FAQs for Publishers

Affiliate marketing is where an affiliate (a web site owner or publisher), displays an advertisement (such as a banner or link) on its site for a merchant (the brand or advertiser).

If a consumer visiting the affiliate's site clicks on this link and goes on to perform a specified action (usually a purchase) on a merchant's site then the affiliate receives a commission (Source: IAB UK).

For more information, visit the Internet Advertising Bureau’s website, or check out this blog post: ‘What is Affiliate Marketing’ by ProBlogger Darren Rowse.

Skimlinks is a clever technology that helps you easily monetize online content by converting normal product links and product references into their equivalent affiliate links. As a result, you can earn a commission effortlessly every time a visitor clicks through one of the links, visits a retailer’s site and makes a purchase.

Basically, we’ve made affiliate marketing easy - registering with us means you’ll never have to sign up to networks or merchant programs, or create and maintain affiliate links. We do all the hard work for you, helping you to harness the potential for affiliate marketing on your site!

Still can’t get your head around it? Check out this simple video explanation of Skimlinks.

Of course you could spend time and effort creating, tracking and maintaining your own affiliate links and signing up to thousands of merchant programs, but why would you when you can get us to automate the lot?

• Create content and link to merchants as normal and we'll convert your links into affiliate links on-the-fly
• Our tech can pick up product references you have included in your text and turn those into affiliate links too
• With one sign-up to Skimlinks, you get instant access to 17,000+ merchants' affiliate programs
• Use our comprehensive reporting suite to keep track of exactly which merchants your users like to buy from
• First-class account management around the clock from our US and UK offices
• Free access to our powerful publisher tools to optimize your earnings

With Skimlinks, you can aggregate all your affiliate marketing in one place - one account with us, one set of reports, and one check at the end of the month. Simple!

Skimlinks works with thousands of publishers from blogs to content networks to national newspaper sites. We want to make sure Skimlinks will work well for your site, so before you sign up, check out the following questions:

• Is your site live?
  Skimlinks can only assess and approve sites that are up and working.
• Is your site a content site, blog, forum or web app?
  Skimlinks can work almost anywhere there’s content online.
• Does your site have unique, quality content?
  We’re looking for content that adds value!
• Does your site have outbound links to retailers, products or services?
  Lots of content focused around products, retailers and services is great, content with outbound links and specific product references is even better!
• Does your site have large amounts of traffic or a very engaged and active audience?
  The more traffic, the bigger the opportunity to earn - but smaller, engaged and active audiences can be just as lucrative.
• Do large portions of your audience reside in North America, the United Kingdom, Western Europe or Australia?
  Skimlinks is currently optimized to monetize traffic from these locations.

If the answer to all these questions is 'yes', then please sign up now!

If you're still unsure if your site is suitable for Skimlinks, email us at support@skimlinks.com and we’ll see if we can help you out.

Yes, if not more! Because of our scale we can negotiate the very best commissions for our publishers, which means you can earn up to 110% of what you would have earned if you managed your affiliate links yourself. And don’t forget about all that precious time you’ll save too! Skimlinks retains 25% of the commission payment from the merchant, and the rest we pay to you, but we’re confident the higher commission rates and time-savings will mean that using Skimlinks is the best choice over traditional affiliate marketing.

It's simple, just complete the sign up form and you will be submitted for the approval process. We approve publishers within two business days of application.

We have a strict approval process because we want quality publishers in our network that add value to our merchants and the entire affiliate ecosystem!

When a publisher applies, we vet each site and only approve those that meet our standards and qualify under merchant terms. Because we hold the power of aggregating so many merchants, we have to be responsible with who we allow to use our service, so we only approve sites that merchants would approve themselves.

But when it’s this good, it’s worth working for - get approved once for Skimlinks, and you’ll be able to start earning immediately from 17,000+ merchants. Imagine trying to get approved on all those on your own!

Sometimes, after a site goes through the approval process, our team will decide it’s not right for our service.

Don’t worry, it’s nothing personal – here are a couple of reasons a site may be denied:

• Lack of content
• Sensitive content (certain types of ‘adult’ content, for example)
• Content that is likely unsuitable for affiliate marketing (like political, or religious content)
• Content with minimal opportunities for automated affiliate marketing (e.g. not focused on products and services available to buy online)
• Websites with audiences in locations that are outside our coverage

If you have been denied, and you feel like our approvals team may have misjudged your site, then let us know why by emailing support@skimlinks.com. We’re always happy to take another look for you or provide further reasoning around our decision.

