One of my daily routines is to go into the InsureMe Commission Junction advertiser account and approve or decline potential publishers. Generally I enjoy doing it since I like seeing all of the different sites and tactics publishers are using. But one thing that really bothers me in the process is that I often don’t have enough information to make a good decision on accepting or declining publishers. Let me explain…

When I look at new publishers, I am primarily looking for the following:

1. At least one website that has something to do with insurance or something related to insurance (cars, health issues, property, finance, etc.)
2. Someone using only approved methods of promotion…meaning no software
3. No incentives being offered (incentive site traffic, even if it is charity incentives, causes more problems for a lead generator like us than it is worth)

Sometimes the approval process is fairly cut and dry. You applied to us with Burburry coat Blogger spam blog? Declined. You use software to drive traffic? Sorry. You label yourself as an incentive site? Buh-bye. You have an insurance related site and promote through search? Welcome aboard!

The problem is the grey area that a good percentage of publishers fall into. For example, you might be a reasonable successful publisher but have yet to build an insurance website, but don’t want to until you have some offers to promote. Now from my end, I will likely decline you, only because I have no way of telling what your intentions are and you have no easy way to tell me them either.

[Let me say real quickly that I take no joy in declining publishers...it actually bums me out. However, in order to keep out account more manageable, we want to aim for quality publishers, not quantity.]

What I’d love to see is a way for publishers to add some additional, customized information to their application when they are applying for a program. Some publishers are already trying to do this by adding information to the “incentive” section of their account to explain what they want to do with a program, even if it doesn’t have anything to do with an incentive. This can be helpful…but I’m hesitant to accept anyone who has entered anything into the incentive section out of sheer paranoia, and many advertisers automatically decline incentive sites.

CJ might also point out that publishers can use the email function in CJ to better communicate with advertisers…but I speak for a lot of people when I say that CJ email pretty much stinks…it takes a long time to load, and since you have to sign in to get to it, the email account is lucky to be checked more than once a day.

So CJ (and I know there are CJers that read this blog), why don’t you give publishers a way to communicate to advertisers through the application itself? Simply make an optional text box for affiliates when they sign up for a program…if they want to send a message to me to explain why all of their sites are blogs about their cats but they have an awesome insurance site idea, shouldn’t they be able to do that quickly and easily?

I know I would appreciate it as someone who manages a CJ account…and I bet it would save a lot of frustration for affiliates who are getting declined from great programs only because they can’t easily communicate their intentions with advertisers.

So that’s my rant suggestion. I can guarantee I’m not the first person to ask for something like this…and I won’t be the last. But CJ needs to understand that fairly simple enhancements like this will increase the number of new and meaningful advertiser/publisher relationships on their network…which means more money for CJ.

I think there is a no-blog comment rule at CJ, but if not, can someone from CJ comment on this? I’d love to hear more from their end about this. Also publishers, am I totally off base on this one? Would you use an option like this in your CJ account?

Leave your comments below, thanks for reading…

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