I have a couple of sites that I’m always having trouble with in terms of getting decent affiliate programs hooked up with. I’m always amazed although on the one hand not that amazed at the amount of homophobia that exists in marketing.
For instance, my gay links site is always a problem—there’s some great/good affiliate programs that I just cant promote there. My Gay Dating site is also another problem child when it comes to promoting good products and services.
Part of the problems lay with the various affiliate networks and part of the problems are with the actual end merchant/program.
Are the programs that are a problem adult or mainstream? I’ve honestly never had a problem with an adult sponsor being homophobic. Mainstream I could understand. But the adult people are usually happy to work with gay sites. Most of the people I talked to at Internext were from mostly straight services, but they all seemed to understand the value of listing their services on GayWebmasters.com. In fact, “Going Gay” is a big trend in the industry right now. So many of the people I talked to were getting ready to launch a gay product, had just launched a gay product, or were revamping their gay product to relaunch.
I checked out your dating site, and if I were you’d I’d join Adult Friend Finders affiliate program, and put up their Geo-targeted banners. These have done very well for me on RateARod.com, and I bet they’d do the same for you.
No it’s mostly the mainstream programs. Although lately there have been a couple of adult programs too.
Personally, I try not to let it bother me although in one case it really did and puts a crimp on how or where I can advertise them. For instance I can’t advertise Gay.com on my gay links site—I got busted by commission junction for that. LOL.
Basically they objected to a bunch of words on one of the pages that I had a banner on. Words that could be on any gay mainstream website. Mmm well they also objected to the whole site actually.
I checked out your dating site, and if I were you’d I’d join Adult Friend Finders affiliate program, and put up their Geo-targeted banners. These have done very well for me on RateARod.com, and I bet they’d do the same for you.
LOL—funny thing—I started promoting sexsearch at one of my sites recently but only just found out that they also have a gay site a couple of days ago when I was reading the cybersocket awards. So, I’ll be giving the gay tour a shot too.
Right on. Let me know how it works out for you. I was thinking of giving them a shot on RateARod. I haven’t had time to check out their geo-targeting options yet.
I think it all depends on the site. Just keep in mind that if one turns you down or gives you shit, there will be a competitor waiting in the wings to take full advantage of your gay disposable income. For example, my personal site was turned down by Priceline’s affiliate program. THE NEXT DAY I got an e-mail from Travelocity being invited into their affiliate program.