Infolinks Review: Not Bad, But Your Readers May Start Hating You! Thumbnail

I have a high tolerance for pain. All throughout the 2011 tennis season, I played injured with excruciating tennis elbow, a sprained left ankle, a torn left meniscus, and loose cartilage in my right serving shoulder. You should have seen me. I looked like a robot with my ankle braces, elbow guard, and knee sleeves!

When the occasional opponent would ask what was up with all my gear, I’d half jokingly respond that I just liked keeping warm. I never revealed my ailments, because I didn’t want them to get a mental edge on me during battle. But, anybody perceptive enough could tell that I was playing with pain.

Due to my tolerance for pain, I also have a higher than average tolerance for blocking out unwanted ads from my web surfing experience. Nothing really bothers me about a website if the content is good. I certainly wouldn’t complain to the webmaster to change anything of his or hers. Suggest perhaps, but not complain.

After reducing the number of Infolink ads per page to one (max is twelve) on Yakezie.com a couple months ago, I forgot they were there until one blogger complained about them in the forums, which started a chorus of further complaints.

I already decided a couple months ago that Infolinks wasn’t worth it on Yakezie.com. It may or may not have slowed down site load time, and I was already getting some complaints. That was when I decided to just go into the dashboard and slide the ad count down to one from the existing five per page. I would have just taken out the code, but I didn’t have the brain power then to figure out where I had first installed the script.

Given I didn’t realize I had Infolinks installed, I took it off after the latest complaints. I share with you some of the pros and cons of the product.

PROS OF INFOLINKS

* Very easy to install. The sign up and approval process is very quick. Once you’re ready to go, all you have to do is copy and paste a five line code into the Footer of your blog right before the </body> tag.  After you’ve installed the code, Infolinks will start generating the intext ads on their own.

* Excellent user interface. It is so easy to customize the number of intent ads per page, the color, the genre of ads, and whether the links are double underlined or dotted. The user interface is the most customizable and user friendly interface I’ve come across.

* Didn’t slow down my sites. As far as I can tell, I did not experience a slowdown in load time due to Infolinks. An occasional slowdown may have been due to the occasional overflow of traffic, but I don’t think due to Infolinks. I am pretty sensitive when it comes to site speed.

* The realization of new support methods for Yakezie.com. Thanks to the complaints about Infolinks, I was able to re-highlight the Yakezie Membership Subscription option for all Members to participate. Members, Challengers, and fans can support the Yakezie Network for as little as $5 a month from the Paypal widget on the right side bar in the middle. Several Members didn’t even realize it was there and have signed up to my delight. You can support Yakezie directly by sending payment to theyakezie AT gmail DOT com as well.  Thanks!

CONS OF INFOLINKS

* RPM isn’t very high. RPM stands for revenue per thousand views. I averaged about $1 RPM vs. comparable RPM levels of $2.5-$4. In the ideal world, I would pick all my favorite products I endorse at a great RPM and nothing else.

* Ad relevancy needs improvement. Sometimes very random anchor texts were underlined by Infolinks to link to a product. Furthermore, almost all the ads were about online trading or lawyers. It would be nice to have more relevant contextual ads.

* Your page might start looking cluttered. If you have some nice affiliate pages, or key articles with good converting affiliate links, your Infolinks which pays you $1 per thousand impressions might “crowd out” your much higher paying affiliate links. Imagine having Google Adsense + Infolinks + affiliate links on one page. It’s easy to see how your reader might not choose the link you want.

* Your readers might start hating you. You might easily block out ads when viewing a website, but others might not be as adept. Even though its your website to do what you wish, it’s good to take in the feedback from readers. I decided that I would rather sacrifice revenue from Infolinks to keep readers happy and have less cluttered pages. It’s the same reason why I don’t have Media.net up as well.

CONCLUSION

Infolinks wasn’t right for Yakezie.com because it populated in the forums as well as the main posts on the homepage.  The majority of traffic is from the forums with an average of six pageviews per user eg highly sticky. There are plenty of readers who just go to the Yakezie Forums and comment and hardly ever comment on the main posts and vice versa.

I’m in the final testing stages of Infolinks for Financial Samurai where I plan to reduce Infolinks to one link a page or completely remove and see how much the revenue drops from Infolinks and see whether my affiliate income and other CPC income goes up. If there is more than a 20% increase in affiliate income, I will definitely take Infolinks down. I’ve had zero complaints about Infolinks on FS, probably because there isn’t a forum, a subscription option, and bloggers account for under 10% of total traffic.

I recommend everybody experiment with various advertising platforms and choose what suits you best. Your website is yours to do what you wish. You will never know the revenue outcome and your user reactions until you try.

Readers, what has your objective experience between with Infolinks like?

Regards,

Sam