ShareASale Tutorial
One of the reasons that i like using share sale is that most of the products that share sale promotes or the merchants that share sale works with are typically a little bit higher quality than what you might find on.
Something like clickbank and it usually is a lot easier to get paid through share sale compared to the other affiliate marketing websites out there as well. So i’m, going to go ahead and take you through the entire process of what it looks like to create a share, a sale account and how you can get set up on share sale.
If you’re just starting out with affiliate marketing or if you’re already a pro in order to do that, we need to go ahead and create an account with sharasao. I’ve made. It really really easy. I’ve included a link in the description of this video.
If you click on that link, it’s, going to take you directly to the affiliate sign up page once you’ve, clicked on that link, you’re, going to be taken to a page that looks like this. This is the affiliate sign up page on this page.
You’re on step, one so enter your username, your desired password and choose the country that you live in once you’ve done so move on to step two. You might see at multiple points throughout this video me fast forwarding or skipping through a few of these different sections.
If you need more time to fill out the information yourself pause, the video and come back to it once you’ve completed each one of these sections yourself. This next page is the primary website page. So this is a really important part of the sign up process.
You need to have a website if you’re going to join, share sale. I have a few other guides, including working with wordpress and registering with the domain with namecheap. I’ll link in the video below if you want to go ahead and get this set up.
But if you don’t have a website already, you ‘ Ll have to go and set one up before you get to this next step, go ahead and enter your website within the url bar here and fill out the information below about what your website specializes in and what you use to drive traffic to your site share.
Sale uses information to determine whether or not to approve you to the affiliate network, so make sure that you’re, including correct, accurate information within this section and that you own this website and have put some time in developing content on that site.
As well, step 3 is email address and confirmation sharasa requires that you have a valid email address associated with either the domain that you entered on, step 2 or an email address which is going to be different from that domain, which might take a little bit longer To verify your account, i’m, going to go ahead and enter an email address which does not match the domain of the website i entered earlier.
But if you do have an email that is associated with the domain that you entered in step 2. Go ahead and click on this option instead, step 4. Is your contact? Information shareasale uses this when you apply different programs and they also use it to cut out your checks and your payments so make sure this information is correct.
You ‘ Ll also want to make sure that you have a nice description, because the description is what the merchants use to evaluate, whether or not to allow you to enter their different types of promotions and their different types of programs.
So make sure that this is professional and make sure that it’s thorough and that you’re. Describing your company, your organization or your account that is going to be used to promote their products. Finally, determine whether or not that your website is an incentive website, incentive is basically a pay to read, email or maybe a reward site.
If you’re operating in that zone, you may or may not be approved for share sale. So go ahead and answer this correctly and if you’re, not sure, go ahead and click you don’t know what incentive program is finally determine whether or not you own the domain that you entered in the previous step.
Once you’ve filled out this section, move on to step five step. Five is the payment information page. You can go through and enter your payment information now or you can come back to this once you’ve actually received the minimum threshold, which is fifty dollars in order to receive a payment.
If you want to go back to any of the prior steps and redo the information that you submitted, you can click on any of these boxes. To go back to that prior step. Once you’ve done this click on complete sign up review, the suresl terms of agreement and then once you’ve done so agree to the following terms and verify.
The sign of information is correct. Then click on complete application. Once you’ve done that congrats, you’ve gone through the entire signup process. They’re, going to send you a confirmation, email, and you should confirm that as soon as you can and you should have a response back from the share a sale team on whether or not your application’s been accepted within three To five days, once your application has been approved and you’ve been invited as an affiliate.
You can log into the affiliate back panel as part of share sale and go to the merchants category. Finding a good merchant is a really important part in being successful of share sale. You’ll notice. On the left hand, side there’s, a whole host of different categories.
You can choose from and thousands of different companies that you can choose to promote. Let’s, go ahead and take a look at two companies right now and we’ll, see the different types of affiliate links that they’re, going to give you and also some of their statistics, that you can choose A really good program when you first get started with share sale.
Every merchant has a merchant detail page where it outlines what the merchant is and also their percentage commission based on every sale that you make. You can make some pretty good determinations on whether or not the affiliate program is good or not.
Based on the statistics that are located right here in this chart, i tend to only look at 30 day. Statistics, as seven days tends to be a little bit too short. So what we’ve done is, we have two affiliate merchant accounts and we have this one, which is called bear mattress and the second one which is called layla sleep so really really similar, and i chose two similar merchants.
So we can compare and contrast their metrics to figure out which one might be better or worse, depending on what you’re trying to sell. So if we look at the first example bear mattress on the right hand, side what we care about is a few important statistics.
This number right here is epc epc is an industry metric for earnings per click. You can think of earnings per click for every 100 clicks using one of the affiliate links. This is the average earnings that is received based on those 100 clicks that are made.
