D.I.Y.

Worldwide iTunes Affiliate Links Via GeoRiot & Related Tools For Musicians

Geo-riot-logoAfter my recent post about bypassing Twitter's iTunes link jacking and other affiliate revenue tricks for musicians I heard from a number of companies relevant to musicians. In addition to sharing news from GeoRiot, VigLink and Referly, I include a bonus list of Hypebot posts about services that allow musicians to set up their own affiliate programs or have related features.

How-georiot-works

GeoRiot – Worldwide iTunes Links

Hypebot previously covered GeoRiot in a guest post by Tierney Stout of The Orchard. GeoRiot basically takes visitors from around the world to the correct iTunes store for their location when they click on your affiliate link to music on iTunes.

The basic idea is that you sign up for an iTunes affiliate program in your country or homebase and then connect that to GeoRiot. GeoRiot handles all redirects and you can then sign up for additional affiliate programs for other countries as you wish. Instead of charging you a fee GeoRiot gets paid by swapping out some of your links for their affiliate accounts with iTunes starting with countries with which you have not established an account. In addition, "if your account sees less than 100 clicks in a 24 hours, you will keep all of your clicks."

If you've got an international fanbase (and you do cause you're on the web, right?) you should definitely check out GeoRiot for iTunes affiliate sales. However, you should also be aware of Glnk, a free service developed by SoundCloud's Lee Martin, previously discussed on Hypebot. It's a bit more bare bones than GeoRiot and will only include the country codes you add so it's not hard to make a case for GeoRiot despite Glnk's free pricing.

VigLink – Turn Product References into Affiliate Links

VigLink is a great tool for musicians who produce a lot of blog content that refers to music, books and other stuff sold online. VigLink basically takes their relationships with over 30,000 companies and uses that info to turn your product links and even your references to products into monetizable links through affiliate programs. They do this without requiring you to join any of those programs and take a 25% cut for the service.

VigLink recently connected with GeoRiot to internationalize iTunes links and they really prove the value of GeoRiot. VigLink would be especially useful for music bloggers and sites promoting a wide range of musicians.

On that note, I've also written about Mixeeba which takes a similar approach to affiliate programs but focuses only on music links to Juno Records, iTunes and Amazon while taking only 10% of affiliate revenue.

Referly – Easy Affiliate Linkage

Referly is another company that handles relationships to large numbers of affiliate programs so that you can refer buyers to specific products and get paid without joining the programs. It's focused on links to specific products that you provide and then you can share the Referly link anywhere online. They say you get 100% of commissions on purchases but it's unclear if that's based on the same amount you'd make if you signed up directly for individual programs.

Referly recently shared the story of a band that used their service to generate iTunes affiliate revenue with links to their new release that were then shared by their fans. To be honest, this doesn't seem like a best use case for Referly given that a handful of iTunes links aren't really that difficult to generate but the post does describe the real benefits of selling and promoting your own music using iTunes affiliate links which could be extended to Amazon and other retailers of music.

Services That Allow Musicians to Create Their Own Affiliate Programs

Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (Twitter/App.net) blogs about music crowdfunding at Crowdfunding For Musicians (@CrowdfundingM). To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.

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1 Comment

  1. This is cool! I got this free iTunes Card Code and it redeemed just fine! Awesomeness!!!! Got it at freeitunesforever♥ com

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