Infolinks Review

Posted on February 27, 2009
Filed Under Recommended

I’ve been planning this Infolinks review for some time since I’ve been very satisfied with Infolinks and this review will hopefully help you decide whether this advertising program is suitable for your online business.

What is Infolinks?

It’s a in-text advertising program which usually shows as a double-underlined link. Here’s an example how the Infolinks shows on my vacuum site:

Infolinks Sample on a website

Here’s how it works (from their FAQ):

Using our dynamic proprietary algorithm, Infolinks intelligently scans your web pages and converts carefully selected keywords into cost-per-click (CPC) In-Text ads. These specially formatted double underline hyperlinks lead to highly relevant advertiser content.

And each time a visitor clicks on the ad, the publisher gets paid. The Infolinks advertising can also be used together with Google Adsense and Chitika on the same page.

Customization

The ads are totally customizable and you can test various combos to see what works for you.

You can change underlining (single or double underline), the color of the in-text links, the format of the ad that shows up when someone holds the cursor over the links (see picture), how many ads you want to show on each page and even where on page you want the ads to start appearing and where to stop appearing.

Infolinks Popup

Infolinks by default shows many ads per page (I think 10 or even 12) and if you use Adsense or Chitika too, then I suggest you lower the number of in-text links per page so that your pages don’t scare your visitors away with too many ads.

Add this line (or change it) in your code: var infolink_anow = ‘3′;

3 is the number of ads in the above example and that’s how many I use and still earn nice additional income.

I also suggest, that when you sign up with Infolinks, let them run for a week or so and then email their support asking for better optimization. Their team will check the theme of your site and optimize the ads.

Their optimization improved my earnings by almost 50%. (That was in November – in the shopping season! See picture below – the red numbers are earnings before optimization and the green numbers are after the optimization.)

Infolinks earnings before and after optimization

Affiliate Program

Infolinks offers also a referral program which works like this:

For each publisher who joins the Infolinks network by clicking the personal referral link, you are be entitled to a one-time referral fee of up to $1,000 per new publisher, as follows*:

• Small Publisher – $25 (up to 10,000 average net Infolinks page impressions per day)
• Medium Publisher – $100 (up to 100,000 average net Infolinks page impressions per day)
• Large Publisher – $1,000 (over 100,000 average net Infolinks page impressions per day)

* Publisher’s traffic must have at least 30% of traffic from the US. If less than 30% of the publisher’s traffic comes from the US then the referral fee will be 30% of the fees listed above.

Please notice that in order for you to be entitled to the referral fees, the new publisher must be actually new (and not in previous contact with Infolinks or related to any of the Infolinks publishers), must enter the Infolinks website through your referral link, be accepted to become a qualified publisher, and remain a fully active publisher with an average of at least 300 daily net impressions for a minimal consecutive period of three months.

Only after this period, and subject to you still being a fully active publisher as well through that period, you will be paid (together with your regular earnings), all subject to your agreement with Infolinks and in accordance with the results accumulated and recorded in the Infolinks system.

As you can see, there aren’t massive earnings with their affiliate program but every little bit helps, especially in the current financial situation around the world.

Earnings and Payments

I have placed Infolinks on a couple of my sites and here are my stats and earnings:

Total monthly earnings

As you can see, Infolinks have added almost $1500 extra monthly income without really affecting my CTR and earnings from Adsense and Chitika. They pay to Paypal or wire tranfer the money to your bank.

Payment is sent 45 days after the earnings period. Here’s a detailed explantion from the Infolinks:

You get paid every month. In details, at the end of each monthly payment period, Infolinks calculates your earnings for that month and issues your payment within 45 days of the end of the payment period, with the exception of monthly earnings of less than $100 which remain in your account and are added into the following month’s earnings. We welcome all legitimate websites, big and small, to join the new generation of In-Text advertising today. There are no hidden commitments or qualification minimums.

I have been receiving the payments on time and have been very pleased with the Infolinks support.

If this Infolinks review hasn’t answered all your questions, then let me know in the comments below and I’ll answer your questions!

To sign up for Infolinks and test drive it on your sites, follow this link. (affiliate link)

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Comments

32 Responses to “Infolinks Review”

spondishy on February 27th, 2009 6:54 am

How does the cpc stack up against adsense?
Tomaz on February 27th, 2009 7:48 am

Check the stats in the picture for total earnings in November 2008; there were 235,390 impressions and 10,102 clicks which resulted in $1,455.81.

