ShareASale Review: How To Use It In [2021]

Hey guys, Ryan from NicheFacts here and today, I’m going to go over a ShareASale on how to make money in it in 2018. So for those of you who are unfamiliar with ShareASale, it is a affiliate network. And essentially affiliate networks arbitrate the relationship between advertisers and publishers, so it does all of the dirty administrative work enabling advertisers to list their businesses online and affiliates or publishers to join their programs.

Affiliates can find affiliate programs they want to join, and be able to create links and get paid based on different commission structures if the merchants enable them. So basically it’s just facilitating the relationship between the two parties.

It’s pretty easy to do. It’s not something that’s going to they’re, not going to prevent you from signing up it’s very easy to join so once you’re joined up with ShareASale, you will get access to essentially the the interior of ShareASale here, and this is basically say social merchants, so you’ll be Inside of ShareASale and if you’re an affiliate and you’re looking for stuff to promote one of the best ways to kind of dig in to share a sale, is to examine the different merchants by power rank and so pile rank. Is this proprietary statistic that ShareASale uses to kind of rank the performance of different affiliate programs within the network?

And right now you can see the number one ranked affiliate program is fanatics and it says the sports apparel company so they’re like a licensed distributor for different types of this different types of sportswear. So if you click right here, you can go to the website. If you see you know, you see what they’re about you know, they they’re selling all different types of NHL and it fell things like that and see right here. You can click join program and if you want to get a deeper look into how they’re performing you can click there, and you see you get in this kind of little landing page here and you see this is what the Commission amount is for.

Every sale that you refer so if somebody buys a hundred dollar Jersey, you’re, theoretically getting 10 % of that and then down here you get even more information. You’Ll see, you know what the average sale is that affiliates. You know in the past seven days the average sale has been $ 64.

If you click 30 days, you see the average sale of six is six dollars and the average commission is two dollars forty cents and then the earnings per click. That’S the for. Every hundred clicks, this is the amount that’s generated when I go into a more of a deep dive of what these statistics mean on my on my post so like we were just looking at at ShareASale, I mean sorry, I pay the power rank statistic and they Actually, don’t share so doesn’t actually create a lot of content about what that actually means. So I need the best definition that I was able to dig up was from their blog, and I link to it in my post and I’ll have the link for that. In the description of the video, so they say that it is a ShareASale, specific statistic and compare things such as: earnings per click, volume, reversal rates, conversion program, uptime, etc, which is not that really not that great of a description.

But suffice it to say it’s it’s a statistic that I’m sure pretty accurately analyzes all these numbers here and some other stuff like how much are how often are people returning you know, merchandise or whatever they’re purchasing and causing you know, voided transactions and things like that And then another interesting statistic here is a conversion rate so seeing like how does this program actually convert? So these are all average figures, so you know you may have better or worse experience promoting something like kinetics like if you have a an NFL blog as opposed to maybe a general merchandise or a general product review site.

For example, you may convert better because you’re you have a much tighter focus on the particular and then the sort of in in the nished cell. So if you’re doing the sports blog as opposed to a general product review site, you look, you would see better. These probably see better, you know, statistics, because your what your slight content is about is specifically related to the affiliate program. You’Re promoting and that’s really in a nutshell, how you succeed with any sort of affiliate program or inside of an affiliate Network. Is that the better quality traffic you send results in better performance statistics for the affiliate program that you’re promoting?

So, let’s close out of that, so that’s one way of analyzing or finding programs is sorting it by power rank and it’s good to kind of look at programs within the top hundred, because these are things that are converting. So, whether you don’t have a niche at all and you just kind of brainstorming or if you have a niche and you’re just trying to figure out, you know how.

How, additionally, can i monetize my niche going at the share, sale and looking at the top 100 performing programs? You see a good way to do that and you can see you know, there’s different. Sometimes they there’s variable Commission structure, so sometimes it’s certain products is 10 % for minted and sometimes 12 %, and they also pay a dollar per lead. So you know there’s different ways: you can kind of analyze these things and you see the earnings per click and how it changes between different different programs for fanatics is $ 44 and from my fellow it’s 149 dollars.

But you know it’s really. It’ll depend on what niche you’re in and, like I said you, don’t the numbers were a good kind of guide to go by and but you know, your own performance will probably vary. One thing to pay attention to is the amount that you’re getting per sale, especially if you’re, comparing to such similar programs, you know if one is, is offering 10 % the other 1 %. You know it. It might make sense, obviously to go with the one that has a higher percentage per sale, but you know if they don’t convert as well like if the conversion rate for one for the higher Commission one is much better. You know you’d want to make an educated decision and you’d probably just want to test the affiliate links and see.

