Jason Hesse | May 9, 2012 | View the article here
Monetising online content is difficult. One company is helping publishers do this, one click at a time. Jason Hesse reviews Skimlinks.
Affiliate marketing is often portrayed as a grubby, even sleazy, industry, full of link-heavy websites trying to flog you nutritional pills. Skimlinks is trying to turn perceptions around with transparent and ethical affiliate marketing tools for content producers.
Publishers can now harness Skimlinks’ monetization and analytics technologies via a set of APIs, built to suit any type of site or application.
SAN FRANCISCO — Skimlinks, the leading content monetization platform for web publishers, announced it has released a comprehensive API suite to make it easy for up-and-coming companies to earn an immediate and seamless revenue stream, and gain valuable insights into their users’ shopping habits.
Skimlinks APIs will allow developers to build on top of Skimlinks’ award winning technology and network of 18,000+ merchant relationships, to effectively grow their business.
“We want to make our technology and insights available to all types of publishers, so we are opening up our platform to make it fully accessible and flexible. This is particularly exciting for startups who need a monetization partner who can help them achieve their revenue goals, without compromising on the user experience.” said Alicia Navarro, CEO and co-founder of Skimlinks.
The API program allows companies to harness and customize the power of Skimlinks technology in several different ways. The Link API allows companies to use the core Skimlinks technology (turning links into monetized links) in any site or application. The Link API can be used in conjunction with the Merchant API, which allows companies to search and filter Skimlinks’ list of 18,000+ merchants by category and name to decide which links to push through Skimlinks.
Publishers will be able to get an up-to-the-minute (and historical) snapshot of every commission they receive through Skimlinks integration with 31 international affiliate networks, via the Reporting API. In addition, the Reporting API allows companies to filter and segment data on a highly granular level, so they can better understand their users’ purchase behaviors, and tailor their experience accordingly.
For start-ups such as social discovery and social commerce sites, the Product API offers a real-time product search based on a given product reference, category, merchant or price. The products results are returned in XML or JSON, giving website developers freedom to choose how to display the products they want to promote, and design their site accordingly.
With the new suite of APIs, there are endless possibilities for start-ups looking to disrupt the publishing and e-commerce spaces.
Andrew Warner, president of Mixergy.com, a website devoted to helping entrepeneurs build new businesses, is excited to see what Skimlinks can do for budding companies: “Skimlinks is an inspiring story of a discovery of a way of generating revenue for entrepreneurs that’s going to help companies grow. There will be entrepreneurs in the future who will say, ‘because of Skimlinks I was able to build this business.’ It wouldn’t be around otherwise.”
About the Company: Founded in 2008, Skimlinks <skimlinks.com> is a leading content monetization platform that rewards publishers for the role their content plays in creating purchase intent. Skimlinks processes 110 million clicks a month on over 700,000 sites around the Web, including AVForums, WordPress, Ning, Technorati, Hearst Digital and many more. In December 2011, Skimlinks’s drove almost $30M in consumer sales from over 18,000 merchants across 27 affiliate networks. Skimlinks is a team of 40 based in London, San Francisco, and New York. Get in touch with Skimlinks at skimlinks.com/contact.
Media Contact: Aaron Weissman | Marketing Director | direct: 415.426.5743 | Aaron@Skimlinks.com
Joseph Ajilore | March 14, 2012 | View the article here
Making money from content is an incredibly tough business to be in, especially in that of niche content – the non-breaking news type of content, which is probably all of the content we tend to cover here on the site. I decided to invite someone who knows all about making money from content, especially since we use Skimlinks here on YHP.
Joe is the co-founder of Skimlinks, a company that provides the technology helps blogs, forums, and content sites earn revenue from affiliate marketing with no technical or admin effort so allowing us publishers more time to focus on writing quality contents and building our community.
I decided to speak to Joe about how he got involved in Skimlinks, originally Skimbit and how the company has grown from that of one that was barely surviving to what it is now (The company raised $4.5M in their Series B funding last November, totalling the amount raised to $7.02M.). We also talked about his background, how he got into entrepreneurship, how the idea for Skimlinks came about and what the company is trying to solve and much more.
