I Followed a Tutorial on Making $100,000 in Sales Using Automated Pinterest Posts and Here’s What Happened

I read a fascinating article about a man who set up an automated Pinterest affiliate marketing system targeting the women’s fashion niche using only a website and a couple of helpful plugins. He claimed to have “Made 100,000$ in 5 Months Using Free Traffic”.

I have a lot of experience building Wordpress sites and I was confident I could duplicate his system within an afternoon so I gave it a shot. I already had a well-seasoned domain (cutestuffalerts.com) set up with Wordpress that I wasn’t using for much so I figured it would be my best bet to use for the framework.

Before I get into how I set it up and the results, I want to tell you briefly why this system appealed to me so much. It’s important to you because of legal issues you might not know about.

First, in order to automate content publishing, you have to have content. Duh, right?

Content is, as I’m sure Medium writers already know, a lot of work to produce. Copying or republishing others’ content is not only unethical in many cases, it is also illegal in many cases (copyright issues).

A lot of the plugins you will find for Wordpress auto-posting involve scraping other website’s RSS feeds and reposting to your site. While these plugins are extremely useful when you have full permission to re-publish content, or would like to cross-post your own content, they are often “accidentally” used by inexperienced admins who need content for their site.

I myself got into a bit of riff raff over a photo once which was completely accidental, attempting to use this kind of system ethically to repost articles from “free for commercial use” sources. But one article and accompanying photo got through my setup and I was tracked down by the copyright attorneys to the tune of around $1200. Eek and ouch!

So, that being said, the thing that appealed to me about this Pinterest affiliate marketing system is that the automated content that is getting posted on the website and onto Pinterest is sourced directly from affiliate product feeds.

This means you have explicit permission to publish the pictures and the descriptions and…