How to boost your online business with Linkshare Affiliate Program

U & M
5 min readNov 2, 2014

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Linkshare.com is one of the biggest affiliate services provider for e-commerce and online businesses all around the world. They are currently known as Rakuten Affiliate Network and they have been voted as the best affiliate network for 3 consecutive years. The Rakuten Linkshare Corporation was first launched in 1996 by Stephen Messer and Heidi Messer and their Headquarters is located in New York City. Some of the most popular brands in the world are also their clients which including Walmart, Viator, Macy’s and Sportscraft. Linkshare provides opportunities for both Advertisers and Publishers to grow their online businesses and generate profits by becoming their member.

HOW DOES IT WORK

You can either join Linkshare as an Advertiser or a Publisher depending on how you want to grow your business. Advertiser account requires you to create your own affiliate program if you want to market your products over the internet. Publisher account is for those who do not want to invest and are looking to generate income by marketing products offered by clients on the Linkshare network. For each sale delivered through your website, you will get commission and the amount varies from company to company.

Before signing up for a publisher account you need to understand some basic concepts about how publishers work and become successful on Linkshare. In order to become a publisher, you should own a website that generates regular traffic and people visit it regularly. If your website or blog gets daily traffic then you can turn it into a revenue generating website by joining Linkshare as a Publisher and apply for different affiliate programs listed on the Linkshare network. You should only apply for those programs that can engage your website visitors and are somehow related to the content of your website in order to generate maximum sales from your ads. If you don’t know what this whole thing means then you should try to learn a few basic things about affiliate marketing. All you have to do is to join the most suitable affiliate programs available and display their ads on your website. Now when a visitor clicks your banner ads and buy something on the client’s website, you will get commission on each sale produced by your ad. And all the banners are provided by the client themselves. Sounds great? Now if you’re wondering what the Publishing portal looks like then take a look at the image below:

linkshare publisher portal

Now you must be wondering what do all of those terms impressions, clicks, EPC, Sales and commissions really mean. Impressions are the number of times a webpage has been viewed that has a particular ad on it. Clicks mean the number of clicks on a particular ad. EPC stands for Earnings per clicks and in our context it means Earnings per hundred clicks. For example a merchant ABC has a 7-day EPC of $20. This means for every 100 clicks sent to the customer in a 7 day period, $20 have been made in commissions. This figure can help you in choosing an Affiliate program. Commissions are the actual amount of profit that you have generated with the ads on your website and that amount will be paid to you after a certain period. Now you must be wondering how the affiliate programs are listed on the portal and how you can apply for them, well here’s a view of the affiliate programs page which should give you just an idea about how it would work.

Linkshare affiliate programs list

So this page shows different Premium Linkshare advertisers affiliate programs that are offering their ads to you to put them on your website and get commissions as specified on the right hand side of the page. The commission return period is also specified. So based on the general statistics and the popularity of the affiliate programs, you can decide to apply for some of them so that their ads can become available to you and you become eligible to earn commissions from them. For example, if your website is a blog which publishes articles about Travel and Eating then you should try to find some good affiliate programs related to travel and eating to engage your visitors and earn commissions. This is the simplest explanation that we could come up with to have your concepts cleared about how Rakuten Linkshare affiliate marketing works.

Now in order to sign up and become a member of the Linkshare affiliate portal click HERE.

HOW DO THEY PAY

Linkshare pays through Check or Direct Deposit which should come off as a great news to the publishers all around the world because this means you can be paid wherever you are. You just need to have an International bank account or a Foreign currency account which is not really hard to get hold of in any country. So those people who always felt isolated because their countries do not support some specific payment gateways can now rejoice because they can now earn big time with Linkshare, provided of course that they have a website or a blog that gets regular visitors. You will be paid whenever you reach a certain payment threshold which you can specify yourself when applying for a publisher account. However, you will have to wait for the commission returning period which can vary from 30 to 60 days. Bit it does not matter as long as you are getting paid on time.

FINAL WORD

If you have a website or even a blog that you update regularly and you are getting a good amount of visitors then you should definitely consider to become an affiliate at Rakuten linkshare network. It will not only help you boost your online business and website’s profits but will provide you a permanent source of income that you can always rely on. You could take advantage of being affiliated with the most popular brands in the world and put their ads on your website to grab the attention of your visitors and earn good commissions on every sale that occurs from those banners. Do apply for it and share this opportunity with your fellow webmasters and bloggers.

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U & M

I am a professional blogger and a Content writer by profession. I mostly write for http://www.webemployed.com