Hi Joe, Thanks for doing this interview with me. Can you give you some background information about yourself, were you the entrepreneurial type growing up?
Not at all. Always a risk taker, but not a born entrepreneur. You hear a lot about entrepreneurs selling out lemonade stands aged 10, but I was more interested in technology itself. I’ve always been fascinated with computers & technology from an early age as my father too was always immersed in computers, with a career as an electrical engineer. Studying Information Technology at university in 97-99, I started to learn about web opportunities and took an elective subject “Entrepreneurship & innovation”, so I guess that marked when my interest really was piqued.
Tell me how the idea for Skimlinks came about?
Skimlinks was the result of a pivot from another idea, Skimbit. Alicia Navarro, my co-founder, started Skimbit in 2006 – a social decision making tool. The idea being that you ‘skim’ products, places, images from around the web via a bookmarklet into a single page to help make a decision on a purchase, holiday etc. Think Pinterest, but 5 years ago!
Realising that advertising wasn’t going to cut it with Skimbit, we conceived a system that would convert retailer links, which users were adding from around the web onto their Skimbit pages, into affiliate links automatically. The other benefit of this beyond earning far better money than advertising is that we didn’t need any visible advertising at all to clutter our website.
Struggling to raise money, especially due to the coinciding of the financial crisis, we were faced with adversity. We were pitching a white-label version of Skimbit at websites with little success, and BOOM suddenly realised that we could just offer the monetization system to them to work with the links in their existing content. We worked day and night, and in 2 weeks managed to turn a failing B2C business into a B2B business with a new lease of life.
What were you doing before co-founded the company?
After moving to the UK post-university and having worked in business analysis/product management for 5 years, I followed my other passion, which is music. I joined an independent electronic music label Finger Lickin’ Records willing to do just about anything, and ended up running the new media side of the label due to my technology background. Essentially this was licensing their content to the new digital download services: iTunes, Beatport, eMusic etc.
Doing it for the love and not the money and living in London started to grate, so I was spurred on by a university friend who had been very successful in Internet Marketing to start a business called SiteRefinery. Building, buying and selling websites I built up a lot of knowledge around site monetization e.g. affiliate marketing, Google Adsense, and also search engine marketing. When Alicia offered me to join Skimbit, it sounded exciting and I knew we’d work well together so jumped at the opportunity.
What are you trying to solve with Skimlinks?
We are trying to solve a difficult problem, which is rewarding content publishers for the role they play in causing people to buy online. It revolves around the concept of ‘purchase intent’, and if you are generating purchase intent from your content, you are creating real value, the problem is trying to remunerate publishers for that in an effective automated manner.
Up until recently, if you published a piece of content e.g. a review on the latest digital camera, you were generally only able to earn a fraction of a penny per pageview by surrounding that content with banner advertising. Using affiliate links in your content was an option, but it was highly manual and difficult for web publishers to manage – they prefer automated solutions, like sticking in an ad unit, so that they can focus on their content and community.
Skimlinks today solves two problems where purchase intent is present but not monetized by the publisher: existing links to ecommerce retailers in content, and product references written in content. Publishers either install our technology via simple script or using our API, which automatically converts existing links or adds new links to product references – these links now tracked by Skimlinks so if users click on them and you drive either sales you earn an affiliate commission (CPA), or traffic you earn an amount per click (CPC).
So with Skimlinks, our vision is to reward publishers for the connections they created between the content and ecommerce, or ones we automatically create for them. We are helping them earn by connecting the dots.
Talk me through the first few months of running the business? What would you say was the hardest part of starting the business?
I’ll describe the time when we first started building Skimbit. We were a small team of 4 and we were trying to get the features we thought were important built, trying to drum up income, work on the business model, drive traffic, raise money all at the same time.
The hardest part was attempting to handle all of those spinning plates and continue to create traction. With only a scrap of funding we needed to get to traction, in order to prove both ourselves as entrepreneurs and the model to investors.
