How I Made Money Spamming Twitter with Contextual Book Suggestions

I'm surprised more people aren't speaking against what you did... I guess people aren't too bothered about spam until it gets above a certain threshold, and I guess it's only Twitters money that people like you are wasting by abusing their services and breaking their T&C's

Posted from a throwaway account.<p>I make about 400 EUR every month from Amazon referals without actively doing anything.<p>I own a comunity fueld site (hosting pictures) that receives about 70k visits (20k unique) per month. Its just a little hobby project that runs itself and has been unchanged for 2 or 3 years now. It's hard to find advertisers due to the sometimes offensive content, let alone making money from banner ads.<p>So I did the next logical thing: putting an invisible iframe on the site that loads Amazon with my referal id. Anyone who visits my site and decides to go shoppind on Amazon in the next few days, still has this referal id stored in a cookie. Note that I don't actually link to Amazon anywhere. Conversion is soley based on chance.<p>My conversion rate is about 0.5% and I've been doing this for about 18 month now.

All I can say is, nice work. It's creative. I've made some decent money off affiliate programs and twitter. What you're doing is similar in nature to what a lot of people are doing (human and bot).

This is an excellent example of the kind of advertising I actually don't mind getting.<p>1) Directly related to something I just said I wanted<p>2) You never advertise to me more than once.<p>I wish more advertisers (or even spammers) worked this way.

Trying the website resulted in this:<p><pre><code> We recommended these books based on the following terms: schon, only, when, that </code></pre> It's really weird that any of the suggestions made sense when words like these aren't blocked. The "schon" is German, but the rest should really not play into any ratings

Here's a legitimate way to make money from affiliate programs on Twitter. I make modest commissions each month via @ThemeHunter without promoting.<p><a href="http://www.dotsauce.com/2009/10/28/affiliate-id-rss-feed-yahoo-pipes/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dotsauce.com/2009/10/28/affiliate-id-rss-feed-yah...</a>

Even if it is spam , this kind of idea always amaze me.And everytime, I am jealous to not having thinking about it before..<p>How many of these bots are spamming twitter already ?

That is a great idea and I do not find it too spammy. Twitter could implement something like that themselves as advertisement (simple context aware text ads).

I did this a long time ago, almost the exact same thing, but I actually parsed trending topics and searched Amazon for ANY product, not just books, based on the content of the trending topic. I started out with books, but moved on to all products. It was a cool project and netted me some cash but not worth carrying on so I dumped it about a year ago.<p>Was actually incredibly easy to do. I'm sure there are loads more out there.

What did an actual recommendation tweet look like?

Upvoted for finally naming that algorithm I've been off-and-on trying to research for the last year or so. Thank you!

Interesting idea (to suggest based on already written content). Maybe it would be considered less "spammy" if it would be just semi-automated, i.e. more like an "expert system". Also, it it would work for popular forums like PHP BB or others, would greatly extend it's usage (so not just on Twitter).

My keywords: "with, from, have, that"<p>I think the algorithm could use some work.<p>Also, the book suggestions are greyed out/faded. Makes me think there aren't any suggestions, you should make the icons come through in full color.

$400.<p>Just go ahead and release the code. It didn't make you that much money.