My Pinterest + ClickBank Journal

[beazt]

So I have decided to give this "Pinterest-to-Clickbank" a try. My goal is to make at-least $50 a day. Once I do that, I'll look to automate or outsource this to scale up.

I am aware that there are already several other similar journals. However, my main objective by making this journey public is to be more accountable, to provide an extra reason to not abandon a method mid-way.

I am also new to pinterest, haven't used it a lot till now. But I have been into online marketing in general for several years now, so will try and leverage those skills.

Over the past few days, I have researched and read a lot on this subject.

My strategy is flexible as I would be changing it as per the results.


Can't say at this stage how long it will take to be successful, or whether I would be successful or not but I am determined to make it happen as soon as possible.

If anyone is reading this, suggestions or inputs are welcome. And hopefully some of you would be able to learn something new or useful over the next few days/weeks/months.

Thanks

 

[beazt]

Day 1:

PRODUCT SELECTION
Selected a Clickbank product based on the following criteria:
-Has passionate audience who spend regularly on such products.

-Has a professional sales page.

-Has high gravity and low refund rates. For such stats I used CBGraph and CBSnooper. I looked at Gravity trend for the past year to make sure it was not falling, as it could mean that the product is getting saturated. Refund rate for obvious reasons. (To be honest, neither of these stats provided by 3rd party tools are accurate, as explained by official Clickbank Reps on various forums. But something is better than nothing. Also, the 1st page results on Google for "product name" or "product name+review" was not negative.)

-Has average earnings of at-least $30 per sale. If you are going to promote a product, it might as well be a high-ticket one since the effort that you would put-in will be more or less similar.

-Doesn't has too many landing page leaks (email opt-in, phone number, social media links). Debatable, but still I chose not to as there is always a chance that I will lose out on few well deserving sales being credited to my account.

-Is geared towards female audience.

-Is a product which can be marketed visually. Or put simply, a product or niche where images are viewed, shared or used a lot.

WEBSITE SETUP
-Booked a general domain from Namecheap, then created a sub-domain with niche related keyword in it. (Already have shared hosting with Hostgator)

-Installed a theme similar to Pinterest. This to to make sure the visitors feels at home after leaving pinterest, as the navigation style, endless image scrolling etc. are all similar. The name of the theme is: PinStrap by Bragthemes.

PINTEREST PROFILE SETUP
-Created a pinterest profile with "Niche Keyword variation" as name. I chose a business profile and not an individual/personal profile. Ever since the business profiles were launched, it was against Pinterest TOS to use personal account for monetization. Secondly, it would not be seen as suspicious when almost all of my pins will have the same website URL in description. (Since that's what business profile are supposed to do).
-Verified the website


That's it for Day 1.

Day 2 onwards, I'll start uploading images to website, pinterest and start other traffic generation tactics.

 

[atticanibal]

Looks neat and clean Will be following

 

[beazt]

Day 2:

-Configured Google Analytics using Analytics plugin by Yoast
-Configured SEO using SEO plugin by Yoast
-Uploaded around 20 images to the Wordpress blog.
-Used a software to add watermark (my website url) as well as changed the format from JPEG to PNG, erased metadata etc. Hopefully these changes will be enough to make the images appear unique to Pinterest's image detection algorithm.
-I made sure that the basic on-page was in place (title, image alt tag etc.)
-Installed the PinIt button using the official Pinterest plugin for Wordpress

-Performed keyword research on Pinterest and made a list of all frequently searched terms.
-Created a board and uploaded all pins to it using PinIt button. The board name, description as well as the individual pin's name and description etc. were optimized as per the keywords shortlisted in the previous step.

-Searched for, and followed around 60 users who were already following other related boards. This qualifies them by making sure they are already interested in this particular niche.
-I also reviewed their profile briefly to make sure they aren't either a)another business profile, or b). another fake affiliate profile.
-Liked few pins of some of them.

That's all for day 2.

I am not too sure about how to find images without infringing someone's copyrights.

