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You can make money on Pinterest as well: http://www.dailydot.com/news/pinterest-steve-amazon-spammer-tells-all/ http://www.dailydot.com/news/pinterest-steve-ama

by kmfrk 15y ago

You can make money on Pinterest as well: http://www.dailydot.com/news/pinterest-steve-amazon-spammer-tells-all/ http://www.dailydot.com/news/pinterest-steve-amazon-spammer-.... I couldn't get Amazon referral links to work at first, but if you use amzn.to, your referral is preserved. :) (I'm not saying you should spam the site, but it is possible to get credit for referring people from your pins.)

DanielBMarkham 15y ago
I consume a lot of stuff from Amazon, so I initially thought I'd just pin whatever I liked and use an affiliate link. That way if somebody else liked my image recommendation enough to chase it down over on Amazon, I'd get a small cut. But Pinterest does not like you doing this. Somebody said they were stripping out your affiliate code and adding their own. I thought about the 10 million ways around this, but at the end of the day I decided that if I controlled the content on my own site, I could do damn well what I wanted with it. Plus over many years it might start picking up search traffic. Who knows? And when the next whiz-bang super cool social site comes out, I still have all of my stuff in the same place. I have no intention of spamming Pinterest, but if I'm taking time to participate and add my recommendation to some product, it kind of rubs me the wrong way that they would so directly take control like that.
- DanBC 15y ago
  They used to use Skimlinks - which convert any links (affiliate or not) to their affiliate links. It was in their TOS. I was happy with that, because they've got to make money somehow. Lots of sites do it. But the blogosphere hated it, and I think Pinterest stopped doing it. There have been threads on HN giving clear details about how to bypass it.
thematt 15y ago
The guy in that article you cited turned out to be a liar. See the follow-up: http://www.dailydot.com/news/pinterest-scammer-hoax-controversy/ http://www.dailydot.com/news/pinterest-scammer-hoax-controve...
- kmfrk 15y ago
  Interesting, thanks. Maybe Pinterest just don't "sanitize" shorturls yet.
tocomment 15y ago
Could you also use a url shortener to hide your affiliate links? BTW does Facebook preserve Amazon affiliate links?
- kmfrk 15y ago
  It works with amzn.to. Haven't really tried it with anything else; I just pinned an item that was available at Amazon, and I preferred to use my own referral on it. I don't intend to make a business out of posting on Pinterest.

by kmfrk 15y ago

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

I consume a lot of stuff from Amazon, so I initially thought I'd just pin whatever I liked and use an affiliate link. That way if somebody else liked my image recommendation enough to chase it down over on Amazon, I'd get a small cut. But Pinterest does not like you doing this. Somebody said they were stripping out your affiliate code and adding their own. I thought about the 10 million ways around this, but at the end of the day I decided that if I controlled the content on my own site, I could do damn well what I wanted with it. Plus over many years it might start picking up search traffic. Who knows? And when the next whiz-bang super cool social site comes out, I still have all of my stuff in the same place. I have no intention of spamming Pinterest, but if I'm taking time to participate and add my recommendation to some product, it kind of rubs me the wrong way that they would so directly take control like that.

DanBC 15y ago
They used to use Skimlinks - which convert any links (affiliate or not) to their affiliate links. It was in their TOS. I was happy with that, because they've got to make money somehow. Lots of sites do it. But the blogosphere hated it, and I think Pinterest stopped doing it. There have been threads on HN giving clear details about how to bypass it.

thematt 15y ago

The guy in that article you cited turned out to be a liar. See the follow-up: http://www.dailydot.com/news/pinterest-scammer-hoax-controversy/ http://www.dailydot.com/news/pinterest-scammer-hoax-controve...

kmfrk 15y ago
Interesting, thanks. Maybe Pinterest just don't "sanitize" shorturls yet.

tocomment 15y ago

Could you also use a url shortener to hide your affiliate links? BTW does Facebook preserve Amazon affiliate links?

kmfrk 15y ago
It works with amzn.to. Haven't really tried it with anything else; I just pinned an item that was available at Amazon, and I preferred to use my own referral on it. I don't intend to make a business out of posting on Pinterest.