Linkshare Training

LinkShare Training

Tutorial

We will show you how to sign up with LinkShare, which represents hundreds of popular companies. We will also show you how to get affiliate promotion links/banner codes to place into your blog articles.

Which Companies You Will Be Working For
This administrative account we will have you sign up with is LinkShare.com. LinkShare.com has hundreds of very popular companies to choose from, from which you will make commissions, from sales, leads, etc., through the promotional links you will place on your blog(s).

Follow our step-by-step instructions for sign-up, and you will be ready for the next step in our training.

How You Will be Paid
LinkShare.com represents hundreds of companies such as: Wal-Mart, American Express, Target, PetSmart, Discover, Esurance, and many more.

LinkShare will pay you once a month on the date you signed up. For example, if you signed up on March 19th, you would then get your first check on April 19th, and then May 19th, etc.

They will not take any taxes out of your check, but will send a tax form 1099 at the end of the year to report your earnings.

You will have the option of getting paid by direct deposit, or by mailed check. International members will need to fill out a special tax form, and will be required to report their taxes to their own government as specified by its tax laws.

How It Works
Every time someone clicks on your special affiliate promotion URL and makes a purchase, you get paid the pre-set commission for generating a transaction, such as a sale or lead for each of the companies you select from LinkShare.

You can select any of the hundreds of popular companies in LinkShare you choose. After you have read the company's offer, you may select that company by clicking on the special button "JOIN PROGRAMS" and then "CREATE LINKS" while logged into your LinkShare.com account.

LinkShare companies will either automatically approve you, or will review you and then manually accept or decline you into their program. Every company listed in LinkShare will have their own preset application process.

LinkShare will track all of your earnings, and send one payment for all the commissions you have made for any of the companies in their program.

We will help you sign up with LinkShare for free, and then show you how to select and apply to any of the companies listed in LinkShare's network.

We will then show you how to get your special affiliate promotion link that will be placed on your blog(s). We showed you in detail how to place these links on your blog back in our main training program Blog Articles Part 1.

To begin the sign up process, click the banner link below:

You will be brought to this screen:

COMPANY INFO
You will want to first select "INDIVIDUAL" as the Legal Entity Type.

Next, select the type of tax form such as W-9 for U.S. or the required tax form as required by your country from the drop down menu.

You will then enter your tax I.D. number or Social Security Number.

Enter your name, address, city, state, zip and contact phone number. If you choose any other country but the USA the Social Security Number will be optional and not required. If you are from the USA; you will need to enter your Social Security Number or EIN if you have one.

Next, enter your e-mail address and select a username and password that will be used to access your LinkShare.com account.

CONTACT & ACCOUNT INFO
Enter a desired username and password, as well as your contact email address. You will also need to select a security question and answer in case you forget your login information.

LANGUAGE PREFERENCES
You can select a language for email communications as well as your account here.

MEMBERSHIP AGREEMENT
Here you will be able to view the members agreements. Once you agree to the agreement, place a check mark in the two boxes to continue.

Enter the captcha letters in the box provided to show you are a human.

Final step, enter your name as your signature in the signature box..

Once you have filled out all the information on this page as required, click the "Continue" button.

On the next page, you will then need to fill in the following information:

Fill in the information:

Website Name:
Enter a simple name that best describes your blog. (Ex: "Dog Training Blog").

URL:
Enter your blog URL address here complete with the "http://"

Here is an example of what your blog URL address will look like - http://yourblogname.blogspot.com

(Replace the "yourblogname" with your own blog name).

Primary Business Model:
Choose a business model that best describes your blog subject. This is for sign up purposes only and can be used with any of your future blogs no matter what the subject may be. You can always select "OTHER" and then BLOG if asked.

Date Established:
Enter the date you created your blog.

Unique Visitors:
Choose "500 - 5000"

Page Views/Month:
Choose "500 - 5000"

Short Description:
Enter a short description about your blog. This is optional but a good idea because companies like to see as much information about your promotion method (blog) as possible.

Primary Category:
Select the category that best fits your blog content.

Your Customer's Demographics:
Select "Both" for Gender, and ages "36 to 50" for age.

Payment Threshold:
Leave Blank unless you don't want to receive money until it hits a certain amount each month. If you leave blank Linkshare will send the money when it reaches $100.

Email Subscriptions:
This is your choice whether you want to receive notification from Linkshare.

After you have filled out the information on this page as require, click the "Continue" button

YOU ARE NOW SIGNED UP WITH LINKSHARE!

LinkShare's Welcome eMail
LinkShare will send you a confirmation to the email you signed up with, and they will give a brief overview of the program.

LinkShare will refer to your "website;" this is a standard welcome email, and your blog will be considered your website with our program.

Your LinkShare Account
After you login to Linkshare, you will now be able to access your main LinkShare account page, which will look like the following:

Depending on your Internet browser the screen above may look a little different then the screen you see when you login to your Linkshare account. However, the account functions will be the same as we will describe below:

A. PROGRAMS	Go here when you want to search the hundreds of companies you can promote in the Linkshare network.
B. LINKS	All of the companies you are currently working for will be located here. You also get your special promotion links here.
C. REPORTS	The "Reports" option is where you can check your earnings in detailed reporting for any period of time and with any particular company you are promoting.
D. MESSAGES	Here is where you can read any messages from the companies you are promoting such as special offers, changes in program, etc.
E. MY ACCOUNT	In your "My Account" you can add additional information about yourself, update pay information, etc.
F. SEARCH	You can search any advertiser/company listed in Linkshare from this search box.
F. QUICK STATS	In the main section of account page is where you can get quick stats of earnings, payments, etc.

