Increasing Your iTunes Affiliate Income with GeoRiot
When launching Ominocity, our local music blog, we had a clear strategy for how we would monetize the site — advertising income from Google AdSense and direct ad sales and affiliate income from TicketMaster and iTunes.
Prior to launching the site I posted a pre-sale code to a NOFX concert along with my TicketMaster affiliate link in my Facebook status and made $50 in commission from a single status update. If I could make that much from a Facebook post, just think of what I could make when we launched the site! Well, TicketMaster got the last laugh and cancelled their affiliate program the week we launched. Efffff!!!
With TicketMaster now out as a revenue source, it looks like we will have to rely a lot more on iTunes. Do people even buy music anymore?
Fortunately the iTunes affiliate program covers more than just music. You get a 5% commission on any album, movie, TV show, iPhone or Mac app sale that you refer. Their cookie lasts for 72 hours so if a visitor clicks on an album link and then ends up buying an iPhone app, you still get credit for the referral.
We applied to the iTunes affiliate program, was accepted in, and bought a couple apps using our affiliate link to test it out. Days later our LinkShare account still showed no sales. WTF?
It turns out that iTunes has affiliate programs for pretty much every country they sell in. We signed up for the main US iTunes program so when I bought apps through the Canadian store, we did not get credit for the sale.
While this wouldn’t be a big problem for Ominocity, since we could replace links for the US affiliate program to Canadian affiliate links since the site caters to a Canadian audience, this would be a problem for our technology blog which has a vast international audience.
While searching for a solution to this problem I stumbled upon GeoRiot, a service specifically designed to resolve this issue. With GeoRiot you swap out your iTunes affiliate links with special GeoRiot links which detect the visitor’s location and directs them to the appropriate geographical iTunes store.
You simply enter in your iTunes affiliate information into GeoRiot’s system for each country that you are accepted in and then GeoRiot takes care of rest. So, if a US visitor clicks your GeoRiot link, they will be directed to the US store and the commission for the sale will appear in your US affiliate account.
In exchange for providing this service, GeoRiot skims a small percentage of your clicks, but never for your base country, so while GeoRiot will get a small percentage of your referrals, you will never make less with GeoRiot than if you used a single iTunes affiliate link. Further, GeoRiot tries to skim only in countries where you are not accepted in an affiliate program to prevent from costing you a sale!
Using GeoRiot is really a win-win. You will make more money by using their system since your affiliate links now credit you for sales in all countries you are accepted in and their skim ratio is very fair and will never cost you more than if you had just used a single iTunes affiliate link. The service is designed to make you more money — and it will!
For more information on GeoRiot, please check out: http://www.georiot.com/
