I was reading a thread on A Best Web from a U.K. affiliate that was frustrated, because his site was being turned down by 90% of affiliate programs based in the U.S.
This surprised me. In the early days, like most affiliate managers, I used to accept all applications. But a few years ago, as fraud was on the rise in affiliate marketing, I examined my stats and determined that the majority of countries were producing more headaches than benefits.
So I started restricting the affiliate program to residents of Australia, Canada, U.K., and U.S. The reason being that I was seeing lots of affiliates in these countries that were managing to target U.S. consumers.
Of course, there could be good affiliates in any country, and I make exceptions on a case by case basis. But the rogue affiliates have largely messed up things for the honest, hard working affiliates in most countries.
Anyhow, back to the frustrated affiliate in the U.K. His name is Nadeem Azam, and I touched base with him about his post. I was curious about which affiliate programs had rejected him.
Mr. Azam replied “There are so many CJ affiliate programs that have rejected us automatically that it would take me ages to compile a comprehensive list.”
“When I send an email to the advertisers and explain that we operate a number of high quality US sites even though we are based in the UK, many of them end up accepting us – though a sizeable proportion don’t even bother to email us back,” he continued.
On the bright side, if the affiliate manager can’t be bothered to respond to such a query, I’d say Mr. Azam is better off promoting those affiliate programs that are proactively managed.
Curiously, when I took a straw poll of affiliate managers in the AffiliateManager.net forum, and asked “Do you reject all affiliate applications for affiliates based in the UK?,” 90% said no.
For any affiliate managers that are listening, turn off that automatic reject and see what you’re missing.