In this ShareASale review, you will find out if Shareasale.com is a good affiliate network to make money and more!
Affiliate marketing is so wonderful.
There are lots of opportunities to make money with affiliate marketing in different ways.
I am pretty sure that Google AdSense disapproved your application, or you make pennies with CPM advertising networks.
Do you want to kick out CPM advertising networks and make real passive income online? Then look nowhere.
Today you’re going to meet an affiliate network called ShareASale. Before starting my ShareASale review, check out this ShareASale earning chart.
In the above chart, the horizontal axis demonstrates the months, and the vertical axis showcases the monthly earnings.
Honestly, I did nothing to make these earnings during the last few months. These incomes are from my old blog posts.
I wrote some articles to promote ShareASale affiliate offers. And ShareASale affiliate network did other things such as tracking my traffic, conversions, and sending payouts.
I did nothing.
Now you may be asking, “Chamal, your blog is in the Internet Marketing field. How would I know if ShareASale has affiliate offers for my niche?”
Your question is fair. I have met some affiliate networks that have limited offers. But, believe me, ShareASale is not one of them.
ShareASale Review
Here are a few affiliate program categories on ShareASale.
- Accessories
- Art/Music/Photography
- Business
- Career/Jobs/Employment
- Clothing
- Commerce
- Family
- Financial
- Gaming
- Web services
- Health
- Travel
- Home and Garden
- Webmaster Tools
- Real Estate
In fact, ShareASale has more than twenty affiliate program categories with more than 4,400 affiliate programs at the moment of writing this article!
That’s a lot of affiliate offers. Merchants trust the ShareASale affiliate network.
So, you can find a wide range of popular online and offline services on ShareASale.
A few affiliate programs on ShareASale you can promote.
- Wayfair — An online retail store. 5% of commissions based on the store. Sky’s only the limit!
- Deluxe Business Products — 20% per sale. 10%-30% commissions for certain products.
- WPEngine — WordPress dedicated hosting service. Earn $200.00 per sale and $0.01 per lead.
- Avocado Mattress — Another high-converting offer.
- Barcelo Hotels — With 6% commissions and high-quality traffic, you could make serious money with them.
- Semrush Affiliate Program — Make $200 for every sale on Semrush. (Semrush is a digital marketing tool to improve your business’s online presence. Learn more.)
Each affiliate programs use different pricing models and have different commission rates. However, most of those offers convert very well.
ShareASale is very restricting in adding new affiliate programs to its network. I have never found an offer that showcases fake testimonials and cheats on customers, such as most MMO products you’d find on the Internet.
Who can join to ShareASale affiliate network?
If you’re a
- Blogger with an authoritative blog
- Blogger with a micro, niche, or event blog
- Search engine marketer
- Performance Marketer (a.k.a CPA marketer)
- Media buyer
- YouTuber
- Vlogger
- Affiliate marketer
You can make money with ShareASale!
Yes, you don’t need to be a super affiliate or an email marketer with huge lists to make money online with ShareASale.
If you are one of the above persons, you could start making money with ShareASale’s affiliate programs right now!
What type of offers could you choose to promote?
As an online marketer since 2012, I know that certain products or services convert differently.
Merchants mostly list their products/services on affiliate networks because they don’t want to handle the marketing aspects (As of high budget, tough competition, low volume, etc.), or the product hardly converts.
Yes, that is the harsh truth that no one prefers to tell you.
But, you shouldn’t promote every type of product.
We can categorize each product or service on ShareASale into four groups.
- PPS — Pay Per Sale or the PPS offers is the most popular product type in ShareASale and other affiliate networks such as CJ, ClickBank, and ClickSure. You can find hundreds of PPS offers in many verticals. The pricing model is straightforward. You get paid once you refer a customer to the merchant. In most cases, you get a significant commission percentage from the product’s or service’s price.
- PPL — PPL stands for Pay Per Lead. In most cases, PPL offers are lead generation offers. Therefore, once someone registers on a merchant’s website, you would get paid. PPL affiliate offers to convert higher than PPS products. However, payouts are very lower on most occasions, $0.01-$2.00.
- PPC — PPC refers to Paid per Click. As the name explains, you get paid once someone clicks your affiliate links. You can rarely find these types of offers on the ShareASale affiliate network. You may ask why. Because these days, some affiliates could easily use fraudulent activities to generate tons of bots traffic to affiliate pages. Therefore, these types of offers disappeared from the entire Internet long ago.
