Affiliate Marketing

An Introduction to LinkShare

One of the affiliate programs I’ve been using for my lenses (and some non-Squidoo projects) is LinkShare. LinkShare is a fairly large affiliate network, and works with several large companies such as AT&T, Microsoft, and Wal-Mart, and focuses primarily on physical products, very much like Commission Junction.

I came across LinkShare just a few short months ago when I was in the beginnings of my affiliate marketing adventures. I was checking out some of the online stores that sold items in a niche I was interested in (what everyone should do when starting out) and I joined their affiliate program, which happened to be with LinkShare.

So, I joined a few more programs, built some lenses and websites, and fast forward to today where I am now earning almost $500 in passive income each month, just after four months of being with LinkShare. That’s not too bad for a newbie, I don’t think.

The road with LinkShare has been filled with long, hard-working days, and even some bumps every now and then. Here’s a review of LinkShare and my experiences with it. There are thumbnails of images in this post, and they’re small to keep loading times of the page down. Click them for larger versions.

1. The Signup Process

Joining LinkShare is fairly easy, and just requires the general information such as name, address, phone number, email address…etc. Additionally, if you’re in the US you need to provide your Social Security Number for tax purposes. International affiliates don’t need to provide an SSN, but I don’t know the specific tax requirements for other countries.

One page two of the signup process you input information about your business model, website, and site category. If you don’t have a website, you can use one of your lenses or your Squidoo Lensmaster Page. I’ve done this in the past with other affiliate programs before I had websites without any issues.

The final page is just a confirmation that tells you to go check your email. It took only a few minutes for me to get mine and I could login to LinkShare and check out the various affiliate programs there.

2. The Interface

LinkShare’s interface is pretty decent, and it’s fairly easy to navigate around, join programs, create links, and check stats. I’m a tech-savvy person, so it was easy for me to find my way around but other non-techy people I’ve talked to about LinkShare have said that it’s easy to get used to.

Above is a picture of the old LinkShare interface–what they’ve been using primarily until recently and what I prefer to use (I’ll say why later). However, just a couple months ago or so they rolled out the new LinkShare Publisher Dashboard, which features a sleeker interface.

So far, I don’t care for the new dashboard. The reporting on it has been way off, and there’s no way (that I can find, anyway) to search for individual products to build affiliate links for. This is very annoying, because if I want to search for a certain product a store offers I can’t, and instead I’d have to scroll through thousands of products to find what I’m looking for. Ick. The old LinkShare interface has a search feature, and the reporting is much more updated and accurate. Until the new Publisher Dashboard has these features I’ll consider switching, but not until then.

3. Finding Partners & Creating Links

Finding advertisers to partner up with is easy with both LinkShare interfaces, and you can browse them by category as well as search for specific ones. The majority of programs are manual approval, meaning you apply and someone looks at your profile to see if you’d be a good match for their program. They respond fairly quickly, and the longest I’ve had to wait to get approved is a week. This may seem like a long time, but I have applications with programs on Commission Junction that have been pending for months. If you email them about your application or apply a second time to the program that can sometimes expedite the process.

Creating links is easy with the old interface, but as I said, terrible with the new one. Not much else to say. I like the look and features of the new dashboard, but until LinkShare fixes the issues with it I’ll stick to the old one.

4. Tracking & Reporting

Reporting isn’t real-time for the programs I’m primarily involved in, as commissions only post when a product has shipped. Stats are updated in batches at various different times throughout the day. LinkShare is really good with stats, and there are tons of fancy graphs and stats analysis doodads.

Above is a screenshot of the options available in the old interface. The new one has similar reporting features as well. However, LinkShare also has a performance analytics feature called SynergyAnalytics, which is some pretty neat software that generates some excellent reports, tables, and graphs.

LinkShare has a serious problem with its tracking, however. There is no way, to my knowledge, to keep track of where sales come from. Every other affiliate network I’ve been with has had some type of tracking such as subID tracking, so I can tell where sales come from (in this case, what lens or website). I read somewhere that LinkShare disabled subID tracking several years ago, and for the life of me I cannot figure out why they would do such a thing.

As you can imagine, it is very frustrating to not be able to tell where a sale comes from. If you have dozens of lenses and websites promoting products from the same merchant, it really would be nice to know where the sales come from so the most effective ones can be worked on and improved. If there is some sort of tracking like this, I can’t find it anywhere. And believe me: I’ve looked everywhere.

5. Payments

LinkShare offers two main payment methods: check and direct deposit. The first couple months I had checks mailed, and only recently switched to direct deposit. LinkShare requires you to receive and cash at least one check before you can select direct deposit as a payment option (identity verification, maybe?). Payments are usually issued between the 15th to the 20th of each month, and it took roughly a week for me to receive my checks. My most recent direct deposit reached my bank account about two days after the “payment sent” box appeared on my LinkShare dashboard.

Conclusion

So far, in my experience, LinkShare has been pretty good affiliate network. If not for the missing features and bugs in the new Publisher Dashboard and the insanely-weird absence of any kind of tracking, it’d be a top affiliate network in my books. I’m moving a bit away from LinkShare because of these issues, and trying to work with other networks such as Pepperjam Network. However, if you’re just getting started in affiliate marketing, LinkShare can be a nice place to begin–especially if an online store you’re interested in has their affiliate program with it. I will still continue to use LinkShare for for the merchants that are exclusive to it and I started out with.