White hat method (only pennies guaranteed)

First of all, sorry for my English.

What you need:
A tumblr blog
ifttt account
amazon account
mylikes/likes account

Disclaimer: There is not zero risk for being banned from tumblr. You can be as white and careful as you want that every link you post or every reblog done or received could be the cause of a supposed violation of the volatile TOS of tumblr.

Phase one:


Create a tumblr blog. Choose a niche and then think about a great name (search the web for this or visit the expired PR tumblr/blogs posts of this forum for having some inspiration.


Change your tumblr theme to minimal (or find, or type/customize something similar or more of your like). I you use minimal or stationery you can add an amazon widget on the right column.


Search on tumbr for blogs of your niche, and start to follow all that tumblr let you follow (tumblr has a daily limit of followings and at first this limit could be reduced if you have not content or followers).


Open a notepad/evernote or a sheet of paper and write a list of the urls of the tumblr blogs that have impacted you. They are going to be your source of info about what your niche followers want to see in a tumblr blog (study what kind of post get more interactions, which blogs has more followers/are more populars, is there someone featured by tumblr staff?, is there someone featured in the radar section?,...).


Make a sublist of the tumblrs that have daily photo updates.


Create a ifttt account and create a recipe for any new item at rss then create a photo post on tumblr. Using the blogs of the sublist. The best is posting them in queue and then review them before allow it to being posted. Add 5 relevant tags.


If your niche is SWF and you see, at the archive, that all posted is useful/interesting, automatize it a bit: making some recipes to directly posted and some to queue (configure the queue of your tumblr to 12 or 24 post a day).

Phase two:


This is a white hat method, and this mean, a lot of manual work.


Daily visit your tumblr dashboard and make new relevants follows and of course like and reblog all the interesting posts you find. Of course, respond all the answers or comments you receive (you are building an audience).


If you have accounts at facebook, twitter, google+, pinterest,... promote/share some of the posts.

Phase three:


You are gaining some loyalty followers because your blog offers interesting content. It's time to ad some sponsored posts to your timeline.


First you can add some amazon product reviews. No more than 2 per day and doing a masterwork (good picture of the product, a headline and a good description, some buyer opinions, discrete links,...).

Phase four:


If your followers are maintaining their loyalty even after the sponsored posts (if not, you are going to easily discover it via a decrease of the number of followers, receiving some message of complain or the worst, being reported to tumblr and then being banned), it's time to add some new.

Create an account to mylikes/likes.

If there is a relevant gallery share/post it in your tumblr and monitorize the reaction/acceptance (are followers visiting it? is mylikes counting/monetizing the visits properly?)

If is good for you, start to create your own galleries at likes (that are going to be surely more relevant for your followers than the official mylikes campaigns).

You should put all post in one, I think its agents the rules.

Phase five:


If you hate mylikes (or don't want an intermediary) create an autohosted WordPress with your own domain and adsense or other advertising platform.


Note: An own domain and a autohosted Worpress cost money (the previous four phases are totally free). Adsense banning polices are more arbitrary than tumblr ones. Be carefull about some ad platforms because they only have scam/malware campaigns.

Phase 6

Send links from Gmail account

I have problems posting all in an only post. Some about posting limits for being newbie

And if you use this method you will get this message in some point "We've terminated your Tumblr account at http://xxxxfdfdxxasasasxxxxxxx.tumblr.com/ for spam, deceptive links, or affiliate marketing. Per the policies you agreed to when creating your account, Tumblr prohibits such activity"

phase 7:

Plz. GTFO

I think, I advertised that there is no zero risk of being banned as soon as you put a link the caption of any photo post. Or even rebloging a photo post with an innocent link.

But since now, I have no casualties. The clue is maintaining a low rate of sponsored posts versus clean posts (no link, no click thorough, no scam source link).

But even abusing you can avoid the ban: see desires-wishes dot tumblr dot com (I know, I have it a little abandoned but the first post in from June of 2012).

Phase 8, not interested

Not sure if this method is for me, but thank you anyway for taking the time to post it.

I personally use Tumblr only to post links to my mylikes page/account and haven't been banned yet. It is a little different to posting links to Amazon and other affiliate programs because I am linking to content/image galleries and that may be why I haven't been banned yet. I will just wait and see what happens, I am not exactly a huge Tumblr user so it's not a huge loss if my account gets banned/deleted. I will just create another one anyway.

Honestly, I don't think that most of the Tumblr crowd would be interested in clicking on affiliate links. They don't seem to be there to buy anything, but what would I know? I have never tried this method on Tumblr.

If it has worked for you then that is awesome. Maybe it will work for someone else.

I am more interested in learning more about IFTTT, I am looking through their "learn more" page and don't understand what it is about. I know that it has something to do with triggers and actions, channels, ingredients and recipes... I still don't understand what this website can do for me. If you have the time, I would appreciate it if you could explain it a little more to me, I am curious.

Try something like this. The channel is like an app (for facebook, tw or tumblr) you go to the label channel, click on activate and then a pop-up with the app authorization is shown, accept it and start to create a recipe.

A recipe is as easy as select one of your channels, select the condition like IF is ten o'clock, or if there is a new post on an instagram account, or there is something new in a rss, or you like something on tumblr. THEN (the trigger) do something, normally create a post on tumblr, facebook, blogger, WP, TW,...

This recipe is for posting into a facebook page on a determinate hour every day. If you activate a tumblr channel is filling the same content in the fields shown.