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- New Blogger Tools
We spend a lot of time here at Snooth HQ thinking about how Snooth can better serve its constituents, and recently we've been thinking a lot about bloggers.
With help from our 20 odd blogger beta tester's (thats "20-odd" bloggers, not 20 "odd bloggers") we just released the following two affiliate tools which are unique in the industry. Also, particular thanks go to Ryan Opaz for his help in rallying people together to help test the two tools.
Snooth Bookmarklet - The easiest way for a blogger to drop contextual links into their blog, allowing them to monetize content in a more relevant and engaging way than ads - just click on the image below to read more about it.
Installation is literally just a case of dragging a link to your address bar, and then when you need the bookmarklet, just highlight some text, click on the bookmark and it'll popup with everything you need. From there, you just paste in the link and start earning money.
Snooth Quick Search - A simple implementation of the common side bar search, however with the same search capabilities as Snooths main search engine there's full support of foreign characters, food pairings, tasting tags and weird queries.
Both these tools are super simple to use, come with tracking code already implemented, and with no monthly traffic minimums and full Paypal integration setup, and payment is a 2 minute job.
Please let us know how you find these and of course, just holler if there's anything else you need.
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5 - Reply by JIKvig, Jun 17, 2008.
Odd Bloggers??????????????
Glad it's out of beat, congratulation on great tools!
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- Reply by philip, Jun 17, 2008.
No, bloggers arent odd ;)
Glad you like it - first of several tools and treats for wine bloggers we've planned. Thanks
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- Reply by Ryan, Jun 17, 2008.
Thanks for the great tools, and I hope more bloggers use them along with other wine sites...Keep up the great work!
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- Reply by Ryan, Jun 17, 2008.
BTW is there a TOS for the affiliate program showing pricing, fraud policy and everything else that would be interesting to peek at? ;)
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- Reply by philip, Jun 17, 2008.
Thanks Ryan - anyone can use the tools without any forms, however to join the affiliate program (ie. get paid for traffic) theres a simple Terms of Service on the sign up page - the same page that the blogger would link their paypal account.
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820 - Reply by HondaJohn, Jun 17, 2008.
Some people might suggest that I am odd ... and I do blog here.
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03 - Reply by getwine, Jun 18, 2008.
Not to be a downer, because I like the initiative and the tool works well, but have you considered whether or not Google will consider this "buying links". Google has been very aggressive in dealing with link buying lately. It would be a shame if the program ended up actually hurting your Page Rank. Maybe you should consider generating the html code and adding a nofollow tag?
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- Reply by Philip, Jun 18, 2008.
Getwine - you raise a really good point.The original version of the tool did exactly that, but the feedback from the beta testers was that most people used WYSIWYG editors and the html code wasnt being pasted in cleanly. So we moved to just generating the link for them.
We've done a lot of reading on the matter and found this quote from Matt Cutts:
"there’s absolutely no problem with selling links for traffic"
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/
This is what the Snooth affiliate program does - it pays for traffic (5 cents per click specifically). We pay the same whether the traffic comes via the Quick Search side bar app (where no links are involved), or through a link generated by the Bookmarklet. Also, if a blogger makes a hundred inbound links but doesnt refer any traffic then they will not earn any money.
However, like i said, you raised a really good point and i wanted to make our stance on this cyrstal clear. We just added a line to the TOS that recommends the use of nofollows and explains in plain english why.
Thanks
