Swimming pool in Costa Rica with Pacific Ocean in the background.
Are you a fan of Pinterest? No, not for saving recipes and collecting photos of places you’d dream about going to if you really wanted to dive with dolphins while wearing your size 4 bikini* and spending all your Zazzle loot. Oh, never mind about the loot. We aren’t making it anyway AND we are going on Pinterest for a totally different reason!
For WORK.
Marketing work for promoting your Zazzle products.
A tool for pinning Zazzle products to Pinterest
I’m presuming you already know why you’d want to have a Pinterest business account and how to use it. It’s almost Christmas, you’d better be doing something!
So, all this marketing is a pain, but people do get traffic from Pinterest so it’s worthwhile. I know they send me traffic, but I don’t have any referrals that I can truly trace back to there. I don’t know if they strip the rf codes or not. I check every time AND use a tracking code, but I have no evidence that affiliating from Pinterest works. And no evidence that it doesn’t.
So, this is something we want to make easier, right?
Well, Beck, from PencilPlus, CardFactory, CasePlus and FotoPlus has created a pretty handy tool for searching through Zazzle products and setting them up for affiliating. He posts about it occasionally in the Zazzle forums. The tool is called Zazzle Affiliate Helper and is available on his site, justsoldonzazzle.com.
Today, he added a very sweet feature: the ability to “pin” from the Zazzle Affiliate Helper directly to Pinterest. You don’t have to keep re-doing a search. You pin and go back to the search results, pin again, and so on. Easy!
The tool is free to use. Beck just asks that you pin some of his products while you’re at it. A lot of his fit well onto my LakeEffects boards, so I pinned a bunch tonight.
Here’s an illustrated guide to the pinning process.
Info in the the turquoise colored boxes, but just follow along. Or just wing it yourself!
1. Go to Zazzle Affiliate Helper
2. Add your associate ID in the box.
3. Add a search term or store name to the top box.
4. Choose a product. Now pin that Zazzle product and start the pinning process. I chose the seahorse phone case.
5. The Seahorse phone case shows up on my Beachwalker board.
6. Check the source box and note that your referral code is included and so is a Pinterest tracking code. 
7. Rinse and repeat!
I will post back here if I sell any seahorse cases in the next few days!
What about you? Are you seeing good results when you pin Zazzle products to Pinterest? Do you get referrals there? Add a comment if you are – or aren’t.
If this was helpful info to you, please share!
*Pinterest users are 70% women, according to MediaBistro.com (2013). But you knew that, right? And, in the interests of disclosure, I really was in that pool in Costa Rica. My beer is in the photograph; I am not. 🙂
Thanks for posting this helpful info, Debra! I can say that I do see some traffic coming from Pinterest, so I will definitely be using this little tool.
You’re welcome!
This could save me time. I always go and add in the tracking code after pinning from Zazzle. I can actually say that I have gotten quite a few referrals from pinterest lately. There was a while that I didn’t get any at all and thought they must be striping referral codes or something. But in the last month, for whatever reason, I’ve gotten about 6 referrals from there. Odd, but I’ll take it!
Glad to hear that referrals do work there!
Nice explanation Deb. Beck’s little tool is becoming one of my regular go to. Like Wasootch I’ve received referrals from Pinterest. They come and go though it is always a nice surprise.
Wow…that makes things alot easier! And it’s good to know that referrals from Pinterest come across now. I’ve only gotten one so far, but I’m not what I would consider a heavy user.
Thanks for alerting us!
How did I miss this post in November? Going to bookmark this so I can follow your information. Thanks for mentioning it at TheZUG forum.
Thanks Deb – I’m going to have a go at Pinterest; I’ve been resisting it so far but am taking the plunge. I’ve always wondered about the referral links and this seems to be a good way of doing it. It will be interesting to see how it goes!
You’ll definitely see more traffic from it! Others have told me they get referrals from Pinterest, but so far, not me. And I have a tracking code on 90% of my pins. See you over there!
Debra:
Was forwarded this by Beck Yang and am going back to thank them as well! Before reading your post, I was overwhelmed by the thought of yet another thing to learn about Zazzle advertising – THANK YOU for making it look so easy and easing my stress level 😉
Keep up the great work and all the best ~ Yonni 🙂
Thanks! I’ve been using the “Zazzle Affiliate Helper” and recently opened a Pinterest account for my business and I never thought of using the Helper to Pin!! Makes it so much easier and it adds the tracking code!!
Hi Debra,
This is definitely going to save a hell lot of time and effort!!!
BTW, I have a small, little (may be stupid) question.
Is it mandatory to have a pinterest business account to promote zazzle products on pinterest or can I promote using a personal pinterest account?
Thanx
You could show Zazzle products on Pinterest with a personal account, but their TOS (Terms of service) say this:
c. Commercial use of Pinterest
If you want to use our Products for commercial purposes you must create a business account and agree to our Business Terms of Service.
It’s not hard and it is worth doing!
Thanks so much! This was the most helpful site about pinning Zazzle products. You ended a week’s long frustration!