SkimLinks Reviews: Is it Good for Content Monetization?
Contents
What is Skimlinks?
SkimLinks is an affiliate marketplace that assists creators and publishers to monetize their content.
This content monetization network will allow you to effortlessly monetize your content and earn passively.
SkimLinks was Founded in 2007 in London UK. Over the years SkimLinks has managed to win hearts with its extensive features and tools.
SkimLinks uses the content you’re already creating and publishing on your website to automatically create affiliate links to products relevant to your content.
It is a platform that will automatically turn your regular links into affiliate links, without you having to sign up for them individually.
Now, for this service SkimLinks deduct 25% from whatever you earn and you get to keep the remaining 75%.
Here, the merchants do not pay you for whatever sales you make, rather you receive commissions from all the affiliated merchant commissions from SkimLinks
For an instance, if you are a blogger and your content for a particular revolves around mobile phones, what SkimLinks does is it will convert the regular link of the mobile phone into an affiliate link.
Now, to get started with SkimLink you need to apply on their official website. Once you get approval for the same, you add a snippet of the code onto your website and you are good to go. All the links to merchants on SkimLinks become affiliate links.
With this one snippet of code, you get instant access to 48,000 affiliate programs
How does Skimlinks work?
SkimLinks can help you monetize your content easily if you own a website or blog that contains product-related information and ordinary links to the same.
As mentioned earlier, it converts these links, merchant links, or even brand mentions into affiliate links that help you earn potentially every time a customer clicks on the link and makes a purchase.
To help you’ll understand better, here is how SkimLinks works and who all are involved in the same process.
Merchant: The merchant is either the owner or someone who is selling the actual product. This product could be a book store, an apparel brand, a skincare multinational, or an online store like Amazon.
Networks: SkimLinks have been working with over 50 networks. These networks give SkimLinks access to over 48,000 different merchants.
Publisher: A publisher is a website or blog owner. The publisher creates content about different products for potential customers.
Customer: Last but not least comes the customer. The customer is nonetheless the blogger’s audience, the website’s traffic, or unique visitors that are redirected to the affiliate link and end up becoming a customer post-purchase.
As a content creator, you need to create ordinary content discussing brands, products, etc. Once you enable SkimLinks on your blog/website, depending upon your CMS listed below are the different options:
A regular website: SkimLinks will accord you with JavaScript that you’ll have to add to your website’s header.
Social Media Publishers: Now if you belong to this category, SkimLinks will assist you in enabling their extension on your website.
Forum Owner: A dedicated Vbulletin plugin will be given to you.
Self-hosted WordPress Websites: SkimLinks will give you a plugin.
After you set it up completely, SkimLinks will automatically start converting your product mentions into affiliate links. After every sale you make, SkimLinks skim 25% and transfers the balance amount.
At the end of every month, if you have exceeded the minimum payment threshold of 65 USD, SkimLinks skims their share. If you haven’t crossed the minimum threshold they wouldn’t take their share. Make sure to read the details on their website.
When does Skimlinks pay you?
Let us dive deeper into knowing how and when does SkimLinks pays an individual.
SkimLinks transfers the payment amount to the users at the end of every month either by PayPal or direct deposit to the UK or US bank accounts.
If you are not from the UK or US, they issue it through PayPal. Their minimum payment threshold is $65.
But it’s not as simple as it sounds, here’s the deal. SkimLinks redirects your payment only when they receive their commission from the merchants. SkimLinks claims that merchants may cancel out on transferring commissions for reasons like a refund request by the customer, fraud, network quality issues, or errors in transactions.
This entire process of verifying commissions and then transferring them may take up to 60 days. Once done, you will be able to send in a withdrawal request. This entire process is time-consuming but also worth the wait.
Commissions
There are 3 ways you can earn your revenue from which SkimLinks allows you to choose depending upon what the vendors are offering:
Pay Per Share:
This is a popular method on most affiliate marketplaces, you get your share every time a visitor makes a purchase by clicking on your affiliate URL. You can add this link to your website or blog.
Cost Per Acquisition:
In this, if a merchant hires you, he will place an advertisement on your website/blog. The merchant will pay you only for a specific acquisition such as an email list sign-up, account registration, or a contact request.
This specific acquisition is decided by the merchant ahead of time.
Cost Per Mille or Cost Per Click:
The cost per Mille is nothing but the cost per 1000 views. You are paid based on how many people view the advertisements placed on your website/blog.
You can choose what product you want to advertise on your website/blog and get paid.
Listed below is a detailed breakdown of what does SkimLinks charges you for:
Signing up with SkimLinks is free, but a 25% commission is deducted by them.
To make it simpler, let’s assume that you earn $100 from your links and that merchant has offered you a 10% commission for the same.
You are only eligible for the commission if the visitor makes a purchase.
Merchant Earnings | $100 |
Commission | 10% |
Commission You Earn | $10.00 |
Skimlinks Share of Commission Earned | $2.50 |
Commission You Receive | $7.50 |
Who should join Skimlinks?
Bloggers and website owners with good traffic can opt for SkimLinks.
A lot of bloggers with more than 100,000 visitors every month don’t know how to monetize their content.
SkimLinks is a platform for well-established bloggers and website owners.
Basically, anyone who wishes to make money from their website should definitely check SkimLinks out.
Without much of technicalities and paperwork, you can start earning as SkimLinks approves your blog/website.
Make sure you have well-to-do traffic such that your application doesn’t get rejected.
Skimlinks for Bloggers
For a blogger, affiliate marketing is the best way to earn revenue from the content they are already creating.
Affiliate marketing accounts for about 40% of the total revenue they make.
