VigLink enables you to get paid for doing what you normally do on your blog or site. Whenever you link to a product, website, or promotion, VigLink turns that link into an affiliate link so that you receive a commission for any purchases made.
On your webpage you probably already link to a number of recommended products or companies, but only affiliate links allow you to get paid if one of your visitors makes a purchase at the linked site. Specifically, an affiliate link tells a site that its customer has come from your site, so you can receive a commission on the sale.
Of course...but it's time-consuming to enroll in a program, ensure that you have the correct affiliate links, and then manage that program. By contrast, one quick install of the VigLink library on your page enrolls you in all relevant affiliate programs quickly and easily. Plus, we'll administer everything so that you don't have to!
You earn a commission for every sale made on a linked site. VigLink takes a small fee from that commission and then passes on the rest to you.
If you refer a publisher to VigLink, you will earn a referral fee equal to 10% of their commissions for their first year. Their earnings will not be affected. Any link you create on a site with VigLink installed is automatically active in the referral program. If you want to promote us on twitter, facebook, or somewhere that is not your site use the link provided on the Account tab.
After you embed the VigLink library on your page, it monitors when visitors click on a link pointing to a different site. The library checks to see if the URL of that link can be affiliated; if so, the link is automatically affiliated.
Likely not. VigLink does not change the user experience one bit. No links are inserted or removed on the page, there are no double-underlines or pop-ups, and mousing over a link looks "clean."
Enabling great content and great websites is our passion, so we test our product carefully on every major browser (and a couple of obscure ones too). We will not break your page.
VigLink is designed to fail gracefully. If any of these situations occur, your page will behave normally. Under these circumstances, links will not be affiliated but the page will function normally.
The presence of VigLink on your site does not affect the security of your site - you still need to take all the standard precautions like using strong passwords and updating your software regularly. The VigLink service itself has multiple layers of security measures both to keep your data and any information you provide us safe, as well as make sure we never introduce anything harmful onto your site.
You can search the list of merchants we monetize here (you must log in to view this). We have over 12,500 merchants in our system and we will work to activate your site in their programs as soon as we see traffic from you.
So far our data shows that only about half of the commercial links on the web are affiliated successfully. Even very active affiliates miss many links for a variety of reasons (long tail of merchants, merchants change link IDs, merchants change networks, etc). We can make sure you never miss a link. Since we don't touch your existing links and you never pay a fee, the worst case is that you get great analytics for free!
VigLink will pay by check in the United States and PayPal anywhere it is available. We are expanding our payment options over time. VigLink will ask for payment information and pay publishers as soon as their balance reaches $25. VigLink typically takes 25% on commission earned by publishers. Often publishers still receive higher payouts due to collective bargaining and high volume commission levels. We will issue an IRS Form 1099 to any publisher who makes more than $400 in a fiscal year.
The same technology that you put on your page when you install VigLink normally can be used to rewrite all of your links using different tracking IDs. We can automatically use our tracking IDs on your page, and you still get paid the normal commission. Once installed go to the "Account" tab and check the box next to "Overwrite any existing affiliate links."
It can take merchants up to a week to post transaction data at the networks. As soon as the information is posted we make it available in your dashboard.
VigLink's proprietary technology tells you the quality of the traffic you send to other sites. This will ensure that you send only traffic that will convert at a high rate. In order to prevent spam, we also give merchants complete control, including the ability to opt-out completely.
Yes! We want you to maximize your revenue. Period. That's why VigLink does not require you to sign an exclusive contract.
VigLink has been designed for high reliability. In case it is unreachable for some reason, your page will be not be affected. All that will happen is that, temporarily, your links will not be affiliated.
If you're familiar with bookmarklets you can use this one to test VigLink on any page: Try VigLink Here (Drag the link to your bookmarks bar, go to a web page you want to test and click the link.)
