Killing it with Pinterest/Google Here's How

My automation is pretty complex but here it is...
A headless browser (PhantomJS) with CasperJS
Python
MySQL database back end.

It's been making good money for a year so you can imagine the time and effort that I have been motivated to put into this setup

You can see in my prior posts that this started to go bonkers last May.

Sounds like it is worth giving it a try. Thanks for posting.

The time I spend setting up other people could be spent setting up more for myself.

I know that sounds selfish and well... it is. But it is something that I never understood about people selling 'systems' for making money out of nothing. Why don't they just make more money instead of all the pain and work of selling it to others for less than they would make themselves. Typically, I've learned the hard way that these systems aren't real.

That said, I do know many others who do what I do because it is easy for me to spot them now. One of them is offering this system for $3000 US. I found out because a client of mine contacted me and asked about it. I had made a custom Magento plugin for them last year as a freelance job and it was around the time that I started making good money with Pinterest because Google had picked some of my pinboards to be #1 for competitive keywords. I told the client about this because we were working closely together at the time.

Anyway, a couple of months ago he called me and said that someone approached him with this system and would charge him a one time fee of $3000. He has products and images that would work well at this. I told him that it sounded like my system and told him what he could do. Then I asked for beer in lieu of the $3000

So, it seems someone is selling this but for a prohibitively high cost.

I am definitely going to have to try this, thanks for the info man.

Thanks!

bit.ly is easy to spy on so I don't recommend that one but others are fine. Simply make sure that the stats aren't publicly available like they are for bit.ly

The most common technique that I see others use is to post a link to a webpage that redirects to a URL shortener address which redirects to the affiliate link. Don't know quite why this is the most common technique. Maybe something about it makes it harder to detect. A direct Amazon affiliate link or Clickbank hop link would be very obvious and easy to block or punish if they decided to do that.

What I do these days is make a simple page that emphasizes the image and pin that page.

As an example...
BIG IMAGE
social links to FB TW and G+ accounts
ability to comment or rate the picture
The big image and a text anchor tag beneath it or above it will take the visitor through the link cloaker (address shortener, redirect technique du jour, etc) to the affiliate link.
There are tons of WP themes and plugins for this.

Remember that the only way this works for good money is when Google picks up the Pinterest page for a high paying, high traffic keyword.

I don't know how long they will give an advantage to pinboards in the SERPs but a year ago I was wondering this and they have not slowed down at all yet. I always figured they were preparing to buy it. Maybe they still are.

The ONLY social media that gets more of an advantage in the G SERPs than Pinterest these days is Youtube. A Youtube video can be used to push ONE affiliate link but a pinboard can push over a hundred if done carefully.

I go to great lengths to build and test my automation in order to insure that it is indiscernible from an actual human being simply engaging with Pinterest.
That is why it is all custom made and not the same as other bots out there, and why I use a headless browser like PhantomJS.

I've often wondered about some of the macro based automation out there but never tried it. If you can randomize the timing of actions and remove any identifying features than they may work.

People who have seen my work in this project are most interested in the automation aspect of it. They want to know how to do it successfully.

I guess that it would be appropriate at this point to discuss how one acquires the skills to do successful automation of internet marketing tasks. It is a slippery subject that is often considered to be a "dark art" because it is abused so frequently. Sadly so many successful techniques are abused to the point of self-destruction in the realm of internet marketing.

To be successful at this, one must know both sides of the coin. That is, an understanding of how to prevent automation will enlighten one as to how to avoid being prevented.

This concept is at the core of competitive internet marketing because we are often in a position to see what is working for others.

For example, quite a few years ago, I promoted a CPA offer for a "quit smoking" product by creating a compelling website that presold the offer. The website was marketed via Adwords and paid over $10 per completed offer. It immediately began making a net profit of over $100 a day. Wow!
After 2 months of this, I was contacted by my account manager and told that I could no longer promote this offer. They would not take my phone calls and answered my emails curtly. They then suspended my account but did pay me the money I was still owed.
A month further on I did a search out of curiousity in hopes of finding a new CPA offer out there to promote. This kind of competitive intelligence is how an internet marketer often finds what to promote.
You can't just look at a list of offers or affilate products. You must look at what appears to be successful. The easiest to spot are things that garner your own interests. If you buy something online, you ask yourself "Why?".

This is working to your own strengths and is also important in who you hire or seek advice from. Like for developing a complex automation system you would hire someone like myself because I have spent considerable time asking "Why?" when automation has worked for me. Or if you need someone to do a technical review of a product or WSO about automation again you would either gain the experience first or hire someone like myself.

Asking "Why?" when you buy something leads you down the path of becoming an expert in selling it to others who are like you. It is the easiest way to find successful offers that you can promote. Not so easy is trying to determine what is successful with products that don't neccesarily appeal to you. But the internet makes it easier since you can determine which marketers are spending a lot of money on their promotions and are not going out of business. They must be doing something right and you can attempt to emulate them. That is what happened to me.

