Tricia Meyer

Affiliate Marketer, Blogger, and Consultant

My Personal 2012 Affiliate Marketing Review

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Affiliate Marketing 2012As 2013 begins and I start setting goals for my business for 2012, I need to take a look back at what was 2012 and see what worked and what didn’t. It was definitely a year for a lot of changes for affiliate marketers and I feel blessed to even still be in the game. That said, it took a lot of work and trying new things–some that worked and some that didn’t. So what was important for me in affiliate marketing in 2012?

Affiliate Summit (and Pinnacle Award)

I started off the year with a bang and high hopes. Affiliate Summit West 2012 rejuvenated me and helped me regain my focus after slacking off a bit. I was awarded the Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Award for Best Blogger and decided that I had better keep up my blogging to prove that I deserve it. I did well with that for 11 months (let’s not talk about December). What could I have done better? Planned more blog posts for sure. Scheduled them out for December when I knew I would be too busy to write. In other words, I should have practiced what I preached. But it was a good way to start the year.

Pinterest

Pinterest took up a lot of my time early in the year. I wrote about how affiliate marketers could use it and even conducted an Affiliate Marketing and Pinterest Webinar. As expected, a lot changed with the site over the year. By the end of it, I was barely paying any attention. I’m glad I jumped on it when I had the chance to stay ahead of the curve. However, I’m not sure I got much out of Pinterest besides a few backlinks. [Read more…]

I Have to Thank Pinterest

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Thank You PinterestEvery now and again something comes into your life that changes you in such a way that you may never be the same again. For me, that special something is Pinterest. I have so many reasons to be thankful to Pinterest today that I thought I should share them with all of you. In no particular order:

For Making Me Feel Fat on a Daily Basis:

And Then Encouraging Me To Make Fattening Foods:

[Read more…]

Pinterest Blocking Amazon Affiliate Links?

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The other day Nathan Smith from Zynali Marketing Solutions commented on my “When Pinterest Met Affiliate Marketing” webinar post about how Pinterest was starting to strip the tags out of Amazon affiliate links. Shawn Collins tested it out and verified it. However, he was able to go in and edit the link properly. Today Shawn reported that all of his Amazon links on Pinterest are now going to the “spam page” notification below.

Pinterest Amazon Spam

Clicking through other people’s links, it looks like Pinterest is temporarily blocking all Amazon links as spam. Interestingly, I used PrettyLinks to build a redirect for an Amazon link using my www.tricia.me domain. Pinterest still recognized the final destination (Amazon) domain as “spam” and killed the link. Although it’s possible that it is just a glitch, this raises some big flags for affiliate marketers using Pinterest.

  • Pinterest can at any time block any domain and render everything that you have pinned from that domain useless. Be careful how much time you spend pinning links to other sites because in one flip of a switch they can all go dead.
  • Pinterest is clearly watching for too many pins from one source. Don’t get your own domain flagged for spam for having too many spammy pins.
  • Use redirects for all affiliate links. You can always direct the links to another domain from the back end if the end domain does get blocked. You’ll just need to find the same product through a different merchant.
  • Although this will probably get switched back because Amazon needs to place nice with Pinterest, it is likely that Pinterest will continue to strip out the affiliate links. Pinterest is onto affiliate markets and can very easily strip our coding from naked links. It would not be hard for them to do a search and replace of our affiliate codes for any network and substitute them with their own if they want.

There isn’t any reason that we all can’t participate in Pinterest in different ways to boost our traffic and our revenue. But Pinterest is not going to allow affiliate marketers to ruin their site (and should not!). Are you an affiliate, merchant, or OPM using Pinterest to build your business? How far should Pinterest go to protect itself from us?

Affiliate Marketing and Pinterest Webinar

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Affiliate Marketing Pinterest
Affiliate Marketing and Pinterest

When I first wrote my post about Pinterest and Skimlinks, I had no idea how big the issue would become and how much would happen with Pinterest in a very short time. The Pinterest/Skimlinks story hit the mainstream media and Pinterest ended up removing Skimlinks from the site. Just as that settled down, a new storm started brewing over Pinterest and copyright. I started getting questions from merchants and affiliates alike about the legalities and ethics of Pinterest as well as how affiliates and merchants could be using Pinterest. So when I was approached by Affiliate Summit to do a webinar, I decided it would be the fastest way to get as much information out there as possible.

