Forum Moderators: skibum
I've got a PR6 Web site with around 5,000 uniques per day, aimed at SF/fantasy fans. Does very well with adsense revenue.
I'm trying to expand into affiliate marketing -- starting a "cool widgets of the day" forum, with widgets under various topics -- game systems, collectible toys, robotics, etc.
The site is PR6, has a nice clean design, not too much advertising (one or two ads per page, plus a search box), the site's "rating" is a mild PG, it has a privacy policy, blogs and forums are 100% moderated (for spam, not rating reasons, but the effect is the same), and it has tons of toy news/toy articles on the site ... it's NOT a new site, either.
And I'm getting turned down by vendors left and right. Baffled here. Is 5,000 uniques not a high enough number? (And how would they know anyway what my traffic is without asking?)
Is there some secret I'm missing to get accepted?
*sigh* I have enough vendors who've approved my applications so far to get the project started, including a couple major companies -- but some of the "Nos" are just baffling.
Often, the rejection was in haste, especially if you have no history with the affiliate network being used. In my role as interim affiliate manager for a company, I rejected several sites last week, then went back and re-evaluated them when I was in a better mood, and accepted them all.
There are some merchants who are extremely restrictive, often without any warning, but most merchants are happy to accept your site as an affiliate, provided that there are no "flags" (such as warez or mp3 downloads).
Quite a few merchants reject all "forum" sites, because CTR tends to be very low (often below 0.1%). A forum is, after all, a "process" site - the visitor is there to read messages and reply to them, and while engaged in that process it's hard to persuade anyone to click away.
