Got Lemonade?

I ran across this new, or at least new to me, affiliate marketing widget this evening, Lemonade as in lemonade stand. It looks like the idea of the site is to allow a person who’s relatively new to such marketing easily build a widget and put it on their site. They seem to be really geared toward Facebook, who they seem directly integrated with, and Blogger users and not so much professional marketers. Let’s take a look at how it works.

After you sign up, which is relatively easy, you create a ’stand’ by selecting from a list of products made available by sponsors. They’ve got a pretty complete list of products so finding something you like, or visitors to your site or profile like, seems easy also. You can also select to show offers by premier vendors as well.

Finally, you get to the code generation part of the setup. As I mentioned, they offer direct integration with Facebook so you don’t have to do anything to put it in your profile there. For Blogger and a few other services, they provide Flash embed code. Stand alone WordPress installations are not directly supported but you could insert the code manually into your template.

Here’s what mine looks like:

Getting Paid - The Good Part

What good is a widget like this if you don’t get paid, right? They pay out via PayPal only so you have to have a PayPal account to get paid. No checks or any other payment options. They pay out after you’ve earned $10. It’s not clear how often they pay from what they say on the site unless it’s buried deep in the fine print. It also isn’t clear exactly what will earn money and what won’t.

The Not-So-Good Part

The not-so-good part is that you only get 80% of the commission from the sale. This means that you might do better with a straight affiliate offer if you can get accepted into a program.

Another not-so-good part is the size of the widget, it’s friggin huge at 240×365 pixels. This will prevent it from integrating into many common WordPress themes.

The last not-so-good thing I noticed is that they don’t have a second tier affiliate program where you can make more money that way.

All in all, it looks like a nice widget for Facebook users and casual bloggers to earn a little pocket change. However, programs like WidgetBucks or Shopzilla should work better for a well run blog. I would guess that Google Adsense would do better although getting that pocket change at their $100 payout level would take a while.

If you look at their marketplace section they have a little over 3000 publishers signed up right now. This seems kind of low compared to the buzz that surrounded some other recent marketing widgets.

What do you think about this widget? I don’t think it’s really worthwhile as compared to the alternatives. Leave me your comments and let me know your opinion.

Internet Marketing