Below is the video playback of that webinar, “When Pinterest Met Affiliate Marketing.” Here are the basics of what it covered:

  • What Is Pinterest? (Explanation and Demographics)
  • Rise of Pinterest
  • Legalities of Pinterest (Pinterest Terms of Service, Pin Etiquette, Copyright Law, and the FTC Guidelines for Affiliates)
  • Pinterest and Skimlinks (No more!)
  • Make Your Site Pin-Worthy and Pin-able
  • Backlink Building
  • Finding Pin Sources
  • Contests on Pinterest
  • Adding Affiliate Links to Pins
  • Merchant Tips
  • Bonus Tips (Gift Guides, Creating Boards, Hashtags, YouTube Videos)

Whether or not you agree that Pinterest is increasing conversions, the huge growth of the site and rise in popularity cannot be ignored. Are you using Pinterest for your business or do you think it is just a flash in the pan? Where do you stand on the ethical and legal considerations?

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My Unpopular View of the Pinterest Links

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Pinterest Skimlinks Disclosure
Should Pinterest Disclose It Is Making Money?

Since the beginning of January, discussions about Pinterest have taken off everywhere. From my Bunco group to Affiliate Summit, everyone is talking about it for some reason. Initially it was because it was a cool, fun site that all my mom friends were using. Then it was because my affiliate marketing friends discovered a way to get traffic and make money from it. Now it’s because everyone thinks that they have been “misled” by Pinterest in some way. I have to voice my opposing view because it doesn’t seem like many people are.

At issue: Pinterest is converting user-generated links to merchants into affiliate links via a service called Skimlinks. As a result, Pinterest will make money if anyone makes a purchase through those links. In addition, affiliate marketers are creating links themselves and fear that their links may get overwritten by Pinterest’s affiliate links.

My disclosure: I’m a Pinterest user. I’m an affiliate marketer. I’m a Skimlinks dabbler.

The Affiliate Argument: I don’t think affiliate marketers have a right to be angry about anything. We’re using someone else’s site to try to make money ourselves. We never had a deal with Pinterest to begin with that we could place our money-making links on their site. If they do end up overwriting them, we can’t complain. They never said that we could place them there. We were taking advantage of their system and their traffic to make money. And we didn’t disclose it to anyone–Pinterest, our merchants, or all of the Pinterest users who click on our links. If it works out for us, great! If it doesn’t, it was a risk we chose to take understanding the way that social sites work.

The Pinterest User Argument: Pinterest users feel duped that Pinterest was making money off of them and they didn’t know it. From my perspective, we don’t have an argument there for a lot of reasons.

  • It’s a free service with lots of great functions. Surely everyone realizes that Pinterest had to make money somehow. There are no advertisements on the site. They aren’t selling our email addresses to anyone. How would they be making money?
  • The only links that they are making money on are the ones that you create to a merchant site. So you are already copying the content from the merchant when you “pin” it to Pinterest. How can you complain that it was your content to start with and Pinterest shouldn’t make money off of it?
  • Pinterest doesn’t in any way encourage you to buy anything through their links. They don’t review the merchandise. Your friends do. If you buy something, it’s not because Pinterest convinced you to, it’s because your friends did.
  • If you are going to buy the item anyway as a result of what you learned from the Pinterest site, why not allow Pinterest to make some money off of it? You don’t lose anything when they make money.
  • If you are pinning your own actual, unique content from your own website, Pinterest is not making any money off of it.
  • Do you know how many other sites make money off of you when you click on their links? Coupon sites don’t post coupons for you just to make you happy. Price comparison sites don’t exist just to help you out. Even a lot of forums let you chat away for free about whatever you want but then overwrite some of your words with Skimlinks. They all have affiliate links and make money when you click on their links and most of them don’t tell you. Are you complaining about those sites?

The Disclosure Issue: For some people, this is where it gets murky. Does Pinterest have to disclose that they are using affiliate links? The issue of disclosure in affiliate marketing is not clear. We do have to let our visitors know that we are setting cookies on their computers that collect certain data. The Pinterest Privacy Policy takes care of that. We also must not deceive our customers into buying something when we have a financial relationship with the seller. Pinterest isn’t representing anything at all. They aren’t writing reviews of products; the other users are. They aren’t encouraging you to visit merchant sites; the other users are. Does the fact that Pinterest might make money off of you if you make a purchase in some way take away from the experience that you are having on the site? I just can’t see why it would. The FTC Guides are about endorsements and testimonials, not links in general.

I’m truly interested in listening to opposing points of view on this. I’m sure that Pinterest will come out with some kind of disclosure policy just to make their users happy. They may also add something about affiliate links in general to their terms to warn affiliates about how they are treating their links. It would be helpful, but I don’t understand why it is required.

Links to other informational articles on the subject:

Pinterest is quietly generating revenue by modifying user submitted pins.

How Pinterest is secretly profiting from your links

What Affiliates and Merchants Should Know About Pinterest Links