Are people who run affiliate programs ever selective?
 

Are affiliate programs selective in the companies they will work with?

Such as you need a certain amount of traffic, a certain type of traffic, etc or do they generally accept everyone who wants to sign up?

Thanks.

Well, before some countries was blocked because affiliates from there would send a lot of fraud traffic, but now days dont think there is any limitation to signup as far i am aware.

Some types of traffic are forbidden by VISA / MC / 3rd party billing companies

I would wager that the least selective companies are also the smallest. A lot of guys doing volume pick and choose who they work with :2 cents:

Maybe I can rephrase this.

When I put out an affiliate program, I don't want to work with low-quality websites or people, for that matter.

Is it ever customary to have an approval process and not just accept every Tom, Dick and Harry who may want to sign up?

Ahh that's what I was looking to know. I'm glad to know it does work that way.

The handful of companies I send traffic to don't even have much of a website, just an unbranded portal to login to. Some send a private link to register, others you apply and they will contact you for more information about your traffic sources.

My affiliates I either know personally, or rely on people I know to vet.

Don't be fooled into believing that advertising CashBucksGold on GFY begging for anyone to click a lambo banner is the only way :)

You can reject any affiliate you want so be as selective as you want, or as inclusive. It's up to you.

Thanks so much for the input. <3

Some companies seem to at least take some time to approve new affiliate accounts. During early pandemic years, many new account submissions went unnoticed. A quick ping via email usually jogged an authorization.

Some of the most established niche sites seem to have their fill of "enough" affiliate and they "close" submissions all together.

My pet peeve has to do with sponsors who look solely at actual sales by an affiliate, and not years of work, writing original reviews, posting their hosted galleries, and providing a search engine path through to the sponsor's sites. Their hosted galleries are usually very leaky and there are plenty of links from my sites/traffic sources, thru their unaffiliated links that they get value from, but the affiliate does not.

Even though search engines don't always give cred for "nofollow", they do pay attention and the sponsor's site still benefit SE juice from "no sale affiliates".

It's disappointing to spend several years building multiple links to the sponsor, with rich text, only to have your account, "expire".

In some cases, they still take your traffic to their join page.

I have always been able to email the sponsor and let them know I'm active, and so far, they always reactivate. It makes me weary though about investing more time in those sponsors who have a habit of doing arbitrary purges.

Affiliates send more than just direct sales to sponsors.

:2 cents:

Solution?

Use a domain like genre-related-keyword.com or a subdomain like genre-related-keyword.maindomain.com when making links, and set them to forward to the sponsor.

Not the cleanest method technically, but this way you can more easily switch sponsors.

Yes. I have a "switchboard" system like that. But using select content to show what a subscriber is getting when they pay is more effective, and more integrated/woven through up to thousands of pages. That content, rightfully must link to, and only to, the owner/sponsor.

The problem with themed subdomains is that they all get slammed by every bot on the planet (baidu, petalbot, etc) and every brute force attack, wreaking havoc on the downstream "sponsor of the month" stats. ie. ratio of raw hits to uniques might cause concerns by the sponsor not wanting that much crap traffic, and I don't blame them.

Now I just license more content (plus what I've produced since '99) for my niche promotions and, in the spirit of what you suggest, I can (re)route the traffic wherever I want.

Over the next 3-5 years, I'm going to be moving more to original tangible branded products (physical erotic artworks) and b2b services, where I control source to destination to monetization.

:2 cents: