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cookie stuffing? I know that was the rage 7 years ago.

NathanKP 10y ago
I made a service that implemented Google AdSense type title and body text examination with the Amazon Product API to automate ad selection. Place a JS widget on a webpage and it would automatically examine body elements for keywords, dispatch a request to our server and find an Amazon product that was relevant, then inject affiliate ads on the page. Then me and some associates applied the plugin to a massive network of content scraped wordpress sites which basically reposted stuff from RSS feeds. There was an art to making a site that has good SEO, would perform well in Google SERP, be just attractive enough that people wouldn't immediately hit the back button, but not completely satisfying so that they would be looking for more and click a link which would take them to the Amazon store. Once they had our affiliate attribution set we didn't care what happened, if they made a purchase within the next 30 days we made money. And electronics was very profitable at the time. A few times I got banned because my affiliate link was all over the place, like literally hundreds of sites, and Amazon wanted to control where the affiliate links were placed, not have them on sketchy semi spam websites. Another time I got banned because I was using the product API in a way they didn't intend.
- marktangotango 10y ago
  I'm really amazed by stories like this. It's the type of thing I would never think of doing. Are you still working with affiliate marketing? What are you up to now?
  - NathanKP 10y ago
    I was doing this while I was a broke college student. Luckily for me the coding experience I got building this system out and scaling it to handle the amount of traffic we were driving to it from Google Search helped me get a job for a startup, and now years later I actually work for AWS, so I've come full circle, but now much more legitimate now haha.
    - trevmckendrick 10y ago
      This is a much more interesting story than you make it out to be! "College kid learns to code building sketchy Amazon Affiliate sites, gets job at AWS."

I made a service that implemented Google AdSense type title and body text examination with the Amazon Product API to automate ad selection. Place a JS widget on a webpage and it would automatically examine body elements for keywords, dispatch a request to our server and find an Amazon product that was relevant, then inject affiliate ads on the page. Then me and some associates applied the plugin to a massive network of content scraped wordpress sites which basically reposted stuff from RSS feeds. There was an art to making a site that has good SEO, would perform well in Google SERP, be just attractive enough that people wouldn't immediately hit the back button, but not completely satisfying so that they would be looking for more and click a link which would take them to the Amazon store. Once they had our affiliate attribution set we didn't care what happened, if they made a purchase within the next 30 days we made money. And electronics was very profitable at the time. A few times I got banned because my affiliate link was all over the place, like literally hundreds of sites, and Amazon wanted to control where the affiliate links were placed, not have them on sketchy semi spam websites. Another time I got banned because I was using the product API in a way they didn't intend.

marktangotango 10y ago
I'm really amazed by stories like this. It's the type of thing I would never think of doing. Are you still working with affiliate marketing? What are you up to now?
- NathanKP 10y ago
  I was doing this while I was a broke college student. Luckily for me the coding experience I got building this system out and scaling it to handle the amount of traffic we were driving to it from Google Search helped me get a job for a startup, and now years later I actually work for AWS, so I've come full circle, but now much more legitimate now haha.
  - trevmckendrick 10y ago
    This is a much more interesting story than you make it out to be! "College kid learns to code building sketchy Amazon Affiliate sites, gets job at AWS."