Why become an affiliate for any company? Because it is an easy free way to earn money without holding or delivering stock. In my ShareASale affiliate program review, I will spell out all the benefits of this highly professional company.
ShareASale Affiliate Program
Based in Chicago. It finds top products and services for bloggers to promote and earn a
commission. Founded in 2000 by Brian Littleton, his company now has over 3900 merchant programs on its network platform.
- ShareASale requires all affiliates to have a live, content-rich website or social media page written free of hate speech and adult content. You must also own and control the website you apply with.
- Still, planning to create that website and not sure where to start? Head over to my review on where I learned to build my very first website business. Try it for Free.
What Types of Products Does ShareASale List?
These are just a few of the categories that you might promote on your website, with the number of merchants listed in the brackets.
- Education (132)
- Clothing (1094)
- Home and Garden (961)
- Books and Media (90)
- Automotive (66)
- Financial (51)
- Food and Drink (364)
- Business (157)
- Health (1358)
- Sports and Fitness (216)
- Recreation (88)
- Gifts (222)
- Accessories (889)
With this terrific cross-section of businesses, you are sure to find a category to promote on your niche website. You may even decide to choose your niche from this list. You will be writing lots of reviews, so choose a niche that you love.
How Will You Be Paid?
Every product that you promote on your website through a link or banner to the company has a commission attached to it. When someone buys a product from that company you will earn a commission from that company. It’s not paid by the buyer but by the company to you for sales or a referral.
For Example, I promote a Guitar course called Learn and Master, when I sell a course I receive a 20% commission that is collected by ShareASale and paid out monthly to me through my bank account.
Affiliate payouts average between 5% and 30%. Sometimes it may be a one-off payment of $20 – $100 or you can be promoting a product that when you make a sale it will pay you a percentage every month that the customer stays with that company. This often happens if it is a web hosting site, Health program, or an educational course.
If you are also promoting ShareASale as a company you will receive $30 for each referral and $150 per sale (this is when a new merchant joins them.)
How to register for a ShareASale account?
Registering with ShareASale is very fast and straightforward. 
When you click on the “Sign Up” button provided on the homepage, potential affiliates are taken to a new screen. Here you will create a username, and password, and choose your country.
You will then enter your website name and provide an email address that corresponds to the website. ShareASale will quickly check your website to make sure it meets their standards and you will often receive confirmation the same day.
Getting paid is important so when you open an account with ShareASale you should fill in your payment details. You can choose from payments sent via Check, Direct Deposit, or Wire.
Other steps include:
- Using an active site since this domain will later be used to confirm your ShareASale account.
- Accepting its terms and conditions, which is the last step. After that, click the link in the confirmation email to send your completed application for review.
Normal approval times for ShareASale accounts are around a day, but weekends and holidays are obviously not included.
You shouldn’t need more than 15 minutes to complete your application in total.
Could You be Rejected by ShareASale?
That can be a possibility if you haven’t read their requirements and met them before applying. This can happen with any company that has an affiliate program. Some are harder to meet the requirements than others. Here are some group and single affiliate companies. I’ve ranked these in order of difficulty to apply.
- Amazon
- ClickBank
- Wealthy Affiliate
- ShareASale
- Commission Factory
- BlueHost
- Fiverr
- Aweber
When you are first building your website and filling it with posts of quality and interest, it can take some time. You will go through a learning curve as you begin writing.
Do yourself a favor and load up Grammarly for free to help with spelling, punctuation, and grammar, and take a look at Yoast if you have no idea about SEO. Yoast will keep you on track for Google to rank your posts. Read about Yoast here.
Just as in any business venture the building phase of creating your online business can take from 1 – 5 years to become profitable. The good news is that I started making money after 10 months, so don’t be disheartened.
It usually takes about 4 months for Google to start indexing your posts and liking them enough to put them on the first page (Rank them). The more eyes that see your posts and click through to read them the more chances you will have for them to buy.
Once you start putting links and banners on your website it is a requirement of companies that you state that if someone makes a purchase that you could receive a commission.
This is an example:
Disclaimer: This article contains affiliate links where I may receive a small commission at no cost to you if you choose to purchase from a link on this page. Thank you for your support.
How Do I Create a Website So I Can Add Affiliate Links?
Wealthy Affiliate offers you the chance to start right at the beginning with teaching videos, community support, and 2 Free websites.
The criteria for me to start my business was tough and simple:
- It must have a free trial (no credit card necessary)
- When I upgraded the monthly cost was to be no more than $50
- Lots of graded training videos
- A helpful community that wouldn’t make me feel stupid
- Fast technical support (less than 15 minutes)
- Live weekly training up to date.
This is what I found at Wealthy Affiliate, every single item on my list, and 18 months later I’m still thrilled and learning. I grabbed one of their Black Friday specials and now my monthly hosting, training, and tech support is around $30.
