SocialMedia.biz

JD Lasica   |   August 5th, 2009   |   view article


It has been one month since the Traveling Geeks kicked off our trip to London and Cambridge with a Tweetup at JuJu in Chelsea. (I was the chief organizer of trip.) From this distance and vantage point, here are a few random impressions:

SeedCamp was a high point of the trip to many of us, and apart from the well-done, compact presentations, it was fascinating to watch tomorrow’s young business leaders mingle with each other and exchange ideas and contact information. Cross-pollination at its best. Spotify, Huddle, Skimlinks, Zemanta — these are names that may grow into notable consumer brands in the coming years, and Moo arguably already has. (Here’s my writeup; and here’s my video interview with Skimlinks founder Alicia Navarro.)

Down the Avenue

Renee Blodgett   |   August 1st, 2009   |   view article


I spent a day at London’s Seedcamp earlier this month, where I met with a number of England and France-based startups, some of which have a presence in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world.

Skimlinks founder Alicia Navarro wants to make affiliate marketing easy for publishers by aggregating every affiliate program in the world, and today, that is across 19 networks and 11,000 retailers.
“There are a number of problems associated with traditional affiliate marketing,” se says, “largely that it’s frankly just to difficult to implement for large or non-tech savvy publishers and editors.”
She adds, “affiliate links can also look suspicious to end users and there are issues with non-deeplinking merchants and maintaining links in older content is cumbersome.”

Tech Crunch

Milo Yiannopoulos   |    July 31st, 2009   |   view article

There’s something in the water of Web 2.0 that makes every semi-successful start-up desperate to “give something back” before they’ve really “got” anything themselves. In the good old days, corporate social responsibility was a pricey but worthwhile PR investment; now, having social conscience seems to be part of the job description for aspiring tech entrepreneurs.

So it is with Skimbit’s Alicia Navarro, whose affiliate sales product Skimlinks has been mopping up at awards ceremonies this year.

Jack Mackey

Jack Mackey   |   July 29th, 2009   |  view article


Heard of Skimlinks? If not then where have you been? In a very small nutshell Skimlinks is a really simple bit of code that you can pop into your website and every time you type a URL they have logged in their backend, it’s converted into a monetized affiliate link. The URL rewrite is automatic and not noticeable to the user, its SEO friendly as it masks the link from the big G, and its a really nice way to monetize what would have been free direct to merchant links.
I’m a big fan and think its really opened the UK affiliate industry up to a lot more content based sites who wouldn’t normally go down the CPA route, so I’m chuffed to bits. Plus they seem to be kicking arse lately and winning all types of awards, just check out the accolades on their site.

Traveling Geeks

Susan Bratton   |   20th July, 2009   |   view article


On my Traveling Geeks blogger junket to the UK earlier this month, one of the most impressive start ups I met was a company called Skimlinks. Founder Alicia Navarro’s business model is solid and she provides a real value to publishers and content creators who want to easily include affiliate links on their site. Here’s an interview Alicia and I did as a wrap up for you.

Tell me a little about yourself and how you founded SkimLinks.
I have always yearned to run my own business, and had studied IT and worked in internet application product management in order to learn what I needed to achieve this. While in an interview for a job at Google that I didn’t want, I was asked to come up with a product idea. I started talking about a social decision-making tool, and I loved the idea so much I started Skimbit the next day. Skimbit didn’t do amazingly well on its own, and went through a few iterations, and during this process we came up with a way to reverse engineer affiliate marketing links from user-generated content. This technology became so popular we decided to change our business strategy and focus exclusively on this and other technologies that helped publishers monetise their content. Thus Skimlinks was born!

Note from Susan: The sign of a good entrepreneur is one who alters their business model until they find the right set of offerings and revenue. Alicia is proving she can do this.