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Affiliate ABCs Podcast hosts Deborah Carney and Vinny O’Hare joined Kim Salvino and Jeannine Crooks of buy.at to talk about things to look at that will get you declined in affiliate programs.
If you are an affiliate odds are you have received an email once or twice informing you that you have been declined by an affiliate program that you wanted to promote. Most networks send out a blanket email without much information on why you are declined. Here is a list of some of the reasons we decline most affiliate program applications.
1) No privacy policy on your site – We have been requiring affiliates to have a privacy policy on their site for a couple of years now. This has a few reasons, for one it tells the end user what information the affiliate sites collect. We don’t want things like email spammers in the program and the Can Spam act put this responsibility on the affiliates site and not the merchant. No merchant wants to get Can Spam complaints as they want to protect their email list. Having an affiliate jeopardize that will not be risked.
2) The affiliate site is nothing but banners and no value to the end user. If your site does nothing but put up banners and hope to get people to click on the links and buy it will not be successful. Think about the websites you visit when you are shopping. Do you shop from pages that look like this? I don’t think so. Banner farms don’t work for sales and never will.
3) The website is a cookie cutter coupon site that has a “Click To Reveal Coupon”. Most merchants feel that this is misleading the consumer especially if there is no coupon offered. They are just trying to get the end user to click and set the cookie. The merchant feels that these sites do not offer value to the end user. Most affiliate programs we run have an automatic “Click Here To Reveal Coupon” policy of automatic rejection.
4) You didn’t fill out the “More Details” section on the application. This is a big help to affiliate managers as you can tell the affiliate manager what sites you plan on promoting the affiliate program on. The affiliate manager may not be able to see all of your sites in your profile and have to guess where you are going to promote the program. This is a big help and I would say 99% of the applications that have “additional details” get approved.
5) All your sites are .wordpress.com, .blogspot, .weebly or Squidoo sites. This tells the affiliate manager that you are not serious about your business. If you can’t get a domain for $10 a year and cheap hosting of $4 a month it shows you are not serious about affiliate marketing. Plus WordPress.COM doesn’t allow affiliate links on blogs hosted there. You need to get WordPress.ORG files and install on your own domain.
6) Your content is nothing but pulling in someone elses RSS feed into your site. These are obvious to spot and half the time the content isn’t relevant to the niche they applied for. The affiliate manager sees this as a waste of time and will hit the decline button.
7) Speaking of content 90% of the time I will take a paragraph of content off an affiliate site and drop it in Google and see if it is original or scraped off another site. If we see copied content that would be an automatic decline also.
Whois information doesn’t match who you say you are on the site. We have rejected affiliate applications only to have the website reapply three weeks later with a new whois info and sometimes even a new domain. We get applications that say they are in the USA and the whois ends up being in another country. Making your site whois as private could also be seen as a red flag to the affiliate manager.
9) Parked page or Under Construction. If you don’t have a website most affiliate programs will not approve you. Unless you take advantage of that comments box and add in what your plans are and how you can fit the program into a site you are developing. Still some merchants will ask you to wait and apply when you have a site to show them.
If you are declined, email the affiliate manager and ask why. Sometimes it is a misunderstanding, sometimes your site really isn’t a good fit. By emailing the affiliate manager you also get to see if the program is being run by a real person or if it is on autopilot or the manager is just plain not responsive. In which case, you won’t want to work with them either 
There is a lot more discussed in the podcast, let us know what you get declined for that irks you as an affiliate, and as a manager let us know what else you decline sites for!
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