Monetising Your Websites

byThe Dressage Husband

4.1K followers

11 years ago

I have lately been experimenting with a FREE product to create natural links in my websites. Well actually there are two of them, but to prevent corruption you should only use one on any given site.

They are Skimlinks and Viglink (if you want to sign up use the link on Http://www.internetmarketingtdh.com) of course I may benefit!

These sites offer you access to affiliate programs with 17,000 quality merchants (Skimlinks) or 30,000 not so high quality merchants (Viglink). The Skimlinks product is a little easier to use and has better API's, but Viglink has slightly better reporting.

Both products allow you access to all their merchants (Viglink has some you need to apply for separately) and then if you turn on the Automatic link creation feature and mention one of them you get a link to the merchants site (it appears to be a direct link) only if a visitor clicks on it and buys a product you get commission via the Skimlinks or Viglink site.

Skimlinks has a 90 day delay (for returns etc.) like Amazon and Viglink is only 60 days. They take 25% of your commission on each sale which is how the software is paid for. You get 35% commission on the Sales of any affiliates that you introduce (one year only!).

I see a great advantage to using this service over Squidoo etc. as they both qualify at the top commission levels and both sites have preferred merchants that pay the 25% so you get 100% of the commission on those merchants.

The biggest advantage is that you get all of your commissions from your merchants in one place so it is easier to keep track of and you can use many more merchants than if you had to administer this yourself.

There is also a neat feature in that if the merchant exists in the country of your visitor and they carry the product you linked to a visitor automatically gets the link to the merchant in his or her own country. This is really neat and of course will increase conversions!

Both products allow the generation of links to use on your other sites, however Skimlinks want you to have your own domain and will validate the site belongs to you before you can use them. Viglink (for now) will approve any applicant. You can use a Skimlink on sites such as Squidoo, but it has to be created using the domain name that you got approved and therefore will look as if the sale or click came from that domain in the reporting.

I am sure that these products will provide many extra sales, they both will convert existing links to Amazon to fall under their control if you set them up automatically, but both allow you to override this if you want to.

I find that they do not convert cloaked links. Have fun!