No, there is no long-term commitment when you use Skimlinks. Try out the technology and if it’s not right for you – that’s ok!

We are confident that Skimlinks will make a difference to your business so if it works for your site and company, keep using it; if not, just remove the code.

When you join the Skimlinks family of publishers, you can access the Publisher Interface and our merchant look-up feature, to see the 17,000+ retailers in the Skimlinks network. We can offer you easy access to the affiliate programs of some of the most popular merchants in the world, like Amazon, eBay, Target, BestBuy, Zappos and so many more, including lots of ‘hard-to-get’ merchants too.

Remember, when you’re approved with Skimlinks, you’ll be able to earn immediately from every single one of our merchants. One sign-up and you’re approved for all those programs. That should save you some time and catch all those opportunities you were missing before!

We are confident that Skimlinks does not affect SEO or Google PageRank.

Google's guidelines are clear that having affiliate links on your site is completely fine, as long as your site adds value, has original content and that the links are clearly relevant to the content.

We have always had a 'nofollow' within our redirect (only on monetizable links) as a further precaution.

You can refer to our blog post on the matter for some more comprehensive background.

SkimLinks does not recognize language, just links. If you’re linking to a retailer in our network of over 17,000, we can turn it into an affiliate link for you – no matter what language it’s surrounded by!

SkimWords does, however, work exclusively in English for now, picking up product references mentioned in the text of your site.

We encourage our publishers to disclose to their users and comply with the FTC regulations which state... "When there exists a connection between the endorser and the seller of the advertised product which might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement, such connection must be fully disclosed".

When using our URL Shortener to include product recommendations on Twitter, we have provided some disclosure guidelines here.

You could also add disclosure to your site by joining our Referral Program and using one of our disclosure badges.

Want to tell your friends and followers how awesome Skimlinks is? Our referral program is available to all Skimlinks publishers and you can earn up to 12% of Skimlinks revenue for sites you refer for up to a year when you add one of our disclosure badges (which include a handy disclosure pop-up to help comply with FTC regulations) or referral banners to your site.

Check out the details of the Referral Program here.

You can visit our Contact us page and complete the form or just give us a call.

Our office hours are 9am - 6pm GMT, Monday – Friday at the London office and 9am-6pm PST at our San Francisco office.

You can also check out the Skimlinks blog, follow our Twitter profile, see our LinkedIn and Facebook pages, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

SkimLinks is the simple solution that works for you behind the scenes, automating your affiliate marketing efforts to let you focus on your content while the commissions roll in.

This clever technology turns any normal product or retailer link (e.g. http://www.amazon.com) in the content on your site into its equivalent affiliate link the moment a user clicks on it. If the user makes a purchase from there, you’ll get a cut of the sale! Find out more about SkimLinks here.

SkimWords is the perfect solution for publishers who have no time to add links - but still want to monetize their content.

SkimWords recognizes product references in editorial and user-generated content and automatically turns these into relevant affiliate links for the user. If the user makes a purchase through one of these links, you’ll earn a commission.

To find out more about SkimWords, and its special, innovative features (for more relevant, less annoying in-text links) check out the SkimWords product page.

Ah, the beauty of SkimLinks. It’s almost invisible to the naked eye! Your readers may not even notice SkimLinks working on your site, but there is a way that you can check that it is!

Here’s how to test it: find a hyperlink in your text to a retail site; like eBay or Amazon. If you hover over the link, you’ll see the normal link you had added, like http://www.ebay.com. That’s what your readers see.

But, if you right click on the link, click away, and hover back over it, a different URL will appear in the browser status bar – that will look a little something like http://go.redirectingat.com…
Well, that’s us – and that’s SkimLinks working!

Note: If you’ve enabled the custom subdomain setting, it’ll look more like http://go.yoursitename…
This is a great option to make Skimlinks look like a part of your site – you can check it out and enable it in your Publisher Interface.

Haven’t spotted SkimWords in action on your site yet? There could be a couple of factors coming into play:

• SkimWords is open and available to all of our publishers, but it is currently optimized for particular verticals, monetizing product references relating to consumer electronics, technology, fashion and mothering.
• SkimWords and SkimWords Lite do not recognize ambiguous references, like ‘televisions’ or ‘shoes’, for a better, more relevant user experience. For more SkimWords love, try to mention particular products in your content (e.g. The Vizio M220VA LCD television is awesome!)

We’re working to increase SkimWords’ reach across further verticals, so watch this space!

If you’re still unsure about how SkimWords is working on your site, contact us today.

SkimWords can be customized to function at a level that you find suitable for your site and audience.