It was all hard. I think ultimately what was the most important hardest part was working out the right things to focus on. It is so easy to get excited and pulled in many directions when you are starting up, when some of those really aren’t important in getting you to your next proof point, your next milestone.
For example, we fretted a lot about the site design and which feature we were going to create next, but really we needed to understand whether fundamentally the concept was going to work and were we able to get it to a point where we could either be making money, or have enough traction to justify investment.
We still have similar challenges today of prioritising what to work on, but we’ve got better. Also there are some good methodologies out there, such as lean, which help you to focus on proving your assumptions, iterating, measuring and finding product-market fit early on.
Why did you decide to change it from Skimbit to Skimlinks?
It took us in retrospect too long to realise, but we realised a few insurmountable problems at the time: the model i.e. social shopping was not mature enough, we weren’t able to generate enough revenues in the business, and there wasn’t enough investor appetite at the time. We didn’t really have much of a choice, but being in the thick of it, building relationships with web publishers, thinking about how we could evolve our model meant we had a better chance of creating Skimlinks.
The point is here is that unless you are actually taking the risk, living your idea daily, experimenting and challenging your assumptions, you may not get into that scenario i.e. the fertile zone where suddenly the momentum is there, or you can make that pivot and it starts to work out. It’s also true that innovation comes often when you have constrained resources, and indeed desperation.
How were you able to fund the business?
Skimbit was self-funded by Alicia originally pretty much by her life savings, and then augmented by a few friends and family rounds. It was nearly all over before we got the term sheet for our seed round at the end of 2008, with salary bills to pay, but since we had created that momentum with investors, mentors, team members, potential clients we were able to tie it up quickly and in-time after we moved from Skimbit to Skimlinks. Then we followed with a series A round in 2009 and series B in 2011.
Would you say the initial idea for the company, or that your business model has changed since starting the company?
Completely. We changed from a B2C social decision making tool, to a B2B affiliate marketing aggregator. Even since Skimlinks sprouted in late 2008, we have evolved both the business model and the vision for the company significantly. We now have a much broader vision to build a content monetization platform and from a business model perspective we work beyond the model of affiliate marketing. I think this is normal for any company to evolve the vision over time as you learn more about the problem-definition and the opportunity.
What would you say has been some of the most crucial things that you’ve done to build the company to this level now?
We have made particular business and product decisions that have been very important, but in a general company building perspective the most crucial thing has been to craft the right team together. Looking at the Skimlinks momentum today, it sounds obvious, but it really has been a result of the team.
We have always been careful to hire the best people possible, even without a lot of resources and have a real diversity of talent. When I say best possible, I don’t mean best universities, grades or most experience, but the right attitude, enthusiasm and cultural fit for the company. I think its important to have everyone in the same room too and be properly aligned – our CTO came on board early, and the tech and product teams work next to each other. Everyone is in earshot, and decisions get made quickly.
Not just about team members we’ve also surrounded ourselves with talented advisors, mentors and peers and talk to them regularly to get their input. Maintaining the balance of getting out of the building and talking to others, networking, pitching is important.
Another thing we’ve always maintained is being pretty bootstrapped and lean, even after a fund-raise. We are careful with money across decisions in hiring, marketing, travel, office – it is so tempting and easy to make a mistake here. Raise more money than you need, but keep a war chest. Don’t be stingy though, the team now all have fast machines and 24” monitors now we can afford it.
Is the business profitable?
Cannot disclose, but I can say that we were revenue generating from day one of Skimlinks
What’s been your most memorable moment so far on your entrepreneurial journey?
There have been many memorable moments when we have achieved a particular product or revenue milestone, won a client, closed a funding round etc but they are always punctuated by the memory of the team celebrating it and recognising that they’ve done it. At different times, its been different sizes of the team, we can still remember sharing a single bottle of champagne in plastic cups around a desk, now the celebrations are a bit bigger.
