

How I Made $3,000 with 90 Lines of Code - Breefield
http://www.breefield.com/essays/affiliate

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jacquesm
> Svpply and Pinterest both replaced/appended these affiliate ID's on any
> Amazon links saved on their platform.

Imagine ISPs doing something like that.

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downandout
You can always bounce the links off of your server first to avoid this
affiliate hijacking that Pinterest & others do. Post a link to a page on your
server that has a javascript redirect to the affiliate page. This fools the
Pinterest bot that follows shortened links looking for http redirects to
affiliate URLs.

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greendata
I don't think this is allowed any longer on amazon and will probably get you
banned. I'm not sure though

[http://www.groovypost.com/news/amazon-associates-bans-url-
sh...](http://www.groovypost.com/news/amazon-associates-bans-url-shorteners/)

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downandout
Interesting. The bit that they are talking about is this:

 _" In addition, you must not use a link shortening service in a manner that
makes it unclear that you are linking to an Amazon Site"_

First, your own server is (arguably) not a link shortening service as long as
you don't offer that service. Second, if you were really worried about it, you
could register a domain for your site called, for example, forwarding-you-to-
amazon.com or fantastic-amazon-deals.com, link to it, forward from there. It
seems to me that this would be compliant. That couldn't be any more clear that
people are going to Amazon.com.

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vomitcuddle
very nice. made about $600 on pinterest this way before they started replacing
affiliate ids. nice idea with using curated product lists, i was grabbing
random products from a few selected categories (clothing, electronics, sports
equipment, etc.) using amazon's own product advertising api. right now selling
"user-friendly" GUI tools to do this sort of thing on "black hat SEO" forums
seems to be a more lucrative business. i used my own python script which i
later ported to c# for better threading support (this was before node.js was
cool).

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Breefield
I wish I'd obscured the amazon links behind bitly, or my own server, or
anything!

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vomitcuddle
bitly won't work. pinterest follows and "strips" redirects to generate link
title and thumbnail. you need to have your own url shortener with pinterest's
crawler either blocked or served different content. an interesting idea would
be to host the links on a domain/service they can't easily block (i.e. tumblr)
and do the redirect to amazon using javascript.

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gopi
This kind of stories are common in the affiliate world or atleast it used to
be...In 2003 i wrote a simple perl script which made me over $1 Million!

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meenzu
wow! Can you explain more about that?

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gopi
Its just a simple script to generate affiliate SEO'd sales pages from a
keyword DB with some markov chain magic to make the page text unique.

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josephscott
This is called spam and we certainly don't need more of it.

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kevinbracken
brilliant. a little grey hat, but very cool nonetheless.

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webhat
He got the money and svpply got the DB filled out for SEO purposes. As svpply
I would have thanked him.

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Breefield
Wanelo*, but yes, can't really argue with free growth numbers.

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aw3c2
When I looked into Amazon Affiliate codes recently I got the impression that
you can only use them on your own site/service. Was that wrong? Can you just
get an ID and use it anywhere you like?

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riffraff
I seem to remember that too, but if you signup with AA then you get a bar when
browsing amazon.com that allows you to share links with affiliate tags to
twitter and facebook, so presumably that's ok?

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Breefield
This part was murky yes, but whatever the policy, they didn't shut me down...

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coledubz
I've been considering a markov chain + tumblr/twitter to do this. Generate an
"aesthetic" and then use it to grep for products/descriptions, as well as
other "content" so as to appear like meat. The more interesting part is seeing
if I can write code that acts like a tumblr user...

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evan_
Please don't. There used to be thousands of these on blogger, it was awful
because they'd often show up in google results.

