Hello citizens!

As part of a general drive for 2011 to attempt to increase revenue on AusGamers, we are experimenting with an affiliate linking system which automatically converts links to some online merchants to affiliate links.

I've tested this reasonably thoroughly and am pretty happy with it as it appears to be totally transparent and doesn't have any impact on the user experience at all.

Background:

We've tried affiliate programmes in the past with close to zero success, but we've never actually put any effort into it, which has probably been why.

AusGamers makes a little bit of money from online advertising, but we really want to grow the site this year - hiring one more person would make a huge difference to everyone's workload here and we need to increase our revenue to make that happen. We've never really put a lot of effort into this side of the site before because we've been happy to just have it ticking along quietly in the background, but now we're going to see what we can do.

What we're testing now:

This new system (called VigLink) is partnered with huge range of popular online merchants, including eBay, Amazon, and iTunes - sites that people commonly buy things from.

It is my hope that we can generate revenue off this to the point where we can cut back on advertising (or at the very least, stop ramping up advertising). We'd obviously love to be able to run the site without advertising but the trend is certainly leaning towards more, not less, so I am checking out as many other options as possible.

So I'm hoping everyone will be tolerant of this change - and maybe even willing to support us by coming through AusGamers when you want to make a purchase on any of these sites. Even one purchase off iTunes for some game will mean a few cents coming to us, and all that will add up.

How you can help support AusGamers:

If you buy anything online from one of the support merchants, doing it from a link on this forum would be awesome.

The links are automatically and seamlessly converted at click-time - you almost certainly won't notice any difference. If you post your link

I have made a testing megathread in the For Sale forum here - all you need to do is post your link there, then click through to it from our site and we will (in theory) get a small chunk of change for each purchase.

I realise it's a vexing extra step, but your support would be greatly appreciated.

Ideas?

I'm also interested in any ideas anyone else has to help make this work.

For example, one thing I'm thinking of is maybe we can get a dedicated ebay expert (or experts) to keep everyone updated with interesting tech stuff/deals that crop up on ebay. I know nothing about ebay (my account is probably over 10 years old and I have bought exactly one thing from ebay in that time) so any suggestions there would be good.

Not sure if I follow, if somebody posts a link to one of these sites it is re-encoded in a way that scores the forums a referral bonus? If so sweet.

Also have been curious whether advertising brings in enough for sites to break even or make a small profit entirely by itself, with the amount of content you guys produce and serve it would be very impressive if that was all funded by advertising. (am also trying to start up a little something (completely non-competitive :P) which would hopefully involve revenue from advertising)

amazon.. meh. get bookdepositary.co.uk if you can

i hear about gameshop.co.uk or whatever a lot on this site...

Might be a good idea to have an Amazon/ebay search bar on top/bottom of the page.

An Amazon "expert" would be great. Someone who trolls through amazon for cool items. How to get discounts (like the gold account), play the recommended system etc etc. WOuldnt work for ebay in my opinion but will for Amazon.

Agreeing with bookdepositary.co.uk (also the .com one too!)

I like this idea better than the achievement scheme - which btw I'd like to know how that's going.

Might be a good idea to have an Amazon/ebay search bar on top/bottom of the page.

Hmm, good idea - I haven't thought about that sort of thing, like top 10 lists or anything.

An Amazon "expert" would be great. Someone who trolls through amazon for cool items. How to get discounts (like the gold account), play the recommended system etc etc. WOuldnt work for ebay in my opinion but will for Amazon.

Yep cool

I like this idea better than the achievement scheme - which btw I'd like to know how that's going.

It wasn't a revenue generating thing - but unfortunately I haven't gotten to "phase 2" of it yet so it's still sort of sitting in limbo. We are getting a bunch of signups and comments from people that drop by and check it out so from my POV its doing what I had hoped, but needs quite a bit more bells and whistles to drive it. Will have more on this later though when I get closed to having more spare time, so stay tuned.

Trogs erepublic army will grow to an insurmountable size.

Do you have http://www.ozgameshop.com? I pretty much buy all my games from there these days

no but I've submitted it for their consideration to add - ta

I dont know for sure, but it look like they use OpenX Enterprise from a screenshot of their dashboard on the VigiLink homepage.

Could be worth running the ad server api on your own machines if they take an unfair chunk of the revenue thats made if this starts rolling...

i used to use quidco. you have to get into a habbit of clicking the links, but its a nice little earner when u do. esp gambling sites.

game.co.uk

Just checked, http://game.co.uk is included already!

So any reason why the ebay link is not localised (i.e. www.ebay.com.au)?

I feel that ebay.com thinks it knows that I am in the US which is untrue...

apparently that is supported too but needs some clarification, which i'm doing now

add dealextreme.com and fishpond.com.au