Admit it: You’ve thought about dabbling in affiliate marketing. After all, who wouldn’t want to make an extra buck by sharing a few products on their blog or Twitter?

But unless you’re an Internet superstar, chances are you won’t end up making much from traditionally low-commission affiliate programs. Amazon’s program, for example, starts at just 4 percent for purchases (you can earn more with digital download commissions).

New York City-based Consignd believes it has a better solution. Instead of dealing with an online retailer’s affiliate program, Consignd lets you create your own storefront to show off cool products. You can also easily pin items from your storefront to your Pinterest account (no surprise there as Pinterest is incredbly popular for e-commerce).

Much like Fab and other online shopping sites, Consignd has drop-shipping relationships with companies and their brands, which means orders come directly from the manufacturer. The big benefit to that: Higher commissions for you.

“By taking the retailer out of the equation, we never hold any inventor risk,” said Luke Sherwin, Consignd’s cofounder and operations head, in an interview with VentureBeat. Since it took out the middle man, Consignd sees a surprisingly high margin of 40 to 45 percent with a typical brand relationship, which lets it offer its users commissions between 20 and 25 percent.

Consigd is a member of Enterpreneur Roundtable Accelerator’s most recent class of startups in New York City. Sherwin and the rest of the Consignd team are feverishly prepping for ERA’s demo day, which is being held tomorrow.

Consignd has certainly come a long way since my initial chat with Neil Parikh, cofounder and head of business development, a few months ago. The company was initially focusing on smaller sellers, like people who offer products on Etsy or sell at local flea markets. Now it’s aiming for “Etsy graduates,” as Sherwin described them, and bigger brands.

Since launching its beta five weeks ago, the company has nabbed 55 brands, including Braun, Soul Bicycles, and WeWod, and has accrued a waiting list of willing partners twice that size. It’s also attracted three of the top 20 Pinterest users, according to Sherwin.

Consignd is currently raising a $750,000 seed round.

Facebook’s latest move is a boon for marketers who want more control over and information about their campaigns on the world’s largest social network.

The new self-service Ads Manager tool measures and optimize campaign performance. In an expansion to its “Optimized CPM” (OCPM) bidding program, Facebook has crafted a two-part addition for marketers who want to drive specific digital actions, say web signups or online purchases.

The first piece, which involves adding code snippets to webpages, gives marketers a more comprehensive look at whether their units are driving the actions they want.

In Ads Manager, marketers can generate a unique piece of code to track actions on their webpages.

The marketer can use Ads Manager to generate a unique piece of code and place that code on check out, registration, or lead pages. When those pages load from a person clicking on the Facebook ad, the code snippet pings Facebook, and Ad Manager counts the conversion. People who click on an ad but don’t take the specific action are counted if they return and complete the action within a 28-day window. The idea here is to go beyond click-through rates and provide marketers with more accurate conversion metrics.

The tracking process is done anonymously, and marketers don’t get any data about users, a Facebook spokesperson told VentureBeat.

The second piece of the new tool is all about unit optimization. Marketers can opt to select the Optimized CPM option in Ads Manager to grant Facebook the capability to automatically show ads to the demographic group of people it deems will be the most likely to convert. This feature is meant to lower the marketer’s cost per acquisition (CPA) and provide a quicker route to potential customers, Facebook said.

Ideally, marketers can use the new features to both improve conversion rates and reduce their ad spend. Beta tester Fab.com used OCPM to reduce its CPA by 39 percent, the company said. On average, OCPM ads deliver roughly 40 percent lower CPAs, according to Facebook.

Of course, the social network would like you to believe that its new conversion feature is the answer to your ad optimization needs. Facebook needs to sell ads, after all. Marketers should keep in mind that the conversation and optimization features are only meant to serve those who want to drive specific online actions. They are not ideal for brands hoping to generate awareness or offline sales from their Facebook campaigns.

Facebook said the optimization product is currently in an extended beta period and will launch at the end of the month.

Facebook photo via Shutterstock

Businesses that want to craft their own referral programs to benefit their customers have a new option to consider: the rewards network Referly.

As founder Danielle Morrill explained to the room at Y Combinator’s Demo Day, Referly creates an online network for “affiliate marketing,” a strategy that seeks to improve user acquisition by giving existing customers incentives to bring in new business.