So this also includes power affiliates and those are really affiliates that have long established track record, but also newbies and new starters. Just like you and i so if you’re, looking at a program that has a very high earnings per click, keep in mind that these are not always average for beginners and may take into account some of those power affiliates that are really really Experienced at getting a lot of traffic being driven to these sites, there’s, two other metrics that we want to look at and that’s.
The average sale and the average commission average sale and average commission are important, but they’re, not really the be-all end-all to determine what merchant to work with what’s more important is to figure out the cookie time and also the Conversion rate, so the cookie is up to 120 days.
This is a very, very long cookie. Sometimes we have affiliate merchants that really only last 24 hours. Some are only 30 days and some are just a couple weeks, but 120 days is a very long time for a cookie to last.
The conversion rate is when someone clicks through on one of your affiliate links the likelihood of them going and actually making a sale. So the higher the conversion rate, the more likely you can depend on that person, that’s, clicked on your link to make a purchase.
A hundred percent conversion rate means that every single person that clicks through on your affiliate link makes a purchase. This will never happen. The last metric that’s important on this page is power.
Rank power rank is really just a list of the most profitable merchants on share sale, so the lower this number, the more profitable that it is, and the more money that affiliates are making. If you’re, going to be promoting a merchant that has a higher power rank, you’ll, probably have less competition from other affiliates, but you may have to make a trade-off.
Maybe the commission is lower, maybe the cookie lasts. Less is long and there’s, different areas that may or may not be more competitive depending on the niche and the type of product that you’re trying to sell.
So for this example, we’ve, seen the total metrics for bare mattress. Let’s, go ahead and compare and contrast bear mattress to this other affiliate, which is layla sleep, and i really just kind of chose these out of nowhere.
I assume that they both sell mattresses just because it has something to do with sleeping within each one of their titles. I have no affiliation with either of these merchants, and this is just an example to compare these metrics across each one of these different merchants.
So the first merchant we can see that the cookie lasts 120 days. If we go back to this one, we can also see that the cookie lasts 120 days. This is pretty good and it gives us a pretty good baseline to go off of, as we compare both of these different merchants.
The next thing we want to look at is conversion rate, so this is how good the landing pages are for the different affiliate links. You’re, going to be using, and also just how likely a customer is to purchase a product.
So for this one we’re. Looking at roughly a 3.1 conversion rate, this one is a little bit higher at 3.2. So this means there’s, just a slightly better chance that someone’s going to go through and make a purchase if they go ahead and go through the affiliate links for bear and then finally the average commission.
So, of course, the average commission, the more money that you’re, going to make the average commission with the bear. Mattress merchant is 100 bucks, and if we go to layla’s sleep, it’s 82.. This is also more popular merchant because their power rank is lower, so that means you might have a little bit more competition if you go and try to promote this type of a merchant compared to this one goes a little bit higher.
To be honest with you, though, these are so close to each other that it really won’t make that big of a difference so based on just the really really brief comparison that we’ve done here. It’s. Probably safe to say that you’re, going to have a better chance of promoting the bare mattress and have a higher conversion rate and a higher average sale along with a higher commission compared to this other affiliate within a similar niche.
Another important thing to do when you’re evaluating merchants is to take a look at the left hand, side where it says, program, status and active sense. You want to find merchants that have been on chair sale for a number of years, or at least for a year, because that way they’re trusted and they have experience working with different affiliates.
You can take a look too at the status history, which shows whether or not the merchant that you’re working with has been online for a long period of time, because if you notice that they’ve been offline for a long Time it’s, pretty likely they’ll, be offline for a similar amount of time in the future, which means that you’re, not going to make any money during that period of time that they’re Offline, this merchant has done pretty well these low funds notifications, they’re, only lasting for a couple hours and it really doesn’t matter as long as they just refill their funds.
This is a pretty good merchant in terms of the amount of time that they’ve been offline. This one indicates they haven’t been offline at all, so this just goes to show that this merchant is online a lot and is really engaged with their share sale account, and this is the type of merchant that you want to work with.
This is a really easy way of how you compare back and forth different merchants, and if you want more information on how to do this really effectively leave a comment below and i’ll share some more tips with you too.
So now that we’ve gone ahead and we’ve compared merchants, we can try to join a merchant program. Joining a program is as simple as filling out an application. It basically says that you have agreed to the program terms and agreements, and you want to join this merchant’s program to promote their products.
You can think of this page. Almost like a cover letter, you’re, going to tell the merchant why you would make a really good affiliate for them and what you’re, going to use in order to promote their products, be very specific on what you’re going to do here because this will make or break whether or not they’ll.
