Commission Junction is Incredibly Frustrating to Work With

We signed up to Commission Junction about a week ago, looking to do some PPC marketing for a few specific US-based financial services companies. We have a great deal of experience with financial landing pages, and were eager to get started. I already had a long list of keywords, different ideas for promoting the site, etc. The companies that we wanted to work with were sure to get a large number of leads from us, as we are pretty good at landing pages / PPC marketing.

So we signed on to Commission Junction, expecting to get started pretty much immediately. Well the initial sign-up was a snap, however the real trouble would lie in getting the companies that we wanted to work with to approve us so that we could start sending them leads.

There were two companies in particular that we wanted to work with. The first company we tried applying for, and were automatically rejected. Fine, I thought, I will contact the email address for affiliates on their web site, and hopefully they can manually approve me. Keep in mind that this is a MAJOR financial services company in the USA; their commercials are everywhere on TV. Well, I try to email their affiliate department, and get bounced emails back. I have tried contacting them via the phone, and always hang up in frustration after 20 minutes. Try explaining to a customer service rep who can't speak English very well that you want to speak to someone in the affiliates department.

The second company seems to be AWFULLY picky about who they work with, as they keep rejecting our application after a few days. Now we aren't some run of the mill spammy company with terrible looking web pages; we've got a pretty impressive client list, and our pages look sharp. When I see the other web pages promoting the company, I can't help but wonder why we are getting rejected and other companies are getting accepted. You would think that they would want to work with any halfway decent company, as we are just going to be their affiliates.

So after a week, the frustration is starting to mount. We can't wait to get started with CJ.com, but man, it's nearly impossible to get a campaign accepted. We are going to keep trying, but so far, it's Frustration Nation.

Filed under: Making Money Online | General Knowledge