I submitted a link to a cake site (incredible-cakes.com) that I am developing. I got rejected. snif. Admittedly, the site still needs a lot of work and has been sitting dormant for most of this year.
According to their message – copied below, they don’t have any merchants that match my site’s content at this point.
I’ll probably submit another site to them in a couple of weeks.
Big Kudo’s to Skimlinks.com for watching their log files and tracing back to my blog post. I rec’d a comment from Alicia Navarro – Co-founder & CEO of Skimlinks.
I fully believe it’s always worth 60 seconds of a company’s time to throw out a quick howdy to a small blogger from Fort Wayne, IN. Plus, I really like that someone out there is “keen to hear my thoughts.” 
Thanks for the comment Alicia, but my thoughts will have to wait until I have something that works with your application!
Here’s my rejection letter. (I don’t care what it is, rejection is always painful.)
Hi Keith,
Thank you for applying to use Skimlinks on your site. Our approvals team has run an analysis and, unfortunately, decided your site is not suitable for Skimlinks.
Regrettably, the range of merchants that we are currently working with does not match the content of your site. Consequently, Skimlinks would generate negligible revenues for you as it is unlikely that we would be able to monetise included links.
If you decide to make changes to your site, or you have another site you would like to use Skimlinks on, please apply again via
or contact us on support@skimlinks.com for more details.
Regards,
The Skimlinks Team
Best regards
Hi Keith,
Thank you for taking the rejection so well, we hate to give them, and if we had known it was someone writing to review us, we could have given you at least a trial version.
The reason we are so strict (we reject about 60% of applications) is because we are in a privileged position to have affiliate networks and merchants trust us to approve sites on their behalf. Because an account with us means an account with 7,500 active merchant accounts, we have to judge a site based on whether we think all our merchants will want to work with this site. We look at how often they update, original content, professional design, traffic numbers, etc. Sometimes its hard to judge and we get it wrong, and we do tend to err on the side of caution, but it does mean on the whole we have a very high quality network of original content sites. I’m sure you can understand why we need to do this, although I of course understand its horrible to be on the receiving end of such emails, I know I would! Any suggestions on how to soften the blow?
My team will contact you today to see if we can give you at least a trial account so you can properly test and review us.
Cheers
Alicia Navarro
CEO – Skimlinks.com