Anyone used Skimlinks?

Alien · Mar 2, 2011

Just had a site approved for Skimlinks and going to try them out.

Anyone used them before?

rob · Mar 2, 2011

http://www.acorndomains.co.uk/affiliate-marketing/78222-skimlinks-review-love-heres-why.html

Alien · Mar 2, 2011

Cheers Rob, testing this out on 1 site first and a forum.

Do you get decent returns using them?

mrh · Mar 2, 2011

Its handy to build quick, but I don't think id recommend them.

They don't have a great deal of merchants and they take a lot of your commission.

Used them on a few sites, all I can work out is that its great for the merchant as they get free seo and great for people who own blogs etc that have tons of old content linking here and there as some of it could make money by just adding a bit of code. But I defi wouldn't build a site from outset purely for skimlinks

peter_w · Mar 2, 2011

Affiliate enabled clickthroughs:
1,913

Number of sales:
25

Earned commission:
£14.24

... In Summary - it's been fairly useless for me.

springer · Mar 3, 2011

So far this year:

Affiliate enabled clickthroughs:
628

Number of sales:
28

Earned commission:
£44.56

Not too bad. It is convenient on the site I use it on, where I don't post regular and it takes almost no time to write a post.

I would probably use my own affiliate links over Skimlinks on a site I dedicated more to.

SkimAlicia · Mar 4, 2011

mrh said:
Its handy to build quick, but I don't think id recommend them.

They don't have a great deal of merchants and they take a lot of your commission.

Used them on a few sites, all I can work out is that its great for the merchant as they get free seo and great for people who own blogs etc that have tons of old content linking here and there as some of it could make money by just adding a bit of code. But I defi wouldn't build a site from outset purely for skimlinks

We work with almost all merchants that have affiliate programs, and are adding new ones all the time. Please let us know if there is a merchant with an affiliate program you think we are missing.
And because of our scale and dedicated merchant team, we can negotiate higher commissions, so even with our cut, you can get as much as you would direct, with zero effort and no errors. If you look at how much time you spend signing up for programs, creating and testing links, updating them, aggregating results, etc... it is time you aren't spending on really valuable things like creating content or growing your community.

Hope that helps!
Alicia - Founder of Skimlinks

SkimAlicia · Mar 4, 2011

peter_w said:
Affiliate enabled clickthroughs:
1,913

Number of sales:
25

Earned commission:
£14.24

... In Summary - it's been fairly useless for me.

Looking at your stats, 25 sales out of 1,913 clickthroughs is within the scope of what is normal, ie. 1-3% conversion rate, higher for very product-centric forums.
The eCPC is quite low though, I presume the items sold were low-value ones? Skimlinks varies in how it performs for forums depending on how product-centric it is and the kind of merchants referenced in the content.
At least you would have interesting analytics on what people are clicking on to leave your site, has that been useful?

Alicia - Founder of Skimlinks

Brassneck · Mar 4, 2011

I've got the skimwords product on my www.catwalkfashion.co.uk blog which gets about 1000 visitors per day. Since November I have had about 150 click throughts earning 8p in total!

Stephen.

SkimAlicia · Mar 4, 2011

Brassneck said:
I've got the skimwords product on my www.catwalkfashion.co.uk blog which gets about 1000 visitors per day. Since November I have had about 150 click throughts earning 8p in total!

Stephen.

Our SkimWords product performs particularly well for consumer electronics, it is not yet as strong as it could be on fashion. But we'll get there! I'm really keen to extend to the fashion vertical very shortly, bear with us if you can, and in the meantime, I hope the SkimLinks product is working out better?

Brassneck · Mar 4, 2011

SkimAlicia said:
Our SkimWords product performs particularly well for consumer electronics, it is not yet as strong as it could be on fashion. But we'll get there! I'm really keen to extend to the fashion vertical very shortly, bear with us if you can, and in the meantime, I hope the SkimLinks product is working out better?

That's good to hear. I didn't implement Skimlinks as I was concerned about it overwriting some of the advertising links I had placed deliberately on the site with affiliate links.

Stephen.

SkimAlicia · Mar 7, 2011

Brassneck said:
That's good to hear. I didn't implement Skimlinks as I was concerned about it overwriting some of the advertising links I had placed deliberately on the site with affiliate links.

Stephen.

Hi Stephen,
Don't worry about this, the SkimLinks product will not overwrite existing affiliate links, it will just monetize any unaffiliated links you have. So you can feel confident if you wish to go ahead and enable SkimLinks without worrying about cannibalisation of your existing revenues.