So you’ve been approved as a Skimlinks publisher (hooray!) and don’t know what to do next? No worries!  We’ve asked one our fabulous publishers, Sian Meades, of DomesticSluttery.com to create a quick Skimlinks guide for you based on her experience.

How do I use Skimlinks on my site?

* Install the code on your site as instructed on your interface.  I was able to do it at 4am in an airport with no sleep.  It’s that easy!
* Include links to the products and websites you’re talking about.  If the link belongs to one of their 8500+ merchants, and a user clicks on it, Skimlinks will automatically turn it into an affiliate link on the fly and you will get a commission if the user makes a purchase
* Throw in a widget featuring a link to a great deal or something you really love to increase your conversion opportunities

How does Skimlinks work with Twitter?

* Create a Twitter account if you don’t have one already
* Tweet out links to your blog so your audience will come to your blog and click on your links
* Use the URL shortener (within SkimKit) for product links and tweet those out with a brief description of what you’re promoting (see what I do with @SlutteryPicks)
* Check out more Twitter tips on the Skimlinks blog

Why should I use SkimKit?

* SkimKit will make your like easier, providing you with a searchable database of products that are guaranteed to have affiliate links

What secret tips about Skimlinks do you have?

* The best thing to do with Skimlinks is ignore it!  Just let it do its thing with the content you’re doing. You’ll get more of an insight a month in, when you can look at everything, rather than being sad that only five people clicked on your Amazon link!
* You only get a commission when someone makes a purchase after clicking on your affiliate links.  Just a click won’t get you paid, but by being under this model, you have a higher selection of merchants and will get a higher commission rate.

What do I do if I have a problem with Skimlinks?

* If you are having trouble with Skimlinks, the support is there for you.  You can email support@skimlinks.com or give them a call and someone will help you happily and quickly.

I’m a complete HTML idiot and must admit that Skimlinks is the least complicated part of our website and revenue.  To have something that’s earning me money while I just ignore is a delight and knowing that the support is there should I need it is even more reassuring.

Sian Meades is the founder and editor of the popular blog Domestic Sluttery and you can follow their tweets here: @DomesticSluts

by Alicia Navarro

Online journalism has become a vast grey area created by the blend of black and white extremes of objective content and commercially-driven content.  We all want to be confident that what we read online is in fact as authentic and objective as possible, but we also know that everyone needs to pay the bills, which means that online content is likely to somehow have a degree of commercial influence.  While users may at first be sceptical that monetised content can be trusted, it is in fact possible to be ethical in this grey area.  Monetised content can be authentic, and with honesty and disclosure, publishers can retain the trust of their users and still make money.

Online journalists are increasingly pressured to bend to commercial pressures as it’s these advertisers that pay their salaries. The newspaper business has been in sharp decline both in print and online, and with ad revenues severely down all-around, newspapers and editorial web sites need a new way to make money.  As a result, online journalists are increasingly encouraged to write sensational content that drives page impressions to their banner and text ads, or commercial content that encourages readers to purchase from advertisers’ sites.

The nature of editorial content has also evolved over the past few years, with professional journalism suffering in the face of citizen journalism and blogging, as well as a seismic shift towards social media and crowd-sourcing for obtaining news and information. In the United States, Facebook has become more popular than Google.  Additionally, a recent study by PRWeek/PR Newswire revealed that 52% of bloggers consider themselves journalists, but only 20% of them receive the majority of their income from it.

With decreased readerships, lowered perceived value of professional journalism, and a plethora of competing options, the ability to rely on just banner advertising is nearly impossible for most editorial sites. This leads to temptations to accept pay-per-post and other paid sponsorship deals, and putting pressure on them to find ways to monetise their content ethically.

Can these competing demands be balanced? Some would say no; that the second you are paid by someone you can no longer be objective about what you write about them. However, most journalists and editors I have met care deeply about their content, and how it is perceived by their readers. They work hard to write content that is true to their audience, but where appropriate, focus on retailers and advertisers that they do objectively like and with whom they have commercial relationships.

Affiliate marketing is a particularly effective way to approach this balance. Editors write about products and retailers they like, and as most prominent retailers have affiliate programs, sites can earn affiliate commissions without having to approach the process in the same explicit commercial way as pay-per-post can be. Also, affiliate marketing is publisher-led, rather than advertiser-led in the way that pay-per-post can be, so editors are still in complete control of whom they write about and what they write about them, making it significantly more possible that they can write objectively on the subject.