The most memorable times are when we have whole team together as we are normally split across the world in London, New York and San Francisco. For example, every Christmas we have a crazy mass team scavenger hunt around London followed by a big dinner, it’s the highlight of the year. It really reinforces my earlier point – its crucial to build a great team that get on well with each other, otherwise you are you going to enjoy your memorable moments with?
What pieces of advices could you give to aspiring entrepreneurs out there?
Build something that is inherently scalable. If you want to achieve exponential growth, your idea needs to be big enough that it can truly scale, especially as your blue-sky projections for your idea normally turn out far less in reality. This is of course if you want this, you can be a successful entrepreneur and create a lifestyle business, but make sure your idea fits with your aspirations.
Don’t get too attached to your idea. It’s easy to say ‘well that’s for people with crap ideas, mine kicks ass’, but its not just about the quality of your idea, but whether it’s the right timing, whether you have the ability to execute it better than others, and whether you have the resources to get there. Post-pivot, you always realise that you were a bit too headstrong about the last incarnation even when it wasn’t going to work out. But that’s understandable, you’re a passionate entrepreneur right? Just take some objective steps or outside perspective to evaluate whether the business is still right in its current state right now. I think the best entrepreneurs can instinctively judge this.
Be very open minded when looking for talent, you won’t be able to convince the best when you are not established so spend the time thinking about where you can access talent where others don’t normally look. It’s highly competitive so think about how you can get your competitive advantage, and think about how you can be unique in attracting people – being able to pitch your business to potential clients is only half of it. As we scaled at Skimlinks, we wish we’d actually hired an internal recruiter earlier – if you do it thoroughly, it takes the founder/management lot of time and effort.
What can we be expecting from you and Skimlinks in 2012?
More of everything for existing or budding Skimlinks publishers – more examples of how to use our monetization technology, more cool ways to deploy our technology, more reporting and understanding of their data and most importantly more money earned for the publisher. We are essentially finding and creating more of those connections between content and ecommerce.
Check out Your Hidden Potential’s interview with Alicia!
Corey Cummings | March 3, 2012 | View article here
London-based startup SkimLinks has been in the news quite a bit since LLC Social discovered their work with Pinterest, an image based social network. SkimLinks works with online companies to create affiliate program links within its content on the fly, preventing admins from having to slog through the normally tedious amount of upkeep required to maintain these kind of monetizing links. Pinterest was using Skimlinks to automatically convert product URLs in users’ pinned images into affiliate sales links.
The partnership had both users and the media in an uproar claiming that Pinterest should have been transparent and upfront with its users about its monitization strategy. A claim Skimlinks’ founder and CEO Alicia Navarro addressed.
Some of these articles raise the point that Pinterest has not been vocal to their community in disclosing that they work with Skimlinks. While we fully encourage transparency and disclosure, at the very least because it is a nice thing to do, many sites choose not to be blatant about their monetization techniques straight away. We can encourage and give best practises, and we do, but it is up to a publisher the extent to which they make public their inner workings. From a legal perspective, for what it is worth, disclosure is required only where the content creator is making endorsements that they financially profit from, like when a blogger is paid to encourage their readers to buy something, or a price comparison site encourages the purchase of a particular insurance product where they get paid for that referral. By providing a platform where people can post things they like, Pinterest isn’t endorsing particular products for the sake of financial gain, just providing a valuable forum for products to be browsed by their community.
Navarro also went on to to say the practice was “not a secret” and helpful not only to fund startups, but also to aid them analytically when bringing users the kind of content they want. Since the scandal, Pinterest has stopped using Skimlinks’ affiliate services. The businesses still remain friendly; in an interview on FeedFront.com Navarro said, “We have a great relationship with Ben and the guys at Pinterest, they are fans of what we do, and we are excited to see the role that affiliate marketing might play in their long term strategy.” But with the scandal making headlines and turning the spotlight on affiliate marketing, many users and investors were left asking ‘Who is this company’ and ‘Why haven’t we heard of them.’
Andrew Warner | February 28,2012 | Watch the interview here
There was an odd uproar when people found out that the sharing site, Pinterest, was trying to monetize its business using Skimlinks.