What SkimLinks does is, makes affiliate marketing for bloggers simpler and more accessible such that they spend more time on their content rather than advertising etc.
According to SkimLinks over 60,000 publishers are earning revenue from commerce content through their products.
Through SkimLinks you can earn revenue from 48,500 different affiliate programs all around the globe without having to invest any extra hours.
Skimlinks for Media Publishers
Media Publishers can monetize good quality content, without being more or less dependent upon advertisements.
commerce content opens a completely new spectrum of opportunities and enables all the editorial teams such that they build a sustainable stream of revenue through their content.
If you are a media publisher, you know commerce content already contributes to more than a quarter of the overall revenue and hence making it a sustainable source of revenue heterogeneity.
SkimLinks claims to have helped over 60,000 publishers to get recompensed for their content.
- Automatically convert your regular links to affiliate links.
SkimLinks lets all types of publishers increase their revenue and monetize their content without having to put much effort and time.
You can install SkimLinks javascript on your blog/website or If you have AMP pages, SkimLinks can be installed there as well.
- Tracking
SkimLinks has a publisher hub feature that lets the publisher track his/her performance.
Through this, you will be able to easily make out what kind of content works best for you, efficient tracking of your readers will also let you know what kind of content your visitors enjoy reading. This way you can single-handedly work on the best.
The tracking includes, clicks made in real-time, revenue collected per merchant, and also your best-performing article/post/page.
- Merchants
On SkimLinks you will be able to work with more than 50 networks and these networks include Rakuten advertising, Awin, and CJ Affiliate. This makes it less time-consuming and you can get access to all the merchants in just one place.
Apart from this, SkimLinks promises its users the best possible commission rates. They negotiate these exclusive rates for you with the merchants you wish to work with/for. These commission rates are usually 2x the regular rates.
Merchant tie-ups for Bloggers & Media Publishers:
- Nike
- LookFantastic
- ASOS
- Anthropologie
- LoveHoney
- Vimeo
- Wayfair
- Adobe
- SelfRidges&Co
and a lot more…
Tools for Bloggers & Media Publishers
- Editor Toolbar
The SkimLinks editor toolbar will assist you in making your experience easy. This is, whenever you browse through a merchant’s website, it directly shows you the current commission rate they are offering their advertisers.
To say, if you decide to advertise for a particular merchant, you can directly generate the affiliate links and share them on your blog.
2. Link Generator
Once you have used the editor toolbar, you can make use of the link generator to generate your very own affiliate links.
These affiliate links can either be used directly on your web, mobile apps, social networking platforms, websites, URL shorteners, and emails or can be shared on social media in the form of youtube videos or IGTVs, email newsletters, and anywhere and everywhere you can think of.
3. Merchants and Offers
On SkimLinks you can search for Merchants that are interrelated to your niche in just a few clicks.
Apart from this, once you have shortlisted 4-5 merchants, you can also see the offers that they are offering and opt for the best revenue-offering merchant.
This entire process is possible because of the Merchants and Offers search bar. Here you can filter by different niche categories, countries, offer types, and many more that will assist you to narrow down your search process.
Pros
- SkimLinks is easy to install. All you need to do is add the snippet of the code, or use WordPress, then you can effortlessly set up the SkimLinks plugin.
- With SkimLinks you can easily manage all your links. Not many affiliate marketplaces accord you this feature. If you have tons of programs, deep links, links, etc you will hands down love SkimLinks as it lifts the burden of managing them from your shoulder.
- SkimLinks is a stack of affiliate potential. You don’t have to search and then signup for thousands of different affiliate programs and stress about getting accepted. SkimLinks does all the hard work for you and all you need to do is place the links on your website/blog.
- Apart from their services, they even ought to provide really great analytics tools. It has a built-in feature that lets you manage your affiliate clicks and non-affiliate clicks, the revenue generated and commissions earned. all these come under analytics tools and you don’t have to spend a single penny on them.
- They also have great enticing offers, SkimLinks is a big company and hence there will be times when you get crazy commission rates for the deal.
Cons
No considerable cons yet.
FAQs
- How can I check if I’ve installed the SkimLinks Javascript code properly?
Firstly, you need to add this link  https://test.skimlinks.com/ to your website or blog. Once that is done click on it and if you land on the success page, you are life.
If you are redirected to an error page, check if you have placed the link close to the tag </body>, the closer the better.
If still, you face any issues, you can check the SkimLinks installation guide on how to go ahead further
2. Will SkimLinks overwrite my existing affiliate links?
No, SkimLinks doesn’t overwrite existing affiliate links. However, they do that only for affiliate hyperlinks that do not have any affiliate tags.
Some users have reported problems like, a few links continue showing redirecting through SkimLinks on go redirecting. Please note that this is not an issue concerned with overwriting but is done for tracking purposes.
How much does it cost?
This integration is completely free for our merchants to join. There are additional exposure and program opportunities for merchants to review directly with the Skimlinks team but those are optional.
Skimlinks work on a revenue share model. You don’t pay anything to join or use the service. They take a small cut from the publisher-earned commissions: Skimlinks keep 25% and pay the publisher 75%.Â
What types of publishers work with Skimlinks?
Skimlinks works with over half of the top 100 US & UK publishers by revenue including Conde Nast, Hearst, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, Trinity Mirror, MailOnline, and more. They also work with over 57,000 manually vetted publishers globally including blogs & editorials, news sites, online communities, content networks & more.Â
Please note this also includes coupon & discount sites and Skimlinks does have the capability to block particular publishers or websites.
How do I contact Skimlinks?
You can send a message from this page: https://support.skimlinks.com/hc/en-us/requests/new