Affiliate networks allow affiliate marketers to quickly find and join multiple affiliate programs under one site. The networks handle all the payments and keep your personal information safe from the merchants. Affiliate networks help ensure adequate affiliate tracking and help you meet the minimum payout balance requirements. If you join affiliate programs seperately outside of a affiliate network, it may take months or years to reach the minimum payout balance in each program. Joining independant affiliate programs also puts you at each program’s mercy for payments and you may not even get payed as promised. There is also no way to know if they are accurately tracking your affiliate sales either. It is for these reasons that affiliate marketers prefer to join the majority of their programs through affiliate networks.

There are many different affiliate networks to choose from, it is hard to know which are the best without first trying them all. I have tried most of them and by far, Shareasale is the best one. They track their affiliates very well for compliance and will even show you a program uptime history. No other affiliate network does that. They also have datafeeds, coupons, and 2nd tier affiliate programs for participating affiliate merchants. There is plenty of affiliate programs across many industries. Every other affiliate network I joined, had some major flaw, but Shareasale seems to have all the features that an effective affiliate marketer needs, while still having a wide choice of affiliate programs.

Signup for Shareasale affiliate network.