we auto approve and review in detail after.

i hate waiting as i assume do most people.

Good for you!! It's very hard to judge someone before they've even walked into your house - right? :winkwink:

One thing that really annoys me is when sponsors have dead/redirected links to embeds and galleries or galleries with img 404s listed in a dump. If there are too many, it's not worth my time to pick them out.

On a new program i'd even go a step further and close down the complete signup process and make it invite only.

Sure you might miss out on the small time webmaster who makes it big over time but that's hardly happening these days. Besides when they do get big you can still send the invite.

Do you mean review them in detail after a couple a days or so? We used to autoapprove affiliates before but this resulted in some affiliates passing the initial review and later on, usually after a few months of very little or no activity, send us bad joins.

Doesnt it also result in having the need to occasionally re-review ton of affiliates who've passed your initial reviews?

It did for us and we simply couldnt keep up. This resulted in occassional CBs that couldve been prevented in the first place.

If I may ask, what do you look for in affiliate sign ups that result in them remaining as affiliates?

Thanks!

Well to be honest the whole affiliate paysite thing is pretty dead now in comparison to then but one thing to understand is that the long term full time affiliate eventually learned to start being very picky about who they pushed after being fucked over a few times. At least most did. It only took being screwed once or twice to learn.

For the site thing believe it or not but not everyone kept their site listings updated. Also it was often a lack of promo material/tours which matched the site and niche combination we were trying to promote. For instance maybe it was a handjob site but we were looking for something with more of a CFNM angle and there were no banners which did the trick. Sure we could make our own banners but that takes time and there are other sites out there to toss up right now with less hassle. "Maybe I'll get to it next month." See how that works?

I liked to be very picky about things. If I saw that it looked like a secondary processor was in there but that affiliates weren't getting credit I usually passed. You wouldn't believe how many programs this took out. Then there were the ones with banners with huge urls. That meant a pass then unless I felt it would convert well enough that it was worth my time to edit the banners. It also told me that the owner didn't respect me to have those urls on the banner. You might not like it but this really is how a lot of affiliates thought and still do. But most of those guys are long gone from the industry now. Better options.

One thing about pimproll. They didn't convert worth shit for me since about 2008 but they did the promo thing right. It was easy to get tools by niche or site from them and they had a ton of banners. You probably wouldn't believe how much making it EASY increased the chances of affiliates promoting you back then. It made a huge difference! So bottomline - if you are serious still about getting affiliates and them actually promoting you then "make it as easy as possible to do so." Common sense sometimes isn't very common though!

You guys are HUGE and you can do whatever you want :)

Maybe some day we can afford to completely go to invite only, perhaps not with PD, but just like you, maybe for a new program. We do have quite a few whales on board who cover about 80% of our joins just by themselves. They surely will be the ones we'll invite first if ever.

i hope not everyone will go private and invite only in the future. it will mean small affiliates will have no chance to grow, and become whale, then affiliate model will be totally dead and it will not help adult business as the serps will be overtaken by pirates, and doesnt matter what someone thinks, search traffic is and always will be the king :2 cents:

I would't know -- when you don't do PPS affiliate fraud is not a big problem ...

Most people start out with good intentions but when it comes to getting work done -- they have other interests (apparently.)

I hear what you are saying. It's just a shame so many signup and do nothing. Why bother?

Yes but other than YOU please name an affiliate who started out a guppy and became a whale in the past 3 years. That's the problem there, too. I am in agreement with you, in principle, but the reality is most affiliates now stay at whatever level they are at and rarely grow to 'whale' status anymore.

It's a vicious cycle: affs don't grow, programs don't help affs grow.

You have a good point and I also hope not all programs do too, and I dont think all will. There will always be programs open to everyone because you just don't know who will be the next big player. Technology changes and so will the players and it will be best to keep all options open.

What affiliate signups? There are still affiliates out there somewhere?

