I have been linking to all sorts of sites for many years with my blogs. Sometimes there are affiliate links and other times they are direct links – no rhyme or reason to it, I just don’t think about it sometimes, but I’d prefer that they were all affiliate links.
But how to retroactively remedy the situation? After all, I’ve got nearly 3,000 posts, dating back to early 2004, on this blog alone.
One solution is Skimlinks, where you paste a snippet of code to your site, and they can then convert your existing links to affiliate links for you.
I caught up with Joe Stepniewski, Co-founder of Skimlinks, at SXSWi, and he elaborated, “Skimlinks is an innovative technology that lets publishers monetize their content via affiliate marketing in a simple and user-friendly way. It aggregates the affiliate programs of 16 affiliate networks and over 8000 merchant programs, and automates the creation and maintenance of affiliate links by converting normal, existing links within publisher’s content into their equivalent affiliate link, on-the-fly when clicked.”
It’s a pretty seamless process, as the new links through Skimlinks are independent of other affiliate relationships you may already have going on.
Per their site on how affiliates get paid with Skimlinks…
We keep a small portion of the commissions paid to us by the networks. We retain between 15-25% of network/merchant payments, depending on the revenues you generate. And because of our scale and the deals we negotiate, it means you can earn up to 110% of what you would have earned if you did it yourself. Its free to sign-up and to use Skimlinks reporting services, and we only get paid when you make money.
More details at http://skimlinks.com/.