Blog

10 reasons why affiliates should use Skimlinks

Posted by Joe on February 27, 2009 in Best Practices

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.