Another thing I noticed is that getting followers for business profile is not that easy, since people are hesitant for obvious reasons. Personal, real-looking profile is followed by others more easily I believe. So I need to come up with a USP or a good enough reason for them to follow me.

 

[I-marketer]

I see from your posts that you take this journey seriously. Keep that approach. Good luck!

 

[SeoElf]

Looks like you mean business with this journey good luck with it i hope you make bank!!

 

[himanuzo]

Keep updating this thread until you meet your goal $50/day with Clickbank + Pinterest.

 

[beazt]

I see from your posts that you take this journey seriously. Keep that approach. Good luck!

Looks like you mean business with this journey good luck with it i hope you make bank!!

Keep updating this thread until you meet your goal $50/day with Clickbank + Pinterest.

Thanks guys for the kind words

 

[beazt]

Day 3:


Today I finalized the following things:
-For the time-being I am going to use images scraped from either google, tumblr or flickr etc.
-Some of them are already on Pinterest, so I will be editing them as explained in earlier posts to make them somewhat unique.


About duplicate images
I do believe now that not only does Pinterest gives less importance/exposure to duplicate images, but they can easily detect whether it has already been uploaded on some other users board or not.

Try uploading any duplicate image on Pinterst - once the upload is complete, you will be shown a pop-up box saying that "also exists on [board name]". This is their way of saying that they have detected your image as dup. So I am atleast making enough changes to the image which will avoid such detection successfully.


-Bulk uploading images is a pain when doing this manually and post by post. So I used the method listed by @reinsteckers in this post:http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...ordpress-blog-earning-system.html#post5093132 . Now I can bulk upload images, and it automatically creates a post+featured image+in-post image for all new media file uploads.


-I spent about 2 hrs searching for the right banner ad plugin to drive users to CB sales page but couldn't find one. If anyone has any recommendations, feel free to let me know. For now, I will be automating this as well by editing the automation code listed in earlier step.


-On Pinterest, I will also be focusing on SEO aspect as one of the board in my exact niche is ranking at #2 on google for a very popular search term.


Results so far:
-Got my first 10 followers yesterday, most of them following me back.
-Couldn't track website traffic as Google analytics plugin seems to be broken at the moment.
-No Clickbank hops or sales either but it's too early for that anyway.

 

[prlinkssale]

Looking for More Update regarding this one.. Good luck Man..

 

[beazt]

Day 4:

-Resolved issue with Analytics tracking today. Google Analytics plugin is not really required for such a simple task. I uninstalled that plugin and simply added the code in the header.php file.

-Installed the "Magic Action Box" plugin to include a prominent, call to action button on all posts to drive users to CB sales page. Images provided by Clickbank vendor sucks, so I created my won. Placements chosen were below all posts as well as in the sidebar and footer widgets.

-Created another Pinterest board targeting a different set of keywords (I grouped similar keywords together, and have been using them as hashtags in Pin description, as keywords in board description, board name, image file name etc.)

-Followed 50 more genuine profiles from related niche manually.

-Also, had an idea about creating multiple accounts suing Pinblaster to repin/like/comment on my main account's PIN's. They will also be used to mass follow other users. Main account will always stay manual, so I would be able to avoid any form of suspension to the main account this way.

Will buy PINBlaster and Private Proxies soon to test this idea.

Results so far:
Gained 10 more followers
No traffic to website yet
No hops or sales yet

 

[Avins]

This journey is a clean-cut. Definitely going to follow.

 

[beazt]

Day 5:

-Posted blog post ( a mix of video posts, image posts & content posts) for all groups of target keywords
-Created an optimized boards for all groups/categories from the previous step

Pinterest Analytics has starting showing useful stats- like which pins rank higher in internal search, as well as which pin/board generated most impressions. These can be used to test and optimize keywords use and time of posting etc.

Progress:
-No increase in followers today for some reason
-Pinterest Analytics seems to be going down, so I need to look into it and make the required changes
-No website traffic yet

 

[beazt]

Day 6:
Didn't get a lot of time for this today.

I mainly researched on how to rank better on Pinterest and optimized the boards a little.

Another thing I would like to research is how to feature on the main category pages, so that I can replicate it.