Review: create iTunes affiliate links with Blink for iPhone and iPad

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Whenever you click or tap on a link which leads to an iPhone/iPad/Mac app in the App Store/Mac App Store, or a movie, TV show episode or electronic book carried on iTunes, we earn a very small commission fee on each sale coming from that link.

Though not much, these things add up and anything that helps us run the site and keep the lights on for you guys is worth the effort from our standpoint.

For those not in the know, anyone can sign up to become an iTunes affiliate partner. Too bad Apple’s web application for generating affiliate links is so tedious and a pain in the you-know-what.

Introducing Blink (or Better Affiliate Links) from Squibner, a nifty little iPhone and iPad application which eliminates the hassle of manually creating iTunes affiliate links with your own tokens and campaign tags.

Once you’re enrolled into Apple’s official iTunes affiliate linking program, you’ll have your own affiliate token (an alphanumeric code) which must be appended to any iTunes URL that you put in blog posts or share on social media in order for you to earn a tiny commission fee on each sale.

But first, you’ll need to add your own affiliate token and optional campaign tags into the settings section of the Blink app.

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Using Blink’s built-in search function, you can quickly search across the App Store, Mac App Store, iTunes Store and iBooks Store at one time. Tap on any search result to get more information about an item.

It’s really convenient and just super nice not having to switch to Apple’s stock storefront apps just to obtain a URL of an iTunes item. If you need to, you can quickly switch to a specific regional store and easily switch between media types to find exactly what you want.

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Once you’ve found the iTunes item you were looking for, select it and up pops a screen where you can generate affiliate links from the results. You can create affiliate links as plain URLs or use one of three available Markdown formats (choose your own in Blink’s settings).

It’s also nice that Blink converts appsto.re, itun.es, appstore.com and itunes.com links into full affiliate links in the itunes.apple.com format. You can also paste any compatible link into Blink’s search box to generate an affiliate link with your credentials or, preferably, use Blink’s extension or URL scheme to convert links on the fly.

Here’s generating affiliate links in Blink, iTunes and iBooks Store.

The real power of Blink comes from its extension for frictionless affiliate link generation from within Apple’s mobile stores — or anywhere else you find links, for that matter, without interrupting the flow of your work.

Check out Blink’s iOS 8 extension in action.

Power users and fans of iOS automation will be happy to know that Blink integrates nicely into more complex workflows with its URL scheme. By the way, Blink also works great with Editorial.

Singing off, we have been using a simple yet powerful Workflow script that our own Timothy Reaves created recently. For starters, it’s easily invoked as an iOS 8 extension from the Share sheet in the App Store, iBooks Store, iTunes or from any app that supports iOS 8’s multi-purpose Share sheets.

As shown below, not only does it add our affiliate token to URLs but also saves full-resolution app images to the Camera roll.

iTunes affiliate link Workflow iPhone screenshot 001

Genius, I’m telling you.

That being said, Blink is everything you’d expect from an iTunes affiliate link generation app done right. It’s dead simple to use, has a clean and self-explanatory interface and a tremendously useful iOS 8 Extension.

With Blink, you can search across multiple stores simultaneously, convert existing links into ones supported by the affiliate program and way more than our Workflow extension is capable of.

Long story short, Blink is effortless affiliate link generation on iOS.

Blink is $4.99 in the App Store.