We believe that Creators (business owners, bloggers, influencers, coaches , consultant, or service provider of any kind) should be compensated for their creative content when helping others make better, easier, and more personalized choices. In a hyper connected world truth is the best marketing strategy for building trust. Trust leads to strong relationships, which increase engagements, which, in turn, improve conversion and help you monetize your content. And of the many monetization methods used by digital creators, affiliate marketing is the one that most encourages dependable relationships. It is around this concept that we built VENNDY with tools to help you easily share your valuable experiences with your clients and followers and help them easily access and save all your recommendations. Building these connections online takes time and effort, but once established, you can enjoy monetizing your creative content as you become a trusted maven, or expert, in your field.

For example, by turning your Instagram into clickable links, you not only introduce yourself better, but you also provide greater value to your followers by improving the way they can discover new businesses and products online.  Same goes for Pinterest; it is not just about pinning endless products with affiliate links but rather about telling a story by sharing a full experience. The clickable links break your story down into shoppable items. This way you provide your followers with greater value by improving the way they discover new products and businesses online.

Our vision is to build trustworthy relationships between creators and their audience around relevant content, challenging the concept that face-to-face human interaction is necessary for reliable connections. Our mission is to encourage authentic and genuine advice based on experience, personal taste or knowledge. This requires finding the fine balance between recommendations and compensation and the best way to compensate creators for their time and effort. We believe affiliate marketing better serves the dilemma of who to trust, as affiliates are paid according to performance and conversion is heavily dependent upon trustworthiness.

Our purpose is to help you:

• Share, in a shop-like format, the experiences and knowledge you accumulate as you grow your business.
• Facilitate the promotion of your commerce-related content across all platforms.
• Invite followers and clients to shop for your favorites and be compensated for valuable information while helping others to make better, easier, and more personalized choices.
• Become your own boss by finding a work–life balance and working when you want and where you want!

Being an early adopter, especially for innovative tech products, bears risks, as no one knows whether this initiative and product will live to the next stage. Although this is exactly where great opportunities lie, it still requires consideration. Opportunities are found in one of those wavering decisions to become a first user who was willing to take a calculated risk and become a leader of the future ecosystem. You get to help dictate the direction, as we are looking for feedback to improve and grow. But at the same time please note that we are providing VENNDY’s Tools “AS IS” and they may still contain bugs and stability issues. There is also no certainty that we will be able to continue offering the Tools or for how long. It will all depend on how useful users find it as well as other factors and circumstances. We encourage you to read more about the Beta phase legal disclosure under our Terms of Use.

Diversification is key in affiliate marketing, and with VENNDY you can diversify your affiliate networks, your publishing channels, and your revenue sources. You curate your content once, add your affiliate link once, link it to a few different experiences you have collated, and share it across any platform you choose. You thus increase your social reach, grow your influence, and boost your potential income all at the same time.

You can start using VENNDY by following these 3 simple steps:

1. Join VENNDY. Sign up to VENNDY and download the VENNDY LinkCollector (Currently by invite only. Follow up on our blog for details on when we open the next round of invites). When you discover something you think your audience will love, you collect it in VENNDY and add your affiliate link so that you can monetize your recommendations. Make sure you comply with the affiliate network’s terms and conditions and you update the settings in your account to include your user’s URL on VENNDY. Some of the networks require it for tracking purposes.
2. Join Affiliate Networks. Become an affiliate at any of the top-tier affiliate networks. You can also join independent (in-house) affiliate programs and add those as well. Make sure to join networks and programs for beginners, as they are less strict about traffic and time limits for making a sale.
3. Earn Commissions. Use VENNDY’s tools to share your recommendations on your favorite digital platforms and start earning affiliate commissions on the products and services your followers buy through your links.

VENNDY is perfect for digital content creators (business owners, entrepreneurs, bloggers, influencers, coaches, consultants, or service providers of any kind) who want to: 1) BE different and 2) MAKE a difference in people’s lives.

1. Connect with your audience. If you want to connect to your audience in a meaningful way, if you’re determined to provide quality, valuable, and helpful information and want to generate an income at the same time, then VENNDY is for you. If you’re excited about helping a tourist discover the best walking tours, a busy working mother find the perfect mix-and-match wardrobe, or a foodie enjoy the best pasta in town, then VENNDY is for you.
2. Grow your social reach. Whether you’re just starting out or already have a large and loyal following, VENNDY offers you a way to grow your audience, your social reach, and your revenue.
3. Be a maven in your field and change the way consumers discover new businesses and products online. You can make a difference in other people’s lives, be it a consumer you just introduced to a great business they’d never heard about or a young fashion designer you helped reach a new group of happy customers.

With VENNDY you can multiply your income potential and build your audience while doing what you love. And you can do it when you want and where you want.