Like many entrepreneurs, I took the opposite view and said, “way to go! When startups earn revenue, it helps them grow.” Then I wanted to go a step further and invite the founder of Skimlinks to talk about how she built her company.
Alicia Navarro is the co-founder of Skimlinks, which makes it easy for sites to monetize their product links by replacing them with links that generate affiliate revenue.
Click here to watch the video or right click here to download the audio from Andrew’s interview with Alicia. You can also read the full transcript on Mixergy’s website.
Julian Blake | February 16, 2012 | View article here
Alicia Navarro is the founder and chief executive of content monetisation startup Skimlinks. Its simple affiliate links service is making big waves, offering some of the world’s biggest social sites a means of converting their content into cash. She spoke to Julian Blake about the linking business – and about how the EU’s impending cookie law changes the game for everyone.
Earlier this month, just 24 hours after speaking to techcityinsider about her firm’s ambitious expansion plans, Alicia Navarro, the founder and chief executive of content monetisation service Skimlinks, suddenly found herself in the strange position of defending her company for successfully doing what it‘s in business to do.
A post, on social media marketing blog llsocial, revealed that red-hot social discovery phenomenon Pinterest, right now attracting millions to share the things they like on the web with a ‘virtual pinboard’, was using the Skimlinks service to discreetly generate revenue by using its subtle referral links to online merchants. “Pinterest is quietly generating revenue by modifying user submitted pins,” reported llsocial.
Navarro responded, unfazed and unapologetic. “It’s not a secret,” she blogged. “We do monetise social discovery, and it’s great. Pinterest and many other social discovery sites have been working with us for a long time, and although they are fabulously popular now, we like to think we helped them get the revenues and insights that helped them grow.”
Over at TechCrunch, wise Mike Butcher dismissed llsocial’s angle as pretty old news. “Skimlinks is the real story behind Pinterest’s success” he argued. “What is getting some people hot under the collar is that Pinterest hasn’t made its use of affiliate links very explicit.” Butcher concluded that now could be the moment that people realise just how powerful the Skimlinks business model could be, especially when millions of users are now creating content.
Navarro herself is certain that the Skimlinks product is good news for both publishers and consumers. “We help publishers get rewarded for the role that their content plays in creating purchasing links,” she says. “We’re all about looking at content and finding opportunities to discreetly, and in a really user-friendly way, link within the content to a place where you can buy whatever that article is about.
“Blogs or forums have traditionally monetised through banner ads and other advertising around content. Skimlinks is a way for a blog to get paid a commission if what they write about results in someone buying something. It’s been a really great asset for publishers because they can start to monetise content without having to add more ads or disrupt the user experience, and it’s been really welcomed within the publishing industry.”
The way it works is simple from both user and publisher perspective. A Skimlinks link looks exactly like a normal link, though Skimlinks automatically turns publisher links to affiliate links when clicked on, through a brief redirect to the Skimlinks servers. Skimlinks retains 25% of any commission payment from a merchant, with 75% going to the publisher. Skimlinks is confident that because of its scale it can earn higher merchant commissions than if individual publishers managed affiliate links themselves. Plus, it saves publishers time. For social platforms like Pinterest, with millions visiting, Skimlinks offers a serious and obvious revenue stream. (Even if in Pinterest’s case, some are unhappy about their lack of transparency.)
For Navarro, who became a tech entrepreneur at an early age in her native Sydney, Skimlinks has been her big career success so far. In five years, the company has shifted from being a social decision-making website into one focussed entirely on affiliate marketing. In partnership with co-founder Joe Stepniewski, Skimlinks has grown into an international operation with 35 staff in London, and more in New York and San Francisco, where Navarro now spends half her time.
“I think it’s going to be a big year for us,“ she says. “We keep growing. We raised another round of funding in November ($7 million has been raised so far from investors), so the plan is to continue to grow. We have big ambitious plans for the year in terms of new product development and new markets, so we’re in hiring mode at the moment, and about to build some great new technologies. It’s really exciting to be at the forefront of a new type of advertising, and to be able to come up with new ideas and make them happen really quickly.”