- Pay per Call — The latest affiliate offer type is Pay per Call. Once you refer a customer through phone calls and it meets general KPIs, you get paid. You may ask how they track that I referred the customer. ShareASale has all these facilities and technologies for Pay Per Call tracking!
I prefer to promote PPS affiliate products generally.
Why?
Because I know from my experience that affiliate offers in ShareASale convert better, and I receive commissions based on the product bought or a flat commission (ex: $20, $100, $200 per sale). So, with the right affiliate product promotion strategy, I could make money online with ShareASale.
Do You Know?
Some affiliate products on ShareASale provide commissions for both free registration and becoming a customer! So, you get paid for both PPL and PPS.
I mentioned that affiliate programs on ShareASale convert better than most other networks.
Here’s the proof…
I know the data is too low to get to a conclusion. However, you could see that product that I have promoted concerts.
I have previously promoted various types of offers in different verticals. Most of them are low converting and/or have a little half-life time.
But guess what? The product I made money from has been promoted since 2013! It converts today as well as the day I started promoting this offer!
The Reliability of ShareASale Affiliate Network
I have worked with 100s of affiliate programs and a few affiliate networks in the past. Here are a few difficulties I have faced.
- Some affiliate programs are unreliable — You might feel that you have made more affiliate sales, but network reports don’t showcase these conversions. It isn’t very reassuring seeing you don’t get accurate information inside an affiliate program or network.
- Customer support service is horrible — Do you believe that I have waited 2,3 weeks to receive a reply to my queries? Those are after my couple of follow-up messages.
- Payouts are not on time — How would it look when you don’t get paid for sales?
- Doesn’t have different payout methods — Many affiliate programs offer PayPal as a payout method. But, as you might know, receiving money through PayPal isn’t still available in a few countries. You could use Payoneer to create virtual banking accounts. However, some affiliate programs still depend on PayPal, which most people can’t utilize.
However, ShareASale is not among them.
Here’s why ShareASale is a reliable affiliate network for small businesses.
- Traffic Tracking — You get a unique link for each affiliate program. Different affiliate programs have different Cookie times. However, you would get paid once someone converted into a member or a customer.
- Rich traffic and conversion reports — ShareASale is one of the top affiliate networks I have seen that show traffic and conversion reports in detail. You can even add sub-ids to track conversions on specific campaigns.
- ShareASale Help Center — If you have an issue with ShareASale, you can submit a ticket to the ShareASale support desk and resolve your problems quickly.
- Directly send messages to merchants — Working with an affiliate network such as ShareASale is helpful in case you want to contact the merchant. I have met some inbuilt affiliate programs that don’t open my messages. However, companies that use ShareASale have agents to manage the affiliate side of the company. You get quick replies, especially on weekdays.
- Different payout methods — It really hurts to hear when you don’t have a reliable method to get paid. ShareASale supports different payout methods, such as Payoneer and direct deposit to banks. I use the direct deposit to US bank method. I usually get paid within 1-3 business days.
I know many Pitiya readers are bloggers and small business owners. ShareASale is a blogger-friendly affiliate network.
Here are a few essential facts about the ShareASale affiliate network for bloggers.
- Your site doesn’t have to have a large traffic volume — My application got approved when Pitiya was hosted on Google Blogger. In those days, my blog received about 10K-20K unique visitors per month. But, it was enough to get my site approved by ShareASale.
- Minimum Payouts — You don’t have to earn thousands of dollars to receive your earnings. The minimum payout is $50. That’s very good for every type of affiliate. Heck, you could even find affiliate offers that give $100 or even $200 per conversion! Only one conversion is enough to break the payout threshold!
- Payments on time — ShareASale sends payments on the 20th of each month. You will receive payments on the next business day if it is a weekend or a holiday.
- ShareASale offers instant payouts to Payoneer account holders — You can apply to ShareASale to receive a free MasterCard sponsored by ShareASale through Payoneer. ShareASale will send your earnings to your Payoneer MasterCard, and you can withdraw them through an ATM that supports MasterCards.
Now, you know why I prefer the ShareASale affiliate marketplace.
Here is a short guide on how to use ShareASale to make money online.
