Joining Affiliate Networks

Becoming an Affiliate Marketer

We started out this affiliate internet marketing concept with a plan for 2 review websites.

We are Christians and wanted to have one which reviews and blogs about Christian movies, books, Bible Studies, gifts and more and other Christian content. That one is built and underway. We found out about Amazon Affiliates and as soon as our Christian site was up and had a little content we got our Amazon Affiliate ID in place.

The other is to be a secular site which also blogs and reviews but it will be reviewing and blogging about a variety of products and the world of internet shopping. We will market a variety of products for both Business and Personal use.

We started out with Bluehost as our web host and quickly became discouraged. In seeking a new hosting company and at the same time looking for more information about Affiliate Marketing we ran across Wealthy Affiliates.

We joined WA about 3 months ago and I love it. There is so much knowledge shared here! It is far beyond a Web Hosting site. Thank you, Kyle and Carson!

Finding more Affiliate partners

We have been anxious to get our secular site up. As we began to look for more Affiliate partners for the Christian site, we ran across more we were interested in for the secular site.

I found early on with the first site that the Advertisers won't even consider you without a live site that they can look at and to understand what your marketing approach is going to be.

Some won't even consider you unless you already have tons of traffic to your site!

This has been frustrating for me. We had one company we really, really, wanted to partner with that just flat out declined us because we didn't have thousands coming to our site already. Then we had one company which is very large that approved us in a flash! Figure that out?

Perseverance

Well, one company I wanted to be an affiliate for markets primarily to businesses and has several subsidiary companies with products for businesses as well. I have personally experience over many years as a business owner and a software consultant with the parent business.

We were immediately rejected by the main company as we 'didn't fit their target market'. I was crushed and then I got a little frustrated. How do we not fit your target market? It is true the first website is targeted to Christians, but gee whiz, hundreds of thousands of Christians use your type of products as business owners or business employees everyday?

Then one of the subsidiary companies declined us, and then another one declined us.

The emails that sent declining us said, 'if you feel we have made this decision in error, please send us a note with more information on your website, visitor traffic and marketing strategy and we will reevaluate.'

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again!

I replied back to the 1st subsidiary company and asked them to reconsider. They did and we were accepted!

Okay, then I asked the subsidiary contact about the owner company and he said send them the same info I sent him. So I did.

I haven't heard back from them yet. I really want to promote that company as I worked with them for years and I know their products and their business ethic.

I am hoping to get a positive response next week.

Just thought I would share this experience with you all. If you have similar stories and wisdom, let me hear from you!

Taresa