After joining ShareASale, it can be quite overwhelming to sign into our interface for the first time.  Lots of pretty icons to look at, menu options to look through and graphs to look into.  I remember signing in for the first time and thinking

I am going to provide a helpful list of things you should look at, look through and look further into. (Something that I wish I had upon signing up for ShareASale.)

Home Page

Once you sign in, you are now on your affiliate Home Page.  On this page, you can find a To Do List of things that you should draw your attention to, such as new creatives, offline merchants and upcoming holidays.  You will also be able to find Program Vitals, an RSS feed with Announcements and News as well as Featured Programs.  Your home page is also totally customizable!  You are able to move the boxes around, add or delete boxes depending on how you want the layout to be.

Hockey Puck

On the top left of each page is a hockey puck with a ShareASale star in the middle of it.  The hockey puck will enable you to find your way back to the home page, view saved baskets or reports and most importantly, it is a portal to the help center.

Edit Setting

Location to change your address, phone number, phone number, etc.  Make sure you keep this information updated!  It is important for us to be able to contact you for support, send you payment checks or email you updates.

Search for Merchants

The whole purpose of signing up for a ShareASale account was so that you can start promoting merchants, right?  This is probably the first place a newbie should go after signing in.  You can search for merchants or products by keyword, category or characteristic.  ShareASale also provides a list of popular merchants, when the merchant was activated and holiday sponsored merchants for your perusing. 

Get Link/Banner

After joining and getting approved into a merchant’s program, you will need to find creatives to put on your site.  Once connected with a merchant, you have the options of text links, banners, deal/coupons, datafeeds, or even creating a custom link.

Reports

ShareASale provides lots of options when it comes to reporting, but I will name a few of the big ones:

Activity Details=shows payments, transaction, voids, etc all in real time.  It gives date, type of sale, amount, commission amount, which merchant and the lock date (the date when the merchant can no longer void the transaction and the date when the amount will be included in your payment)

Merchant Timespan=gives details specific to one merchant

Today at a Glance=specific to a single day, gives number of unique hits, raw hits, sales, etc.

Merchant Summary=give overall performance with a merchant since joining

Once you master these areas of ShareASale’s Affiliate Interface, you can go on to understand and incorporate more advanced tools.

•  Learn more on ShareASale’s Blog

• Affiliate Marketing Resources – Do your research!

• Webinars

• Green Tutorial Tabs (see above)

• Contact Support at shareasale@shareasale.com