Jel

here's the thing: like a publisher knows that a simple tweak like changing the title of a book = all the difference in sales of that book, a designer knows all the tweaks that will make many more sales for a tour.

mobile responsive doesn't equal sales, whereas other design tweaks/usage does. most savvy affiliates (and there surely aren't any other kind left these days) know their traffic, and from years of looking at various tours, analysing their stats to various tours, know which ones are likely to convert, and which tours aren't. You can have the greatest content, awesome retention, but if the tour lets you down, you are facing an uphill struggle, not only with your own traffic/joins, but in regards to enticing affiliates to send their traffic from a tour they know converts, to a tour they feel isn't going to convert - that just isn't going to happen, simple as that.

You have an emotional attachment to your site - that's only natural, thing is, affiliates have no emotional attachment and are concerned about 1 thing only: will this tour convert with my traffic. There's one variable you can change in all that, and that's to get an outstanding tour...

you have genuine amateur content, good member interaction, ccbill which affiliates seem to like (for some unknown reason to me), but the tour and join page kill the idea of affiliates switching their analyzed traffic over stone dead.

Getting a professionally made tour and using eg zuzanna's vast experience of what works is pretty much 99.99% of what you need to do to push on as far as getting affiliates, imho.