I just added the Skimlinks wordpress plugin to my site. Skimlinks is my first step into affiliate marketing (is that what it is?). The wordpress plugin was very easy to install – but I think I should have read up more on affiliate marketing so it was over to the NMA magazine who recently ran an special on affiliate marketing to help me out.

In essence, affiliate marketing involves any 3rd party creating content that is linked to a product page and the affiliate gets a commission for the sale. The better the affiliate, the better their content the more likely the sale can happen. Good affiliate marketing works best where the 3rd party qualifies the lead before linking to the product page for example a popular blog on Android mobile phones might link to a purchase page for a phone.

I could have just turned on the Google Adsense … I guess its the easiest option for anyone to get started with affiliate marketing and its probably the most well known programme – but Adsense doesn’t know about me or my blog and so it can suffer from quality issues.

I like the folks at Skimlinks … they are helping to sponsor London Startup Weekend @startuplondon and so while I don’t expect to make them or me $$$$ I do hope that I learn more about affiliate marketing and how it will help any new business.

Now every new post has a button reminding me that I should put a link in it to somewhere,   don’t worry, I figured out Skimlinks have a great Adobe AIR application to make the process of creating links easier called SkimKit … Ill have to go and setup a whole lot of links.

Now if only Skimlinks had an RSS feed and then I could setup a Twitter account with special offers and really do some damage to my reputation.

Do you use affiliate marketing? What tools do you use?