If you are already an affiliate you may be thinking “why would I give Skimlinks a share of my commission when I do affiliate stuff myself already“?  Here are 10 reasons why you should, or if you’re in a hurry skip to #1.

Broken links look amateur – affiliate networks can pause programs, change and expire their links, so if you don’t update immediately you’re going to look silly for having broken links. Skimlinks automatically reflects any changes to any program across all networks, so if an affiliate link doesn’t work, we don’t convert the regular link into one until the affiliate link is restored.

Get paid sooner - don’t wait until you reach the minimum threshold for payments across many affiliate networks, your combined balance will be paid out monthly, and on time. Skimlinks uses a separate escrow account for affiliate commissions, so your money will always be safe.

Have more time to focus on other fun things – by outsourcing your affiliate link management, it leaves you more time to dedicate to SEO, design, content, PPC and community management, things that make you unique and stand out from the crowd. Let Skimlinks manage the commodity task of creating and maintaining affiliate links.

No need to mask – affiliates often use link masking, or redirect scripts so visitors are not looking at ugly affiliate links in their status bar. Skimlinks’s solution doesn’t require link masking, you just link to a product/service with a normal <a href=”… >  link.

Just one line of code… – you can enable your entire site in minutes, and publishers often discover we are enabling affiliate links they didn’t know about that were already in their content. Manually crafting affiliate links is generally painful, but painful doesn’t mean its necessary does it?

100% deeplink friendly  – Deeplinking directly to a product instead of the homepage/landing page is proven to bring better conversion rates. As you know some networks/merchants don’t support deeplinking, but Skimlinks has a solution in place to make deeplinking work for 100% of links.

Less Excel hell – if you are consolidating lots of reports from your affiliate programs you are definitely spending lots of time in front of Excel or Openoffice. Skimlinks offers comprehensive reports showing your earnings across networks, merchants and date ranges.

No more apply now clicking – instead of filling out applications to umpteen affiliate networks and then clicking the apply button to 1000s of merchants, just do it once via Skimlinks and you’ll have access to 16 networks and 6,000+ merchants worldwide.

Its all about integrity – Skimlinks is not a contextual service, we want you to maintain editorial integrity and convert only links that you create. Contextual services can be problematic, adding links that are out of context, and interrupting the user experience. Keep your visitors happy, link out, and earn some money.

Earn more compared to doing it yourself – this is the killer – we’ve negotiated higher tiers with the affiliate networks and merchants so you’ll probably earn more using Skimlinks than doing it via your own account – so you could earn over 100% of the affiliate commission.

We also have a raft of exciting upcoming features that affiliates will be interested in, especially around tracking what your outbound affiliate links / visitors are doing.

If you are an an existing affiliate, how do you think Skimlinks can help your job? Or why would you prefer to do it yourself?

Signup today at http://skimlinks.com/register.

I am pleased to announce that we completed our major seed funding deal this week.

It was led by John Brimacombe from Sussex Place Ventures. We met John 10 months ago, while we were still focused on our social decision-making site Skimbit.com. By the time we had evolved to working on Skimlinks, he knew our team, technology and plans thoroughly, he believed in what we were trying to achieve, and was best placed to be our investor.

We were then lucky enough to be joined by Robin Klein from The Accelerator Group. As one of the most respected investors in the UK, and with his knowledge of advertising, blogging and software as a service startups, he is a welcome and very valued addition to Skimbit.

There has been a lot of media attention about the government’s role in supporting innovation, and much encouragement of government funding bodies to pour their money into the economy. So, we are honoured that another party to the funding round is NESTA – the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. NESTA have been an active and supportive part of the startup and innovation community here in London, and we are excited to have them onboard.

We also have the fabulous Angels who also participated in our funding round. Duncan Jennings from eConversions – a well-known and respected super-affiliate known for sites like VoucherCodes.co.uk and my old favourite welovelocal.com. Max Niederhofer, a partner at Atlas Ventures, with incredible industry contacts and insights; Adrian Weller and Tomaz Slivnik who are behind many other well-known and successful startups… and of course, my Chairman, Alex Hoye, now CEO of search marketing great, Latitude, who has also been Skimbit’s advisor and mentor for almost a year.

And of course, I must also mention and thank here the many friends who were Skimbit’s ‘friends & family’ funding up until now. It is due to their belief and dedication that Skimbit is now here, a well-funded and supported company that is growing rapidly in the midst of an economic crisis.

You can read about our funding announcement at TechCrunch, BrandRepublic, and the Affiliates4u blog.

Many of our clients ask us what they can expect to earn via Skimlinks. It varies in so many ways, but we are starting to build a picture of what different types of publishers should expect from our service.

What type of site?

Firstly, the best performing sites are forums, by a long stretch. Forums generate a greater sense of community and interactivity, and as the content is generated by users for other users, carries a higher degree of authenticity than editorial content. Also, the people reading forums tend to be closer to a purchase decision, and are more likely to click on outbound links.

