Lesson Learned: Never Put All your Eggs in One Basket

JordanS

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I'll admit it guys... I got lazy.

One of my main sites took off like crazy on pinterest over the past year, which resulted in me neglecting pretty much all other traffic avenues.

I stopped worrying about SEO, I stopped doing other social media, posting on niche related forums, etc.

All of my focus was on pinterest, collecting emails, and pushing traffic to my offer. I was bringing in a few thousand profit per month so it was a pretty sweet gig, right?

Fast forward to a few days ago. I check my email and see an email saying that my pinterest is suspended. I load up the app and sure enough, it is gone.

I checked my analytics and my traffic in the past week went from minimum 1k daily to under 100 hits. Daily revenue down to basically $0.

Fuck.

Well, it's not the end of the world. Lesson learned. Always keep multiple traffic sources going, especially when your life is in the hands of a third party service.
 
What was it that got your account suspended? Any chance to get it back?
 
mmm91492 said:
What was it that got your account suspended? Any chance to get it back?
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Not sure really. Just a generic "spam" as the reasoning. I don't post spammy links or do anything against the rules. Just follow the standard pin advice that all of the big pinterest blogs use.

I've sent in an appeal daily since my ban with no luck. I'll send a handful of more appeals and then if it gets denied still I will just start it over.
 
Check your competitors or similar sites - chances are they got suspended as well. It looks like Pinterest is rolling out some policy enforcement or something.

One of my websites was suspended from Pinterest as well. I noticed the same for some other sites in my niche. Mine was also not spammy, I was following posting guidelines. I think the problem was too many round-up posts overall. Organic is steadily increasing, so I'm not too worried. Besides, I didn't actually learn how to monetize Pinterest traffic properly. @JordanS, I'd appreciate if you shared some tips on what's worked for you.

I was thinking of reworking my site, and after some time applying for Pinterest reconsideration again, at least for the sake of selling the site - it wouldn't look good to be banned on Pinterest. Anyone having any experience with that?
 
@Handel I feel you about monetizing pinterest. It's easy to get clicks but many just leave fast. For monetizing pinterest I aggressively collected emails and pushed my course on every blog post. Also collected data on FB/Snapchat pixel to retarget with paid traffic.

Was your page in a health niche? They seem to be ban happy in general right now but many many health related accounts are being deleted if they aren't ones actually backed by science/run by a doctor.

I'm not sure if my best move with this site is to keep it going and focus on SEO+FB+IG. Or move over to a fresh domain and start over so that I can attempt to use pinterest again. The risk of a re-ban is there, but its just such easy traffic to start out with.
 
JordanS said:
I'm not sure if my best move with this site is to keep it going and focus on SEO+FB+IG. Or move over to a fresh domain and start over so that I can attempt to use pinterest again. The risk of a re-ban is there, but its just such easy traffic to start out with.
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My initial reaction when reading this quote above was that I'd keep your site going if it's successful with other tactics. If it's making money and people like the content, then why not. You could potentially 301 it to a new domain in order to get back on Pinterest, but you'll create a big SEO shake-up for yourself in the mean time. And potentially get banned on Pinterest again if you don't solve the problem (whatever it may have been).

I also thought that it'd be silly to start over just to get access to Pinterest, if you ditched the original site. If you keep the original and can quickly create a new site to use Pinterest with, then it might be a path to fast money. But now you're talking about churning and burning the Pinterest search engine instead of the Google search engine. Same game, different platform. At the end you don't have a business, you have a day job of re-building over and over.

I'd try to determine why I was banned. Was it a sensitive niche? Was I overzealous with pinning? Was it a follow/unfollow thing that got me smacked? If you can figure that out, that will pay off no matter if you start a new similar project or any other one in the future. That's better than churning and burning.

This situation sucks. I've been there several times with Google. I eventually just played it straight with them and abide well within their rules and haven't had a problem since, except the huge technical SEO problem I had for a couple years :confused: There's no escaping other than to not play on their playing fields! I feel your pain.
 
One thing I will add though is this would not necessarily be a loss if you played it correct (and I hope you did).

You found a hyper-effective method of driving traffic in sales. That is a win in my books.

The bigger question is what did you do with that? Did you save the capital and invest all of it back into other traffic sources or did you just blow it like most internet guys?

Did you build a brand people really liked throughout the process or where you spinning junk? (I've done this myself and learned the hard way)

It's a tough balance. But it is definitely a balance. You wouldn't want to invest 100% into a hyper effective traffic source but it could very well make sense to go 70 or 80% and ween yourself off.
 
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