How to Make Money Online With ShareASale Affiliate Network
ShareASale is an affiliate network where merchants or advertisers list their products on the network. Affiliates are just like me, and you join each program manually and promote their services.
Therefore, you will have to:
- Sign up to ShareASale,
- Join affiliate programs,
- Promote affiliate programs…
…to make money with ShareASale.
Phase One: Sign Up for ShareASale
Step 1: Register on ShareASale.
Sign Up for the ShareASale affiliate program by clicking this link.
Step 2: Fill out the ShareASale affiliate application form.
You will be guided through five easy, self-explanatory steps to sign up as an affiliate for ShareASale. Enter accurate information. Your username doesn’t matter for affiliate tracking. It’s used for identifying you.
I recommend entering your business email address when signing up for ShareASale. For example, yourname@yourwebsite.com.
However, you can still use a generic email address if you don’t have a business email address.
Do You Know?
You can generate unlimited email addresses with your Googlemail.com account!
Ex: username+custom_name@gmail.com (Replace “custom_name” with a unique identification name)
Although using a generic email address such as your Gmail, Yahoo Mail, or Outlook email address won’t significantly affect your application approval process, a business email address will give a professional look and speed up the application approval.
Step 3: Verify your identity.
Confirm your email address by clicking on the verification link sent to your email address. ShareASale may want to verify you own the website you provided in the above steps.
Follow the instructions and confirm you own the website. In most cases, you could verify by adding the meta tag code within the head section. (between <head> and </head>)
Step 4: Complete Your ShareASale Affiliate Profile
Once you are successfully approved to the ShareASale affiliate network, you’d first have to complete the incomplete tasks, such as filing the tax form (if you’re a US citizen) and setting up the payout method.
If you still haven’t verified your website’s ownership, I recommend doing it first. Because when applying for affiliate programs in ShareASale, they (merchants or affiliate managers) look at your profile. If they find you haven’t confirmed your website yet, then you won’t be approved for the particular affiliate program.
Other settings I would like you to set up in the first place.
- Payout method — ShareASale provides a few different payout methods. One of my favorites is Payoneer. Link your Payoneer account with ShareASale or create a new one over here.
- Add your website — You should primarily add or edit the website address.
- Explain yourself — Write a short description of yourself, your blog, what you do, etc. This will certainly help in getting approved for affiliate programs in ShareASale.
- Fill in Tax details — Every publisher should fill in IRS or International Revenue Service forms to receive payouts. United States residents must fill out the W8-BEN form, and non-US residents must fill out the W8 form.
Phase Two: Join Affiliate Programs
Getting started with the ShareASale affiliate network is really easy.
How it Works
- You join an affiliate program.
- Affiliate manager(s) of a particular program review your profile.
- You get access to affiliate links, creatives, and coupons.
- You promote the affiliate product.
- You make money for each conversion.
- Conversion locks on the 20th of every month.
- According to the payout settings, you get paid on the 20th day of every month.
Step 1: Search merchants.
Go to Merchants >> Search For Merchants.
Merchants in different verticals join ShareASale consistently.
You can search affiliate programs by keywords. Ex: washing machine, foodies, SEO tools.
Also, you could do an “Advanced Search” to find specific affiliate products that meet your metrics.
After finding an interesting product, click on the “Join Program” button to sign up for each affiliate program.
Check out the “Details” tab to find important metrics for affiliates like Cookie period (the longer, the better) and deposit type.
Some affiliate programs automatically deposit earnings into your ShareASale affiliate account once a conversion occurs.
Step 2: Account Approval.
According to the program you have requested the promotion access, you’d be approved instantly or after affiliate managers reviewed your application.
Step 3: Get Affiliate Links.
Once the particular merchant approves you for the affiliate program, you can start promoting the product or service.
Click on “Links”>> “Get a Link/Banner.”
Click on “Get Links” under the affiliate program you have joined.
In the next window, you’d see a lot of options to select for promoting the product/service.
Related: Top URL Shortening Services with Custom Domain
How to Promote Affiliate Products of ShareASale Network
In this ShareASale affiliate program review, you found out that affiliate programs on ShareASale convert better. But, you won’t make any penny without a good promotion strategy.
Here are four popular and effective ways to promote ShareASale affiliate programs.
