Pinterest Affiliate Party is Officially Over

Hello Henry

I'll post again in a month or so about whether or not any action is taken on my pins to thin affiliate pages. All I have been officially told about is changes to certain links that remove my affiliate identification.

My secret sauce has always been getting my pins on boards that were the number one result on Google for profitable keywords. Last fall I noticed that Google stopped being so nice to Pinterest and many of my number one spots became number 3 or 5 on the Google SERPs. Also, many results where I was in multiple spots like 1,2,5 and 6 now only had one Pinterest result in the top 10.
At this point I was already plotting my contingencies as earlier in 2014 a competitor had falsely reported many of my pins as being malicious and they were removed for over a month before being reinstated. That made me realize the fragility of my income stream and I invested in other ones.

Most did not work out. For example, I write e-commerce software and utilities so I tried my hand at creating and selling mobile apps in that niche. This became a frustrating exercise in watching my work be copied and prices undercut in a race to the bottom where no one wins.

But alas, this put me in touch with people using my apps who were successful in e-commerce and they helped me build some income streams like they had. These took an investment of several thousand so there was not the low barrier to entry that flooded my app biz with people willing to work for nothing.
The investment was in products, infrastructure and supplies. Not courses and ebooks. These are people too busy making money to spend time writing and selling ebooks and WSOs Often, all they wanted was some custom programming (simple for me) and a pint or two.