Merchants, have you gotten that letter yet? I can speak for all advertisers when I say if you haven't, you will soon enough. Unless you start giving us affiliates what we want and need.

If you're an advertiser like me, you're pressed for time. I find I spend most of my valuable time looking for creative pieces that fit with my scheme instead. If I could find what I want and need faster, I could concentrate on building content.

If you're a merchant, please answer these questions:

• Have you spent any time at all asking us what we need to sell for you?
  
  
• Shouldn't our feedback have something to do with what kind of creative you give us?
  
  
• What's to stop us from going to your competitor (who has better creative pieces) if you continue to ignore our needs?
  
  
• Don't you love us anymore???

We want more! We want it now! We want it to be effective!

What do we need? Here's a starting point:

• Better banner ads. Some of your ads are, well, completely ineffective. If they aren't poorly designed, they're boring. Get some professional help if you have to, but do something. Also, make sure you give us at least one in every size available. Check the IAB standards and get cracking. It is extremely frustrating to find a merchant that's perfect for your program, only to learn it offers horrible banner ads.
  
  
• Email campaigns. We don't have time to take your products and build them into a well-designed email campaign every week, much less every day. You should be doing this for us! We have large databases of opt-in email addresses we could be sending to all the time, with a potential for high earnings.
  
  
• Interactivity. It would be nice to have an occasional advertisement with that extra bit of pizzazz. How about a nice Flash banner or two? What about a video or audio link? Get creative. Help us sell.
  
  
• Page layouts/storefronts. We put in a lot of work making your products look good. Couldn't you design a few sample tables of different sizes that could act as a guideline or template for effectively presenting your products?
  
  
• Co-branding. If only we could instantly grab your product database and link to it from within our site without having to do it manually, link by link. If we sell more, you're only going to make more money. Let us in!