How to make sure you get accepted into affiliate networks

Every day I bump into people complaining about not being accepted into affiliate networks. Most of them assume that they were rejected due to their country of residence. Being a curious person I actually spoke to a bunch of these guys and asked them to go through their application process with me. I was astonished at the lack of common sense. After fixing some of their obvious mistakes I was happy to see most of them get accepted. Here are a few common mistakes that people make when applying to an affiliate company.

Sound professional

Make sure you communicate in the formal manner. If English is not your first language make sure you get an English speaking friend to go through your application with you. I would not go into business with somebody who can’t string a sentence together, nor I would want to deal with anyone who sounds like an 8 year old kid. Use correct punctuation.

Its all about quality

Affiliate companies look for people that can generate them quality leads/sales. A free Blogger blog created on the day you apply is not going to get you accepted. Get your own domain and hosting. You can start from as low as $30/year. If you can afford internet access you should be able to afford hosting. This will make a whole load of difference. When setting up your website make sure it looks professional, original and has some quality content. I suggest you go for a tech/shopping niche. Most affiliate companies have tons of offers related to consumer electronics and therefore need more people to promote such offers.

Numbers

When asked for traffic stats most people assume that the more traffic they receive, the greater the chance of them being accepted. Most just end up making the number up. Affiliate companies don’t mind if you generate 300 daily uniques rather than 10.000, however they do mind when you start lying to them. Its is pretty easy to get a rough estimate of your traffic. When you say that your brand new blog with 0 backlinks and no internet presence generates 5.000 daily uniques you would get rejected just for your lack of honesty.

Have a plan

Have a plan ready. How exactly do you plan on promoting the offers? Go into reasonable amount of detail, use examples and be specific. With some affiliate companies this level of detail can actually save you from tons of questions later on.

The dreaded phone call

Some affiliate networks might want to speak to you on the phone before accepting your application. For some reason this is the part many people wish to avoid. In reality there is nothing to worry about. The whole conversation usually takes a few minutes. You will usually be asked a few simple questions about your websites and methods of promotion. If you are worried that you won’t be able to understand them, ask your English speaking friend to help you out.

PS: Looks like Google has now given ExposedSEO.com an authority status. Search for exposedseo and see for yourself. I also appear in Google search suggestions for various seo related keyphrases. This is quite funny considering that not that long ago I was spanked with PR:NA. Google obviously had a change of heart.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 16th, 2009 at 1:31 pm and is filed under Affiliate marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.