So I am looking at search results to see if anyone else is doing a "quit smoking" offer like the one I was suspended from and I was surprised to see.
The same adwords ad I was running.
A copy of the same website I had built.
And...
upon further investigation, the domain for that website was owned by the account representative at the CPA marketing firm who suspended my account. Actually, it was owned by a family member of his that lived at the same address as him.
He saw that my system worked so he eliminated me and put up a copy of my system for himself.

This is my point. That if you are in an advantageous position to see "what works" or even "what doesn't work" then you have an edge.

I have done web security work for many years and it has often involved doing battle with automation related attacks. I have spent a lot of energy learning how to detect and block these. Xrumer attacks on forums, dictionary attacks on Wordpress logins, relentless attacks on RPC on Windows IIS servers and on and on. If I block them too broadly, I end up blocking legitimate visitors so the solution must be exact.

This knowledge of detecting automation is the greatest tool in creating undetectable automation. Success can be as simple as knowing that an automation task that moves slowly over ten hours will go undetected as opposed to running that same task over twenty minutes which will sound the klaxons and light up detection circuits as a massive attack.

Becoming really good at undetectable automation is most easily achieved by becoming good at detecting automation. It's not an easy solution but the best ones are rarely easy.

It appears that this party may be coming to a close

A person or group of people have found a 'dirty trick' to steal my success. It works like this...

1. Find pinboards that are ranking high in Google (like many of mine were)

2. Slowly build up a new pinboard that is exactly the same as the one that is ranking well with only a few small changes in text and of course, setting the affiliate links to pay you. (not repinning the original but actually building the same board.)

3. Use a technique that I am loathe to reveal that causes the original pinboard to be reported as spam or copyright violation and causes it to be suspended.

4. Very quickly, Google picks up the copy in place of the recently suspended site and begins sending incredible amounts of traffic to it.

I am certainly positioned to use this nasty technique myself but I do not "roll that way" as they say.

My whole technique was based on the Google's policy of ranking pinboards so highly and I always knew it would end eventually. Though I never expected it to end with a malicious hijacking technique

Ah, well. On to the next thing. I have some Twitter ideas to try.

It is still a great way to get traffic but you are not going to come close to $20,000 a month without getting your pinboards picked up by Google.

Next month I will probably cancel the Rackspace and Linode servers that I had setup to handle the redirects because it was such an absolutely incredible amount of concurrent connections at its peak. It was a wild wonderful ride and I'm coming out way ahead.

A little scared of trying to find the next big thing though.

Happy days are here again!

I had the penalties removed from my Pinboards very easily once I pointed out that the complaints made were without merit. It took about a week but when they were live again, it was too late. The people that reported the boards had already made copies that were picked up by Google in place of my Pinboards and there was no way to change it back

Remember, my success was completely based on Google giving my Pinboards a ranking in the top 3 for big money keywords since Google loves Pinterest way more than if I made a website of my own with the same links.

That changed last week. I haven't looked at my affiliate income for days and when I checked today, I could not believe my eyes. Back to incredible numbers!!! Yesterday was one of my top 5 days ever.

It seems that the copied boards were removed for some reason. I swear that I did not have anything to do with it. Then luckily, mine were picked up by Google again!

The fastest was about one month but I don't build my pinboards in a day. Usually seven weeks or so before they get Google attention.

Look for things that already do. I don't know how to monetize this one but I did see it last year...

origami flowers

Last year when pinboards were in the top 3 results in the SERPs for that term the pinboards had only a fraction of the pins and followers that they have now. They became so popular BECAUSE they started to be listed high up in the G SERPs and so they added a lot more pins.

They aren't ranking as high anymore because YouTube beats them now. YouTube is the only thing G seems to love more than Pinterest these days.

You can link to a landing page on your site. You should probably cloak your affiliate link, but Pinterest doesn't seem to mind landing pages.

You can't link directly to your affiliate offer, or even do a redirect because pinterest will follow that redirect.

At first you can do it manually then later the automation is easier because you have a better idea of what it needs to do.

Thanks for the info.

Do I need to use proxies for each new Pinterst board?

Good info.

Google's algorithms are too immature to see that the vast majority of pinboards are meretricious.

It is an infectious condition since repinning and following is often done with little thought or investigation.

As such, it is very easy to get thin affiliate pages in front of many people using this technique. People who are at least marginally interested in the topic.

I do not believe that this will be the downfall of Pinterest but it is definitely its Achille's heel. The next great thing to appear in this space will probably deal with this aspect directly.

What makes this so fascinating is that it flies in the face of Google's arduous efforts over the years to focus on quality yet like a naive tourist in a distant souvenir stand, they can not see that it is mostly 'beautiful garbage' which is actually not very high quality at all.

Perhaps Google simply fears Pinterest may enter the 'search engine' business and they are 'keeping their friends close but their enemies closer'.

Being honest and open about this allows you to make better decisions and not be caught up in the illusion. Understand that 20,000 people came to your thin page from Pinterest today because the picture and the description were compelling. Not because you created something of high quality.