Accept you into their program at the bottom. You’ll, be able to read the agreement and also take a look at the different keywords which you are not allowed to bid on. This is really only applicable if you’re doing pay-per-click and you ‘
Ll also have an overview if they do allow you to bid on it. What the bid limit is. So you’re, not competing directly with the merchant itself. If you’re, not doing pay-per-click, you won ‘ T really have to worry about this too much.
Once you’ve gone through and outlined. Why you’d, make a good fit for their program and you’ve, clicked on join it’ll either automatically approve you or you ‘ Ll have to wait a couple days for the merchant to approve you into their program.
Once you’ve been accepted into a merchant’s program. You can go into the top bar here and click on get a link. Slash banner within this page, you can select your merchant that you want to work with. In this example, i’ll, just use, share, sale and click on the get links button to go and see all the different types of links that you can use to promote their products.
There’s. A couple different types of links: there’s, text links which are based on just html, that you can embed within one of your pages and there’s also banner links – and these are more popular that you probably see when you browse On the internet, different types of advertisements of different sizes and shapes that you can use as well, if we take a look at the text links, we can go ahead and click on get html code, which will show you the html code, that you can copy and Paste into your site, if you just want the url itself, you can click on select url only and copy, and paste this directly on the banners page for your different links.
You can choose based on the size or based on the shape, and you can also drill down in this advanced tab to categorize, based on category of the different colors or maybe the banner size based on width and height there’s.
Also, the option to create a custom link and creating a custom link is pretty unique if you have a merchant that you’re working with and they have a certain page or maybe a certain product that you want to make an affiliate url.
That will link directly to that page or product. You can copy that products url and then paste it within this url here. So, for example, let’s say that i want to send everybody that clicks on my affiliate link to the about us page of share sale.
What i can do is i can paste my url within that box and click on create custom link, and what this will do is automatically create a short link that tracks and directly takes a user to that page directly.
If they go through that link itself. This is really really handy if you have a lot of different products or you want to link to a specific product based on the merchant you’re working with and it doesn’t make it so people are taking to the home Page or to a page that’s irrelevant to the product they’re.
Looking for so now that we’ve created a few custom links. You’re, going to get to a point where people are clicking on those links and they might actually make a sale, and in order to do that, you want to go into your report section and then activity details.
The activity details section outlines all the different interactions and compensation that you’ve, made based on the programs that you’re working with and all the links that you’ve used within that link section.
It’s, going to show you all the different types of payments and the different types of payment locks. Payment locks happen when someone goes through and makes a sale on one of your links, but it’s not confirmed yet, and it has to be locked, which means that you’re guaranteed to make that amount there’s.
Certain situations where, even though someone goes through clicks on one of your affiliate links and makes a sale, you might not actually be credited for that sale if the customer was say a bot or they go through and they don’t actually complete the Purchase or they have a refund in that process, so all you really need to worry about is the locked amount, because the unlocked amount could change depending on your final payment.
Once you make enough commissions to get over that 50 limit, which is the threshold for share sale to send you a check, you’re, going to have an affiliate payment and the affiliate payment really just outlines what they’ve paid you You can see some more details within the payment summary, and this also includes what merchant that you were working with, and also what you actually made on the commission, based on the sales of whatever the person bought.
If you want to see the activity of all of your different merchants and be able to see more details about what urls they’re going to and what links they’re clicking on you’re, going to be able To go into your report section and click on activity, details or you can go and click on traffic report.
The traffic report allows you to choose what merchant and also the date range that you’d, like to see what types of links were clicked. So i’m, going to select one of my merchants from this drop down list and then i’m going to choose a date range once you determine the date range that you want and you click on the filter results button.
You’ll, be presented with this data below this is really helpful because it’s, going to tell you what type of banner you used or what type of link you used. The number of hits on that link and your commissions and sales there’s, also really good information.
If you click on the number of sales button, because that’s going to take you to the transactions that were associated with those clicks. So you can see the types of products that each one of those users is using or purchasing when they click on your link that you have here.
The conversion rate and the net epc is included within this as well, and you can download this data based on csv or save the report for later, so you can come back to it and see how you’re improving over time.
Another great report is if we go and hover over reports and click on the weekly progress report. The weekly progress report is a really good report too, because it just shows you over time how you’re doing in terms of numbers.
It clicks across all of your different merchants, so you can see, based on month over month, whether or not you’re, doing more clicks or less clicks and how that kind of relates to the number of commissions and conversion rates that you have.
As you get more experience, this page gets really exciting and you’re, going to be able to use this really easily to figure out what your top performing merchants are, and also the number of clicks that you’re receiving over time.
Sometimes different merchants will give you coupons or deals that you can use to add within one of your deals websites or that you can put directly in one of your blog posts or videos. In order to get to this page, you have to go into the links, section and click on coupons and deals, and you’ll, be able to scroll through and see all the different deals that you can give to your customers or readers.
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