New developments at Skimlinks include a new interface “that delivers better analytics and reports for our publishers, so they can take that data and create more monetisable content,“ she explains. “And we have just released a new version of our SkimWords technology, which is all about finding products specifically named in content and turning them into links where people can buy that product.
“We’re continuing to build out with platforms that will allow any type of content search to monetise the content in really seamless and simple ways,” she adds. “We’re keeping the details of that a little bit under our belt for now.”
Navarro is nothing if not upbeat about Skimlinks. But a “big worry” for her is the imminent implementation of the EU’s Directive of Privacy and Electronic Communications, aka the Cookie Law. The directive, active since May 2011 but only set to be enforced from this May, requires that consumers give their consent, or opt in, before cookies or any other form of data is stored in their browser.
“There is a sense of bewilderment about whether companies are going to be able to abide by the letter of everything that is being required,” she says. “Because you would have a very intrusive user experience if every time you visited any website you were confronted with a large pop-up that says ‘do you agree to the terms of service and the privacy policy for this website?’. It’s going to be impactful to everyone, and not just websites. A lot of people are waiting to see how the leaders in the space interpret the legislation, and how strict the powers that be will be when policing it.
“Everyone is talking about privacy and ways to continue being able to deliver good services both to publishers and advertisers with the increasing constraints placed upon us by government legislation. The whole industry is going to have to become innovative. For retargeting firms in particular, it’s going to be innovate or perish.
“There are direct implications for every single company that operates in Europe, plain and simple. Every single company is going to be dramatically impacted by the fact that they have to get opt in approval even to use things like google analytics. Any other kind of advertising cookies and every company that puts any kind of ad on their site is going to have to update their privacy policy and the way that they get opt in approval from users that visit their site.
What does the new law mean for Skimlinks specifically? “We are going to be affected, yes, because we are an advertising company, and we rely upon cookies to be able to track patterns of usage because that’s what helps us target what we do better. We’re taking it seriously and are making changes to our privacy policy and the way we handle cookies and so on. So we’re going to do everything right, obviously. But it will be interesting to see how bigger companies that rely more heavily on data collected by cookies are going to update their practices as a result of this legislation.”
Looking ahead, which sectors does Navarro think will be the ones to gain in the tech space? “In San Francisco, cloud interactivity API services are starting to be the big thing. Not very sexy front-end stuff, I know, but it’s the architecture and backbone for all the cloud-based applications where there is will be a lot of innovation in the next year.
Navarro is also keeping a close eye on the subscription commerce sector, with companies looking at repeat purchases and create automatic subscription services for certain products. “It’s a really interesting space right now, with companies like graze.com and whatsinmyhandbag.com http://whatsinmyhandbag.com/) doing good work,” she says.
“I also think there’ s going to be much greater emphasis on advertising technology aimed for smartphones and tablets so it’s going to be interesting to see what kind of applications bubble up around those spaces.”
ISEdb.com
Jonathan Hawkins | February 16, 2012 | View article here
Founded in 2006, Skimlinks has revolutionized affiliate marketing. The company offers two primary products, Skimlinks and SkimWords. Skimlinks converts existing straightforward links into revenue generating affiliate marketing links. Skimlinks targets blogs, forums, and content-driven websites, with its innovative affiliate marketing linking program. 31 international affiliate networks have integrated within Skimlinks’ ever- expanding system. As of December 2011, Skimlinks has over 18,000 active merchants participating in its affiliate marketing program.
The premise of Skimlinks’ business strategy is the ease of transitioning from boring links to revenue generating affiliate links. Merchants gain access to over 17,000 affiliate programs, without the hassle of conducting negotiations or creating affiliate codes. Skimlinks automates and aggregates the entire transition process, allowing merchants to spend time on other business matters. The company provides merchants that participate in the program with pertinent information, such as what visitors click on a website and the products and services that they purchase.
WHY CHOOSE SKIMLINKS
Behind the Scenes
Skimlinks eliminates unsightly affiliate links. The company turns current product links into links that are virtually invisible to site visitors. The visitors trust the new links, because they know where the links will take them in cyberspace.
