Am I stupid?
 

Ok I signed up with a sponser. private cash. They requested a url for the sign up that I would be promoting them on I gave them www.fullphotos.com
I get a email from them today
My sites are never down and I check them every hour with ping notifications and I go to them every day at least 10 times each. Could I be mistaken in thinking they want to go right to the list of the site? I would think the root would be good enough or am I wrong?

Write them back and ask it may have been a router down.

Thanks MML. Just sent them a mail. Should be interesting to see how this goes. Oh well if they send me another rejection I'll move on to someone else. Thanks again..

There's a few sponsors out there like that that will kind of brush off what they percieve to be small time players. Usually if you bring it to their attention that you recieved their oh so polite rejection email and would really like to join their program, they'll put you through. For example G3X seems to be ignoring me all together |bullshit| .

its possible that their approval script put the link in without the http:// at the beginning, and therefore, they got the 404 error when they clicked.

Sometimes sponsors just don't understand how things work either.

We signed up for a sponsor earlier this year (not private cash), but hadn't gotten around to using them yet. We were about to grab all their links and hosted content when we received an email saying,

"Your ************ affiliate account has been terminated. We require a minimum amount of clickthrough traffic from our affiliates to remain active in our program. Your account was sending us less than 100 clicks per month. Thank you for your participation in the program."

Yep, we were sending less than 100 clicks, since we hadn't even put up their links anywhere yet. I know I could contact them and explain, but since they didn't bother to ask before terminating our account, I'm not going to waste my time promoting their program.

In your case though, it's probably worth contacting them and straightening things out.

I dont understand some of these sponsors. Why on earth would they drop affiliates? It's not costing them anything, not even time.

There's only one thing I can think of that makes any sense at all. If they have a promo content area that requires login, perhaps they think they're deleting surfers to prevent them from having continued access.

Most sponsor signup forms I've filled in require that you list a web site URL, and some even require that your email match that URL. Much easier and more effective to do the anti-surfer screening at sign-up rather than after the barn door has been open for a couple of months.

I had to explain this to my previous employer. They used to approve webmasters by hand. I let them know how a webmaster operates. He or She builds a site, maybe they want to try a new sponsor so they signup. When they don't get access to linkcodes and banners then and there, they just move on to another sponsor.

Approving by hand or script is fine as long as it doesn't slow the webmaster sign up process. Get the webmaster's info, give them the linkcodes and banners and check out the site later if you must. The worst thing that will happen is you end up with a webmaster's email address.

when i started at my previous employer the first thing i did was disable the auto-approve they had on their join page for affiliates. I just figured it was better if i hand approved all joins...
lasted about 2 weeks before someone pointed out how stupid it was for me to do this just because of the reason listed by Jim.
Now, well after that, when a webmaster joined they got instant access to the affiliate program and when i got the notification i would check out their info... it worked better all the way around :)

I only killed accounts in the case of trojans/spyware or spam complaints
and only after an e mail was sent to them inviting them to have a dialogue with me so we could work it out. Real affiliates are far to valueable to just toss aside and one sign up a week or month adds up if there are a lot of affiliates doing it.


spaz

I noticed that Lightspeed just changed to an auto-approve, but, the new WM doesn't get access to content until after they have been manually screened. Other sponsors ask you to email them for access to the content. I even started to freak out the other day when I got a bunch of 20mB emails, that turned out to be exclusive content from a sponsor.

As far as a website URL, I know a couple of WMs who only do PPC, and don't even have a website.

Well no response to the email I sent the other day. Oh well, no promo for them. I use my time and webspace for some other sponser.

Are you allowing for a blank referrer in your htaccess?

If not, and they are not sending referrer info, then your images could appear broken. Thats all I can think of besides a bad router or something when they checked, like MML said.

The only thing I keep in my htaccess for my promo sites are mail bot blocking. I dont really care about hotlinking as 99% of the images are all HFS. I host the banners but heck who is going to hotlink them lol.