Through the Wealthy Affiliate training, I learned all about affiliate companies and ShareASale was one of the first programs that I joined. I only had 15 posts on my website at the time but they were quality posts. The ShareASale links in those posts are still paying me commissions even today.
ShareASale is a winner, with great integrity. Start your future prosperity today!
Get a Free Website and Training to Start Your Journey
You will need to learn a lot about websites and email marketing, social media promotion and so much more. At Wealthy Affiliate the friendly community is always there to answer questions, you have on-tap technical support and 120 videos, and 1000+ tutorials to teach you all you need to know.
Which Companies Can You Promote?
ShareASale has a skill for identifying merchants that larger networks wouldn’t be interested in, but they make perfect sense to affiliate marketers like you and me. This is something I really like about them.
ShareASale is currently the affiliate marketing network of choice for nearly 4,500 merchants overall.
Big brands are much more receptive to the idea of small site owners promising to work incredibly hard to promote their products/services.
ShareASale does, however, highlight some well-known brand names such as:
- Autopom and Wpengine logos.
- Qatar Airways Logo
- National Debt Relief Logo
- Thinkifc Logo
- Logos for Masterclass and the Princeton
This is just a random selection from the hundreds of top-notch merchants on the network.
By today’s standards, the ShareASale dashboard appears shabby.
Your current affiliate payment balance, any significant updates to your ShareASale account, and any closed or inactive merchants are all shown in “At a Glance.”
The drop-down menus provide access to other features:
- ShareASale dashboard menu
- The “Trending Merchants” feature that shows the top 10 merchant programs on ShareASale overall.
Affiliate Link Creation
At this juncture, you might have guessed that ShareASale prefers to keep things straightforward, and creating an affiliate link is no exception.
Once the top navigation menu opens, click on “Links” and “Get a Link/Banner.”
On the subsequent screen, just click “Get Links.”
The final step is to review and select the kind of creative you require (a text link, banner, etc.) before simply grabbing the HTML code.
Other intriguing methods of creating affiliate links are available on ShareASale. Its internal tool for creating short links is called Custom Link Tool.
You can create product galleries with Make-A-Page. You can create banners showcasing products from a particular program using Product Showcase.
So once more, ShareASale gets a lot of factors for pure innovation.
You can start today for free and test-run the system before deciding. Nothing is easier.
Thank you!
LILY Munday
Hi LILY
Thank you for sharing this blog ShareASale Affiliate Program Review. Your article is excellent. Another benefit of signing up with ShareASale is the welcome training series that they mail to you. On the negative side, I never receive any feedback from the affiliate company whose products I decided to promote. This is one of the reasons I decided to venture into a different niche. I see that the health category is the biggest category of ShareASale. It will be a daunting task to decide on an affiliate program to join. What are all the aspects do you consider before joining an affiliate program?
All the best
Louis Munro
Hi Louis, you are correct the training from ShareASale is excellent and they are easy to contact if you need help. For me when I am looking for a new affiliate product it has to be complementary to the niche of my website. I have to feel that it is a quality product (one I would recommend to my mum or a friend) and that it also has a reasonable commission. I do like recurring commissions if possible as I will be writing reviews of the product often and being paid every month is great.
Products and services are about helping people to solve their problems and I feel that ShareASale has a great range. Wishing you all the best in your business.
Thank you for this great information! I love ShareASale and I love Wealthy Affiliate! I’ve been with both for a little over a year now and I recommend them both 100%. Both platforms have high standards and integrity. I love that ShareASale is totally free because, honestly, who can afford to pay out the nose when we’re first starting out? On that same note, I also love that Wealthy Affiliate is free to join and I could update, if I chose to, at my leisure. The monthly fee is very affordable. I encourage everyone who is seeking a new career to take a look at these platforms. It’s free so what have you got to lose?
It’s great to hear your confidence in both platforms, Cynthia. Free is always good in my view and I have been super impressed with both of these companies. That is a rare statement to be able to make these days.
Wishing you a great journey in building your business online.
Thank you, Lily, for a wonderful review. I really like ShareASale. It is interesting I have clicked on your site to apply to be an Affiliate with them and they will respond in three days. They have a very interesting method of payment. Your post was informative and the content had clear instructions. I will surely come back to your site to read more articles.
Ntlhane
Hi Ntlhane, I’m delighted that you found this information so helpful, and thanks for joining ShareASale through me. I’m only a click away if you need any support to understand their system. Thanks for your comment.
ShareASale was the first affiliate network that I joined when I first started my journey on affiliate marketing. It took me months to actually understand what I was doing and how to do it in a way that people would be interested enough to actually check out the products I was promoting. I think this network is a great start for anyone who is looking for affiliate network alternatives.
Absolutely, Stephanie, they have great products and a very reputable company to cut your marketing skills on.
Well done.