By default, VigLink does not affect links you have already affiliated. However, there are a number of reasons you might want us to overwrite affiliate links that already exist in the page: #1 You may live in a state that has passed a nexus law that led to you being fired by your affiliate programs. VigLink is located in California which does not currently have such a law. By checking this box, affiliate links will be overwritten so that the merchant is working with VigLink and the payout from your traffic will resume. #2 You may have rules against submitting affiliate links in your forums or comments, but often users do it anyway. Overwriting these affiliate links so that you take the revenue will reduce the incentive for users to break your rules in this manner.
Anyone can opt-out of VigLink's automatic link affiliation for sites that they visit. See our opt-out page.
We simplify the affiliate process so that bloggers, authors, and site masters can focus on creating great content. Affiliating links takes time and know-how, yet the majority of people sending users to your site have neither.
VigLink allows your affiliates to spend more time linking to your site and less time making sure they got the affiliate code right. With an easier process, more more publishers will want to become affiliates; more affiliates means more business for you.
Additionally, VigLink increases confidence, click-through rates and conversions by making the links to your site appear to be "natural" links instead of obviously embedded affiliate codes.
It doesn't, really. VigLink links appear completely "natural," so users are unlikely to notice the difference.
Yes! VigLink will let publishers know about you whenever your products are relevant to their content. This automatically will bring you new affiliates.
VigLink is completely transparent to merchants and gives them full control, including the ability to opt out completely.
Uniquely, VigLink uses proprietary technology to analyze publisher quality in real-time. This prevents the traditional problem of publishers becoming overly aggressive once they've been admitted to an affiliate program.
In most cases, VigLink deals exclusively through affiliate networks like Commision Junction, Linkshare, and the Google Affiliate Network. Please make sure viglink.com is enabled in your program.
If you run an affiliate program that is not represented by a network, please let us know.
When a domain is submitted for a pre-sales report, VigLink must go and retrieve the entire website or at least a substantial fraction. VigLink avoids hammering a domain by throttling the speed at which pages may be retrieved and this lengthens the process. Overall demand may affect how long it takes as well.
A number of things may have happened:
The crawl process will currently crawl a maximum of approximately 5,000 pages per domain. This provides a reasonable sample of the site without spending unreasonable effort trying to crawl the whole domain. (Which may have an infinite number of pages.)
If the number seems too high, it may be because a single page is available through multiple URLs, for example with a preceding www. and without.
VigLink will not re-crawl a domain it has already crawled recently. The crawl dates are an indication of when the crawl was performed. If the site has been updated since then, the report will be inaccurate.
Traffic numbers are estimated using publicly available data such as Alexa but there is considerable uncertainty in these estimates. If you would like to provide a more accurate number, the estimate can be recomputed.
An outclick is a user click that causes the user to leave the domain. The outclick rate is a measure of how many pageviews result in an outclick. In practice this can vary tremendously based on the structure and content of a particular page and the mindset of your readers. The estimate is based on VigLink's historical data but may be affected by other factors like your site structure. You can provide a different value to see how the estimate might change.
The payout rate is the amount the merchant is willing to pay for your traffic on a per-click basis. Merchants don't actually pay per click, they pay on commission, so this value is the average commission divided by the average number of clicks it takes to get a sale. Both of these values can vary tremendously based both on the subject matter of your site and the behavior of your users. If you have a more realistic value, you can supply it and we will revise the estimate.
Not all links are equally likely to get clicked on. Commercial bias is a measure of the commercial nature of your site and affects our prediction of the likelihood of your readers clicking on commercial links relative to non commercial links. If you have a more accurate value you can fill it in and we will revise the estimate.
Link share is a direct measure of what percentage of outbound links are directed to a particular domain. A link share value of 1% implies that 1% of all links point to that domain. In our current models, domains with more links are likely to receive more traffic.
Static analysis of a website is crude and not nearly as accurate as installing the VigLink library and observing what customers do in practice, but it still provides directional guidance about the VigLink opportunity for a particular site. Our models are constantly improving over time based on more data.
Yes! VigLink offers an API that allows any application to use the VigLink service. Please refer to the API documentation.