So the average CPC was around 14 cents. Adsense still pays more but not much.
Tracy Shaffer at Honest Personal Finance on March 1st, 2009 4:04 pm

Thank you very much for this review Tomaz. I was trying to decide whether or not to monetize with Infolinks and it was great to see a review. I signed up and put it up today.

Great information!
Heidi on March 2nd, 2009 2:06 pm

Tomaz,

I requested that Infolinks optimize my ads and was happy to say that I received an email back the next morning (on a Sunday!). To me that’s huge. Though they asked for me to 1)Define a category 2)Give a list of keywords to target and 3) Create a Blacklist of words not to highlight.

Did they ask the same of you? And if so was this what made your revenues double?
Tomaz on March 2nd, 2009 2:55 pm

Heidi,

I only defined the category, Infolinks team did the rest. And yes, at that time, the revenue almost doubled…
Henri on March 4th, 2009 6:36 am

Thanks again for a good article.

I have been thinking about infolinks, but it will probably be in the future, I will try adsense first.

But then again, like you said, infolinks probably wont hurt my adsense earnings so I might put it in.

I’ll try it on my poker website now and use your aff link!

Cheers
Brian on March 4th, 2009 6:51 pm

Hi Tomaz,

Roughly what percentage of your site’s income comes from each of the 3 ad networks you use? Do you find that adsense should always be your primary ad?

Thanks for the intersting article.
Tomaz on March 5th, 2009 2:36 am

Hey Brian,

It’s roughly like this: Adsense 60%, Chitika 30%, Infolinks 10%. Adsense pays best in most niches except one that I have.

There I’m using Chitika mostly which pays 50% better per click than Adsense.

Eventually it comes down to testing and seeing what works best…
tom on March 9th, 2009 8:47 pm

hiya, infolinks looks like a great ad program. Have you ever tried out Kontera – do you know how much less Kontera pay?

tom
Tomaz on March 10th, 2009 2:17 am

Tom,

I didn’t try Kontera but there is a long thread in the SBI forums where most users say that Infolinks pays better.

Kontera has heard about that and they have now a person that advises SBI-ers on how to improve their earnings. This competition between Kontera and Infolinks is always good for us, publishers.
Heidi on March 10th, 2009 1:36 pm

Hi Tomaz,

Thanks so much for the heads up on how to improve my numbers from Infolinks. I gave them the category and I have to say that my revenue from them has gone up by 50%!

Also, I read that you are getting most of your revenue from Adsense. Do you find the numbers fairly stable (as well as the cpc)? I have found that if I am not on top of Adsense every other day (checking to see if they’re advertising a cash parking site) then my cpc drops as well as my revenue.

I know that you said that you are only putting a limit of 3 links per page but I have to tell you that I put the maximum per page (and did so because they will decide if 12 is what you need or only 2 on smaller pages) and while my Adsense has dropped my overall revenue has increased by 25-30%.

Have you tried playing with it?
Tomaz on March 10th, 2009 3:35 pm

Thanks for sharing, Heidi!

Yes, I find my Adsense numbers very stable now. One of the reasons (I assume) is that many of my ads are now placement targeted by advertisers (that’s under Ad Review Center in your account) so they are not replaced by low paying ads.

I also haven’t tried more Infolinks ads on my pages. I think I already have enough of them; 2 Adsense, usually 2 Chitika and 3 Infolinks per page which is quite a lot so I don’t wish to bother my visitors with too many ads…
Heidi on March 14th, 2009 10:18 am

Tomaz,

I’ve been trying to find the Ad Review Center in my account in Ad Sense and haven’t been able to locate it. Can you tell me where I could find it?

Also, fyi, my infolinks revenue has gone down by anywhere from 50-75% in the last three days (the biggest change is in my CPM but also a decrease in my clicks). I’ve sent an email off to them to see why the change has happened so drastically. I will let you know of any response.
Heidi on March 17th, 2009 5:16 pm

I actually found it — thanks for the heads up.
Jack on March 24th, 2009 7:55 am

Hey Tomaz

Just wanted to see what you think of the comments over at

lissowerbutts . com/site-build-it-scam-review/

your vacuum site is mentioned a few times.

thanks
Tomaz on March 24th, 2009 8:31 am

Jack, I read the post and a few others and it got ugly. Not worth my time.

