietary URL shortener and tracking system. When you use Su.Pr, you get practically all features of Bit.Ly but you also get a 1-click StumbleUpon submission as well.
6. Head back to Pinterest and open for the pin you just made.
7. Click on it and you’ll see an EDIT button, click that.
8. Change/enter the shortened Su.Pr URL into the LINK field and re-save. You’re done!

I don’t have tremendous (or marginal) success making sales via Pinterest because I really don’t do it often. I enjoy using Pinterest and would hate seeing it being spammed by crappy affiliate links, but I do use it get traffic and lots of repin action, and this guide is just to show you how to put your links into Pinterest.

My Most Popular Pinterest Board

I’ve made a couple of watch sales and a couple of book sales in the past via Pinterest, you can see (and add me) my Watches, Good Ol’ Epic Watches board is the most popular board I have on Pinterest as I’m a bit of a watch freak. That board currently has over 1,000 organic followers and lots of repins.

Most items on that board are not items sold via Amazon and the watches cost 4-5 figures, over half of them are just repins of other watchaholics as well, but from time-to-time, I squeeze in a couple of cheaper watches around the $200-400 range in there.

Those cheaper watches are the ones I embed Amazon links to, and yes, I could find a CJ vendor that sells high-end watches to embed with this method as well.

Give it a shot, but don’t spam Pinterest, especially if it doesn’t really interest anyone. Successful repins rely on a targeted board and niche for it to work.

Using Pinterest for Traffic to Amazon Niche Site

Last tip would be to create boards that are related to your Amazon niche sites.

Make sure your website has a great SEO silo structure and content, if you’re not sure if your site does, check out the free Amazon Affiliate Blueprint I’ve been giving away to hundreds of readers here, it’s a free download.

You can add affiliate links directly to your pins and add your URL on the pin description as well. Mix up the affiliate links and URL to your Amazon review site. If your site has some ‘how to’ guides, create a grid graphic of the instructions and pin that on an appropriate board.

You’ll get very targeted traffic via your informational and how-to articles while your product pins can make you direct affiliate income.