1. Passive Income for Flexible Lifestyles. With VENNDY you only need to curate the product, place, or service once. You can then easily generate links or shopping widgets to share on your blog, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or any other websites. Your links and widgets keep on working around the clock, even when you’re not.
2. For Beginners and Experts Alike. New bloggers and content publishers can start to make money from the start without waiting to build up a mass following. VENNDY levels the monetization playing field, allowing every voice to be heard.
3. Multiple Monetization Options. VENNDY supports content monetization via almost any platform you choose to publish on, using links from most affiliate networks you join (as long as it complies with the network terms and restrictions). This means more choices and greater potential earnings for you.
4. Complete Control and Report Tracking. You’re always in full control of your affiliate relationships, with affiliate sales and commission tracking coming straight from your affiliate networks. You’re also in direct contact with your favorite brands and retailers; we don’t get in the middle nor do we take a cut.
5. Relationship Building. VENNDY helps you position yourself as an expert and as someone to trust. When you share and recommend your personal lifestyle choices (and associated products and services), your audience build a genuine relationship with you as a respected expert in your field – whether your love is for travel, fashion, wellness, food, or others.

VENNDY’s tools offer you a simple, fast, and effective way to collect all lifestyle experiences in one place. The LinkCollector collects items (products, places, blog posts, articles, and services). Rating the product and adding your notes helps you build trust by offering useful tips and reviews and, when you’re ready, you can add affiliate links to promote your stories on your blog, website, and social media sites.

Turn your tips, views, and reviews into Stories which connect everything. A Story is a collection of items which describes a complete experience: where you went, what you wore, what you did, how you felt – in short, whatever you want to tell your audience about. You can add a blog post, an Instagram post, shoppable products, and non-shop-related items. No matter where you share your content, with VENNDY both your everyday and your special adventures can quickly be converted into clickable links that help your audience either buy a product you recommend or save something to their wish lists. Help others by collating useful information in your stories and sharing your tips and finds across many verticals. By using your original creative content, you can help improve the way consumers discover new products and businesses online.

VENNDY’s tools allow you to work more efficiently and effectively as you grow your influence and reputation online. You’ll help your tribe find valuable and useful products and services and, at the same time, generate more commissions. What could be better than that?

Anything that is lifestyle related and fits the pre-defined categories. Lifestyle is defined as the way of living on a day-to-day basis which is expressed in both work and leisure behavior and patterns. It can include activities, interests, opinions, values, and allocation of income. Think of it as a cheat sheet summing up all your commerce related and non-commerce content that can bring value to your readers.

As this is all user-generated content, it is users who take responsibility for the subtext. Users are not allowed to share any inappropriate content, be it text or images (porn, spam, or other offensive material). We appreciate the community's help in reporting any inappropriate content through the link displayed on all Item and Story pages.

At this point you can only share them on other social media platforms, such as Facebook and Pinterest, or you can "like" them on VENNDY and they will then be stored in your Loves. You can also save them to your VENNDY account by voting on the Style Chart at the bottom of every Item Page.

Treat your VENNDY collection like every other brick and mortar shop and consider that although you are not limited in space, users will want to see the most updated content from the best that you’ve got. We believe you should keep your VENNDY collection relevant and updated, so if you realize that a certain post performs particularly well, you may want to update it once in a while to keep it current. We recommend that you replace out-of-stock products with in-stock ones, keep an eye on broken links, and add new products or merchants. You may also want to take the time for continuous Story maintenance.

Well, it really depends on your preferences. We only suggest that you consider the distinction between:

• Timely content — which is highly valuable for a limited period of time after which it is no longer relevant to a user (such as sales items, coupon codes, etc.); and
• Timeless or “evergreen” content —which is valuable to users for an extended period of time especially if regularly refreshed (such as links that direct users to relevant services and products).

A combination of the two probably makes the best impression.

As in every friendship, honesty is generally the best policy. Whether your impression of something is good or bad, give your genuine opinion and let your voice be heard. A bad review is sometimes even more helpful than a good one, and it is certainly important for building new relationships, especially virtual ones. Remember— there is no good or bad advice, only advice that best suits you and will best suit the other VENNRs who find that your VENNDY collection matches their taste.

You can use VENNDY’s content and share on social media without being registered. However, in order to benefit from VENNDY’s features (i.e., to save Items and Stories, to interact with other users etc.) and its personalized recommendations tools, Let’s VENN feature, and other connectivity elements, you need to sign up and interact.

To start using VENNDY, register by using the sign-up button. You can with your email and a password. This will allow you to decide who to follow and what to like, to add items to your wish list, to vote on the style chart and to comments on Items and Stories.

In order to upload items, start by downloading VENNDY's Extension, currently built for the Chrome browser, from the Google Store. The Extension will allow you to easily collect any content from the web and give it your own interpretation.

Once downloaded, a VENN-It browser button (marked by NN) will appear on your Chrome. Click on it to login on initial use. Use the same email and password as used when registering on the VENNDY site.

To upload text content, check the box next to the Selected Content title on the Extension window.

Go to any website on the web, highlight the text you want to use when posting your new item, and click the VENN button that will show up next to the highlighted text. This should help you add a description of a product, highlight a sentence from an article, or gather any reviews you have written on an online retailer's website or a social network and put them all under the same roof – in your own VENNDY collection.