For example, one of our clients achieves conversion rates of over 7% on their forum. They also have an enormously high rate of users clicking on outbound links, up to 20% of users viewing a page click on an outbound link on that page. We are able to convert on average 10% of links into affiliate links. This means a good forum site can easily make thousands per month using Skimlinks.

On the other hand, blogs and content sites have a slightly lower conversion rate: 1-2% depending on the nature of the site. This is in line with industry average conversion rates, so is by no means a poor result, but does suggest that social media elements like forums can help boost earnings.

Average Commission?

We also get asked about things like average basket sizes and average commissions. This again varies based on the content of the publisher site: technology-oriented sites have a larger basket size, although fashion sites are not far behind. We are doing well also with car accessory sites, and eco-friendly products is a fast growing area for us. The average basket size is about £50, but we see examples from £40 to £75.

Average commission vary based on product type. Technology merchants and general stores have a lower rate: 2-4%, with niche stores and many fashion merchants at around 10%.

Great Merchants

We often get asked what our favourite merchants are: at the moment there are two:

• Love Honey has a great site and range of products, and pays great commissions
• Ebay (both the UK and US) have a fantastic program, both in terms of their rates of commission and the people that run the programs.

We heartily encourage all our merchants to think about incorporating these merchants into their sites, eg. “Weekly Ebay favourites” and for appropriate sites “Best female toy of the week”

That is generally the best we can provide in terms of figures, the rest depends on the publisher’s traffic levels and the propensity of their users to click through on outbound links. We can give further tips to interested publishers, just get in contact.

As you can tell, this is the first post we have done in many months. Although this is dreadful, we have good cause. Lots has been happening in Skimbit-land, quite fundamental changes, which I am pleased to announce here.

The story is well-known to some. I started Skimbit 2.5 years ago in Australia, inspired with the idea of creating a social decision-making tool that helped people collect ideas and make decisions, about things like organising holidays, or buying stuff. I launched this as skimbit.com

Then about a year after this, I came up with the idea of offering skimbit.com’s technology to other publisher’s, in the form of a white-label service. This we launched as Skim-in-a-box. We initially charged license fees, and later developed a clever way of monetising the user-generated content, which we applied across both skimbit.com and Skim-in-a-box.

However, although we loved both products, the climate was tough. Even though skimbit.com was a new and exciting concept when we started, there were now too many competing ‘social shopping’ sites, none of them doing particularly well. It was a crowded market, and I wasn’t convinced sticking to our current plan would yield different results, when things were only going to get tougher as the economy worsened.

In a moment of revelation, I realised that many other publishers would benefit from the monetisation technology we had built, and it seemed almost a waste to keep to ourselves the innovative technology we had spent 8 months building. The Skimbit team then worked hard to commercialise what had been an internal technology til then, while I went out and talked to well-known publishers. We were overwhelmed with the response.

We didn’t realise the extent to which publishers would value Skimlinks – for Skimlinks is what we called our newly launched technology. Publishers who had til now only focused on advertising as a source of revenue, and were finding this source starting to dry up, were keen for incremental revenue streams. However, with a worsening economy, anything which required investment, resource or time was not an option. Many publishers realised they could earn revenues through affiliate marketing, but forays into this revenue source left publishers frustrated, confused and overwhelmed. Affiliate networks are fragmented, there are many merchants, each with different deeplinking syntax (or no deeplinking capability at all), and it takes considerable time to create and maintain affiliate links.

So a solution like Skimlinks was warmly welcomed by publishers. We offered them a solution that meant they didn’t have to change any of their internal processes, and leveraged their community, influence and content without compromising integrity. All of this without spending a cent or requiring any additional technical or administrative effort. Within a few weeks, we signed up some of the most well-known publishers in the UK and US: T3.com, TechRadar.com, Channel4.com, Internet Brands, CatwalkQueen.tv, ShinyShiny.tv, Daily Mail, and many more.

Unsurprisingly, we made the decision to focus our business entirely on Skimlinks. It was a big yet simple decision: I had an emotional attachment of skimbit.com as I had spent the last 2 years of my life working on it, but being in business means identifying market opportunities and reacting to them swiftly, and we knew Skimlinks was what the market wanted.

So, we write this post now, to fill you in on what we have been doing for the past few months. We have been busy, but thrilled to be involved in a business the whole team passionately believes in. skimbit.com was fun, but Skimlinks is truly helpful to the publishers we work with: incremental revenue, helpful reporting, and proactive service. We are innovating constantly, so be prepared to see more valuable products that build on the patent-pending Skimlinks technology.

Welcome – officially – to Skimlinks! Here we will continue to write about developments in Skimlinks, and about the Skimbit team. I promise I won’t take as long to write again next time!