How to Apply & get Accepted by Affiliate Networks

Stuart — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 06:13:03 +0000

We’re currently working on the beta version of our Affiliate Network Reviews & as such I’m currently signing up to every network out there to really get an idea of how they operate.

I thought this would be a good opportunity to outlay some of the key things you should do before applying to a network:

What you’ll need

Name
Email
Other contact details (Daytime & Evening Phone)
Current Address
Business Name
Payment details (Paypal or DD)
Tax Information / SS (Unless outside USA)
Website details including UB’s & niche
How you intend to send traffic (i.e. Email, PPC or SEO)
If Email you may be asked for the IP address of your mail server
Other affiliate networks you’re working with

Domain

You’ll be asked to provide the domain that you’re using to carry out any activities. Make sure the domain is active & isn’t a holding page. Also make sure that this is a reputable domain that has potential to provide leads/sales to the network.

Avoid putting adwords.com or anything similar as your domain because this probably won’t get accepted (depending on the Network, most are fine with PPC only affiliates as long as you specify). If you’re just doing SEM I wouldn’t bother putting any website down.

I submitted Earners Blog as the domain for most of the networks since this is where I’m doing the reviews. Funnily enough I did get one application declined by CX Digital Media because they don’t accept sites hosted on free hosting. I don’t know if they’re retarded over there but it doesn’t take much intelligence to figure out that I’m not hosting on a free blog host.

Email Address

This is a vital part of the equation. It’s best to provide an email address that corresponds with the domain name you’ve submitted above, this helps to cement the fact that you’re legitimate with the network you’re applying to. Try to avoid free email accounts like hotmail, gmail or yahoo.

Verification

Quite a large number of networks will now ask you to verify that you either own the website or ask you to call up & have a chat with them. This is a good opportunity to start up a conversation with an AM before you get accepted. This may give you some insights into how knowledgeable they are.

I was even asked by one network to put up a text link to one of their partner sites as verification. Um no.

What not to do when accepted

Don’t lie about the website that you own
Don’t start trying to get a better payout on offers right away, wait until you start pushing volume
Don’t hassle the hell out of your AM, use them wisely
Avoid brand bidding, you’ll get booted fairly quickly for this
Be careful with incentivized traffic, some offers allow it but most don’t

How you should use your AM

Account Managers are a wealth of information at some Networks, the bottom line is that the better you do, the more money they make.

Ask the right questions, don’t bust balls:

Which offers are converting well currently?
Which landing pages are kicking ass? (most won’t tell you this but it doesn’t hurt to ask)

This should be all you need to really start rolling.

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Azoogleads

Stuart — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 06:40:46 +0000

It’s been a while coming but Azoogleads has finally deployed version 2.0 of their website & reporting. They seem to be moving affiliates over in clusters as a few I know are still getting reporting from Version 1.

New Interface

When you first login, you’re greeted with a popup Virtual Tour. Now I know that most people just skip past this stuff because they just want to see how much cash they’ve made in the last 20 minutes, but I think it’s important to check the tour out. The reason for this is because Azoogleads have carefully created step by step videos taking you through each & every aspect the new version has to offer. Neat eh? If that isn’t your cup of tea you can simply click the “Don’t show this again” button and be on your merry way to the stats screen.

The main screen is incredibly different from the old version. Instead of seeing just the news & updates of current offers you now have access to some new features.

On the left hand side of the screen you have access to your top 5 converting offers of the last 30 days & also some nifty charts that are created in realtime (in flash). You can measure clicks/leads ratio, year to date & more.

The main menu is pretty much exactly the same as before, it scrolls along the top, you can use this to access your profile, referrals (which it lists for you), offers, statistics & rewards.

One of the first things I noticed when switching over is now that you can choose to be paid by either Check or Wire Transfer. This is a new improvement, you can also choose which currency you’d like to be paid in (Dollars, Pounds or Euro’s). I’m pretty sure this option is only available for transfer within the USA since there’s no space for an IBAN.

Offers Area

The offers area is fairly similar, you now have the ability to view the landing page of the offer & also see the MTD revenue from that particluar offer without having to go into your reporting section. You also have a number of sorting options, to see which offers are in your particular niche. You can also choose to see which offers are expiring soon, so that you can prepare to replace them with something else & not lose out on revenue.

Remember how before it was always hard to see which offers were incentivized or not? Well now when you view a particular offer you can see exactly how you can promote it, then click on the link to view the creatives. Banned keywords & Suppression lists are also much easier to find & download.

Finally, whenever you are choosing your creative it will also show you the global CTR of all the provided banners. You can use this to see which banners are converting the best for other Azoogleads members

Reporting

The reporting system has had a bit of an overhaul. Apart from being much slower than before, you can specify the exact search criteria that you wish to look at, you can save your custom reports easily or export them as a csv file for later analysis. You can also view each offer easily for a number of different quicky reports:

Sub ID Report
Daily Report
By Hour Report
Traffic Types
Creative Report

But to be perfectly honest, if you’re like me I don’t care about this type of reporting. I just want to see how much money I’ve made :p

Rewards Section

This is the only section that’s had a downgrade, you can’t choose your lovely reward from your collected points anymore. It merely just says:

For Rewards please contact your Affiliate manager directly.

Thanks,
The Azoogle Team

Maybe this means you can negotiate for you rewards now, who knows

Summary

The new interface is a welcomed update with enough features to keep even the report crazy amongst us happy. Probably the most important for me is the Wire Transfer option. Probably since I’ve started with Azoogle they’ve yet to send me a Cheque. Another point to note is that the email address they are using for support keeps bouncing emails back, so I’ve been unable to contact them or my affiliate manager about chasing up payments.

Features I’d like to see? Well I guess like Adsense I’d like to see if payments have been made & whether they were successful or not. Unless you keep in close contact with your Affiliate Manager it’s usually, it’s hard to see when you’ve been paid until the cheque arrives.