Our amazing merchant manager, Jenny Williams, was interviewed recently on “Affiliate Voices: Conversations With Top Performers” about all things Skimlinks. On the podcast she explains how Team Skimlinks only works with high quality publishers and merchants, negotiates better commission rates for its publishers, and delivers superior results (along with brilliant customer service) to all of its clients!

Greg Hoffman - who runs the Affiliate Voices program – sets the stage for the podcast by posting: “I love Skimlinks. I’m happy to say we work very well with Skimlinks in every one of our affiliate programs.”

You can find the full post and listen to the podcast on the Affiliate Voices website here:

http://www.affiliatevoices.com/2012/01/affiliate-voices-podcast-24-with-skimlinks/

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About Jenny Williams

What Charity Donations and Business to Business (B2B) Purchase Decisions Have in Common

It’s always nice to know where your money or time investment is going. When you consider purchasing an e-mail automation program for your business, you want to know what the thousands of dollars and man/woman hours you might spend will go towards. A similar phenomenon takes place when you consider donating to a charity; you want to know what impact it is going to have. Good salesman know to highlight the benefits of the product they are selling and explain why it’s worth the money – they manage to show the value to the client. However, charitable organizations don’t often have full blown sales teams, which is why they need to rely on other means to convince people that the money they spend is going to used wisely.

In marketing a charity, much like in marketing a B2B solution – there is no silver bullet to closing a sale; and there are parallels in the purchaser/donor’s thought process. You have to move people through the different buying phases in the traditional B2B cycle: awareness –> consideration –> purchase. People need to be made aware of your service and the opportunity it offers –> begin to view your platform as the right choice –> decide it’s time to invest their time, money and energy.

This past holiday season, Team Skimlinks wanted to do something special to thank all of our fabulous partners. As a team, we thought the best way to express our gratitude would be to give to those in need, on behalf of the publishers and merchants we work with (we’ve entered the awareness stage of giving). We ultimately chose UNICEF, whose vision is “to build a world where every child can grow up healthy, protected from harm and educated, so they can reach their full potential.” While we loved the vision (put us in strong consideration mode) – we were ultimately sold when we were given something tangible to hold onto: the ability to see exactly what impact our gift would have via UNICEF Inspired Gifts (purchase mode). Our gift went to the purchase of child survival kits, and school-in-a-box kits; which we recently heard have been deployed and used around the world. When it’s clear what you are getting in return – you are more likely to invest.

There a few behavioral marketing principles that if called upon, can help guide people through those phases, ultimately leading them to ‘convert.’ I’ve outlined a few below which seem to apply to both charities and B2B sales:

• Impact – make it clear what the money is going towards.
• Incite Emotion – If you make it clear what the impact of a purchase is, you should be able to incite emotion (fear, anger and laughter are the 3 human emotions found to most likely lead to some sort of action online).
• Recognition – make it easy for the buyer to get props for what he or she has done.
• Reward – does the decision maker get something special for deciding to work with you?
• Personalize – it’s always nice to have a closer connection with the company or charity you might be working with. After all, people buy from people.
• Make it easy! – this is the age of busy. People are ridiculously busy already, and are justifiably  scared of things that sound complicated and require lots of work.

You could say that this whole blog post comes down to what is in my mind the #1 marketing principle of all – Figure out what audience you are trying to reach, figure out what matters the most to them – and showcase the specific product benefits that will resonate with that group, over listing features you can offer.

We hope you all had a terrific holiday season, and are hitting full stride in 2012 – thanks again from the entire team at Skimlinks!

Have any high quality charities you’d recommend? Marketing tips? Share your thoughts! And, if you are looking for a fun way to motivate your friends to donate to a good cause, consider checking out Causes.com (who seem to apply a lot of the above marketing principles to their site and Facebook app!).

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About the author

Aaron Weissman is Director of Marketing at Skimlinks, where he leverages his expertise in brand and PR management, online advertising, customer acquisition strategy, and other marketing channels to help spread the word about Skimlinks and its superior content monetization technology. Prior to joining Skimlinks, Aaron served as a Product Marketing Manager at Google, where he spent time managing the Google brand and Doodle program worldwide, as well as creating branding and online marketing campaigns for Google Maps. When not behind a computer, Aaron can either be found on the basketball court or at the espresso machine.

