Applications to affiliate programs are sometimes approved automaticaly but most of the time they are reviewed manually. This may take from a few hours to 3 days depending on the number of applications a program receives per day.

Some of you may have received this email when applying to an affiliate program: “Your Affiliate Program Application was Declined!”. The affiliate manager and the merchant are the persons who decide what the criteria are to accept or decline an application.

Common criteria set by merchants for declined applications are:

1. your main listed website does not show or is an under construction page
2. your website is not in English
3. your website contains malicious scripts
4. your country is not accepted in the program

These are the most common reasons but some affiliate managers or merchants have other conditions that seems to be not very well thought, knocking down affiliates’ motivation and slowing down the growth of their program:

• The website is in English but the affiliate is located in another country. Some merchants think that the affiliate has to be in the USA to generate USA traffic. This is a misconception as many foreign affiliates have 80% of their traffic in the USA and make sales. It is also a fact that many super affiliates are non US based.

• The website does not match the merchant’s products. Some affiliates do not type enough details in their affiliate profile where the main website should be listed as well as a few secondary websites if any. At the time of application, there is a box to write how it is planned to promote the program and with what website. Some affiliate managers also do not look at all the details and see only the main website that may be a mismatch.

• The affiliate details do not match the WHOIS information of the website or the WHOIS information is protected. The information that an affiliate set in his profile has to be real in order to receive payment and should be the reference. If the WHOIS info is different, a communication may be necessary between the affiliate manager and the affiliate to clear things up.

• The affiliate is a PPC affiliate and there is no particular website except maybe their corporate website. It is normal that the affiliate manager checks with the PPC affiliate that the bidding rules will be respected. Another reason is that the affiliate uses a free hosting service or free blog. Some of these may have the potential to produce a few sales while others are complete junk.

• The website appears to have low traffic and the affiliate manager thinks that it is not worth it. Well, a website may have low traffic but high targeted traffic with specific keywords. Also, the website may not exist yet and will be made with the merchant’s data-feed. Niche or micro-niche websites have low traffic but make sales, smart niche affiliates know this.

If unfortunately you have been declined, it is always possible to inquire for the reason and see what to do to be finally accepted. I have been declined in programs before and most of the time an email to the manager is what it takes to be approved. For those merchants who just do not want you in their program, let it be. There are many others in the same vertical who will be happy to have your traffic and revenue.

Go to Pantika Home Page. Article by Michel Gerard

Building a coupon site is certainly another good option to make money online. Contrary to banners or product links that present to the potential buyer a product or a store in the form of an ad, coupon sites offer a wide range of discount offers.

There are many smart buyers that search coupon sites before making any purchase with their favorite stores, and that is an opportunity for us to make affiliate commissions. Everyone loves to buy at a discount and people who look at coupon sites are hot online shoppers.

How to make a coupon site? I advise that you start slowly with only one affiliate network to make it easier and grow your earning from only one place. If you have a website or a blog in any vertical, you may want to make a section with related coupons to boost affiliate revenue. Conversion is better than banners, so it is worth adding these offers.

Making a real coupon site with a minimum of 1,000 coupon codes is more challenging as you can imagine. Some affiliates will add coupons manually one by one, track their expiration dates and remove them one by one, or just keep them expired. There must be a better way you think. Hopefully, there is, with the use of coupon scripts and data-feeds.

A lot of coupon sites are scripts developed by in-house programmers and not for sell anywhere, they are usually very successful with their unique designs and features. I can only see 2 other affordable options, which are couponpress.com and couponscript.org. The first one is a WordPress plugin, which make it easy to use if you know the platform and the second one is a completely independent system.

I invite you to comment on these 2 scripts or suggest others.

Go to Pantika Home Page. Article by Michel Gerard

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the work that has to be done in order to see a website or blog appear in search results of search engines for chosen keywords or phrases. A website without proper SEO is like a beautiful brochure in a close drawer.

All pages of a site have to contain three important tags that only search engines can see to index websites, which are a “Title”, a “Description” and a “Keywords” tag. This information is available between the <head> and </head> tags, the part of a website visitors can’t see.

Search Engines Optimization for a WordPress blog is easy as there are plug-ins available that automatically select a title, description and keywords based on the post. That is not the same story for a regular HTML website where everything has to be done manually page by page, and this can be really painful when you have a hundred pages.

A good title must contain the name of your website and a short descriptive title of the page with two or three main keywords for a maximum of 100 characters. The description has to describe the content of the page with the main keywords or phrases you want to target. A good description is  less than 160 characters, but it will work for 200 or 250 characters in some search engines.  And finally, the keywords tag has to contain a selection of words present in the page and separated by commas. It is important to make a fair selection and not include too many keywords that would not do any good.

Some webmasters use the power of Dreamweaver and web templates to easily add an identical description and identical keywords for the whole site, but it is not really the best option. Each page has different content, so it is logical that the 3 tags reflect this and be different so each page appears different when indexed. Some web designers make very beautiful sites but unfortunately, they are not SEO friendly.

I suggest that you check in Google for the main keywords of your vertical and see how concurrent websites have their title and description indexed. More SEO posts will follow later.

Go to Pantika Home Page. Article by Michel Gerard

There are many creatives available in an affiliate program interface for you to choose from. Banners and text links are the most used, but what are the other creatives available?

I can think of 7 creatives, which are: banners, text links, content links, forms, data-feeds, widgets and coupons.

Depending on the site you have, you may use one or more creatives listed below:

1) Banners: Static, animated or flash banners can be used effectively if placed in the first fold of the website. While they provide a good branding opportunity to merchants, conversion in sales is low for the affiliates as visitors immediately identify them as advertisement.

2) Text links: Short or long text links with key words or phrases are very effective when placed in a page relevant to the product promoted. Conversion is much higher than banners as visitors are more keen to click on them.

3) Content links: They can be simple or elaborated HTML creatives containing affiliate links that can be quickly  placed in a page just in copying a piece of code. They can be articles with content , photos and links, or a big ad like in a magazine.

4) Forms: A simple search box, multi fields search box, lead form, or enquiry form can be placed in an affiliate site and provide very good results as the visitor get a result for what he is looking for. They can be easily used in copying a piece of code on your site.

5) Data feeds: A data feed is a merchant’s catalogue of products that can contain from 10 to 50,000 products. The data feed is a CSV file, usually comma or pipe delimited, that you can open in Excel or Open Office Calc. Full affiliate sites are built with data feeds but implementation is more challenging for beginners.

6) Widgets: They use a selection of products from the data feed and can be of any size with 4 or 5 tabs. They are made by the affiliate manager and you should be able to get a custom one with the products you want and that matches your site’s design. Only a short piece of code has to be copied and they will auto-update automatically on your site.

7) Coupons: They are very effective promotional tools and look like “Xmas10″ or “Mom45″. A lot of Internet shoppers are chasing discount coupons for their next purchase, and placing an affiliate link with the coupon code in your site is a good idea. There are Coupon sites that use coupon data feeds to populate their sites that are very popular.

I hope that you will find in this list a few new ideas on how to promote your affiliate programs.

Go to Pantika Home Page. Article by Michel Gerard