If editors ever do get too tempted to wax lyrical about an advertiser who is paying them, the most powerful policing technique will be applied to them: reader loyalty. Readers are the best judge of the authenticity of an editor’s voice and won’t return to a site if they feel the content is overly commercial in its nature. It’s better to be honest about a product and not earn an affiliate commission but keep the loyalty of the reader, than get a sale but never get the reader back again; and editors can take one more step to take to ensure complete transparency with readers, and this is to disclose how they monetize their site.

Disclosure is key to building a loyal readership. Besides being part of the FTC guidelines for blogs and editorial content, it is also good practise to be honest to your readers about where your income comes from and how this might influence your objectivity. There are some great examples of how disclosure can be done in a way that is honest but won’t scare your reader base– check out Scott Jangro’s disclosure statement and Shawn Collins’ on his affiliate marketing blog AffiliateTip.

What this boils down to is that editors and bloggers have to take responsibility for the integrity of their content and for finding a balance between writing objectively and writing commercially. It is possible to navigate this grey area between objectivity and subjectivity; and moreover, it is necessary if we want quality content written by professional journalists or talented bloggers, and we don’t want to pay cash to read it.

Alicia is Skimlinks’ CEO and Co-Founder and you can find her on Twitter: @alicianavarro

As an industry, affiliate marketing can occasionally get a bad rap for not being transparent with users. We believe there’s no reason why this can’t be a thing of the past if you follow some good practice and open communication principles. Whilst there are some poor websites out there that abuse affiliate marketing, there are also many content-rich editorial sites created by dedicated people who just want to make some money from what they love doing by using affiliate links.

This is a win-win-win marketplace, with publishers making money from content, merchants making more sales, and consumers getting honest recommendations and finding new products; but it’s important to be transparent as to how you make your daily bread.

As a leading player in the affiliate marketing space, we encourage all our publishers to comply with the FTC guidelines that state “the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.”

We recommend that you read through the FTC guidelines yourself to see how they apply to your site; however, to help you on the way, we’ve created some handy tools and tips to make disclosure easy for you.

Disclosure can be performed in a number of ways:

• Minimum: Disclosure text included in the ‘About us’ or ‘Privacy’ section of your site
• Recommended: A link in the footer or navigation bar to a dedicated disclosure page or acknowledgment of monetisation of links in each article

Skimlinks Disclosure Badges

Available to all Skimlinks publishers, to help you maintain an honest relationship with your users, we’ve created some smart Skimlinks badges that can be placed on your site and will disclose your use of Skimlinks technology in a small info pop-up.

These badges are also part of our new Referral Program helping Skimlinks publishers to comply with FTC guidelines while simultaneously rewarding you for referring other high quality content sites to Skimlinks.  We’ll have more on the Referral Program soon so keep your eyes on our blog, or register now and we’ll contact you when it is live.

Keen to get started?  Here are some websites using affiliate marketing with good examples of disclosure statements:

NPR.org explains their merchant relationships and that the links on their shopping site are affiliate links with the money they make helping to fund their service.  They also make contact information readily available to users.  On Jangro.com, Scott Jangro tells his users that his site uses advertising and some links within content that may earn him a commission, but that his content is not influenced by the advertisers or affiliate relationships.

What great disclosure examples have you seen?  We love seeing how publishers retain transparency with their users.  And if you have any questions about our Disclosure Badges or new Referral Program feel free to contact support@skimlinks.com.

Mark Macdonald is the Account Director at Skimlinks. You can follow him on Twitter here: @markofmac

The long Easter weekend has a reputation for being a popular time for home DIY, as professionals and amateurs alike bring out the hammer, paintbrush, and saw in an attempt to give their home a fresh look.  It’s also a great time to give your site a polish and see what you can do to improve it.  Here are 5 tips to help you spruce up your web and blog content, without the bruised fingers or paint marks.

