LinkShare Bento Box
For our partners using LinkShare in the US and Canada there is a great set of tools to help create commissionable links without having to log into the LinkShare Dashboard.
On the LinkShare Bento Box page affiliates will find many tools that they can use either "in-browser" or as downloadable apps to help them get started sending traffic to iTunes or the App Store with ease.
Here are a few standout tools for the Affiliate Program:
Using this bookmarklet tool is simple and requires no log-in.
This is great way to make links on the fly. Rather than logging into the LinkShare Dashboard, an affiliate partner can use this tool to make a commissionable link with just one click.
Simply visit any of the iTunes or App Store Preview Pages and click the LinkGenerator bookmark and a window will pop up with an affiliated deep link. You can even shorten the link using a Bit.ly format.
This is a wonderful tool for bloggers. Just add your affiliate token and you will have no need to log-in to the LinkShare Dashboard to create and affiliated link.
A side panel can be attached to the WordPress workspace that can be used to look up links and even drag and drop content into your blog. All this can be done without leaving the blog entry and breaking your workflow.
Tumblr is a micro-blogging platform that supports lots of rich media.
This tool can easily be used to publish content to a Tumbler feed without logging into LinkShare or being on the Tumblr website.
An affiliate partner can simply create the TumblrShop bookmark and navigate to an iTunes or App Store Preview Page. The partner can then, click the bookmark, log-in to Tumblr and the content will post, already affiliated.
Link Lookup Mac Dashboard Widget
This is an extremely handy dashboard widget for OS X.
Affiliates can pull up Dashboard, plug in their affiliate token, then search for content they would like to promote.
The widget makes it easy find iTunes and App Store content and URLs, then create deep links that are affiliated. This functionality is similar to the LinkGenerator Bookmarklet mentioned above. The advantage of using the widget is that you can create affiliated links without opening iTunes or an internet browser.
These tools help partners get affiliated links incorporated into websites without doing any of the heavy lifting. The tools work well with iTunes and App Store content and increase efficiency in the long run.
However, these are not the only tools in the Bento Box. There are more to explore to increase your efficiency in building links.