Strict Screening
Skimlinks does not just accept any merchant into its affiliate marketing program. The strict approval process guarantees a match between top notch merchants and over 17,000 affiliate programs.
Better Rates
Economy of scale allows Skimlinks to negotiate the highest commission rates for merchants. Compare the pay per click affiliate rates offered by Skimlinks with the rates offered by companies such as Amazon.com
Extensive Product Line
Skimlinks constantly adds new products to its already extensive line. Merchants track links on social networking website, monetize RSS feeds, customize WordPress blogs. Constant product innovation ensures the company has staying power.
Personal Service
In an era when customer queries sit in an email box for days, Skinlinks has established a reputation of providing superior customer service. Customer service ranks as high a priority as introducing innovative products. Merchants can contact Skimlinks with questions or issues any time of the day, on any day of the week.
Leading Technology
The underlying reason behind Skinlinks’ success is the patent-pending technology that drives Skimlink’s product line. The most impressive part of this technology is how affiliate links seamlessly integrate into merchant websites.
After six years of operation, Skimlinks has already climbed to the top of the industry recognition list. The company wins awards for its groundbreaking product launches, including awards one at the top affiliate marketing galas. Skimlinks won the 2010 Technology Genius Award, at the LinkShare Golden Link Awards ceremony.
Easy as 1-2-3
Applying to become part of Skimlinks’ affiliate marketing program takes only a few minutes. Complete a simple form and Skimlinks will immediately respond with a decision as to whether the company is a good fit for your business. Skimlinks looks for quality, original content, regardless if your business produces it in house or user generated.
If accepted, you can install Skimlinks in a matter of minutes. Obtain the JavaScript code and simply cut and paste it into the footer of your business website, blog, or forum. If you use vBulletin with your forum, Skimlinks offers a vBulletin plugin. The same goes for bloggers that use WordPress.
After installation, you can immediate access to the Publisher Interface. The Interface allows you to customize products settings, access reports, and utilize the myriad tools provided by Skimlinks. Spend some time navigating the Interface before using any of the features.
For business owners who want to spend less time micromanaging affiliate marketing programs, Skinlinks offers the most innovative products and extensive product line of any similar company. You can have a revenue generating affiliate marketing program up and running in a manner of minutes, while confident that you are part of a team that only accepts the highest-quality of merchants.
Adam Vincenzini | February 10, 2012 | View the article here
Brrrrrr! It might be snowing in London (and incredibly cold!) but that hasn’t stopped us from serving up a collection of this week’s hottest new social media tools and platforms.
To help warm you up, were giving this week’s post a ‘green theme’ – yep, the green we all want more of, money.
Let’s introduce our money-spinning tools to you one-by-one…
1. Create your own online store filled with products you love with Styleowner.com – In the week Pinterest has been ‘outed’ for monetizing its links, you might want to check out its more overt competitor, Styleowner.com. This is the latest in an increasingly long line of communities that reward your content discovery, curation and recommendations. Watch this one.
2. Create you own Facebook store (and more) with Tabjuice.com – Keeping with our monetization theme, Tabjuice gives you the pieces you need to sell your products through Facebook (at a fraction of the cost of a bespoke build) with some robust analytics integrated on the back-end. What are you waiting for?!
3. Hop on board the hottest content monetiztion solution of the week, Skiminks.com – This solution places some basic code into your blog or website template and then crawls your content to add affiliate links to products you mention creating a win/win/win situation for everyone. For more on Skimlinks and similar products, check out this post.
4. Make your content curation efforts for targeted ad efficient with Percolate.com – While this one one directly generate revenue for you, it will make discovering the most suitable content for your communities a helluva lot easier. Percolate is still in an ‘invite-only’ beta for at the moment but luckily for us we have some invites to dish out! Read our full story on Percolate here. And get your daily brew here.
