I will not make an “Affiliate Marketing for dummies” type of article, I will just get to the point. There are many affiliate networks out there, many of them bad, some of them good. The most popular of them include: Commission Junction, Clickbank, Linkshare, etc. Today I am going to talk about an affiliate network that is overlooked by many, but one which I consider to be the best: Shareasale.

I don’t really know why they are somewhat in the “underground” when it comes to affiliate networks. So why do I like them so much? Simply put, they are everything I want a professional  affiliate network to be. Let’s start:

1. Efficient real time tracking
Clicks and commissions are tracked in real time, there’s no waiting until the next day in order to see your sales. And what’s even more important, this is a network that doesn’t shave affiliate commissions – meaning it will not steal your commissions. This is a very rare quality indeed.

2. Deep linking
I hate it when an affiliate network doesn’t give me the opportunity to link to any page I want from the merchant’s website. If I want my visitor to go to the page that sells blue bikes (I figured the widget example is way overdone), then I should be able to get him to that particular page. Not to the page that sells red bikes, and not to the homepage.
Well, Shareasale will let you link to whatever page you want from the merchant’s website. This will consequently help you increase your conversions.

3. Quality control
This network is not one that accepts just any merchant. They must go through a pretty rigorous examination before being accepted into Shareasale. So you will never get the feeling of a big fat scam when looking at the programs that got accepted into the network.

4. Professionalism
A while back, I talked about what happened to me on Pepperjam Network. Well, Shareasale is way out of PJ’s league. I’ve had something similar happen here also, but the professional folks over at Shareasale are probably aware of the fact that you can’t control your visitors once they are off your website. So they simply voided the transactions.

5. On time payments
Don’t you hate it when you don’t get your money when you’re supposed to? Well, you will never experience an unfortunate event like that with shareasale.com .

6. Many merchants to choose from
After you use Shareasale for a while, you will find it hard to get back to almost any other affiliate network out there. They have a total of 2544 programs, out of which 2402 are pay per sale, 227 are pay per lead, and 6 are pay per click. You will find almost any niche you might be looking for – yes I know that if you add them up they are more than 2544, but some of them are both pay per sale and pay per lead. They will also provide you with great statistics like total EPC, 7 day EPC and 30 day EPC. In fact, Shareasale is one of my favorite money makers, together with Amazon and Adsense.
If you want to be a Shareasale affiliate, click here - it will take you directly to the sign up form.