Is it worth promoting the one with the higher higher commission structure but the lower the lower conversion percentage? So things like that or something you’d want to consider, but I like just looking at the power rank you kind of brainstorm new affiliate ideas, like checks unlimited this one has been in ShareASale for a very long time and they’re very you know they they’re observe A proven entity they’ve converted for a very long period of time, and so, if you’re it have like a personal finance blog, you know linking to where you can buy different checks. You that obviously makes sense. So you know this is a good way to kind of get a sense of you know what what exists within ShareASale and you could also dissected by categories which is pretty cool. So this is a you know. If you’re in a particular niche like say I’m in you know, I run a recipe blog food and drink. That would be a logical category to to analyze, and, I should also say share so recently updated the whole user interface.

So, for a long time this looked really bad. It was very stodgy, it looked like it was. You know, internet mm, basically, but now it looks much cleaner, much more modern, it’s easier to discover different things, different programs. So always, you know just if you’re in a particular niche just make sure that you check out the categories section, it’s a good way to to analyze different programs that you can potentially join. And so, if you want to join a program, you just click to join program, and I you know they have. They have specific agreements oftentimes they have if you’re doing like Adwords they’ll, have specific keyword terms that you can’t bid or can’t compete with them on like in this case, it’s like they’re branded terms Bistro. They don’t want people buying that, but other than that, you know.

If you were doing AdWords, you could basically buy whatever you want and you would click to join this program. One thing I’ve learned is that when you join ShareASale, don’t go crazy, joining every single program, you kind of want to prove that you’re. You know a reputable entity for the most part, there’s some programs that will just accept you, because you know like Wayfarer in my, I was able to quickly join Wayfarer without having any earnings and Wayfarer is like this home and garden site, all sorts of stuff. It’S sort of like an Amazon competitor, but they they’re much deeper in sort of home garden interior design stuff.

So I was able to join that and slowly get my earnings off the ground with them. But if you try to do some, there’s some programs that you try to join they’re going to be a little bit hesitant if you don’t have any earnings to show. So, if you’re new to share a sale, I would just try to do a couple at first and make sure that you’ve filled out your your profile. Your account settings so like list out all your websites right out there there’s settings within account where you describe how you get traffic, make sure everything is completely filled out, because you know if you’re a merchant on here and some person just joins and then just randomly Applies without any sort of profile or earnings, history there’s a chance that you’ll get rejected by them, which you know it’s not great, and then I’m not exactly sure how it works, but it may be specific to particular programs, but eventually you can reapply. I think in most cases I’ve been rejected by some that I wish I’d gotten into. You know it’s just sort of how it works.

You don’t really know what’s going on with the merchants behind the scenes, so my advice, if you’re new to ShareASale, is just fill out your profile. I don’t want to go too deep into my profile publicly, but if you once you’re in they prompt you to fill out everything, so we just fill out everything write everything out, make it look as good as you possibly can, and then you know, choose the programs That you want to join and do maybe you know three to start and see how it goes, and so now that we’re into this category level thing here for food and drink, you can see there’s different ways that you can rank or order. The programs that are inside of it so if by default it’s doing seven-day EPC, you can do it by power rank. So you see the the top performing the top ranks top power, ranked programs within food and drink, and in this case it’s daily harvest is the number one and they have this really huge, seven-day EPC. So EPC refers to the average affiliate earnings per 100 clicks across all affiliates in a merchant’s program.

So it gives you like a baseline measurement of affiliate success with the program and it’s a good way to kind of compare between different affiliate programs. Another way that you can find affiliates – or let’s say you have a particular product that you’re trying to, but you write about on your website, for example, so I like in my case I’ve done dust extractor. So I’m one of my sites. So if you click into the keyword search – okay, it’s not letting me, let’s see, I think, because it’s searching within it’s searching with within the food and drink category.

Let’s see, let me just close out of this. It’S modify the search, yeah good. The problem is, is that dust extractor research, it’s searching within the particular category, so let’s see if I could change up the category so that it’s not searching within that’s annoying, so yeah, okay, sometimes it’s a little bit like. I actually had an experience as before. So it’s kind of a good, a good learning. The adjusting of search filters is not so intuitive [, Music, ]. So still a couple kings to work out. I guess I would say within within ShareASale, search for merchants. Like I, in that case, I couldn’t really see how to escape at that category. So let me just open up a new window and do it that way.

Okay, now we go so, let’s close that one. So if I search for this is like another way to search within share of sales, you got to just run a product, query search, and you see right here there for merchants that have that type of product and then here there’s 35 individual products. So if I search this, I would see these are the four mansion Rockler house and heavy-duty depot, and I know that I’m actually I’m actually a member of Rockler. So you see it enables me to get links, I could click into product matches and I would see. Okay, here’s a dust extractor it retails for five hundred and ninety-nine dollars estimated commission based on rocklers commission structure is seventeen dollars. So it’s actually changed a little bit. I don’t usually get links this way anymore.

Okay, so if you want a text link, you can just grab that or it can get thumbnail or large image, but actually the way that I I do it now is. To so say I installed this. It’S called the ShareASale product discovery tool, and this is the honestly the easiest one I found to get trade custom, affiliate links so say I want to have a a DIY site. I want to link to this particular six drawer dresser. You click this a bookmark and then you can just grab this link, which is a great way to create text links or you can choose one of these so say I want at 736 by 736 square image of this. You can see here. This is kind of ugly, but you can just click like this and just get a pure image eventually, so they are so then you can just click the copy, and then you get the you get. This code use control-c, and now you have that image link or you can just grab a text link here and that’s for me is the way I create affiliate link. So say you want to link to a specific query so say I want to search for dog beds. I just want to link the search path.

