The director of merchant development here at Skimlinks, I’ve, been working here for eight years, so it probably won’t. Surprise you that I picked up a few tricks along the way and as the person who looks after Skimlinks merchants, I’m in a good position to walk you through how to make the most from them and start making money with our technology.
During this webinar Viktor from our marketing team will answer any questions you may have: okay, let’s begin Commerce, content 101. What we’ll cover today, what we mean by commerce content and why it’s important today.
Different ways to use skim links on your website, spoiler alert you don’t need to be an HTML hacker to get things installed. We’ll, take a look at different formats of commerce content and one to use each a deep dive on how to find the right merchants.
And finally, we’ll, go through our reporting tools to help. You extract the best insights for your audience. Everywhere we go. We’re bombarded with ads, telling us what to buy a commercial before a YouTube clip a banner between candy crush levels, an ad on Facebook.
As a publisher, you can try to get a piece of the pie by putting out banner ads on your website, but what, if I told you there’s, an alternative that makes you money and improves your editorial experience at the same time, according to Research done by eMarketer com in 2016.
Online reviews are the most trusted source for product information and recommendation. More and more people are going online to learn about the best products before they complete any purchase. Many spotted an opportunity to educate readers about products and form their shopping experience and drive sales.
This is now commonly referred to as service journalism. So how does service journalism, work, publishers, help their audience make informed purchases they take time to review, compare and recommend products or brands when their content successfully influences and drives a sale.
Publishers are rewarded with mission paid by the merchant whenever a sale comes from these articles. This is different from sponsored content. Publishers are not paid upfront and instead they create content based on products that they believe in to help their readers make purchase decisions.
No money, exchanges hands before a sale is driven to get better results. It’s, important to keep their trust in you once readers don’t believe your recommendations are genuine. Your advice becomes no better than an ad and you lose your ability to influence sales.
So where does Skimlinks come in? Our technology helps publishers automatically earn money from their service journalism. In practice, it means publishers can earn commission without creating a new monetized link every time they want to write about a product or a brand.
We also offer instant access to 24,000 merchants around the world, so publishers have plenty of choice and can be objective about what they want to write about. There are a few different ways to use. Skimlinks.
You can install a JavaScript on your site to affiliate the links automatically. This is our recommended installation method. Let me share my screen with you to show you where you have to go once you log into the publisher hub, you go to settings, install copy code and put it in the footer of your website.
You can even test the installation. The second way is the Skimlinks editor. This is a Google Chrome extension that displays information about emergent directly from their website. You can also generate those short links directly from the hub, using the link generator if you’re, a power user, and you want full control of your integration, you can also use our public API s2 affiliate merchant links now comes the fun part.
We get to write some content, but Before we jump into that, we have to understand who you’re writing, for where is your audience coming from? Your strategy can be different depending if you want to mainly focus on organic search or develop a brand with a strong social presence use Google Analytics to get page level data about your audience, find the categories make sure that the most popular pages have a direct product.
Being promoted or a link to another page with proper commerce contents map who your readers are and start creating profiles to better understand them. What are their gender education level financial status? If you have a Facebook, page use the page insights to get demographic data about your readers last but not least, promote only the products that they will be interested in.
You can use Skimlinks reports to find which products and merchants are converting better with your audience more on this later commerce content can have different formats. There are product reviews, gift guides product lists, but they can be organized into two major types: timely or timeless.
Do you know the difference? Timely is a trending opportunity that’s, valuable for a limited amount of time it’s normally focused around a product launch a deal or an event. Some examples are best Mother’s Day, gifts for the year Amazon, Prime day best finds and a 15 % off coupon valid this month.
Only timeless is also known as evergreen content. It remains relevant for a longer period of time and can be updated from time to time to make sure it’s relevant some ideas are birthday gift guides for your best friends, the best headphones for your daily commutes or board games that we all Love, let’s, jump into some practice.
Can you guess if these examples are timeless or timely ranks and listicles? This looks at the best printer, which will always be around and you can just update them as new ones. Come around that’s, why it’s timeless Black Friday deals.
These are one day only so they’re. Timely, mainstream, special events such as the Grammys again just a one-time thing, so it’s. Timely product comparison, such as online mattresses, this is something that readers can look at again and again, which makes it timeless product launches.
These also only happen once so that’s. Why it’s, timely, in-depth product review. These can be referred to time and time again that’s. Why they’re timeless calendar events such as Valentine’s Day, gift guides.
These are only during certain times of the year, so they’re timely. You can’t, have commercial content without a merchant to write about, but how do you spot a good opportunity? We have a few ways to help you decide who to write about when you’re starting out at Skimlinks.
We label merchants by type VIP merchants, offer a rate at least a hundred percent higher than their base rate. Preferred merchants offer a commission rate at least fifty percent higher than their base rate exclusive merchants offer you a custom commission rate.
Skimlinks also provides useful metrics to help you understand how successful a merchant is and give you a way to measure whether you want to write about them. These are the main metrics that matter average basket size.
The total average order value placed with a particular merchants conversion rate, the percentage of clicks that resulted in a sale average. Commission rate average Commission rate received by our publishers across all events offered by a merchants EPC how much publishers earn from linking to emergent calculated by dividing total commissions by the total number of clicks.
Now it’s, demo time head over to the merchants tab you can filter by category or by type, once you find a merchant that you want to write about, you can click on their name to get more information and see their metrics.
You can also favorite them if you want to get notifications and updates okay, so we’ve covered how to install Skimlinks, how to write the best content and how to pick the best merchants. But how do you know if it’s? All working and you’re making money.
We provide reports for that. Let’s, go back to the hub when you log into the hub head to the performance tab. If you want to see how a specific merchant is performing click Buy merchants, you can also see which products your users are most interested in.
Just a quick note that this is a beta feature, so we only show data from LinkShare a win and CJ affiliate at the moment. Alright, that’s all we have for you thanks so much for coming today. Now it’s. Your turn to go out there and write some content and make some money
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