Monday, May 21, 2012

10 Lessons You Can Learn from a Pinterest Spammer

What do you think of when you think of spamming?  No, I’m not talking about the meat product that comes in a can, although I do kind of like that Spam.  You may think that a spammer sends a bunch of junk e-mail to your in-box, but what if I tell you there’s another kind?  A spammer who bombards social sites with information that leads to him making money.  Check out 10 lessons you can learn from a Pinterest Spammer.
  1. A Lot of money is being made: Spammers are making anywhere from $500-$2000 a day on Pinterest.  As they do more spamming their earnings grow.  No wonder they are interested in doing this.  If they kept this up for even a year they would make over a half a million dollars.
  2. It takes very little money to get started: No big investments are needed to do this.  You need to have a computer with a lot of bandwidth.  So you do need to have already purchased a decent computer and have excellent Internet service.  Other than that it’s all know-how.
  3. Spammers use bots: I really had no idea that spammers use bots to do their ‘dirty’ work.  Apparently they have the knowledge to create a program that will pin photos onto Pinterest and note a link on that photo.
  4. Not invitation only: When you go to www.pinterest.com you can look around at photos, but you can’t start pinning them to different boards until you become a user.  It says right up front that becoming a user is by “invitation only”.  The spammer tells that this is not true and that if you make a request from a valid e-mail address that you will get your invitation no matter what or you can invite yourself from a different e-mail account.
  5. Easy to spot: If you spend enough time on Pinterest the bot postings are pretty easy to spot.  There’s a picture, but the words under it have nothing to do with what’s in the picture.   You’ll see a cute photo of puppies and the link will be for hand bags.  Unless you are making hand bags out of the puppies like Cruella Deville I don’t think the link really relates to the photo.
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