Your help: Which comes first, the site or the merchant?

[melviego]

Hi Everyone,

Perhaps you more experienced affiliate marketers can help me.

I'm almost finished designing my first affiliate site and have begun researching the affiliate-merchant agreements with CJ, LinkShare, etc. I've noticed that most merchants require your site to up and running, field a certain amount of visitors per day, and so forth before they will agree to use you as an affiliate.

My site is being built around these handful of merchants and it would be odd to launch it without having my merchants in place. I find myself in a chicken and egg quandry: which comes first?

Am I missing a simple solution here? Should I launch the site without merchants and slowing add them on?

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Melanie

[Will]

Hi Melanie,

See if this helps.

[richerbrat]

Melanie - your site should always come first. There will always be merchants with the products you could sell from your site, no matter how obscure. Find your market, and build a site that market wants - preferably a site you are interested in building. Build great content, then find a product that appeals to your visitors.

[melviego]

Gentlemen, thank you for the helpful link and answer. Of course that makes sense!

I shall be launching soon and would appreciate your feedback. I'm fighting my way through Dreamweaver and learning it slowly, but I created something appealing, though probably a little patched together. I still haven't figured out the whole newsletter sign up thing, but I'm going to save that for later I think.

It will be cool to site up and running!

Cheers,
Melanie

[Will]

You already gotten over the first hurdle of actually taking action so I'm sure it won't be long until you're up and running.

There's nothing quite like actually having a go, seeing what works and what doesn't work for yourself.