5. Say hello to a ‘Pinterest for the design community’ thanks to Fab.com – If you are inspired by design you will go bananas for Fab.com. Other passionate community members track down great design-related products and then you can share or buy them depending on how much you love ‘em. Read how Fab had the best year ever in 2011, here.
That’s it for this week, stay warm!
TechCrunch UK
Mike Butcher | February 8, 2012 | View the article here
I love it when a startup I’ve been covering for literally years suddenly finds itself in the spotlight, and for the right reasons. In this case, Skimlinks, originally from London but now with a growing US base, has been revealed as powering the affiliate links behind Pinterest, one of the hottest startups on the map right now. For some that appears to be a little bit of scandal, at least for Pinterest, though not for Skimlinks.
LLSocial uncovered the practice, whereby if a post on Pinterest happens to link to a commerce site with an affiliate program, Pinterest uses Skimlinks – a third party service – to modifiy the link to add their own affiliate tracking code. Anyone making a purchase from that click through sends affiliate revenue, via Skimlinks, back to Pinterest. Kerching, everyone benefits.
This is very old news in the word of affiliate schemes. What is getting some people hot under the collar is that Pinterest hasn’t made this very explicit. And fair enough, they should, though I seriously doubt it would send their users running elsewhere, and – as BetaBeat candidly points out – most users would simply shrug and carry on. After all, on free services, we are the product, right?
What is more interesting is the effect this will have on Skimlinks. This could be the moment – which I for one have been waiting for – when people realise just how powerful Skimlinks’ business model could be. It puts a great deal more power and control in the hands of traditional content generators, but when applied to a social network where users are creating the content by the bucketload it could be very, very powerful.
With clones of Pinterest proliferating all over the planet, suddenly Skimlinks could be sitting on a goldmine, and that is good news for its investors.
Skimlinks has so far raised a modest $7 million, the latest from Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments late last year which put in $4.5m. Dave McClure of startup accelerator 500 Startups also participated. Other early investors include Angel investor Alex Hoye, Sussex Place Ventures, NESTA Investments and TAG.
Skimlinks’ main competitor is Google-backed VigLink, although VigLink hasn’t iterated as fast as Skimlinks, which has formed much deeper relationships with publishers a lot faster.
With offices in London, New York and San Francisco, Skimlinks is in most of the right places to talk to media owners and – increasingly – the startups that will be watching the Pinterest model with interest.
No doubt this new Pinterest story will mean Skimlinks’ phones will now start ringing off the hook.
The other slight hilarity is that – shock horror – Pinterest is actually making money on its Betabecause of its relationship with Skimlinks – that is news on its own.
That Skimlinks could well be a monetization engine behind new social platforms is, for my money, the real news.
Affiliate Voices
Greg Hoffman | January 24, 2012 | Listen Here
I love Skimlinks. I’m happy to say we work very well with Skimlinks in every one of our affiliate programs. We especially like the fact that Jenny Williams is readily accessible to discuss any issues that might come up with sales. I was at first a bit skeptical about the technology because I was worried affiliates I did not like would use skimlinks to steal the low hanging fruit sales from my programs. But that never happened. During the fall of 2011, Kim Salvino, recently crowned Pinnacle Award Winner for Affiliate Manager of the Year at buy.at, introduced me to Jenny from Skimlinks. We’ve found times to talk via Skype while she lives in London and we are on east coast time in the US.
If you have any questions about what Skimlinks is and how to best work with them, please listen to this podcast and then follow up with questions directly to Jenny. She is ready to hear from you.
Here’s some more info on Skimlinks:
Affiliate marketing becoming all work and no pay? Let SkimLinks affiliate your links – so you don’t have to!
- You add normal links to your content and we’ll convert them on-click.
- No affiliate links to create or manage – we do the work for you.
- No more network sign ups and approvals – get instant access to 17,000 affiliate programs.
- Our centralized reporting makes it easy to see which retailers your readers love.
- Our scale allows us to negotiate better commission rates for you.
Jenny was at Affiliate Summit West this month but with more than 5,000 people in attendance, we couldn’t find each other. Hopefully we’ll meet at Affiliate Summit East.
