Why VigLink?

The main reason you might be looking at VigLink is because Amazon has dropped you from their affiliate program. If you have a large pool of established links to Amazon then it probably isn’t practical to try and reroute those to different affiliate programs who may or may not be dropping affiliates for the same reason as Amazon. VigLink gives us a second chance to get back in the game and not worry about the future.

The other big plus is the broad coverage of affiliate programs makes it easier to link to other sites besides Amazon. VigLink covers about 12,000 sites and you can check coverage through their backend site. I know when I was in Associates I pretty much only linked to Amazon. Now I’m starting to link to other sites and present some price comparisons to give readers some additional links to explore.

How big of a cut does VigLink take?

VigLink takes 25% off the top. Might seem like a lot, but they also have the ability to reach higher affiliate tiers because they funnel referrals through a single account. On Amazon I would barely get into the 2nd or 3rd rate tier, but now I’m pretty much guaranteed to get the top rate. So the 25% commission definitely eats into our share, but it is potentially offset by higher payouts. For those of us dropped by Amazon, 75% is much better than 0%.

Implementing VigLink and How It Works

You install VigLink by dropping a bit of JavaScript into the template of your site. This code writes out a <script> tag that links to the JavaScript file on VigLink’s server. Their code is obfuscated so I can only guess that it goes through all external links on a page and adds an OnClick event to each one. When a link is clicked it transparently redirects it to their system to record the click, add on the needed affiliate info and then redirect the user to the modified link.

The plus side to this implementation is that links appear to be unaffiliated to the reader. This also makes it much easier to add links to posts without having to worry that it is properly formatted for a given affiliate program.

AdBlock Strikes Back

If users have JavaScript disabled then obviously none of this works, but that’s fairly rare as far as I’m concerned. What’s not so rare are readers who use the AdBlock browser extension. I use it to help keep popovers and banner ads under control; things that are just out right annoying. The AdBlock Plus filter subscription blocks the retrieval of VigLink’s JavaScript file which prevents links from being affiliated. I have no idea what percentage of people use filtering extensions like AdBlock, but it hurts knowing you might be leaving money on the table from those uncounted clicks.

I implemented a workaround that lets me serve the VigLink JavaScript from my own domain which avoids it being matched to a blacklist. You can read more about that on this post: Make VigLink Work with AdBlock Plus and Other Ad Blocking Software.

Take VigLink for a spin and see how it works for you

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I prefer my web presence to be somewhere I have more control of my personal data. I highly doubt I’ll miss it since I never particularly liked it to begin with. Let our blogs live on.

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I think a big part of this migration is that the barrier to posting is very low on Facebook and the audience is quick to reach. I don’t mind seeing what people did last night or checking out some of their photos, but I don’t expect to have any deep discussions on Facebook. There’s little incentive for people to post anything too meaningful because as soon it drops off the front page of everyone’s News Feed it is essentially lost forever. Posts and comments on a blog are much more permanent and easily retrieved. I could easily find a blog post from last year, but I don’t think I’d be able to find a Status Update from last year. Why invest time in creating content that might as well be deleted after it reaches an age of one week?

Of the 18 or so blogs on my Blogroll, I’d say only 5 or 6 could be considered active. All the people who’s blogs are dead are active on Facebook. That seems like fairly good evidence that Facebook killed the casual blog. Not good or bad, it just is what it is.

I’m also experimenting with Facebook imports, so if you are seeing this on Facebook, come visit our blogs if you have never been before. My siblings have to fly under the radar at http://theblarg.com and http://myrighteousindignation.com/.

A while back I was trying to figure out a way to share those “shared” items with a wider audience. I stuck a link in the sidebar to my shared item page, but I doubt anybody uses it. What I really wanted to do was have WordPress automatically create posts with a link to the content I mark in Google Reader. The WP-o-matic plugin does exactly what I want.

Setting up the plugin involves creating a CRON job on the server and setting up a feed to check periodically. You can customize the content of the post that gets created; I opted for a little blurb and a link to the content. I wanted to modify the title that gets created which isn’t an available option so I modified the plugin to do that for me. I also set it to save posts as drafts so I can assign a category and tags and maybe some of my thoughts before Google Reader gets a hold of it and caches it forever.

So these shared posts are really the cream of the crop of my subscriptions and I’d love to have people share things they find. I like the fact that whenever shared items show up in Google Reader from my friends they are of high quality and worth the read even though it might be outside my immediate area of interest.

The main issue I was having with categories is that I was using them to say what a post is about. For example, if I had a post about our wedding, it went in the Wedding category. But once our wedding was over I had like 10 posts sitting in a category that would never be added to. With tags I can place those posts into “Life Stuff” and tag it with wedding. The category becomes a general bucket and the tags describe exactly what the post is about.

I’ve made some theme changes and added a list of tags on each post. I went back through all my posts, recategorized them into my core categories and added tags. Now I have 8 categories and over 100 tags which will be much easier to manage and will keep me from trying to stuff my posts into overly specific categories.