With the launch of Jounce, Tyson Quick and Kevin Mesiab have set out to shake up the affiliate marketing industry by giving us a new way to find products to promote. The site certainly looks sharp and it's easy to navigate, but does it deliver the goods?
The key selling point of Jounce is that you can search for products to promote and get results from multiple affiliate networks without having to sign up to them individually, saving you a lot of time and effort. I've had a good look through their site to check out whether it's worth your time and what it has to offer the aspiring affiliate marketer...
First up, Jounce is free. There is no cost when signing up. You can actually search and read product descriptions without even creating an account. You only need to set one up when it comes time to getting your referral link. Having an account brings a couple of other benefits though, such as allowing you to customize your Jounce profile and sync your affiliate network accounts, and I'll cover these later in this review.
To date there are more than 12 million products for affiliates to promote listed on Jounce, gathered from over 60 different affiliate networks. In the next few months they have plans to increase the number of networks to over 400. With access to so many products and networks in one place, this platform really has the potential to become a one-stop shop when you're looking for products to promote.
After doing a few searches in the popular niche of 'muscle building' the first thing I noticed was the large range of product types available - everything from several thousand dollar home gym stations to $2.79 protein bars.
Although the results can be ranked according to relevance, commissions, earnings per click, price and last updated, it would have been great to be able to sort by product type. I was looking for informational/digital products specifically, but there was no way to filter out everything else. Most of the relevant info products I saw were from ClickBank, and if there were some from other networks, it wasn't easy for me to find them. This left me with the feeling that I would have been better off just searching ClickBank for information products, as they cover each product more in-depth.
This brings me to the biggest problem I have with Jounce. For a lot of products it was difficult to tell what the price or commission was, either because information was missing or it was presented in a confusing way. This was especially common for digital products.
Another small gripe I had was that there were no stats on the site comparable to Clickbank's gravity score to tell me how popular a product was. Without these stats, I'd still have to visit the affiliate network site. This takes more time and detracts from Jounce's aim of being a one-stop-shop.
Before you think I'm being a bit harsh, bear in mind the site is still in the Beta stage, so many of these problems will no doubt be worked out in the future. And regardless of these small niggles, I think there are some really great features worth signing up for.
Once signed up, you can sync your Jounce account with any affiliate network you belong to already. What this means is that when you find a product on Jounce, you don't need to then log in to the network that promotes the product to get your referral link. It's all worked out from the Jounce site.
Even if you aren't looking for new products to promote, the sheer number of products you can search through in Jounce makes it easy to do some market research on what other products are being sold in your niche. Not all will be suitable, but you will almost certainly find some that are - and others could be worth coming back to at a later date.
My favorite feature though - and I haven't seen much mention of this elsewhere - is the news aggregator. With over 90 affiliate marketing related blogs already feeding directly to the site, the news section is a great place to stay up to date on what's happening in the affiliate marketing world. You can even personalize your profile page to feature the feeds that you like the most.
Overall, as a tool to add to your affiliate marketing arsenal, Jounce delivers. As it is right now you still have to do your homework to get price/commission information and an idea of how popular the product is, but hopefully this will be improved in the future. This is definitely a site to keep an eye on if you are serious about affiliate marketing.
Positives:
- A lot of products to search through -and growing.
- Great news aggregator service.
- Not having to log in to each affiliate network separately to get referral links.
Negatives:
- Incomplete commission and price information.
- Hard to determine popularity of products.
- Can't sort results by product type.
