Skimlinks Archive

London-based Skimlinks announced today the beta release of their latest service, Skimwords.

We’ve covered SkimLinks several times before but if you are new to the service, here’s a simple description from my earlier post. Skimlinks provides a way to instantly turn all of your product links into affiliate links with no changes to individual content. You add one line of Javascript to your template and then, where Skimlinks has a relationship, the links automatically become affiliate links.

Skimwords is a bit different than the main Skimlinks product. The Skimwords service looks at the content on the page and creates links on-the-fly for products listed within the content. The goal is to drive additional affiliate sales through the newly-found product links. The service is similar to other in-text programs including Kontera and Intellitxt.

Skimlinks is looking for sites in the following categories to join their Skimwords beta: technology/electronics, sport/lifestyle, automotive and fashion.

Amazon ran a similar program several years ago — one line of Javascript allowed Amazon to automatically create affiliate product links from the text on a page. The Amazon service was closed about a year ago.

Check out our interview with Skimlinks CEO Alicia Navarro from earlier this year.

Last week London-based Skimlinks launched the SkimKit, a tool that helps publishers find products that have affiliate opportunities attached. Martin Bryant from Next Web has a good overview from the launch of the SkimKit service.

This morning I met with Skimlinks founder and CEO Alicia Navarro in NYC to learn more about her service and the new SkimKit launch. It was a great conversation because it combined a product demo/pitch with a good industry discussion.

We’ve covered SkimLinks several times before but if you are new to the service, here’s a simple description from my earlier post. Skimlinks provides a way to instantly turn all of your product links into affiliate links with no changes to individual content. You add one line of Javascript to your template and then, where Skimlinks has a relationship, the links automatically become affiliate links.

Alicia noted that one of the benefits (actually the main benefit) of using Skimlinks over signing up for affiliate programs yourself is that you will generally make more money because Skimlinks typically receives the highest commission levels while most affiliates will generally stay in the lowest bucket. Skimlinks takes a cut of the earned revenue (25%) but even with the split, you will most likely still earn more. You also only need to signup once with Skimlinks and then you can participate in all of the programs that Skimlinks supports – over 7,500 of them.

The SkimKit is an Adobe Air application that helps publishers find products for the stories they are writing. If you are familiar with how Zemanta helps you find links for your stories, the SkimKit does the same thing for products except that the SkimKit only shows products where there is an affiliate relationship.

The idea behind the SkimKit is to make it super easy for writers (especially teams of writers) to find product links to include in their blog posts and articles. The SkimKit also provides short URLs for sharing links in emails along with direct share links for Twitter and Facebook.

Skimlinks has grown from just Alicia to now 20 employees all based in London. Their widget is “loaded” to over 470 million unique visitors a month and the javascript that loads the Skimlinks service is loaded 300 times a second.

Also checkout Alicia’s guest post about building a startup in the UK.

We’ve written about London-based Skimbit several times and CEO Alicia Navarro provided her reasons why the UK is a great place to build a startup.

Today the Skimbit team is announcing the launch of Skimlinks. The easiest way to describe Skimlinks is that they provide a way to instantly turn all of your product links into affiliate links with no changes to individual content. You add one line of Javascript to your template and then, where Skimlinks has a relationship, the links automatically become affiliate links.

Revenue is split between you and Skimlinks. Skimlinks doesn’t share what percentage they take of each sale. What I like about Skimlinks is that once you add the Javascript code to your site, all of your old pages of content will also work with the Skimlinks program.

Skimlinks works with merchants including AmazonUK, Ticketmaster, Boots, eBay, BT and play.com. It looks like the list is mostly UK-based companies. Depending on what percentage Skimlinks takes, it may make sense to use Skimlinks in addition to affiliate programs you are already running.

Here’s a video overview of how the Skimlinks system works and you can checkout another viewpoint on the launch from Jemima Kiss.