You could do that here too so say I wanted to have a text link in my text. We have to be signed in to share a sale, and then you just go to the the program that you’ve already a member of and then you’ll be able to generate these links. So the next thing I want to go over is just kind of how I use the reporting analytics, so I’ve mainly spend most of my time and activity details, and it shows you, like you, know your most recent transactions, the sale amount, the merchants that you the transaction, the transaction stats under Reports and Activity Details, and that’s just that’s an interesting kind of just top-level look at how things were going on a moment-by-moment basis and the other thing that I think is interesting. It under reports is the traffic report, so this will show you. You know what your the traffic that you’re ascending.

So if you just click filter results, it’s going to show me month to month date month to date of what’s occurring, and so it’s just December 2017 and showing the old traffic that I’ve sent. You know I’ve sent over a thousand. You know 1300 clicks to Wayfair. It shows me a number of sales, the net sales, the commissions and conversion. So in this case I’m converting a 2.2 percent. You know which isn’t amazing, but I mean it’s not that it’s not it’s not too bad. It’S kind of it’s kind of what I expect at this point, having been a member for a while with wayfarer and let’s it was there anything else that I wanted to show within that.

That’s really what mostly, what I use is all sorts of other things that you can look at in here. There’S invalid links, which is useful. It shows you other so say you link to a particular affiliate program within share a sale, but the program goes down. You can always check invalid links and see you know which links of yours aren’t working anymore in that way to fix them on your site: [, Music, ]. So in general that that’s how I use it, you know basically, if you’re looking to get inspired if you’re searching for a niche, I recommend you know going merchants search for merchants and then just looking looking through the different categories or looking at the top performing affiliate Programs by power rank. They also have a trending merchants section with a show like so much you’re, not sure what the exact definition of trending is.

Maybe these are, programs that are just outside of the top 100 power rank that are doing well and have some potential, and they want to promote them and get them more. Exposure to affiliates the the modified and modernized user interface is a lot better than at what it used to be. So I’m pretty happy about that and on my blog I actually do an analysis of the top. The top 10, so I’ll leave a link in the description to this particular post. But you know I just wanted to take kind of a deeper look at which some of the top performing affiliate programs and kind of analyze. You know what they’re about how they’re converting so, if you’re at all interested in enjoining ShareASale, you know it’s it’s. You know. It’S a functional affiliate network that you know I’ve I’ve done well in and that’s a lot of different interesting programs and, in my experience it’s more about physical products than something you know. Obviously, like Clickbank words, you know it’s all information products, but it’s really a much big focus is on the informational products that you can.

You can buy there or buy through the different merchants on within the network, and that is it. So if, if you find this interesting, just leave a comment, I answer to all comments subscribe, I’ll, be coming out with more more information, around affiliate networks and, as usual, my niche reports on different niches that you can join. My most recent post was how you can actually learn. You could actually play candy crush for a living, so I did a a full overview of a site that is up for auction now called app tipper, where you can.

Basically, they do walkthroughs of the game. Candy crush – and I show you you know how they did all of the you know it sort of the SEO hack. They did to get tons and tons of traffic. You know like half a million pageviews per month, so check out all the other content.

I got a lot of great write-ups talking about different niches, I think, are really interesting. The tickets niche like nobody is in that, like being an affiliate for Ticketmaster or ticket network musical instruments is another really cool niche where print. For example, even you share a sale to find like different musical instruments and watch therapy. No okay, good there’s some there’s some trumpets out there that you could buy.

So how many people do you think are se owing the keyword trumpet, not many. So if you were to go to to Google and you type in trumpet – and you see what you get – you’ll get two hundred and one thousand searches per month and just stuff like this Guitar Center, which obviously is a great great resource. You know for buying a trumpet, but I’m willing to bet it’s not too heavy informational content. So, okay, so they have this year. So a little going a little bit far afield here, but I do have some pretty interesting content and it’s a natural complement for you know my my post on ShareASale, because ShareASale is where you’re going to find a lot of sort of niche vendors.

So if you decide to do a an affiliate site around musical instruments – and I list out the top ten here – electric guitar or a keyboard – piano guitar, there’s all sorts of instruments with tons of search volume. Shareasale, it’s gonna be a great place to go to get really niche affiliate links, for example like you’ll, be able to source the actual trumpet and, for instance, here’s a classical music sheet download. So it’s like where you go to find the actual sheet music.

You need four four trumpets. Those are the good use case, for you know how you use ShareASale. You know you choose a niche, say you’re, you know doing the trumpet niche you’re able to find affiliate links within share yourself for that particular niche. So just keep that in mind. That’S really how it works and ShareASale is just sort of a tool in your tool belt to monetize your content.