How to make money on Pinterest: the five real routes in 2026

Updated October 22, 2026 · 8 min read

The honest starting point

Pinterest does not pay you to post. The Creator Rewards program, which paid creators for hitting engagement goals, ended on November 30, 2022, and Pinterest's community staff have said there are no plans to bring it back. If a course or video promises Pinterest payouts for views, it is describing a program that no longer exists.

What Pinterest does offer is traffic from people who are planning something. With 631 million monthly active users as of March 2026, and searches that repeat every season, a pin that ranks keeps sending visitors for months. Every way to make money on Pinterest is a way to turn those visitors into revenue. Pinterest's own list, from its creator pages, has five routes.

The five routes compared

Route 1: traffic to your own site

This is the route Pinterest itself lists first, and the one that works for the widest range of people. Pinterest's creator page says links are "a great way to drive traffic, and revenue", and suggests sending people to subscriptions, memberships and product pages.

It works for anyone whose site already makes money: a blog with display ads, a store, a freelancer with a services page, a newsletter with paid tiers, a course. Pinterest becomes a search channel that costs you time rather than ad spend.

What it needs:

• Pages worth clicking to. A pin sends one person to one page. The page has to deliver what the pin promised and have a way to earn: an ad slot, a product, an email form.
• Keyword-first pins. Each page needs a title and description written around the term people search. The keyword tool shows the monthly searches and related terms for any topic.

• Rich pins. Add Open Graph or Schema.org tags to your pages and Pinterest pulls the headline, description and author for articles, or price and availability for products. There is no application step; it can take up to 24 hours to sync.

• A claimed site. Your profile picture and a follow button appear on every pin anyone saves from your site. The business account guide covers both.

How to judge it: Pinterest Analytics counts outbound clicks, and your own analytics tell you what those visitors did. If you run display ads, revenue follows pageviews. If you sell, watch which pins send buyers.

Route 2: affiliate links

You join a merchant's affiliate program, get a unique link for a product, and use it as the pin's link or on a page the pin sends people to. When someone buys, you earn a commission. Pinterest's creator page describes exactly this: join a program, make a unique URL for each product you feature, and add it to your pins.

The rules are short. Pinterest allows affiliate links and asks you to be transparent about them, run one account, keep affiliate pins original and in moderation, and not produce them repetitively or in bulk. The FTC requires a disclosure that is clear, conspicuous and placed where people see it before they click, which means the first line of the description, not a hashtag pile or a More fold. Amazon Associates has its own required wording and bans link shorteners.

The affiliate marketing guide covers programs, the two models and a first-month plan, and the disclosure guide has examples that pass and fail. Before publishing, run the pin through the disclosure checker.

Two choices decide how well this works. Direct links from the pin to the merchant are fastest to set up but give you no email list and no rich pins, and some programs restrict where their links may appear. Pins to a page you own, with the affiliate links on the page, take more work and earn more steadily. Most people who earn from affiliate pins use the second model for their main content and direct links for a handful of products.

Route 3: product tags

Product tags are the "Shop the Look" tags under a pin. You tag specific products in an inspirational pin, and people can tap through to buy each one. Pinterest's creator page says combining tags with affiliate links adds "more opportunities to drive more affiliate revenue per Pin", and that merchants can use tags to connect catalog items to inspirational content.

What it needs: a business account, and tagging available in your market, since availability varies by country. Tags work best on pins that show several products in use, a styled room, an outfit, a table setting, where each item is one tag.

Treat tags as an addition to routes 1, 2 and 5, not a route on their own. The pin still has to rank in search first.

Route 4: paid partnerships

A brand pays you to make a pin featuring its product. The deal is agreed outside Pinterest; what Pinterest provides is the paid partnership tool, which labels the pin so viewers know it is sponsored.

How the tool works, from Pinterest's help pages:

1. You need a business account.
2. When you create the pin, you tag the brand.
3. The pin shows a "paid partnership" label as soon as you publish.
4. The brand gets a notification and approves the tag from its own business account, on desktop. Once approved, the brand's name is added to the label. If the brand rejects it, the label is removed.
5. Either side can remove the tag later, and a removed tag cannot be added again.
6. You cannot promote a paid-partnership pin yourself as an ad. The brand can.

What it needs beyond the account: content a brand wants to be next to. Brands look at your analytics, your niche and your pins, which means routes 1 and 2 come first in practice. When you have numbers, a media kit with your monthly outbound clicks, your top boards and your audience's top interests from Audience Insights is what a brand asks for.

Route 5: selling your own products

If you have a store, Pinterest can show your products as product pins with current price and availability, and your pins can carry the blue checkmark of the Verified Merchant Program.

What it needs, in order:

1. A business account with a claimed website. Marketplaces like Etsy and Amazon cannot be claimed because you do not control their source code, so this route is for a store on your own domain. Etsy sellers can still use routes 1 and 2, and the Etsy guide covers that.
2. A product catalog. Pinterest ingests your product feed and creates product pins, which can also be used for shopping ads.
3. Conversion tracking. The Pinterest tag or the conversions API, so Pinterest sees page visits, add-to-carts and checkouts.
4. The Verified Merchant Program, which is automatic once you meet the requirements: a business account at least three months old with a profile picture and About section, a website at least nine months old that is claimed and meets the merchant guidelines, a catalog with 75 percent of products ingested successfully, and page visit, add-to-cart and checkout events sent every seven days over the last 30 days. Verified merchants get a blue checkmark on their profile and pins. Fall out of compliance and you have 30 days to fix it.

The Shopify guide covers the setup for the most common store platform.

Which route to start with

Pick by what you already have.

• You have a site that earns. Route 1 today. Add affiliate links to pages where a product fits, and add product tags once tagging is available to you.
• You have no site. Route 2 with direct affiliate links, while you build a simple site for the long term. The without-a-blog guide is written for this.
• You have a store on your own domain. Route 5, with route 1 pins for your blog or guides sending people to collection pages.
• You have an audience elsewhere. Routes 1 and 2 on Pinterest, and route 4 once your Pinterest analytics show steady clicks.

Whatever the route, the pins have to rank. The title and description do most of that work, and the generator writes five keyword-first options per pin with the limits built in.

What to expect in the first six months

Month one is set-up and the first fresh pins. Months two and three are when pins start to rank and outbound clicks become a daily number rather than a weekly one. Months four to six are when you can see which topics earn and double down on them. Pinterest keeps showing a good pin long after that, which is the reason the early months are worth it.

Three things shorten the wait. Write for searches people actually run, which the keyword tool confirms. Pin seasonal topics two to three months before they peak, which the seasonal calendar explains. And publish a few fresh pins every week rather than a burst followed by silence. The growth guide has the full 90-day plan.

What to avoid

• Programs that pay for pins or saves. Pinterest's guidelines prohibit paying people to distribute pins in bulk and quid pro quo saving.
• Hidden affiliate links. Link shorteners that mask the destination, or redirects that evade Pinterest's spam systems, get pins removed and can cost you the affiliate account too.
• A second account. Pinterest's commercial guidelines say affiliates operate one account.
• Dozens of near-identical affiliate pins. Repetitive affiliate content is named in the guidelines, and the community guidelines effective November 12, 2026 tighten the rules on near-duplicate content.
• Claims you cannot back. Income claims in pins and landing pages fall under the same FTC rules as the disclosure.

Where to go next

• Pinterest affiliate marketing guide
• Pinterest affiliate disclosure examples
• Amazon affiliate links on Pinterest
• Pinterest marketing: the complete guide