Automatic Affiliate Linking Solution

Today we are going to talk about a service that allows bloggers to make money without adding ads into their site or selling links and posts. This service is a “set it and forget it” program so the passive income aspect is very appealing. (if you want to understand affiliate marketing better read more)

It is also dead easy to implement. The whole process takes less then 15 minutes, and that assumes you have limited experience in adding code to your blog or forum.

Viglink turns your site into a stealth affiliate marketing site. You don’t need to searching for affiliate programs. You don’t have to sign up for affiliate programs. No looking for the right affiliate links to insert. No need to even think about inserting those money links. There are no ugly weird-looking affiliate links that readers are scared of.

With Viglink you have several optional ways to make money:

1. Just use normal links to any of the affiliate friendly e-commerce sites. The service turns these links into affiliate links for you. This is fantastic for user generated content in a forum for example. I help run a forum where members link to ebay auctions regularly – a perfect application for VigLink.

2. Allow Viglink to look for mentions of sites like Ebay, Amazon and Adobe. In the last sentence I just typed the words Amazon etc and Viglink took care turning the words into affiliate links. Readers seeing the link may click and when they buy, you get paid.

3. Viglink will actually goes back into all your old posts and places affiliates links there too.

How Does Viglink Make Money?

The site manages all the affiliate program relationships (over 17,000 to date) and collects the money from each program. They mostly do this through the major affiliate networks and the large e-commerce sites that run their own affiliate programs. They also keep up with changes in affiliate programs that can cause your affiliate links to stop working. Keeping up with changes to affiliate programs can be a big job if you have a lot of content.

Because Viglink has so many sites working with the program, they get top-level payouts in tiered programs, often making more per sale than a small affiliate can earn with their small volume.

For this service Viglink takes 25% of the earnings and pays you 75% of the earnings . If you join Viglink through another blogger’s link that blogger gets 30% out of Viglink’s 25% share for a year, making the site worth promoting if you have a webmaster audience on your site.

Does this Work with Adsense/Chitika/InfoLinks/Other Advertising?

Absolutely there is no conflict with any advertising program because Viglink is only modifying existing links and (optionally) introducing new links to the site. This takes up no real estate on the page and does not interfere with Adsense or Chitika so is completely within the TOS of these ad networks. Remember that we are talking about automatically inserting the same kind of links that you already insert manually.

The main link ad networks have been tested ok with the product.

Is it Legit?

Unusually, the Viglink team proudly displays full names, photos, and short bios on the site. They are clearly experienced and a review of forum posts and articles indicates the management is solid with a good reputation.

The company has been featured in many major media outlets. They have various venture capital backers including Google Ventures (the venture capital arm of Google Inc.) Big sites like PC World and Mac World use the service. Cloudfair is fully integrated.

The company actually started as a Harvard Business School business plan competition entry.

What Does Success Look Like?

The success of this program depends on two big factors:

1. Traffic – without visitors to your site all the affiliated links in the world are not going to earn you anything. Likewise ads with no visitors are pointless. So you really need to be looking for ways to increase your traffic.

2. Topic – what do you talk about? If you are mentioning specific products, businesses, and online shopping portals like eBay and Amazon regularly there will be many more opportunities to create affiliate links. If your blog is about your cat… not so much. So the ability for Viglink to insert links is very contingent on your content form.

Because of these two factors, it is impossible to predict how much you will earn from Viglink. However, the President of the company said in an interview that most sites make within 20% of what they make from Adsense.

What are the Alternatives?

Skimlinks is another similar offering, with some variations on their secondary products. The core product of link insertion revenue sharing at Skimlinks is the same as Viglink. It appears that the two products can be run together, though there is so much overlap on the major affiliate programs that this seems redundant.

Selected WordPress plugins can replicate the part of finding places to link, but you are on your own to manage all the affiliate programs.

Disclosure

FCC rules require bloggers to disclose connections to advertisers. If you do not do this already, grab one of the buttons from the site and install it (a little piece of code). As a bonus, anyone that joins the service by following the disclosure link gets credited as a referral from your site. You can find these badges on the FTC Disclosure link at the very bottom of the page once you have an account.

How to Install Viglink on Blogger

Open your blogger dashboard, log in, and click “Design”.

Under the design tab, make sure you’re on the “Page Elements” page.

Click the “Add a Gadget” link that’s closest to the bottom of the page.

From the gadget list, under “basics”, select the HTML/JavaScript gadget.

Copy the provided VigLink code to your clipboard

Back on Blogger’s HTML/JavaScript gadget page, paste the VigLink code under “content”. (Leave the title empty.) Click “save”.

You’re done and it took under a minute. You can use the installation checker to make sure VigLink is working on your blog.

WordPress Install

The service can also installed on other types of sites. For WordPress there is a plugin that makes the install very simple. Just search for the plugin by name from the plugin menu in the backend of your WordPress site. You’ll need to insert a code from the Viglink site once you have the plugin installed.

What Next?

You can explore Viglink by signing up free. It simply requires your email address and installation is easy as described above. Before you install grab the little toolbar tool and use it to preview what your blog will look like after you install the code.

Here is a sign up link for VigLink.