Turned Down by Commission Junction

Help ?

[4crests]

I recently applied for Commission Junction and was sent a rejection letter. It stated the following as a specific reason:

"Specifically, our policy states that we do not accept third party Web sites"

What does this mean ?

My wife and I Manufacture 95% of our products, and the other 5% are imported from Pakistan. How is that 3rd party?

The only thing on our site that isn't ours is a few Commission Junction affiliate links. Could it be possible that Commission Junction won't accept you as an advertiser if you are a Commission Junction affiliate Publisher ????

These affiliate programs only bring a few dollars a month in revenue, and I would gladly delete them if it solves the problem. Anyone else have any experience with this ????

[Lisa]

Yes that must be the case. They checked out your site and thought you wanted to loopback into the system. :) I would suggest having 100% of the things on your site only orderable through your site. That means no links to other places where people can buy things.

[4crests]

Thanks Lisa.

I hope that's it. My main competitor recently got listed in CJ and is selling the same exact items. It was frustrating to be denied.

I am going to give it a try.

Pretty funny that I have to delete all CJ links to be a CJ advertiser.

[buckworks]

CJ has received negative feedback from affiliates about this issue -- I know because I'm one who has grumbled in public about this. Who wants to promote a so-called merchant who links to other sites where he/she might stand to earn something but the original referring affiliate will get zero? Knowledgeable affiliates do not exactly consider that a sign of good faith on the part of the merchant (I'm working hard to be diplomatic here!), and "leaks" will seriously undermine your chances to recruit competent affililiates to promote you.

If you want to promote other merchants (from CJ or anywhere else), a better way to do it would be to promote them in your newsletter or in a completely separate site, not in the site that you want other affiliates to send traffic to.

[mayor]

4Crests, as a CJ affiliate publisher, I wasn't aware CJ was rejecting sites with referral traffic leaks, but I'm delighted if they now are. It saves me the trouble of digging though the merchant's site to see if they are skimming the traffic affiliate publishers send them.

I routinely look for these schemes and avoid those merchants like the plague. So CJ is doing you a favor if they make you remove those 3rd party leaks because most experienced publishers will take one look at them and go elsewhere.

4Crests, I encourage you to reapply to CJ with a clean affiliate advertiser's site. They are the best network to be associated with in my opinion.

[JamesR]

What you can do is take down the current affiliate links, explain to CJ the situation, get approved, and then re-add them. Lots of current publishers have affiliate links on their sites, it is silly that they rejected you for this.

What they may be doing is discouraging you from reselling affiliate products. This is a problem in other networks. Just reemphasize to them that the products are yours and you are not reselling as an affiliate.

[buckworks]

JamesR, that doesn't make a whit of sense to me.

[Mike_Mackin]

I think what buckworks is saying makes sense.

An good affiliate marketer will spend the time and in some cases the money to drive traffic to a merchant site if, and only if, there is a 100% chance of making money. Any LEAK LINKS reduce that chance and therefore why bother with that merchant.

[4crests]

Ok, this CJ thing is really frustrating.

Nope, that wasn't it. I deleted ALL affiliate links from my site. I even deleted the Linkexchange banners I had on my site, and also deleted the Banners that advertised my own websites. My site is totally clean now. I re-applied, and still got rejected. Oh the shame! It has something to do with them thinking that I am a "Third Party" seller of my products (I THINK). I thought it was the affiliate links, but that's not it obviously. I do have a few products on my page for which we pay royalties to another company. I don't know how CJ would know this, but maybe that is the problem. However, The products in question are produced by us. We just pay another company for the right to produce them since they have a copyright on them. It's really no different than paying wholesale for something. I'm pretty sure it's not my products, because one of my competitors is on CJ with the same products. Maybe I will just have to create a brand new site just for CJ. Of course CJ won't specifically tell you what is wrong. Every time I ask, they just send a STANDARD letter reffering me to a big list of things that COULD be wrong with my site. Then, it's up to me to TRY to figure out which one is causing me to get rejected. So, I end up changing a whole bunch of stuff that probably didn't need changing in an attempt to GUESS what the problem is with my page. It could be they just don't like the look/layout of my page. If anyone has any connections with CJ, PLEASE tell them to be more specific when answering emails. Is it possible that CJ just has all the money they need, and don't care about new customers. I am willing to do WHATEVER it takes to get into CJ. I JUST WANT TO KNOW WHAT IT TAKES !

[4crests]

JamesR...

Thanks for the advice.

BTW, I live in the
5 mile / Indian Trail area
Spokane, Wa.

mike

[Lisa]

Make sure the site is pretty. Sometimes people judge a website by looks.

[JamesR]

buckworks,

say you affiliate with a company and they give you 20% commission for advertising their products. You could then turn around and open up your own affiliate program with a network like CJ and offer 10% to any who would affiliate with you. You are a third party making a 10% commission off of every affiliate sale from the program you started. I believe this might be what CJ is trying to avoid.