Best 3 Blogs That Help Me Most

I have been at ShareASale for three years.  In these three years, I have been responsible for providing some form of product support for ShareASale clients.

As a part of that, I have had to challenge myself to seek out information on Affiliate Marketing and really the ins and outs of what works and what does not.  As a result, I have what I call my go to blogs and articles which contain information that I have referenced dozens of times at this point.

Below you will find the 3 blog articles that have been the most helpful to me and why I continually reference them.

• Eric Nagel’s blog has been a huge help to me when understanding the challenges that Affiliates face everyday in building good quality Affiliate sites. For myself and my agency partners, the aspect of building and maintaining an Affiliate website seems fairly simple.  However, Eric’s blog details the numerous and complicated steps that it takes to build a QUALITY Affiliate site.  I have also really enjoyed reading through the blog comments, as they have helped me suggest great optimization tips to my clients.  These comments are real Affiliates voicing their frustrations with tool, creatives, and much more.  These frustration have directly led to me reaching out to a client and suggesting an optimization tip for their program.  The real takeaway here is to continually check out articles relating to Affiliate tools, as they can lend guidance to areas for improvement.

• One of the most commonly posed questions to me as the agency relationship manager is how to gain more Affiliates for a program.  This article with tips on recruiting content sites is one of my favorites for two reasons.  The first is that it highlights the importance of content sites and the value they provide a Merchant program.  The second reason is that it gives specific tips on how to find content Affiliates and how to best to engage the Affiliates.  This is invaluable information for recruiting Affiliates.

• Anyone who has met me knows I am a bit of a data geek.  Data in my opinion is one of the most important ways an agency can distinguish themselves and truly show their value to a Merchant.  This article breaks down the types of information that one needs before taking on a program and also the type of data that needs to be shown to the Merchant to prove the Affiliate program’s value.  It is a great start for any agency and the reports in the ShareASale interface can help provide more data once the program is established in our Network.

These are just 3 of my collection of blog articles that I look at on a frequent basis.  My advice is to continually be on the lookout for information on Affiliate Marketing.  This can be done through subscribing to specific blogs or signing up for industry magazines like Feedfront.  I also have set up a number of Google alerts on various Affiliate Marketing topics.  All of this allows me to have an idea of the potential issues an Affiliate or Merchant might face and results in me being able to better help agencies craft solutions to improve Merchant sales.  If you are an agency and have any questions or would like to schedule a one on one strategy session, email me at Bethany [at] ShareASale.com.