About Aaron Weissman

17,500+ Merchants Worldwide (and growing!)
Skimlinks belongs to over 17,500 Merchant programs around the world, and we join more every day. That’s a lot of online stores and services for you to pick from! From the big names like Amazon and eBay to the niche stores with unique products you can’t find anywhere else (like Invitation in a Bottle or The Popes Cologne), we make it easy to get rewarded for the variety of product sales you drive. Check out all of our merchants in the Merchant Look-up in your Skimlinks Publisher interface.

Better Commissions
Skimlinks receives top tier commission rates from our Merchants, which we pass on to our publishers, so that you earn more.

Preferred Partners Reward You Even More
We work closely with select Merchants to get even higher commission rates for you! These Preferred Partners want to reward Skimlinks Publishers because of the great traffic you send them. We have over 100 Preferred Partners and continue to bring more on board. You’ll see them in your Merchant Look-up and can find them at the top of your category searches as well.

Sign up for ‘The Scoop!’
Have you seen our new Merchant blog/newsletter, The Scoop? We update it regularly with offers from our Skimlinks Merchants, highlights of our Preferred Partners, and announcements of new Skimlinks Merchants we’ve brought on board. Stay a step ahead of the game and get a weekly digest of The Scoop delivered straight to your inbox by subscribing on the The Scoop homepage! You can also get the freshest info on Twitter by following @SkimlinksScoop.

We’re always happy to hear your feedback about Skimlinks Merchants, and if there are any Merchants you’d like to see with Skimlinks, just let us know at merchants@skimlinks.com.

Jenny,

Skimlinks Merchant Manager

That’s a ton of money. As online publishers, forum owners, writers and advertisers, we’d all love to earn our slice of the pie for the role we play in generating purchase intent. So to drive home just how crazy the holiday spending spree is, and to help you in the quest to capitalize, we’ve put together a beautiful wintery infographic with our top five suggestions on how to monetize your content.

Please share with your friends and co-workers on all of your favorite social media channels; or if your old school, tell them about it in person. As incentive, we are going to give out a $200 Nordstrom (or John Lewis) Giftcard to one lucky person who links to skimlinks.com/blackfriday in a tweet. Do it.

Happy Holidays from your friends at Skimlinks!

Today, SkimWords has become the first real-time, fully automated content monetization solution to feature in-text product and price comparison across multiple verticals, improving the users’ online shopping experience, and increasing our publishers’ revenue.

Since our acquisition of AtmaLinks, we’ve been working to combine our technologies to create SkimWords 2.0 – offering unparalleled accuracy and speed as it analyzes page content to recognize product references and deliver in-text affiliate links, and optionally show product and price comparison information, all in real-time.

As a result, the new version of SkimWords helps:

• publishers to earn incremental revenues,
• consumers to discover new products, gain valuable product information and be directed to the optimal retail site to make their purchases, and
• advertisers to receive highly qualified traffic.

It’s a win, win, win!

The new version offers coverage of consumer electronics, fashion, beauty, automotive and lifestyle categories (more categories coming soon, watch this space), and is available to all Skimlinks publishers. You can switch SkimWords on if you log in and check the settings page.

Note: the product and price comparison flyover is not enabled by default, so you must turn it on via your Settings page.

If you’re not already a Skimlinks publisher, you can look at getting started or just sign up now to get access to SkimWords (not to mention all of our other content monetization tools) and start earning from all the opportunities you could be missing in your content!

We’ve just lowered our payment threshold to $10/£7.

What’s a payment threshold? Well, it means your total commissions cleared in a month have to reach, or exceed the figure we set to qualify to receive a payment. If you don’t reach the magic number, your earned commissions just roll over into the next month.

Up until yesterday, our payment threshold sat at $50/£35, but as of today, September 1st, it’s even easier to qualify for some cash. You’ll just need to reach $10/£7 worth of cleared commissions in your account, to get paid at the end of the month (whatever your final figure for the month may be).

Just don’t spend all that dough in one place!

And one other thing – Skimlinks is now going to cover the cost of transferring the commissions to the publisher (although some banks may charge additional fees for receiving bank transfers). That’s an even better deal for you!