Using the platform, participating companies create a system that encourages their customers to do things such as recruit new customers, opt for upgraded memberships, and make recommendations. By designing their own incentives program, businesses themselves may decide on what types of actions to promote and how to do so.

By motivating supporters to make referrals, businesses can get their customers to do the marketing for them. And in exchange for their support, customers receive rewards.

The Referly system is based on prepaid deposits. A company decides in advance how much it wants to pay for each action, and Referly subtracts that amount from the account on a pay-per-action basis. Companies can also track how these tactics affect their sales.

Referly already has a massive list of brands and stores on board, including luxury designers, auto-parts retailers, bookstores, sporting-goods outlets, candy shops, airlines, and pet-supply chains. It has conducted over $100,000 in business since launching, and it takes commission on all transactions.

Read more on VentureBeat.

Pinterest is the invite-only digital pin-board site where people, mostly arts and crafts enthusiasts between the ages of 25 and 44, “pin” products, recipes, and photos to themed boards. The two year-old company is an insanely buzzy up-and-coming social network that attracts millions of visitors each week.

But unbeknownst to the average user, Pinterest is automatically swapping out the links behind product pins, using a third-party service called Skimlinks (a thriving business of its own), with its own affiliate links. A pin that points to a product on Amazon, for instance, will pass the clicker through to the product page with a Pinterest affiliate code thrown in for good measure. And should that person go on to make a purchase, Pinterest pockets the affiliate money.

The behavior has been sleuthed out by a number of Pinterest users, but a post by digital marketer and blogger Josh Davis is the first to shine the brightest spotlight on the young company’s questionable affiliate link-swapping actions. The primary issue is not that Pinterest is making money — a significant finding on its own, especially considering that the relationship between Pinterest and Skimlinks is mutually beneficial — but that the company is doing so in a way that could be perceived as deceptive.

“I, like many people, don’t have a problem with Pinterest making money off of user content,” Davis wrote. “The links are modified seamlessly so it doesn’t affect the experience. Pinterest likely should disclose this practice to users even if they aren’t required to do so by law, if only to maintain trust with their users.”

Pinterest did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Photo credits: crossed fingers/Shutterstock, Josh Davis

For example, Skimlinks converts every mention of “Modern Warfare 3” in a review of that game into a link to a site like Amazon where the game can be bought. The blog earns a cut of every sale driven from the review. That commission can range from 4 to 15 percent of the price of the product, and Skimlinks takes 25 percent of the blogger’s fee.

New investor Bertelsmann AG owns the RTL Group, Europe’s biggest broadcaster, and Random House, the world’s largest trade book publisher, as well as numerous magazines. Another investor in this round is Dave McClure of startup accelerator 500 Startups, in a departure from his normal focus on very early stage companies.

Skimlinks’ main competitor is Google-backed VigLink. Skimlinks CEO Alicia Navarro doesn’t seem worried. “VigLink does much of what we do, although we innovate faster,” said Navarro. “We launched our link-insertion product, SkimWords, over a year ago, and they launched a soft version of it a month ago, but it isn’t commercially as ready or as lucrative for publishers as ours is. We also differ in that, as we are London-based, with offices in New York and San Francisco, we have a very international mindset.” Gaining the backing of a media behemoth like Bertelsmann, which has revenues of over 22 billion and employs 100,000 people, certainly helps counter the Google threat.

Skimlinks was founded in 2008 and has 30 employees.

Publishers and bloggers typically earn advertising revenue through one of two ways — from the number of times an ad is exposed or the number of times that a visitor clicks on an ad.

But there’s also a third way. Publishers that happen to write about goods and services for sale can earn advertising revenue through affiliate links, which offer them a cut of every sale on Amazon they drive, for example. That commission can range from 4 to 15 percent of the price of the product.

The problem is that it can be time-consuming to input the special affiliate codes and links to earn affiliate fees. Skimlinks takes over that part, setting a publisher up with multiple affiliate networks, inputting affiliate links and even suggesting products to reference. It takes a 25 percent cut of the affiliate fee in return.

Its new service today, Skimwords, hunts for direct product references. It will turn a term like Canon Digital IXUS 130 into a link. (But it won’t take something more generic like “camera” and turn that into a link.)

