I’m sure you’re wondering what 123LinkIt is and who’s behind it.

123LinkIt is an emerging startup company located in the suburbs of Philadelphia. The idea came from Yasmine Mustafa early in 2009 out of pain-points she’s experienced in the space. As a full-time partner at Team and a Dream, a marketing agency that catered to web startups and SMBs, Yasmine didn’t have time to fully embrace affiliate marketing because of its complexities and required time commitment. However, she was generating a nice chunk of passive income from an affiliate program she’s set up a few years back.

When it came time to transition into starting her own company, she decided to explore the space further and talked to bloggers and affiliate marketing experts in the space. The consensus was clear – there wasn’t a tool that provided an easier solution to integrate, manage and optimize an affiliate program for bloggers. On April 1, 2009 (no joke), Yasmine started working on the project full-time.

With the help of bloggers, affiliate marketing experts, a strong Advisory Board and a couple of great interns, the product slowly formed while changing direction over time (our name alone transformed four times!). It’s evolved to an automated solution for bloggers in the shape of a plug-in, which a) determines the context of blog posts b) cross-references the top relevant keywords with advertisers in our database and c) transforms those keywords into affiliate links. Sounds pretty simple, right? We’ll keep the other features close to our chest until we launch our public alpha.

Our alpha is tentatively launching on the first week of March 2010 and more details will be available regarding the service. We can say our main focus is on helping bloggers make more money with their blog and we have a lot of cool ideas on how to do just that. That aside, we plan on putting our users first so we’ll be keeping you abreast of the latest features and current status.

So what’s the main point of this blog? It was created to discuss our product but also to provide tips on affiliate marketing and blogging – and how to blend the two in a way that results in the highest ROI for your blog. We’ll also be eating our own dog food by implementing our own creations to showcase examples of how our software will work.

If you have any questions or want more information, please feel free to leave a comment or shoot us an email.

P.S. We’ve turned off the ads on this post. Yep, you can control exactly what you want to appear – and what you don’t want to appear with our plug-in. Check it out for yourself!

- The 123LinkIt Team