I’m encountering the following barrier:

Whenever I wish to review products/brands offered on a new affiliate
partner site, I cannot view them unless I sign up.  To do that, I need
an active website with a history of traffic and relevance.  I have one
site active, but I still get denied.  Then, I move on and try another
affiliate partner site.

So how can I get started and build an attractive site if I don’t know
what products/brands that a potential affiliate partner program
offers?  Just keep moving on to different partner programs until I get
accepted.

I do belong to CJ.  So, should I just stick with that program until I
build a successful website to demonstrate to others?  Receiving
commissions so long after the fact is not attractive.  So, I’m more
interested in partner programs with shorter payout time frames.

I believe that most new affiliates run into this problem. To
understand this problem, let me give you a 30 second history of
affiliate marketing:

You may have heard people refer to affiliates as “publishers.” The
reason why is because the earliest affiliate marketers were
“publishers” in the sense that they published content about a certain
topic, e.g. news, hobbies, etc.

The publishers were publishers before they were affiliates.

Advertisers knew that the  publishers already had traffic and tons of content and
basically purchased advertising space from the publishers.

Affiliate Marketing has evolved since then of course. Nonetheless,
many advertisers still expect the same standards when they accept new affiliates.

In other words, advertisers expect you to already have good relevant
content on your website which matches their offers. This makes sense
for those new affiliates who are fairly sure about the field you want to
get into.

If you want to quickly become “legitimate” in the eyes of the
advertiser, here are some ways to beef up your website and have a
better shot at getting approved:

1. Post articles on your site. You can get free article feeds from a
lot of the article directories so long as you leave the resource boxes
intact and give proper credit to the author;

2. Post relevant videos from Youtube and other video sites. These
sites offer an “embed code” so you can cut and paste a video in no
time flat

3. Post testimonials about a product or service. You can use your own
or see what other people are saying online

Finally, one more tip on getting approved:

See whether the offer is available outside of Commission Junction. An
advertiser is often partnered with several networks. Sometimes I’ve
been rejected for an offer in Cj, but approved in a different network
like ncsreportng.com.

Oh yeah – make certain you always include all the necessary
formalities on your site, e.g. privacy policy, contact info, etc.

And if all else fails, you can always go out of your way to get an
advertiser’s attention. (I used “snail mail” before to get the
attention of an advertiser who was totally inundated with applications
and it worked!)