If you have any questions about these changes to our payments, contact us today, or if you want to get in on all this earning – why not join us?

We’ve recently bulked up our Twitter and Facebook profiles with more great, regular content, while working to create more, interesting posts right here on the blog. And, just so we can get every platform well and truly covered, today, we’re kicking off a new vlog series on our YouTube channel; dubbed The Skim!

We’ll ‘skim through’ (get it?) the biggest news to find the stuff that matters to you – with action points and top take aways, in easy to consume video bites, hosted by me, Skimlinks’ Marketing Director Hannah Keys.

The Skim will cover all things internet – online publishing, monetization and affiliate marketing (for both affiliates and merchants) – if it’s relevant to you, we’ll deliver it. Look out for special tips and tricks for using Skimlinks in the mix too!

You can count on us to cut out the boring stuff, and give you what you need to know.

Check out our first video, a quick recap of yesterday’s blog post on the psychology of sharing online content – we’d love to hear what you think!

Atma Links is a company based out of New York City with co-founders, Chris Dickson and Erik Nygren working together over the past two years to build some really ground-breaking technology for in-text product linking and price comparison.

We’ve kept a close eye on Atma Links – during the last year, we’ve been very focused on our product SkimWords, and when Atma launched their solution, we couldn’t help but be really impressed at what they had achieved. They had tackled the problem of monetizing content, and taken a novel approach to addressing it.

We realized that our solutions were very complementary to each other, and that there was huge potential to benefit all our customers if we integrated their solution into our platform.

We met with Chris and Erik and found that, not only were they great technologists, but they were genuine, clever guys, who shared our passion for innovation.

It didn’t take long for us all to come to the conclusion that by joining forces, we could all see our vision come to fruition: a first-of-its-kind, real-time, fully-automated, multi-vertical, highly-configurable, relevant and non-intrusive solution for in-text content monetization… that’s quite a mouthful, but it’s what brought us all to the table, and led to us make the deal happen!

Chris and Erik will be joining the Skimlinks team, and together we are really pumped to launch the new combined SkimWords product, as well as a series of other improvements to EveryFeed and lots more. Watch this space!

It’s an exciting move for the industry: affiliate marketing and content monetization seems to be heating up lately, with more sophistication, more players, and more new solutions coming out, as it becomes more mainstream. It is clearly driven by a real market need for solutions that are accurate, cover many verticals, and work at scale, and I’m delighted to be able to announce today that this is what our acquisition of Atma Links will mean we can achieve.

And who wouldn’t want to call a moustache like that part of the family?

For further information on the acquisition, check out the press release, or give us a call, and we look forward to letting you all in on our new and improved products soon.

Alicia Navarro
CEO and Co-founder
Skimlinks

Our service is now being offered directly to their entire user base (that’s over 70,000 forums!) and is available as of right now.

Skimlinks can be activated directly through vBulletin’s core software for all vBulletin Version 4.1.2 users, and as a plugin downloadable from vBulletin’s Members’ area for all legacy users.

The vBulletin integration also offers an extensive degree of control for forum owners as to how Skimlinks can be implemented, to best suit the characteristics and sensitivities of each individual forum. Existing vBulletin Skimlinks users can upgrade to the new plugin, to take advantage of all the new fuctionality available too.

And if you’re already a vBulletin customer and want to get in on the action, you’ll find everything you need to get started in the vBulletin members section with more information on their blog, or you can apply to Skimlinks here, to have access to the plugin.

For our full announcement, check out the press release.

Now, all Skimlinks publishers can access SkimWords, which automatically converts product references and keywords in content into monetized links.

SkimWords opens a seamless new revenue stream for all kinds of publishers, without requiring extra effort, or any taking up any extra space.
Beta publishers have seen an impressive uplift in clickthroughs, and increases of up to 300% on their Skimlinks revenues.

As SkimWords is released from Beta today, a range of new implementation options are also revealed. We now offer a SkimWords solution for every kind of site, from the most sensitive, to those looking for the maximum revenue potential from their content.

If you are already a Skimlinks publisher, you can check out the new SkimWords options in the publisher interface. If not, check out more information here, or sign up to get access to try SkimWords for yourself!