We currently offer two settings: SkimWords and SkimWords Lite.

SkimWords will turn the most popular merchant and product references in your vertical into unobtrusive shopping links.

SkimWords Lite links up retailer names & domains in your text you haven’t already linked, like TigerDirect or bestbuy.com.

The SkimWords option has the highest revenue potential, as it can turn hundreds of thousands of product and merchant references into unobtrusive shopping links. But don't worry; we always limit the amount of links on a page based on the amount of content, so your content will never look over-linked! We also optimize these links based on the geography and shopping preferences of your community.

The full version of SkimWords has the option to enable a product & price comparison flyover which provides your readers with useful and relevant information and enriches your content. Additionally, there is the ability to choose the number of links that appear on a page - available on both SkimWords and SkimWords Lite.

SkimWords can be configured easily at any time on the installation page of the Publisher Interface and you can find out more on the SkimWords page.

Coupling innovative technology from the company’s acquisition of AtmaLinks, we have completely re-engineered SkimWords, combining Standard & Premier into a new and improved product. SkimWords 2.0 can now automatically and in real-time detect very specific product phrases, and deliver in-text product and price comparisons from the most relevant retailers across multiple verticals – including consumer electronics, fashion, beauty, mothering, automotive, and lifestyle categories.

SkimWords Lite remains the same in turning just retailer names and domain references into links.

Read more in our blog post »

Skimlinks does not affect the way links on your site look so you and your users will not notice a difference.

You add the natural hyperlinks (e.g. http://target.com) to your content and we convert them, when a user clicks through, into their equivalent affiliate link without any visible change, so there's no effect on their experience or the way the site looks.

If particular links can't be converted to affiliate links (because we don’t have a relationship with the merchant, or it’s a link to somewhere the user can’t buy anything, like Wikipedia.org) the user is taken to the destination of the link as normal.

SkimWords has been built to offer in-text monetization without interrupting the users’ experience.

When SkimWords recognizes a product reference in your content, it will turn it into a relevant affiliate link, leading the user to where they can buy the product you mentioned.

The link will look just like a normal link to your users, and if you have the flyover enabled, they’ll see that when they hover over the link, giving them useful information on where they can get the best price for the product mentioned.

Find out more about SkimWords here.

Traditional affiliate links appear in the browser status bar when a user hovers over them. They tend to look ugly and suspicious, and may make a user less likely to click on them.

Skimlinks links are just your normal links, monetized. The user sees the normal link you added when they hover over, so they know exactly where they’re going if they click through and they’re more likely to do so!

With Skimlinks working on your site, there is a redirect measured in milliseconds that your users will not notice.

Our technology will not over-write or affect existing affiliate links you have on your site.

If you would like to maintain direct affiliate relationships with particular merchants or networks, you are free to do so without any impact from the Skimlinks technology. We’ll just work on any links you haven’t already affiliated.

However, if you’d like to streamline all your affiliate efforts (and consolidate your reporting and payments as well as benefitting from accurate link creation and maintenance) with Skimlinks, just add normal links to your content from here on out and we’ll leave any previous affiliate links alone.

If you are interested in sending existing affiliate links through Skimlinks, we currently offer an overwrite function for any Amazon affiliate links. You can access this feature when you sign up and visit our publisher interface.

Skimlinks payments are made at the end of each month. We pay you the cleared account balance as long as it's over the minimum amount of $10 / £7 / €8.

Payments take up to 60 days to clear because sales can be refunded or identified as fraud and merchants have the right to cancel the commissions related to these transactions up to 60 days after the sale. Commissions are cleared after this period and are eligible for payment to you.

Once Skimlinks is installed on your site, you can earn commission on every click-through to an affiliated merchant that leads to a sale.

We operate on a revenue-share basis, so Skimlinks retains 25% of the commission payment from the merchant, and the rest we pay to you monthly, via PayPal, check or bank transfer. More details are available in our Terms of Service when you apply for Skimlinks.

Yes, you need to have earned at least $10 / £7 / €8 in commissions in order to be paid. If you don't reach that amount in a month, it will roll over to the next month.

Yes you can, click here to check out our Referral Program.

It's completely free to sign-up to Skimlinks. Once approved as a Skimlinks publisher you get full access to our suite of reports and tools, and our main products, SkimLinks and SkimWords. Our technology will start working for you immediately after installation, we’ll collect all the commissions you earn, keep a small cut for our services and pay you the rest.

This revenue share model means you can open a new revenue stream on your site without any investment (of time or money), so there’s simply nothing to lose.