Skimlinks has been part of a four-year journey for co-founder and chief executive Alicia Navarro. She originally started with an idea around social shopping but pivoted to focus on affiliate revenue on the advice of investors.

Since then, the company has grown to support 27 employees and has raised just over $2 million from investors including Sussex Place Ventures, the Accelerator Group and the U.K.’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. Its competitors include Google Ventures-backed VigLink.

Commercialization of affiliate links isn’t an easy business model. It requires massive scale, since the company is effectively taking a tiny cut of a tiny cut of revenue. And of course, only a fraction of people even bother to click on a link to a product to begin with. Then an even tinier fraction of them buy the good.

But with the right audience size and content, affiliate fees can translate into meaningful revenue for a publisher. Navarro said Skimlinks’ biggest check so far has been $300,000 to a publisher around the holidays, when visitors were looking for just the right gift to buy.

Getting stuff for free is always an attractive proposition from the consumer’s point of view, if not necessarily the greatest business model for the company doing the giving (go ahead and recall your favorite dot-com example here). Now TrialPay, a self-described arranger of “alternative payments” that just raised another $13 million, thinks it’s found a way to square that circle by updating an old department-store offer: Buy one, get one free.

TrialPay gets online vendors — many of them software makers who are painfully aware that few people really want to pay for their offerings anymore — to offer visitors a free product if they’ll sign into the TrialPay service and buy something from a list of selected, and presumably targeted, advertisers. Once the purchase is verified, TrialPay emails the consumer a coupon for their free swag. TrialPay has started to attract some well-known advertising merchants to its platform, ranging from brick-and-mortar stalwarts like Citibank, Geico, Comcast and Time Warner Cable to Web-centric businesses such as eBay, eBags and eMusic.

This is still one of those ideas that sounds kind of nutty until you dive into the business logic behind it. Essentially, the merchant who actually sells its product — the “buy one” side of the deal — is subsidizing its “get one free” counterpart in exchange for acquiring a new customer relatively cheaply. (The rationale is similar to that of merchants who pay bounties to blogs and other Web sites that deliver customers through affiliate programs.) That commission is often higher than the actual selling price of the free item, TrialPay says. And as long as the average customer buys more than an item or two, the selling company also makes money on the transaction. The New York Times explains it all in detail here.

TrialPay, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., makes money by taking a cut of the commission and supposedly also does some targeting to put the most relevant advertisers in front of would-be customers. The company told the NYT that roughly 2,500 merchants now show TrialPay offers to prospective customers and that its annual sales may top $20 million. (Presumably, TrialPay is referring to its own revenues and not the total sales volume moving through its network. I’ll run that down and update. UPDATE: A TrialPay spokesperson confirms that the company is expecting total revenue of more than $20 million in 2008.))

That said, TrialPay isn’t exactly intuitive the first time you come across it. Coincidentially enough, I ended up stumbling across a TrialPay site just yesterday while downloading a free version of the antispyware program Ad-Aware. First, TrialPay snags you as you’re about to launch the free download with an offer for a free copy of the paid version:

Next, you’re asked to sign into TrialPay with your name and email address. There’s a minimum of explanation here, and at the time, as someone who’d never heard of TrialPay before, some of the language here — especially, “Try it, it’s free” — struck me as a little on the hucksterish side. In fact, it was at this point that I bailed on TrialPay, particularly since I had no idea what I’d be signing up for and how much marketing spam I might inadvertently be opting into. (Yes, the signup box says your email address won’t be sold; I just didn’t believe it.) That screen is here:

Next, you’re presented with a variety of advertiser offers, which you can sort by category and even filter specifically for merchants who’ll give you instant credit for your purchases (some credits, particularly with big financial institutions, can take a few days). Here, for instance, is what the service offered me:

Whether such offers float your boat or not is a matter of personal preference. (I didn’t end up biting on any of them.) Overall, however, TrialPay offers a pretty intriguing model, and one that several of its participating merchants seem happy with. “You can reach out into the virtual space and find new customers you wouldn’t have otherwise reached,” Gap.com general manager Will Hunsinger told the NYT. “It’s a little different model, which is something we haven’t seen come out of the Valley in a little while.”

TrialPay just raised $12.7 million in a second funding round (the release is here), for a total of $15.8 million since its founding in 2006. Investors in the latest round included Index Ventures, Atomico Ventures and former PayPal executives.