ShareASale Affiliate Network

Shareasale.com offers a variety of different offers from pay-per-click (PPC) to pay-per-lead or pay-per-sale. It will offer cost-per-action (CPA) opportunities as well as pay-per-click. There are over 2500 merchant offerings on the shareasale site, in multiple categories from cars to health and fashion. They offer a sign up bonus and multi-tiered commission program. Payment is by direct deposit or check.

They are proactive about monitoring their network for fraud, whether on the part of the publisher or the advertiser. They quickly terminate any account with suspicious activity. They aggregate payments into one single payment, so you don't have to chase multiple affiliate advertisers around to get paid. They offer payment via two methods: check and direct deposit.

As far as the offerings go, they offer banners in many different sizes for a variety of categories. Code for links are available too, although they require some understanding of HTML to properly insert into a web page, although it's not hard to figure out. Banners can outperform links on some sites, so having them already available saves time for publishers.

Since they offer cost-per-action ads too, it can be one way to use the network without having to generate a sale to earn a commission. In a recession, when money is tight, many publishers are finding that the performance of their CPA ads are working better for them than the PPC ads and can be a beneficial strategy to implement when money is tight.

While payment is aggregated, it is monthly, available on the 20^th of each month. The payout minimum is high, $50. In addition, it's not aggregated for payments from when you start to the 20^th of each month, it's from the first to the last day of month, paid on the 20^th of the following month. If you sign up late in the month, it may be about one and a half months or more before you see a payment, depending on if you can hit the $50 minimum in that time, also.

As a multi-tiered program, you gain 5% on commission for affiliates that sign up under you. You also get a $1 signing bonus for each new affiliate. These are added to your commissions from your published offers. Multi-tiered programs are a great way to increase income for people just starting out.