- Blog Post Articles — Write an article based on an issue your potential customers are facing. Introduce your affiliate product or service as a solution. Ex: https://www.pitiya.com/semrush-alternatives.html (Introduce your affiliate product as an alternative)
- Review Articles — Most people search for unbiased and honest reviews about a particular product or service on search engines. After researching its pros and cons, write a good review article about the service. I recommend you buy the product or service yourself first. It will certainly help you understand the product’s advantages and disadvantages. Ex: https://www.pitiya.com/shortpixel-review.html (Write a complete review, plus a tutorial to get started)
- Comparison Articles — Does your affiliate product or service have competitors? Write a comparison article and increase your sales. Check out my Ginger vs. Grammarly comparison for an example.
- Creatives — Most affiliate programs in ShareASale provide creatives such as banners and videos for publishers. Display a few of them on your blog and see how it works.
- Youtube — Create explainer and review videos on ShareASale affiliate offers and publish them on your channel.
- Email marketing — Send out several emails to your list. If you do not have an email list, consider starting building now with a tool like Aweber. Additionally, you can try giving Solo Advertising a try. Here is a complete guide on How to high-quality buy solo ads. The best place to buy solo ads is the Udimi solo ads marketplace.
My favorite methods for promoting any affiliate product as a blogger are writing a review article and writing a good lengthy article showcasing the product’s or service’s benefits.
For example, let’s say you want to promote the DMCA product on your blog. It offers $10.00 per sale and $0.25 for each lead. It’s pretty good, right?
So, how do you promote DMCA.com on your blog?
First of all, let’s build up a questionnaire.
- What’s the product’s category? Webmaster tools
- What is the target audience? Bloggers, webmasters, and SEOs.
- What does the product do? Protect your website content from thieves.
- What does the product offer? Provide tools to deter, detect, and defend against unscrupulous content thieves.
- Does the product have any competitors? Yes, some services offer a variety of tools.
- How a particular product differs from the competition? Apart from checking plagiarism, DMCA offers a badge to display on the website to protect content.
- What are the other benefits of the product? Protect content against people who intend to steal content in the future. Provide tools for Blogger, WordPress CMS, and plagiarism scanners. Receive monthly status reports by email.
Now you should get a clear idea of what DMCA offers and how you can promote it. Once you understand key takeaways from the above questions, the next BIG thing is finding the right angle to promote your offer.
The ANGLE is the most important factor in promoting an affiliate product, whether you promote it on a blog or a YouTube video.
A right-angle could crush your competition and stand you out as a top affiliate of the particular product.
Here are a few blog post ideas for you to promote DMCA.
- How This One Tool Helped Me Protecting My Content From Content Thieves
- Why Your Blog Posts’ Organic Rankings Don’t Increase (You May Be Not Responsible For It!)
- How I Increased Direct Traffic by 19.28% Using a Very Simple Trick
The USPs or Unique Selling Propositions for the above article headlines are:
- Protect content and be safe.
- Increase search engine ranking by checking plagiarized content or stolen content.
- Watermark photos and drive more direct traffic while increasing brand awareness.
These three blog articles promote DMCA at the backend. However, the difference here is your approach to promoting DMCA for different audiences with various intents.
Of course, your writing skills and designs contribute to conversions as well. However, using a right angle is the key to converting a reader into a buyer.
I could write an entire article on promoting affiliate products on your blog. But, I wanted to give you a basic idea of how this affiliate promotion stuff works.
In content writing, keyword research also matters. I recommend you check out this guide on ranking less competitive keywords on search engines. I have explained everything you need to know to write pillar articles that search engines eager to index!
Some More Tips To Make Money With Affiliate Programs
Even though you could find high-converting offers on the ShareASale affiliate network, you still have many works to do to generate conversions.
Here are a few tips and tricks to make money online with ShareASale affiliate programs.
- Promote products that fit your niche — Promoting a fitness product on your gaming blog doesn’t make sense. Am I right? Be sure to check the product’s specifications and see how they could benefit your audience.
- Don’t be a salesman — You want to make money. Everyone wants to make money. But don’t be salesy. Don’t put affiliate links all around your articles. Put them in the right places and when it is necessary.
- Be with your potential customer — You can push readers to buy from you once or recommend the product showcasing its pros & cons and building trust. The decision is in your hand.
- Benefits over features — People don’t care if you make money or not. They want to know how a particular product or service solves their problems.
- More angles better — Be creative and develop different ways to promote the particular affiliate program for distinct audiences.
