Shareasale is one of the best Affiliate marketing Networks

About Shareasale, a great Affiliate Marketing Network

One way to make money online with a home business is by being an affiliate marketer. Affiliate marketing is NOT a get-rich-quick activity. It takes a lot of work and time just like any other job, but it does have its advantages of simplicity. In this post, I want to let you know about the Affiliate Marketing Network Shareasale.

An Affiliate Marketing Network is a company that provides a common interface between affiliate marketers and merchants which offer affiliate marketing programs. They provide integrated sales tracking and payment for a fee to the merchant. The merchant saves time by outsourcing some of its tasks while the marketer gets merged payments and one site features.

What is Shareasale?

Shareasale is a great Affiliate marketing network with many affiliate marketing programs.

Reporting &Tracking

It offers real time click and sales tracking through its varied reports. I personally have checked my product and merchant links and they have updated immediately. I use two reports almost exclusively. Today's stats and activity summary.

Today's stats only shows a list of merchant's programs that have been clicked through on the same day. It resets at 11pm Central Time. This is useful for testing new links for tracking and to see which pages people are clicking through.

Activity Summary gives you a month to date and total figures by merchant so you can check overall performance. Since it lists all of the merchants that I have signed up for, it is a good place to make sure everything is running smoothly. If I don't see any clicks then I check to make sure that I've put up links and that they're working. I can also click 'get links' to find products, banners, and data feeds to use on my website(s).

Another useful report is past revenue which shows you your earnings by month.

Link Creation

Link Creation is simple with shareasale, but it is up to each affiliate manager to make those links available so the number of links available do vary.

Most merchants offer text links, banner ad links, and product links. Some merchants offer data feeds which is a type of database that can be integrated into a website using special software. Very few merchants will offer widgets.

If you like to use plain old HTML on your webpages, you can use the "Make a Page" feature. "Make a Page" makes HTML coded pages that you can upload on your website using your criteria.

Program Management

You can easily join different merchant affiliate programs through searches, categories, and advanced search. The categories aren't perfect but they are good enough to find what you need in a minute. Before you join you can check information such as the company URL, Percent of commission, Earnings, and tracking cookie duration. Many programs will automatically approve you so that you can start promoting right away. Others will requre a review by the affiliate manager.

If you ever get denied from an affiliate program that you believe will be a good match, send an e-mail to the affiliate manager and let them know how you are planning to promote them and most likely they will approve you. This is common when you have more than one website and the manager only looks at the first site which more than likely isn't related.

Payment options

Sign up is free for affiliates. When someone buys a product through a link, graphic, text or otherwise, on your website, a commission is earned and the amount is reported at the top of your Shareasale administration page as well as in the reports. Once your account reaches $50 or a higher amount that you manually set, you get paid.

Currently Shareasale offers direct deposit for United States accounts (and possible some other countries), check via FexEx for a $20-$55 fee (a good reason to see a higher minimum payment!), or check sent by US mail/postal service which is slow but doesn't incur a charge. Getting checks internationally even if only to Mexico can take weeks.

Conclusion

Except for the lack of PayPal or Mexican bank deposit, I'm happy with the Shareasale program. They seem to be more responsive than the other networks and their click tracking seems to work better meaning fewer lost sales. If I were starting over today I would have gone first to Shareasale and then to the other networks.

Go Ahead and sign up today, you won't regret it. Join shareasale.com, Earn Cash!