LinkShare will send any updates and correspondence directly to the email you signed up with when you created your account. There are many other features LinkShare offers, such as how to promote these companies and how to update your account.

Finding companies in LinkShare to promote
Here is how you search and select LinkShare companies to promote.

After you are logged into your account, select the "PROGRAMS" button.

That will take you to the following page:

To locate companies to promote, you will see the following two options:

A. Advertiser Search: Here you can search for a particular company, or a type of product or service offered. For example if you were looking to promote Avon, then you would simply type a search for "Avon" in the search box.

B. Categories: You also have the option to search for companies by categories, and sub-categories such as "Autos," "Business & Career," etc.

For example, if you wanted to find the company Avon, you would look for them under the "Health & Beauty" category.

You will see sub-category tabs such as New Advertisers, Premium Advertisers, My Advertisers, and Private Offers. The My Advertisers are companies you are already signed up with.

LinkShare also has an option to "See All Advertisers." Here you can see ALL the companies in LinkShare's network.

For training purposes, click on the "Travel" category.

After you have clicked on the "Travel" category, the following page will be displayed:

Each company will be displayed in separate boxes as shown above.

A. Company: The company name and the company website URL address will be displayed here.

B. Description: A brief sales pitch to you of their products or services will be displayed here. Basically they are telling you why you should promote their company.

C. Pay: Here is what this company is offering to pay you. Many companies will offer a flat fee for all your promotional efforts, some will offer for leads, and some will offer you commissions.

In the company we are using in our example, you see that you will make 50% of each sale of their product. Their product sells for $9.99, so you would make approximately $5.00 for each sale that your promotional efforts produce.

As an example, since this is a popular competitor to CarFax, you can easily produce 10 or 20 transactions for this one company per day if you had a blog on automotive buying tips, or automotive sales, etc.

D. Return Days: This is the amount of days the company will pay you if the reader who visits your blog returns to the company's site within this time. You would still get paid the commission in this time frame if the buyer purchases the product/service within this time.

E. Status: This is your current status with the this advertiser/company. The status will either be "No Relationship," "Approved," or "Pending Approval."

Applying to Advertisement Company Programs
We will show you how to apply to any of the advertising companies listed on Linkshare.

For our training example, we will have you select the company "VinAudit.com" on this "Travel" category page.

The first thing you will do is place a check mark in the box next the advertiser's name.

You will then click on the "Apply" button in the status section of advertiser.

You will need to accept the terms of each company you decide to promote, place a check mark by the accept terms, then click the "OK" button

Some of the companies will approve you automatically, and some will manually approve you. The applied company will contact you by email to give you the status of your application. If you are automatically approved, you will be notified immediately after you click the "Apply" button.

If you are automatically approved, this is what the page will look like after you click the "Apply" button for selected advertiser:

If you are not approved by certain companies, don't panic --- it is usually because they will require you to be a member of LinkShare for at least three months. However, that will be only a very few companies. If you find yourself not approved by a certain company for this reason, you can re-apply after three months and will more than likely get approved.

Getting affiliate promotion links for LinkShare companies
As you see in the picture above, you can get the links for your blogs by clicking the "View Links" button in selected programs after you are approved after directly applying to the advertiser.

We will show you the main place in your account where you can get links for all your approved advertisers/

You will always need to be logged into your LinkShare account to obtain the affiliate promotion links for any of the companies in LinkShare, click on "LINKS" button in the main menu.

You will then be at the following page:

All of the companies that you have been approved for will be listed here, so it will be easy to locate and get your promotion links for any of them.

If you were approved, you should have your VinAudit.com company listed in this Links page.

Click on the VinAudit company, and that will take you to this screen:

There several ways to get promotion links from the companies in Linkshare for your blogs.

Banners / Images: You can use these banners to post in your blog(s). First select the banner you would like to place on your blog, then copy the complete HTML code from Linkshare banners and paste it in the page element on your blog templates layout.

Text / E-Mail: This will be where you will get all of your affiliate promotion links for text links, such as your call-to-action links (e.g. "GO HERE", or "CLICK HERE" etc.)

Links by Promotion: This lists of promotion links are special offers and are time restricted. We suggest if you use these, make sure you check promotion times so they don't expire on you. If the promotions expire then the links will not work on your blogs.

Getting affiliate link codes for text links
To get the promotion banners and/or links to place on your blogs follow the steps below.

BANNERS/IMAGES
To get banners or images for your blogs, first click the "Banners/Images" link and you will be at this page:

Place a check mark next to the banner you would like to place on your blog; then click on the "Get Link" button and you will get this pop up page:

Click in the "Link Code" box and the code will highlight the code. You then copy and paste that complete code in to your blog where you would like that banner to be placed in the page layout of your blog.

We give you instructions on where to post that code on your blog in the Blog Articles Part 1 training.

TEXT/EMAIL
To get just the link for your call-toactions, this is what you will do. Click on "TEXTUAL / E-MAIL" and you will go to the following page:

A list of several textual headings will be displayed; you can choose any that are listed on this page. This is because you only need the promotion link. We will have you create your own textual data, such as the call-to-actions, when you post any of your links.

For the training, place a check mark on any one of the textual headings, then click the "Get Link" under that same heading and following box will appear:

Your affiliate promotional link will follow the "href=" as we show you highlighted in blue above. You will copy the complete link between the parentheses ("and") from the box above.

The complete promotion link will look like this:
http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=7R1tfeNPcDA&offerid=270707.4&type=3&subid=0

(The link above is an example of what your code would look like)

All of your promotional links with LinkShare will begin with the http:// and end with subid=0

NOTE: You can use the text ads that LinkShare will give you if you choose; if that is the case, you would simply copy and paste the complete HTML code in the box above.

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