Easy Affiliate Links with VigLinks and Skimlinks


One of the toughest things about running an affiliate website can be keeping track of all of those links that you need to create to redirect to the merchants. Not to mention if one of the merchants programs goes offline at an affiliate network all of your links for that merchant can stop working just like that. Then there is the problem of forgetting to add a link to a merchant. You write a great post talking about how great this new product of service is and add a link straight to the merchant instead of using your affiliate link. The post becomes popular yet you don’t notice right away that you missed the link. All those possible sales gone.

One of the new trends in affiliate marketing is using services like VigLink or Skimlinks. Essentially these services take some of the headache away of managing your own affiliate accounts at all of the different affiliate networks and allow you as a publisher to focus on what you do best, publish great content.

Both services work pretty much the same you sign up for them and then you add a small snippet of javascript into your website. That javascript will take care of making sure the links that are to their affiliate partners are linked properly. The best part as a publisher is you do not have to worry about creating special links, links breaking or any of those headaches. If the merchant is covered by the service they will automatically add in the affiliate link.

While both services are similar in how they work there are some subtle differences in them. Skimlinks makes you add your website and have that website approved before you can add the Skimlinks code to your website. VigLink does not authorize websites individually so once you are approved you can pretty much add the code to any site you own. Also VigLink is also partnered with Cloudflare so you can actually install VigLink on any of your Cloudflare enabled websites and Cloudflare will take care of inserting the javascript for you.

Both services are free to join but there is a cost to having them manage all of the links and affiliate merchants for you. They both take a 25% cut of all sales you make. That might sound like a lot but if you have a site with hundreds or thousands of merchant links it can easily be worth your time to have those links managed but VigLink or Skimlinks. The services can also get some better rates so it is possible that even though you lose 25% on each commission you might actually make roughly the same since the commission is higher to begin with.

If you have been looking for a way to monetize your website but don’t want to go through all the hassle of creating managing all of the affiliate accounts you would need or simply want to monitize all of the possible links you can with as little headache as possible take a look at either VigLink or Skimlinks. They might be exactly what you are looking for. I know I have been converted a couple of my own affilaite websites over to VigLink and have been pleased with the results and the fact that I no longer have to worry about links breaking or other problems. The links just work and if they can be linked through an affiliate program VigLink takes care of it.

All that being said I am not using either service here on LGR Internet Solutions yet so I manually had to add the links.

Categories: website-monetization