A couple of days ago I blogged about Skimlinks which is a nifty service that will automatically convert any product deeplinks into affiliate links on the fly. Wanting to find out more and take a look under the hood I decide to sign up and give Skimlinks a whirl. I’m seriously impressed with their service so far.
Signup was a breeze as you’d expect, just a few small details required and of course your website. What I wasn’t expecting was a phone call shortly after from my new account manager to tell me my application had been approved and welcoming me to Skimlinks. Nice personal touch guys.
40 second installation
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an easier process to install something, especially when you consider that this is actually a powerful bit of kit. Installation took me no more than 40 seconds, seriously! Once you’ve logged in for the first time it provides you with some javascript to cut and paste on your site (think google analytics) or for Wordpress users like me you can download a plugin that does it all for you. Believe it or not the longest part of the whole process was activating the plugin! So far so good.
Grabbing your links
If you’re familiar with affiliate networks your first instinct will no doubt be to try and find the merchant your after and then pick up a tracking link. But that’s just it, the whole point of Skimlinks is that they do it for you. Forget looking for links, you should be thinking content, content, content. For now you’re done with Skimlinks and it’s time to get back to your blog to start writing articles, reviews, tutorials etc
Picking a topic
With my MacBook Pro, iPhone, and iPod nano I have to confess to being a bit of an apple fan. I also have a growing number of their products on my “wish list” for a while now. So what better way to test Skimlinks than to share one of these products here and see how Skimlinks deals with the deeplinks.
Apple LED Cinema Display (24″ flat panel)
Ok, so I’ve been eyeing up this bad boy for a while. It’s not cheap but for me is the perfect monitor for my home office and would look great with all my other equipment. I also chat to a lot of buddies in other countries via skype so the built in webcam and mic is also a nice bonus. Anyway, let’s test some links…
Buy from apple.co.uk for £635 – click here
Get a bargain at Amazon who are selling it for just £598 – click here
Clean a whistle
Now the first thing to notice is those links. Hover over them with your mouse and you’ll see that they look like direct links to the store. Don’t be fooled though, when you click on these links you are redirected via a regular affiliate link and any commissions you earn will appear in your Skimlinks account.
How easy is that? No more logging into networks, building deeplinks, masking your urls, just get cracking and focus on writing that content. Let Skimlinks do the hard work for you. This for me is the real power of Skimlinks and the reason why I’ll be playing with this a little more.
Anybody else using Skimlinks yet? Let me know your experiences, good or bad.
Thanks
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This is a nifty service as you put it. This is will be useful for many bloggers who don’t have time to maintain a DB of link formats.
I read your blog via my feed and it doesn’t work ;( . I’m sure it can be addressed though.
Hi Gaj,
That’s odd. Have you set http://www.fishandclicks.co.uk/feed/ as your address? I’ve tested it in several feed readers and it appears fine to me. What one are you using?
Thanks
Paul
I’ve been running skimlinks for about 2 weeks now on my netbook forum.
When I first started out there were very few places to purchase upgrades from, so I could easily make sure I had all the different stores covered with my affiliate programs, but 6 months later there are no end of different manufacturers offering upgrades for the products I cover. With many users posting links to all the latest deals all over the web it was hard for me to capitalise from the manufacturers without signing up to a specific program and then invasively changing a link to an affiliate one. Thankfully skimlinks addresses this exact situation, its a great service for making revenue, and saving time.
Especially now the cookies are out there the revenue is coming in!
Hi Matthew,
That sounds great way to use Skimlinks, especially when forums are notoriously difficult to monetise. What’s even better is that you now have people in your community providing the content, researching bargains and you benefit from the commission in exchange for running the website. I like it!
Thanks
Paul
Hi Paul,
Interesting post, do you have any insight as to how it works,
do you need to be signed up to the networks the programme is on and approved for the programme?
How does payment work if a sale is generated? Do skimlinks pay you or does the network?
How do you see the data is it all in the skimlinks system?
Thanks
Emma
Hi Emma, glad you liked the post.
Almost all the info you need can be found in the Skimlinks FAQ however to answer your questions…
You don’t need to be signed up to the programmes yourself. It’s Skimlinks who do that and you instantly become a member of all the progrmames that they are already a member of. At the time of writing that was 4898 programmes across 16 networks.
Skimlinks record all the sales made via your links and pay you rather than you getting paid by the networks. You can log in to skim links and instantly see how many clicks and sales you’ve made. Within the Skimlinks interface you can inter in your bank account details so that they can deposit any commission due.
Hope that helps
Paul
Thanks Paul, should ahve read the site eh :)
Has anyone checked out the legality of the links not disclosing to your readers that you are paid as a sales agent? I read all the time about companies being fined for bad sales practice which is often things like not disclosing to the customer that you are a sales agent. In the energy market companies have been fined millions for bad sales practice. I couldn’t find any disclosure on Matthew Dunham MyDell Mini. With a forum your content is user generated so you are not going to know what you are a sales agent for. I wouldn’t be surpised if this isn’t under the radar for now but not sure I’d put all my eggs in one basket.
Ha ha!!! Just came over here as a recommendation from my mate Duncan (He is a friend of Tim Dingley) and saw the first comment is from one of my friends / clients from up north :)…. Small small world.
Anyway I have just joined PPC Coach and am going to be trying out this Affiliate Marketing malarky a little more seriously…. will be back here and there.
The world has just got a bit smaller…. I live with Tim Dingley!
Hi Paul
An interesting read, how do merchants keep control of their brand? It seems that if I am declined from working with a merchant, I could sign up to Skimlinks and get paid.
We looked at this in depth when we were choosing the model for Easy Content Units, we originally planned to use our links all the time and pay the affiliates a share, but found that merchants were against this, as they couldn’t control where their links/products were being shown.
So now we show the affiliate’s links and payments are handled by the networks.
Hi Jason,
From an affiliate management perspective this was my concern too. I gather Skimlinks have a merchant side to their system that allows merchants to see which affiliates (using skimlinks) are promoting their programme and remove if necessary. I’m sure the guy’s a Skimlinks can confirm. In fact I’m pretty sure this was in their FAQ.