Other affiliate promotion tips that everyone should know
Apart from the above affiliate marketing tips, you can use these tips to make more money through affiliate programs in ShareASale.
- Promote affiliate offers with high payouts and high conversion rates: Higher payouts are high earnings, right? No, it is not. Always be in attention to how far each product or service converts. Higher commissions always help, but overall, it is not.
- Cloak affiliate links: In modern days, people aren’t silly. They could understand whether you have linked out to affiliate products or not. Even if you cloaked affiliate links, people could know it. However, it is generally better off hiding original ugly affiliate links rather than inserting naked unattractive links.
- Track everything: I can’t talk about the importance of tracking. Just track everything. You know nothing about particular campaigns if you don’t track affiliate links. Use a tool like Replug to track your link performance over multiple channels. Read my Replug review to learn more about the tool. But, use a link tracking analytics tool like ClickMagick (check pricing details from here) if you want to get real-time reports on profitable channels and traffic sources when promoting ShareASale affiliate offers.
Related: Best Link Rotator Tools to Redirect Traffic to Multiple Links
ShareASale Alternatives
I shared my reviews on the ShareASale network from an affiliate’s point of view.
But ShareASale is not the only one out there. There are a few.
- Commission Junction — A similar site like Shareasale.com with many affiliate programs for different industries.
- PartnerStack — An affiliate network for SaaS products. Previously known as GrowSumo.
- Impact — One of the most popular affiliate programs with robust features. Appsumo, Canva, and Envato Network use Impact.
- Avangate — Another affiliate marketplace like ShareASale with many products from established companies such as Awario (from SEO Powersuite) and BitDefender.
- ClickBank — Famous for digital products in niches such as Make Money Online, Network Marketing, Software, and Health.
- JvZoo — Very similar to ClickBank but used by product launches
- Warriorplus — Similar to JvZoo.
Related: What is Launch Jacking in Affiliate Marketing?
What is the best ShareASale alternative?
ShareASale is an affiliate network of its own. I already shared why I prefer it over others in this review on ShareASale. But, you might be wondering what the best alternative to ShareASale is.
Each of the ShareASale contenders has its own strengths and weaknesses. For instance, PartnerStack is very famous for SaaS affiliate programs. You could find affiliate programs for many Software As A Service (SaaS) startups.
So, if you are looking for a better ShareASale alternative to find SaaS partners, PartnerStack would be a good choice.
Similarly, JvZoo is very famous among internet marketing communities for finding product launches. There are also evergreen sales funnels that you can promote and make money.
Impact.com is very close to ShareASale. It offers different payout options for affiliates, and there are many programs you can choose from.
Recommended:
- How to make money with the Udimi affiliate program
- A step-by-step guide to using MunchEye affiliate programs
Conclusion on ShareASale Review
ShareASale is one of my favorite affiliate networks that I have been using since 2013.
The best thing I have found about the ShareASale affiliate network is its good and qualified programs. Fortune 500 companies use ShareASale to give the marketing aspect to affiliates.
Unlike you find affiliate programs in networks like Jvzoo, ClickBank and Warriorplus, etc., ShareASale qualifies programs and assures the payments for every successful affiliate conversion.
Companies like Semrush, WPEngine, Godaddy, Grammarly, and GingerSoftware make millions every year because of quality affiliates in ShareASale.
If you still haven’t signed up for the ShareASale affiliate network, I recommend giving it a try.
So, what’s your favorite component of ShareASale? How would you review the ShareASale affiliate network? Share your thoughts in the comment form below.
ShareASale Affiliate Network
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Payouts
(5)
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Affiliate programs
(4)
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UX and UI
(3.5)
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Support
(4.25)
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Supporting Tools
(4)
Summary
ShareASale Affiliate Network is used by thousands of affiliate marketers globally. It contains a wide variety of affiliate offers that you can sign up for and promote immediately. Semrush affiliate program, Grammarly, and WPEngine are some notable ones. ShareASale pays every 20th of the month, and you can get paid via Payoneer, direct banking, or PayPal.
Pros
- Regular payouts
- Tracking options (Sub IDs etc.)
- Reporting
- Merchant feed
Cons
- The user Interface can be upgraded
Nice post here on Pitiya.Com
This blog is filled with very important and crucial tips that really helps.
Kudos!!
Thank you Victor for kind of words. Looking forward to hear more from you!