UTalkMarketing.com

March 10th, 2010  |  view entire article
Publishers are faced with an ever growing challenge as print sales slip and readers largely reluctant to pay for content online.
Sure they could start simply churning out advertorial. That would surely keep the advertisers happy, but where’s the editorial credibility or ethics?
A new tool could well be the much sought after holy grail offering to monetise content both ‘seamlessly’ and ‘ethically’.
It comes from Skimlinks, a content monetisation service that we picked up on UTalkMarketing some time ago, and now operating on more than a half million sites – blogs, newspapers, content networks and forums – worldwide.

VentureBeat

Camille Ricketts  |  March 9th, 2010  |  view entire article

SkimKit, an affiliate marketing tool made my Skimbit, aggregates products from a network of merchants, allowing users to discover new products they may haven’t otherwise.

dotCOMreport

March 9th, 2010  |  view entire article

Skimlinks is a service that turns an ordinary link to a product into an “affiliate marketing link” that generates revenue. This UK startup wants to revolutionize the affiliate model by giving publishers access to affiliate programs of thousands of merchants from a number of affiliate networks. Each time a user clicks through and makes a purchase, the website earns a commission from the retailer. With Skimlinks, a publisher can decide which links should be affiliate ones or not. The publisher earns money from content via affiliate fees and Skimlinks takes a 25% cut of the commissions.

The startup is introducing a clever discovery tool for publishers to search for affiliate links by keyword. The new desktop tool, called a Skimkit, is powered by Adobe AIR and is basically a live searchable database of millions of products from Skimlinks merchants.

CenterNetworks

Allen Stern  |  March 9th, 2010  |  view entire article

Last week London-based Skimlinks launched the SkimKit, a tool that helps publishers find products that have affiliate opportunities attached. Martin Bryant from Next Web has a good overview from the launch of the SkimKit service.

This morning I met with Skimlinks founder and CEO Alicia Navarro in NYC to learn more about her service and the new SkimKit launch. It was a great conversation because it combined a product demo/pitch with a good industry discussion.

We’ve covered Skimlinks several times before but if you are new to the service, here’s a simple description from my earlier post. Skimlinks provides a way to instantly turn all of your product links into affiliate links with no changes to individual content. You add one line of Javascript to your template and then, where Skimlinks has a relationship, the links automatically become affiliate links.

5 Star Affiliate Programs

Linda Buquet  |  March 5th, 2010  | view entire article

Some of you may know about Skimlinks, a cool tool for bloggers and publishers that want to spend their time on content and don’t want to (or know how to) work as hard on the monetization side of things. If you are a publisher that doesn’t want to deal with joining and logging into multiple networks to find, create and maintain lots of different affiliate links, this may be something you want to take a look at.

Skimlinks makes it easy and automatic to add affiliate links to content. You don’t have to join any affiliate networks and Skimlinks does most of the work for you, for a percentage of the commissions.

Skimlinks just launched SkimKit, a new editorial research tool.

Journalism.co.uk

Laura Oliver | March 5th, 2010 |  view entire article

UK start-up Skimlinks has developed a new tool to help US and UK publishers make better use of affiliate marketing on their websites.

The new desktop application powered by Adobe Air, SkimKit, will provide publishers and bloggers with a searchable database of products with an affiliate link and image that they can include as part of an article about that item. The tool will be free to existing Skimlinks customers.

The development is intended to make adding affiliate marketing links more efficient, as Skimlinks’ existing service requires publishers to search for links to relevant products and retrieve links and images from the merchant’s site.

DotPonto.com

Steve Masters   |   March 4th, 2010   |   view entire article

Most small website owners will know about affiliate networks. Promoted as a great way to make money, because you promote products of big brand retailers and other businesses and get paid if people follow your links and complete a sale.

There are many affiliate-based websites that make a good living out of just earning commission on a mass of products that are promoted using feeds from affiliate networks like Trade Doubler, Affiliate Window or Commission Junction. Not all website owners are resourced enough, though, to capitalise on XML product feeds and Google Adwords budgets to bring in the audience. For bloggers, hobby site owners and small businesses, earning affiliate revenue is often a painstaking, time consuming affair…
….There is a neat solution for such webmasters in the name of Skimlinks. I’ve been working with Skimlinks on a client site for several months, and it works very well. Instead of signing up to hundreds of affiliate programmes individually and managing these and trying to keep track on sales, Skimlinks gives you a couple of bits of code which sit at the top level of the site. This turns outbound links into redirects, so instead of having to individually link to a retailer using an affiliate code, Skimlinks tracks it all for you.

ZDNet

Sam Diaz   |   March 4th, 2010   |   view entire article

As a career journalist, I have to admit that I was a bit squeamish when I first heard about Skimlinks, a service that turns an ordinary link to a product I might be writing about into an “affiliate marketing link” that generates revenue for my site.

After all, I’m sort of old school when it comes to those sort of things. I came from the side of the business that wouldn’t be compromised by worrying about bringing money into the site. To insert a link for the sake of bringing in a few coins just makes me feel like I’ve compromised myself and my readers.

Recognizing that, Skimlinks has come up with a system that brings dozens of affiliate marketing programs, including Google’s AdSense, into a site by automating the links to a product that a publisher might place in the content anyway. With the process running in the background, the publisher of the content can write freely, without worrying that he has somehow compromised his credibility for a percentage of a sale of a digital camera.

The Next Web

Martin Bryant |   March 4th, 2010   |   view entire article

Affiliate marketing has something of bad reputation.

Linking to products in online stores in return for a cut of the profits is seen as easy money, so there’s no surprise that it attracts “lowest common denominator” types. However, it’s worth noting that some of the world’s largest publishers use affliliate links to boost their revenue.

Skimlinks is a service that makes affiliate marketing a little less ‘ugly’ by getting rid of the long URLs that often put users off clicking links. The fact that the publisher is getting a cut from sales of the product they’re linking to is completely invisible, as a Skimlinks URL looks just like a normal non-affiliate link.

TechCrunch.com

Leena Rao   |   March 4th, 2010   |   view full article

U.K. startup Skimlinks is hoping to revolutionize the affiliate model by turning normal product links into affiliate links. The startup gives publishers access to affiliate programs of thousands of merchants across a number of affiliate networks. Each time a user clicks through and makes a purchase, the website earns a commission from the retailer. With Skimlinks, a publisher can set which links should be affiliate ones or not. The publishers makes money from content via affiliate fees and Skimlinks takes a 25% cut of the commissions. Today, the startup is launching a nifty discovery tool for publishers to search for affiliate links by keyword.

The desktop tool, called a Skimkit, is powered by Adobe AIR and is essentially a live searchable database of millions of products from Skimlinks merchants. The tool lets publishers research, find and link to products they are writing about, with immediate access to deeplinks and image URLs.