A Skimlinks review, this is the information I wish I had known before signing up to the Skimlinks service. This Skimlink review covers why you should not use skimlinks to gain revenue from your blog, website or forum. The conclusion is a thumbs across and why is below.
We signed up for Skimlinks about a month ago. Signing up to Skimlinks is currently free and the approval process is quick and problem free (takes under 24 hours). The plan was to place Skimlinks javascript code on our test wordpress blog nerdr.com before rolling it out across our major web properties.
Skimlinks vs. viglink as a replacement? We have not tried the skimlinks competitor viglink yet although we are looking into it. It is likely to be the next test we run.
Quick history lesson. Skimlinkswas started by young co-founders Alicia Navarro and tech guru Joe “Joey” Stepniewski from London. Webmasters add the Skimlinks affiliate enabled code to their codebase then, when a user visits the page with Skimlinks enabled, they see products mentioned on the site as actual links to affiliates. If you have Skimwords activated they get a popup too with price comparisons from various suppliers. Some of these links earn the website owner affiliate commission from Skimlinks association with affilite providers like Amazon, Ebay and others.
What we liked about Skimlinks, the pros:
- Skimlinks is a great way to generate extra revenue from text heavy pages. Skimlinks works well on forums and wordpress blogs and links created are relevant to the content. Skimlinks has a wordpress plugin you can use but it’s best to just use a text wordpress widget and add the code manually.Skimlinks
- CTR was very good on a WordPress blog. But Skimlinks revenue and conversion ratios are a big problem (see below).
- Technically, Skimlinks just works. Although at this point in tech the “just works” is becoming common, it’s still useful to mention. We had no problems with Skimlinks while it was on the nerdr wordpress test blog.
- Skimlinks Amazon and Skimlinks Ebay links are auto targetted to the correct region. Anyone who has used Amazon or Ebay affiliate links knows the problems of region specific affiliate URLs. With Skimlinks, you don’t need to worry about region coding and checking.
What we didn’t like about Skimlinks, the cons:
- Some rumors on forums like Digitalpoint and v7n suggest that Skimlinks slows down page load which can lead to Google penalties. We didn’t measure for this on nerdr and so we can’t comment on Skimlinks and page loading times, however I suspect the code is asynchronous once the Skim Javascript snippet is loaded.
- Skimlinks merchant list consists of the usual Amazon and Ebay, together with excessive padding of random and small time ecommerce shops. The Skimlinks merchant list is what you would see from any affiliate network like CJ (commission junction) or LS (linkshare), but still contains many small timers.
Skimlinks Review and Conclusion
Thumbs unsure, we are now trialling viglinks too. We originally removed Skimlinks for one very simple reason: non affiliate enabled merchant links. It turns out we were wrong about this and it was simply measuring non-skimlinks outgoing links. It would be nice if Skimlinks explained non affiliate enabled merchant links on a FAQ page or similar. Under 10% of links visited by users on http://nerdr.com were affiliate enabled during the trial period and this looks bad until you figure it what affiliate enabled links means.
Conclusion, I would recommend Skimlinks as a revenue source on your website at this point in time. It’s free to sign up and they’ll sign anyone up at this stage so give it a shot below.