I have been linking to all sorts of sites for many years with my blogs. Sometimes there are affiliate links and other times they are direct links – no rhyme or reason to it, I just don’t think about it sometimes, but I’d prefer that they were all affiliate links.
But how to retroactively remedy the situation? After all, I’ve got nearly 3,000 posts, dating back to early 2004, on this blog alone.
One solution is Skimlinks, where you paste a snippet of code to your site, and they can then convert your existing links to affiliate links for you.
I caught up with Joe Stepniewski, Co-founder of Skimlinks, at SXSWi, and he elaborated, “Skimlinks is an innovative technology that lets publishers monetize their content via affiliate marketing in a simple and user-friendly way. It aggregates the affiliate programs of 16 affiliate networks and over 8000 merchant programs, and automates the creation and maintenance of affiliate links by converting normal, existing links within publisher’s content into their equivalent affiliate link, on-the-fly when clicked.”
It’s a pretty seamless process, as the new links through Skimlinks are independent of other affiliate relationships you may already have going on.
Per their site on how affiliates get paid with Skimlinks…
We keep a small portion of the commissions paid to us by the networks. We retain between 15-25% of network/merchant payments, depending on the revenues you generate. And because of our scale and the deals we negotiate, it means you can earn up to 110% of what you would have earned if you did it yourself. Its free to sign-up and to use Skimlinks reporting services, and we only get paid when you make money.
More details at http://skimlinks.com/.
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Your Message@Emory Rowland:
Hi Emory – I just edit the actual text file – I am not sure about other options.
Hi Shawn,
I’ve found editing the .htaccess to be a little unwieldy. Is there a special script or editor that you recommend for this?
Thanks.
Your Message@Tom Lindstrom:
Hi Tom -
I use .htaccess myself (usually) when inserting affiliate links into my posts, but the neat thing about Skimlinks is that they would help monetize existing non-affiliate links.
Thanks for the tips! I have been using simple .htaccess forwarding.It also helps to prevent that your commissions will get stolen.
Thanks for the post, Shawn! You have captured what we do at Skimlinks really well!
And thank you for the feedback, Steve. We are familiar with Bounce.cc – its pretty good, although Skimlinks goes a step further and converts links being added to a site to affiliate links without any effort being required by the publisher. I believe with Bounce.cc you still need to sign up for merchant programs and create the links yourself. We also support non-deeplinking merchants which I believe Bounce.cc does not (and non-deeplinking merchants account for 30-40% of total international merchants).
Finally, we have advanced technology that pre-empts when an affiliate link is going to break, so we provide a completely seamless experience for users.
Hope that helps in your analysis, thanks again for taking the time to consider Skimlinks!
Alicia Navarro
CEO – Skimlinks
Thanks for pointing out Skimlinks, if it can help me catch more links without all the hassle of encoding, then I’m all for it.
Interesting service. We’re currently using a similar one – http://bounce.cc – to manage our links. It’s not perfect either, but does seem to be a little more advanced than skimlinks.
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