Yeah it's a vicious cycle, I understand why some program owners feel the need of going invite only because of the current state of affairs but in the long this will ultimately kill the affiliates and as a result it will kill the paysites too.

Nothing wrong with manually approving your affiliates, it actually means you care, you spend precious time doing the approval because you care and you want to succeed. Over doing it though is a problem it's one thing asking for verification that the person who signed up is really an active webmaster and a completely other thing when you start asking for screenshots of stats and payments from other programs...

:thumbsup:thumbsup I hate manual approve! Here is my reasoning. If I'm signing up to your program it's cause I found promo of your site and I thought it was hot. When I sign up I want to get promo right then and throw up links/promo. I don't want to wait 24 hours or ESP till Monday. That makes me think you make your paying members wait 24 hours or till Monday for support. If you can't reply to a email in 8 hours (people have to sleep) then you will have upset members.

Like others said just watch the signups from new affiliates like a hawk and refund or verify weird joins. I've also emailed affiliates and asked them where they are sending traffic from if the url isn't adult or they are sending weird traffic. It's easier to kill a fraud affiliate than to have to verify and make every potential affiliate wait.

I don't care about affiliates that don't send traffic after they join cause being in the biz for 12+ years I know there are tons of reasons why they haven't sent traffic.

That said I will sign up to certain programs where I have to be approved IF I know the program well and know they will OK me in a timely manner. Back in the day when everyone used ICQ I'd hit up the program on ICQ to let them know I joined to speed up the approval time.

It's not about the extra checking.. It is about the delay.

Anyway, if I sign up to a program which needs manual approval, than I contact them right away, this way the approval is fast and I also discuss other things, like reviewing the sites, etc..

So in the end I say: no biggie if there's manual approval until there's someone who can be contacted quickly during EU/US office hours.. But still, I believe [assuming there's very little risk in taking traffic from non-verified source for a short time] that auto-approval is the winner, with restricted operation until account becomes fully verified [can access link codes and basic promo content, can not access payment info for example]

There are no programs around here gathering information just to gather it. If you had any idea what it takes to even get a single site approved for billing you would begin to understand how idiotic it would be to burn your affiliates like this.

You should really stop chiming in on affiliate matters, you are not an affiliate and haven't been for years. The only thing unethical here is you trolling every single business thread on this forum pretending that you are involved as a webmaster, giving advice, when you admittedly haven't been doing so for a long time. This makes all your advice and tips moot and worthless. stick to your day job while the people who actually make money in this business handle the advice instead.

Thank you all so much for your priceless feedback, suggestions, ideas and tips. We are very grateful for all those who have participated :)

By no means am I suggesting this thread is done. I'm currently subscribed to it and will continue to eagerly await more comments that might come in.

Gracias to all and GFY :thumbsup :thumbsup :thumbsup

At Adult Empire Cash our sign-up process is not automated, as we prefer to work directly with our partners. This way we get a better idea of what the affiliate is looking for so that we can help determine the best ways to maximize traffic and conversions. We look at the website, the network, etc. and try to find the best way to help that affiliate promote. I answer all new leads as soon as I can - usually within 1 day, if not hours.

I wont approve sites that offer or support piracy, period. I also won't typically approve accounts if you dont have an active source of traffic up and running.

On a similar note: We've done whitelabel stores (and now, responsive VOD Theatres) for a long time. Our old system was very similar to the ones you see now where anybody can just fill out a form, upload a few pictures and they end up with a shitty-looking generic whitelabel. (I think of this as a "set it and forget it" mentality, which is great if you dont want to make money ;) )

Now we take the time to actually vet all potential affiliates. Our developers personally build the Stores/VOD Theatres specifically for the new partner site, so typically we want to see a high volume of traffic/Alexa rank/Google pagerank from a non-whitelabel source before building a store for a new partner, but there are always exceptions...

Its always good connecting with the affiliates and learning what they need. :thumbsup