ShareASale continues to innovate and rise above the crowd of affiliate networks with its commitment to conversation and the community of dedicated affiliates.

Today, ShareASale CEO Brian Littleton announced an option for merchants to easily create widgets for participating affiliates within the SAS network…

Today is one of those fun days… I get to introduce a brand new product/feature of the ShareASale Network. As with everything new, it might take some time to build up - so we are opening it up to all of the Merchants on the network first, so that they have time to fill in some content. We then have plans to open it up to Affiliates as soon as we can, hopefully as early as next week if there are a decent number of widgets created in the next few days.

Seeing how 2007 was declared to be the “Year of the Widget” by so many industry bloggers, we decided to make an easy-to-use interface enabling merchants on the ShareASale Network to create and maintain a variety of widgets for their affiliates. As is the custom with widgets, when a merchant updates the content of their widget, this information is updated in real-time (and without extra effort) to all of their affiliate’s websites.

The benefits for both merchants and affiliates are potentially tremendous.  Not only is content refreshed real time and without the need for recoding a site, but as Brian points out in his post, the widget will continue to update based on seasonal offers or specials.

This is the type of innovation that will continue to gain affiliate marketing new audiences and participants in places such as the blogosphere and those formerly held back by affiliate marketing’s higher than needed barriers to entry.

While other affiliate networks are having a hard time even starting a blog, ShareASale is going out of its way to engage and push the industry forward with innovative tools.