If there is no text you wish to copy to the site, simply click the NN button. The NN button turns on the extension which then automatically appears in a pop-up window with a suggested TITLE and IMAGE from the page you're browsing. You can change the title, choose one of the suggested images, select a category and subcategory, and rate the product or service you are uploading. You can then write some text of your own (a recommendation, a reminder, your thoughts). VENNDY is perfect for addressing personal content and commerce-based topics; anything that falls into one of the pre-defined categories. By clicking the VENN button you send your experience straight to your VENNDY where it can now go on to inspire other VENNRs.

This is our firm intention, but at present we are still in the process of updating the Extension and making sure it can be adjusted to all formats. However, not all configurations will be supported. Google search results, for example, will not be supported at this point as we are looking to direct users to a specific item, article, or location.

The VENNRs you follow impact your personalized feed. Once signed in, you can choose to view the FEED/EXPLORE/VENNRS screens; otherwise only the Explore option will show on your Home Page.

• The FEED will include all latest Stories and Items uploaded by the VENNRs you follow.
• The EXPLORE will allow you to investigate ideas coming from the rest of the community. But, it is still influenced by your choices, namely, the Items and Stories you upload and your use of the Interaction Features (explained below).
• The VENNRs will introduce you to new users who you are not yet following. This introduction, as with everything else on VENNDY, is categorized according to the quantity, popularity, and relevance of the user’s contributions. The purpose is to put your interests and preferences at the center of inspiration, thus letting us expand our circles of connections beyond geographical coincidence. VENNing is a verb; VENNRs are those interacting this way.

You can increase your contribution by uploading content, but you can also have a greater degree of influence on your web experience and what you see by using the Interaction Features: designating Loves, voting in the Style Chart, adding items to your Wish List, commenting on Stories and Items, and sharing on other social media.

A Story is a collection of items gathered around a certain subject, very much like posts in a blog. The platform is designed to give users maximum flexibility to be creative about the ideas raised in a Story. It could be the plan for your next vacation, a collection of your adventures from a previous trip, a set of beauty tips you want to share, your list of best books from the past year. Stories can be built by an individual user (Closed Story) or by the community (Open Story). The purpose of Open Stories is to create a list based on crowd experience that can be constantly updated with new insights and the latest observations. So Stories about the most romantic restaurants in Paris, the best dresses for the coming summer, or the best serum for oily skin can accumulate the knowledge of many experienced people with first-hand know-how.

To take your experience one step further, you can create STORIES using your various uploaded items. Just choose a topic and upload the first item by clicking the STORY+ button. This is a great tool for creating "Best of" or "It-list" posts. It could be a Closed Story which you alone build and maintain, such as "My Best Tuscan Experiences—Summer of 2015," or an Open Story where others can share their insights and cooperate in building the Story, such as "The Do's and Don’ts of European Fashion," "The 15 Best Rompers for Summer," "Must-Dos in San Francisco This Fall," or "The Best Brunch Restaurants in NYC." The ideas are endless; it is all up to you. To add an Item to an existing Story, click the ADD ITEM button on the Full Story Page and it will direct you on. The curator of the Story will get notice of suggested items and approval is in her hands alone.

• In a Closed Story, only the curator can add items and edit. The curator can request collaborators to contribute their experiences to the building of the Story, but this is by invite only. Closed Stories are public for viewing only.
• In an Open Story, the curator allows anyone to help upgrade and improve the Story by adding relevant items via the ADD ITEM button on the Story’s page. The curator has sole discretion over the addition.

When creating a new Story, you will see a text box which allows you to add the email addresses of potential collaborators. The invitees will get an email inviting them to collaborate.

Our purpose is to provide a user-controlled web experience. We want you to be the one in charge of what you share to enable you to get better personalized recommendations. We have chosen to create transparent communication so that we all get to know you better, according to what you choose to share and not your other online activities.

Please note that for now the information you share on My VENNDY is all public. That includes your Stories, Items, followers, Loves and the VENNRs you are following (this is your public information). However, your Wish List, Style Chart, Archive, and Settings are all private and accessible only to you (this is your private area).

For the full disclosure, we refer you to the Privacy Policy under Privacy and Cookies policies. As specified there, your information is kept within our system and is not given to any third parties without your prior notification.

We would like to state that the information you share on your VENNDY will be used only for its initial purpose, namely, to place the power of influence in the hands of the users. It is you who determines by the content that you upload which links will forward information to other VENNRs and to which sites.

Since we are bootstrapping the company, we will soon be looking for ways to make money; otherwise we will not be able to sustain a viable business, serve you better, improve our product, or adhere to any requests, suggestions, or needs that arise. We plan to use the links created by users to drive traffic to other sites. We will not, however, be selling your information.

As much as we welcome the advantages of technology for evaluating big data and producing important valuable outcomes, we do not appreciate the fact that technology interferes with privacy or that users’ information is exploited by other parties. This is why VENNDY is about letting you choose what you share. By using the Interaction Features embedded in the platform, we will do our best to help users get the best relevant information from other VENNRs.