Pinterest Kills Affiliate Links As It Readies A Buy Button!

Social networking site Pinterest is banning the use of affiliate links and redirects according to VentureBeat, which broke the story on Thursday. 

The news came as rumors surfaced that Pinterest was planning to launch a buy button later this year, possibly in partnership with payment service Stripe. But the company denied it was blocking affiliates due to monetization purposes.

"This is 100% about the Pinner experience and ensuring relevant content on Pinterest," a spokesperson told Mediapost, which pointed out that Pinterest was, nevertheless, "aggressively pursuing various monetization opportunities."

In 2013, for example, Pinterest launched an ad format called Promoted pins.

Pinterest issued a statement to reporters saying it had observed affiliate links and redirects causing irrelevant posts (Pins) to show in feeds as well as broken links "and other spammy behavior." 

The company said, "We believe this change will enable us to keep the high bar of relevancy and quality Pinners expect from Pinterest."

The Wall Street Journal said Pinterest claimed it had been automatically removing affiliate links for years but had allowed some exceptions that were "maintaining good quality."

"RewardStyle, an affiliate network that caters to the fashion industry and works with 9,000 bloggers, websites and other publishers, was among those that had been allowed to link, until yesterday," the Wall Street Journal wrote on Friday. 

It quoted a Pinterest spokesperson who said, "We have noticed their Pinner behavior going downhill. This has caused slower delivery of Pins and less relevant Pins in people's home feeds."

VentureBeat said Hello Society, a company billing itself as a "Pinterest marketing agency," was also affected by the new policy.

Online sellers are using Pinterest, but as a marketing tool rather than an ecommerce platform, according to Ecommerce Bytes readers participating in the annual Sellers Choice Awards in January.


http://www.ecommercebytes.com/cab/abn/y15/m02/i16/s03

How To Be An Affiliate Marketing Rockstar!

Have you been living the rat race life for quite a while and now you’ve grown tired of the boss breathing down your neck and the exhausting office politics? Or maybe you simply need an extra source of income? 

Whatever your reason may be, if you want some good decent income going your bank account’s way, doing affiliate marketing can be a very viable path to follow.

What exactly is affiliate marketing? It is a technique posing as a business opportunity that lets those with entrepreneurial spirit explore the world of passive income through marketing products for other businesses. You can earn through commissions.

So if you think you’d like to give affiliate marketing a try, how do you ensure your success in this field? Here are some very important tips you should follow:

– Choose your niche well

One of the most important factors to consider in doing affiliate marketing is choosing the best affiliate company or products to market. It can make or break your earnings. 

If you have a certain field that you’re most interested in, the easier you can go through the process of deciding what affiliate program to join. So start making a list of your interests and see what affiliate programs come up from that list.

– Create a website that gets followed

One of the best ways to make the most bucks in affiliate marketing is through the creation of well-designed websites. Make sure that your site is easy to navigate and compels targeted visitors to convert – either to sign up under you as referrals or to purchase the products you are marketing. 

A quality landing page that has a call to action for your targeted visitors to do what you need them to do has excellent content that can either be texts that reviews the product, a video tutorial that lets visitors learns how to benefit and use the product well and a very conspicuous opt-in form.

– Use the power of freebies

Useful content is what you can use in making the word free mean money to you. When you offer free content, like say, free reports, when the right people get hold of this report, it can translate to more referrals or purchases.

– Learn how to get targeted traffic to your site

You can’t benefit from your well-designed website, no matter how good your content and freebies are if you don’t have the right visitors. So how do you drive targeted visitors to your site? 

You can do off-page search engine optimization or also known as link building. Whether use blogging, social networking and word of the mouth just to get the attention of the right people.

There are different ways on how you can successfully make people go to your site through this means – article marketing or the use of written content and submitting it to directories for publishers to pick it up and drive people to your site. 

You can set up and maintain social network accounts and let people know about your affiliate sites, or you can tap on your contacts – especially the new media savvy ones like popular bloggers and or community managers to spread the word about your sites.

If you follow all of the above mentioned bits of advice, it will be hard for you to fail as an affiliate marketer.

http://www.affiliateorg.com/affiliate-marketing-info/how-to-be-an-affiliate-marketing-rockstar/