Merchants approaching affiliates?

**T.J.** · 11-11-04

As an SEO and an affiliate I use AWIN, where as I see it,
the merchants display the products and the affiliates
choose the products to work on.
This is fine, but does anyone know of anywhere where it is the
opposite way round?
Somewhere where the SEO can show examples of their work
and the merchant offers them products to optimise sites for.

**D-Mac** · 11-11-04

To the best of my knowledge it is an area that is sadly lacking. It would be great if there was a directory of affiliates that merchants could browse to select possible partners that they would like to approach. The current system is very one-sided and really doesn't reflect the fact that many affiliates are established businesses.

The networks really need to pull their fingers out on this issue as it is sad fact that networks (at least in my experience), do very little when it comes to matching up merchants with affiliates.

In fairness, Julie @ Awin is proactive in this respect, but the job is far too big for one person! Please, give us the tools and the data to faciliate doing it ourselves. Affiliates have superb data about merchants. Why are merchants given no data about affiliates? It is crazy.

Moan over

**T.J.** · 12-11-04

What about trying to set something up here?
How would the moderators feel if we set up a topic where we,
as affiliates and SEO's gave examples of our work the affiliate schemes we work with, if we do the work privately, etc. and
then the merchants could come looking for us.
Basically a small directory within the forum here, where we have a list of affiliates and SEO's who are open to offers.

**Retail Creations** · 12-11-04

The adult market (products not porn) is wide open when it comes to SEO, not many people are doing it and we'd love to get in contact with some good seo guys, unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a good way of doing this, other than to mention it on here where we can

**Dynamoo** · 12-11-04

One of the problems is that many affiliates don't want to advertise their sites to other affiliates, especially if they're successful.

**T.J.** · 12-11-04

Originally posted by Dynamoo
One of the problems is that many affiliates don't want to advertise their sites to other affiliates, especially if they're successful.

Yes, I tend to agree.
I wouldn't want to talk about some of the things I am working
on (even if about 10 out of the top 20 in Google are other affiliates)
But I would be happy giving a general overview of things
I do, and examples of previous work.

**D-Mac** · 12-11-04

Dynamoo - OK, that's fair enough. However, it would still be good if the affiliates who don't fear their competition were able to 'advertise' somewhere.

**Dynamoo** · 13-11-04

Yes, but the affiliates who don't fear competition are often the ones who don't generate much income.

However, it's an interesting suggestion. Perhaps the affiliate details can be anonymised in some way?