I was wondering if anybody here has any experience of joining a bonafide Affiliate Marketing company as a Merchant !

I use the likes of CJ.com , Linkshare.com and Tradedoubler.com to advertise other companies on my sites and they are extremely expensive (relatively) to join as a merchant. The price is okay for the likes of Amex or WallMart but for fledgling companies it is a no go.
I did come across shareasale.com and they charge just $150 to join as a merchant. Does anybody have any direct experience of this company ?

I have used their services as an advertiser as well and they do deal with a lot of lesser known companies like mine. This is good and bad. Good that, at least, I can afford to join them as a merchant and bad that this obviously means that they are small fry and I might be wasting my money

I currently use a http://www.affiliate-service.com for my own affiliate campaign. It works well on a couple of higher traffic sites but on other sites with little traffic obviously I am signing up very few affiliates in the first place. Hence the need for something different.
The positive thing about established Affiliate Marketing companies is that people go to them to find baners/links from companies to advertise on their site. So I believe I will at least get more people to put up my links on their site in the first place.

Any thoughts before I throw my money at it !?

Thank you

Fineclicks (owned by Shareasale) is at an even lower tier. Apart from that I don't have much experience on the merchant side.

Ah, never heard of them.

I will have a look. Though the main Shareasale price is very good IF the service is decent. Mainly, I was wondering if the site is dying as they dont seem to have a huge amount of decent names.
Oh well, you get what you pay for...

I'd love to advertise with CJ but it costs thousands....

Like you said, it's hard to kick-off an affiliate program via the reputable affiliate marketing companies such as LinkShare and others if you're just starting out, with very little revenue and a small budget for advertising.

As a website publisher, I wouldn't touch any campaign on Shareasale and I know I am not alone. They once manually reversed a (merchant) finders-fee that they claimed was mistakenly credited to my account. The way the described the "mistake" you would think they actually had people watching transactions as they happen and then keying in your commissions into your account! The gist of their explanation was that someone (their staff) credited the commission to my account when it was actually meant for another publisher.... yeah right! Maybe they thought I was brain dead or something.

To make matters even worse, they think it's quite alright to plug a 3rd party webmaster forum from within their Members Area eventhough they expect other webmaster forum publishers like myself to advertise their merchant offers? I don't think so!

LinkShare and CJ, these are really your best options, everything else is just hot air.

I was worried somebody would say that....

CJ and Linkshare cost thousands...

There is no way a small hosting/whatever company will be able to afford them.

If anyone else knows of a 'cheap' and relatively reputable Affiliate Marketing company then please let me know.

Cheers

There's always the option of running your own inhouse program and hiring an AM consultant.