I actually followed Vic’s and Grizz’s blogs for a while but now I see that they don’t know what they’re talking about.

They talk about Adsense earnings which supposedly I get 5 to 10 cents per click when in reality the vacuum niche pays at least double.

The guys says that visitors don’t buy when they type vacuum cleaners in Google – which is most likely true – but I can tell you that they are very happy to click on ads.

Also, the site was found for 21,863 different keywords this month, so making conclusions of how the site sells because of one general keyword is really not very knowledgeable about internet marketing.

I also never bought a single link for this site but that’s their attack (their only explanation) because they really don’t know how else to explain something they don’t understand.

They say that people don’t buy vacuum cleaners online, and I sold 38! vacuum cleaners through Amazon in the last 3 days. Very funny.

So to everyone: please stop wasting your time with these people and focus on something that will improve your life and / or earn you more money.
Jack on March 24th, 2009 9:21 am

Thanks for the reply
Spondishy on March 24th, 2009 11:00 am

Tomaz,

Do you think you’ve been affected by:

http://www.seobook.com/google-branding
Mark on March 24th, 2009 12:18 pm

What a crap site –> lissowerbutts . com
They are not objective.
tim on March 26th, 2009 2:00 am

tomaz,

yeah i read the post at sowerbutts – i didn’t like how someone mentioned your site actually – don’t you think though, that if you publish your niche that many people will start a vaccuum site ? isn’t this bad? or are you too much of an authority to be overtaken

just a thought
Tomaz on March 26th, 2009 4:06 am

Tim,

I don’t worry about a new vacuum site. Yes, my site is well established and second, as I replied to Jack, my site was found for more than 20,000 words.

So what if someone overtakes me for a few of them? Don’t worry about the competition, it’s not about one or two keywords…

And even if I am #1 for a keyword and then someone overtakes me and then I am #2, that will have no significant effect on my earnings or the authority of the site. While they try to overtake me for 1 keyword, I’ll publish 10 new articles and overtake them for 20 keywords.
Tomaz on March 26th, 2009 4:08 am

Spondishy,

I don’t know. I haven’t noticed any big changes in my traffic…
spondishy on March 26th, 2009 6:54 am

Good to know… Just noticed some big brands going top for queries where they don’t even have the keyword in the title.
dave on April 20th, 2009 5:26 pm

if i update my site content everyday so that the words in it are changing, will the link words find new words to use…if you know what i mean..will the ads change as my content changes, can i do that?
Tomaz on April 21st, 2009 12:56 am

Yes, the Infolinks code will adjust. It’s a dynamic process…
WebmonkeyDOTdk on August 22nd, 2009 3:56 pm

Hi guys!

Does Infolinks support multiple sites for the same account???

And how well will it work for English language sites located outside of the USA and UK?
Tomaz on August 22nd, 2009 7:34 pm

Yes, you can use the same code from your Infolinks account on multiple sites.

I don’t think the location of your server has anything to do with how ad networks perform. They are triggered by content…
WebmonkeyDOTdk on August 22nd, 2009 8:22 pm

Hey man thanks.

I just thought I read somewhere that Kontera has support for it under some account settings where you like in adsense can add more sites…
Sheryl on October 22nd, 2009 9:30 am

I was looking for good and working tips to increase my earnings in infolinks and good to see your post about it. I’m on half of the min. payout but since I want to increase it more just like other bloggers including you… I want to apply your tips on my blogs as well.
Sheryl on October 22nd, 2009 9:39 am

i have a question, is it possible if infolinks support will help me with the optimization even I joined infolinks for couple of months already? or do they entertainment e-mails from new registrants?
Tomaz on October 22nd, 2009 12:32 pm

Hi Sheryl,

I am quite sure that the Infolinks team will help you out even if you email them later…
Sonya @ baby shower ideas on January 23rd, 2010 7:51 pm

I keep running into articles that recommend infolinks, so I think I’m going to give them a try. I’m currently using adsense, chitika mega units and chitika text links. The mega units do well, but not the text links.