1. Get organised– Categorizing all your blog posts is a great way to make it easier for your users to find old posts, and new users will have an easier time navigating through your site to find what they want.  Having organized content makes your site a place people will want to return to if they know they easily find what they are looking for.
2. Out with the old… – It’s important to let users comment freely on you posts, but every once in awhile nasty spam comments can appear.  Go through your posts and delete the spam to keep your blog clean.
3. Fix what’s broken– Links to products can often change without your knowledge, so when a user clicks on them, they don’t get to the product you’re talking about, and you lose both credibility and potential commission.  Have a trawl through your content, making sure all the links work, including images, and fix or delete ones that don’t.
4. Lighten-up– While having a lot of posts is certainly beneficial for search, the quality of your content remains king, and outdated irrelevant content brings that down.  If users are stuck filtering through posts about how everyone needs to buy a Furby for Christmas 2008, they won’t want to come back.
5. Do some shopping around – It’s a great time to start building up some ideas for future blog posts.  Search around for new interesting products and tools that might help your business and and save them so you have a little idea bank to refer to and use for inspiration.

And after all that heavy typing and clicking, you will definitely have earned some Easter chocolate treats!

For handy tips on cleaning up your social media life, check out this post on SocialMediaToday.

Recently, I gave a talk at the awesome Techcrunch Geek n Rolla event, which was a quickfire day of presentations and panels for London based entrepreneurs, with about 200 in attendance. Mark summarised some of the highlights from the day in the previous post.

My task, was to give startups some practical advice on how to generate revenues from an early stage – specifically looking at advertising and affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing can work well for early/mid stage startups

The slides from the presentation are below, but the main point I was trying to convey is that affiliate marketing is truly one of the best monetisation paths for a startup in 2009. (this is from our experience as a publisher working in-depth with all monetisation methods, not just because we promote an affiliate-based service!)

Why affiliate marketing?

The key indicators are there: CPM advertising is down 6%, and performance marketing up 6% (source: IAB 2008). eMarketer says that affiliate marketing is up 13% YoY compared to 9% for the whole of online advertising.

What does this mean for web publishers? The money is shifting towards affiliate marketing (search marketing is also on the up but harder to benefit from unless you are a search engine) which means:

• More quality merchants: brands are entering the affiilate space and although the recession has claimed some smaller merchants, all networks are reporting a net gain for merchant growth. Is there a new merchant in your niche that could be very relevant to your site? (Skimlinks publishers can search over 8,000 merchants who are all grouped into relevant categories)
• Bigger affiliate budgets: merchants have more resources, more creatives, more offers and incentives such as voucher codes and promotions in order to entice affiliates to promote their products and services. Nothing converts as well as an exclusive offer or promotion that you have been given by a merchant.
• Maturing of the industry: eConsultancy’s affiliate census revealed shortcomings in the industry such as lack of communication between affiliates and merchants. So affiliate networks are proactively taking steps to improve the lines of communication both online and offline. The IAB’s Affiliate Council meets quarterly to look at how issues in the industry can be overcome to create a better environment for affiliates, merchants and networks. As advertisers are focussing more and more on affiliate marketing, the support is also there for you.

What do startups need to do to benefit from affiliate marketing?

As a startup, you will probably not be experiencing the traffic volumes or have the reputation yet to make traditional advertising work. So how can web startups benefit from affiliate marketing straight away?

• Know your niche - find out what merchants operate in your niche/sector – you can either do this by signing up with affiliate networks and using their browse/search, or as mentioned, Skimlinks publishers can search/browse across many affiliate networks at once.
• Speak to the merchants/networks – from firsthand experience, merchants are incredibly interested in working with startups who are bringing a new approach to promoting their products/services compared to traditional publishers/bloggers. Merchants will be helpful and give you tools such as offers and voucher codes to help kickstart your affiliate commissions. Also speak to the affiliate networks who know which merchants will be suitable, or more open to work with.
• Use text links – text links have been reported by affiliates as the best converting links, so look to add affiliate links inline in your content, and do it with a neutral message (not overtly commercial). For example, link to a relevant product – if you are talking about web hosting in your content, can you add a link to a web-host’s deal? Can you refer to products and services in your newsletter or blog: available at…?
• Harness the technology – as a web startup, your advantage is technology, so can you use a merchant’s product feed or API to integrate affiliate links into your own data? Mashery are working with Bestbuy to offer the Bestbuy Remix where developers can create mashups, widgets and facebook applications, which are affiliate-enabled links.
• Monetise your user generated content – if you have a startup that has user generated content that contains links e.g. forums, blog comments, social networks – Skimlinks can help your monetise those links, and we have advice/guidelines on how to do it in an ethical way, so as not to upset your users.

Does your web startup have positive or negative experience with affiliate marketing?