Not only Pinterest can make money out of Pinterest

Feb 10th, 2012
by Steve Masters.
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Pinterest boardsEarlier this week I read a couple of articles that took glee in revealing that Pinterest was “modifying user pins” to make money. This Daily Mail-style, ill-informed scare-mongering made out that Pinterest was duping its users by not telling them that if they post a product on Pinterest, the company may then earn revenue because it “modifies” the link to add an affiliate tracker code.

Anyone who doesn’t realise this is how most of the websites on the Internet work would think Pinterest is doing something underhand. I have written about and praised Skimlinks before – for that’s the system Pinterest is using. Thankfully, online professionals who know about online publishing and marketing have spoken in defence of Pinterest such as Mike Butcher, writing on TechCrunch.

Skimlinks is a super affiliate scheme – earning commissions from hundreds of retailers who pay commissions when users click on coded links that result in a sale. Skimlinks’ system saves website owners the hassle of encoding individual links by simply installing a piece of code across the whole site that turns each link into a redirect pointint to Skimlinks, which then checks to see if the destination URL belongs to one of the retailers that pays commission, it then encodes the link with an affiliate tracker code and sets a cookie that will allow the retailer’s affiliate program to report a commission. Skimlinks then shares this commission with the website that generated the click (in this case Pinterest).

What complainers forget, of course, is that Pinterest is not the only one likely to be making money out of Pinterest. If, for example, you publish a website that reviews products where you are also running Skimlinks code, and if your product reviews are posted on Pinterest, anyone clicking on the pin will come to your website where they will then click through to the retailer. So, Pinterest earning money is great for them, but it doesn’t mean no one else can earn money from it as well.

What you don’t know CAN hurt you

Feb 9th, 2012
by Steve Masters.
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Store closedImagine you run a successful shop in a busy high street. A growing number of customers know where you are, your brand and address are listed in all the important places like Yellow Pages, adverts in newspapers, local websites and on posters all over town. Business is booming.

Now imagine your world is rocked by the revelation that you are being evicted because your landlord, who you didn’t know existed, is kicking you out. You thought you owned the freehold on the shop but it turns out that a partner you trusted to set up the business had rented it in his name and not told you, and now he wasn’t paying the rent any more. You have to move to a different premises and suddenly business collapses. Now imagine that, when you move, you are contacted by your logo designer to say you can’t take the logo with you because you don’t own the copyright.

That’s what it’s like for a website owner who finds out too late that they don’t own their domain name or the copyright on their website. So many businesses discover, when they try to move their hosting or redesign their website, that the domain name was registered in the name of an individual who is now hard to contact or with whom they now have a bad relationship. If that person decides to hold the company to ransom they can, to a degree, and it is a painful lesson to learn too late. I’ve seen it happen to companies and sorting it out requires careful diplomacy.

The copyright problem is down to business owners not realising how copyright law works. If your website or your brand is designed by a freelancer or an agency, the copyright is automatically owned by the creator, not you the client. Unless full copyright is assigned to you, you don’t own it all.

Now, if you’re reading this having already registered your domain name(s) many moons ago, with a website that’s been operating for years, you are not in the lucky position of getting it all right before you hit the go button. What I would advise, though, is you check who owns your domains and ensure you know what copyrights you hold.

Google now judges your web design

Jan 29th, 2012
by Steve Masters.
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Building with adsThe headline of this post is more dramatic than the reality. Google is not actually making judgements about the design of your website. As Matt Cutts has said several times in his videos, Google doesn’t really care what colour your site is, what shape it is, how many H1 tags you have or the amount of text you use. All it cares about is promoting websites people want to read.

As I have said to many people on many occasions, there is an absolute logic to giving Google what it wants. Create a website that people can use, that people like to visit repeatedly, that people like to promote, that is textually relevant to the kinds of things your target readers search for in Google. (more…)

Why brands should take a Pinterest.com

Jan 25th, 2012
by Steve Masters.
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Pinterest boards from BergdorfIn my last post, The convergence of magazines and web, I mentioned Pinterest, which is like a scrapbook. Now I would like to focus exclusively on Pinterest and the opportunities it offers to brand owners.

Used until now primarily by women, the audience for Pinterest has now widened in recent weeks as its name has been bandied about on other social networks like Twitter. (more…)

The convergence of magazines and web

Jan 25th, 2012
by Steve Masters.
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Vanity FairI worked in magazine publishing when the “world wide web” (as it was still being called) was becoming the new way to publish. At that time, magazine publishing companies, and some newspaper publishers, invested warily in the new medium because of the fear that the web would kill magazine sales and affect marketing.

Trade magazines that relied on industry advertising (especially those reliant on job ads) suddenly saw their paginations drop as the web offered a more cost effective and trackable way to reach customers. (more…)

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