Why not sign up now, try out Skimlinks and see how much cash you’ve been missing out on?

There are a huge number of factors influencing the potential to earn revenue from links on your site, including the volume of users and their profile, the type of content, seasonality and the amount of other advertising you have on your site.

Years of experience and lots of happy customers tell us that Skimlinks has a real impact on publishers’ businesses - but the best way to find out how much you can earn with us is to try out our tech! Install the code in minutes and you’ll start to see for yourself clicks and sales tracked in the reports in the Publisher Interface.

We’re monetizing the opportunities in your text you were missing before – install Skimlinks (with no commitments) and find out exactly what it was you were missing out on!

At the end of each month we pay to our publishers the total amount of commissions that have entered their cleared balance.

For commissions to enter the cleared balance they have had to be approved by the retailer and paid by the affiliate network that we use to handle the transaction.

The time it takes for an individual commission to clear can vary depending on the retailer or network involved, but typically this takes around 60 days, meaning that it can take around 90 days for a individual commission to clear, and then be paid at the end of the month. Typically this will mean that commissions earned, for example in November will begin to enter the cleared balance during February and paid at the end of the month.

It is also possible for commissions to be cancelled by the network or retailer at any point; this can be due to fraud, returning of the goods or other errors in the transaction.

After a few months with Skimlinks, you’ll start to see regular monthly payments occur, provided you reach the payment threshold ($10/£7).

If you have any further questions about our payment schedule, please contact us.

Don’t even sweat it. Installing Skimlinks is as easy as adding Google Analytics to your site! We provide complete instructions and all that's involved is to copy and paste our JavaScript code into your footer and then you're ready to go! We also provide installation guidelines, which you can pass onto your tech support. If you're unsure, don't worry, our support team is always available to answer any questions: just email support@skimlinks.com or visit our Contact us page for more details.

The Skimlinks technology is monitored 24/7, and is fully redundant, which means, basically, that if, in the unlikely event of our servers spontaneously combusting and causing our technology to stop working, links will not be affiliated while the issue is rectified but the user experience is not affected.

No, Skimlinks' code will not affect any ads or existing partnerships you may have. Skimlinks only works on natural links.

Once you have applied and been approved for Skimlinks with one of your sites, you can add sites in the publisher interface. Our approvals team will look over the additional sites to make sure they meet our approval criteria and you will receive an email to let you know if your new sites get the thumbs up.

Yes. The administrator of the account (whoever originally signed up to Skimlinks), can add additional users and set up different access levels for each user very easily in the publisher administration area.

Yes. Simply paste the code only on the pages you want Skimlinks to run on. Or, get in touch with us if you would like to exclude just a small number of specific pages while keeping Skimlinks active on the rest of your site - we have a way to do that too.

Yes. Rather than paste the code into the site template, you can use a common include, global footer or template.

Yes, Skimlinks can be run alongside Google Adsense.

Our automated validation of affiliate links means the user will always get taken to the correct merchant page, even if the merchant changes network or the links change syntax.

Want to consolidate your Amazon affiliate efforts under the Skimlinks umbrella? Try out Amazon overwrite function – which will allow SkimLinks to recognize all previously affiliate Amazon links, turning them into SkimLinks links that will be tracked back to your Skimlinks account.

You can access the Amazon overwrite function in the Publisher Interface as a Skimlinks publisher – so if you’re not already with us, sign up today!

Yes you can! Contact us to discuss options and see how we could work together.

Yes! Go to your WordPress Dashboard to activate the Referral Program and we will automatically add a Disclosure Badge to the bottom of your posts. If you haven't already seen our WordPress Plugin, check it out in the Directory.

Find them here: skimlinks.com/terms

Find them here: skimlinks.com/privacy-policy

Find them here: skimlinks.com/program-policies

Yes we do. See the policy here: skimlinks.com/privacy-policy

These are also available as a machine readable versions at: http://www.skimlinks.com/w3c/p3p.xml and http://skimlinks.com/w3c/privacy.xml#policy1

All our APIs issue the P3P header below that makes reference to this machine readable policy which in turn references our opt-out page:

P3P: policyref="http://skimlinks.com/w3c/p3p.xml", CP="NOI DSP COR CURa ADMa DEVa TAIa OUR BUS IND UNI COM NAV INT"

• We have all our servers and services audited by an independent security company every 6 months.
• We store all our data in ISO 27001 certified data centers.
• We are registered with the UK Information Commissioner’s Office as a registered Data Controller.
• We run all our services on the latest versions or the available software and a strict policy of implementing security patches as soon as they are available.