Connecting Your Site to a New Campaign

Getting a site connected is a three-step process and usually takes under fifteen minutes. Most of the delay people hit is avoidable, so this covers the steps and the things that trip people up.

Verify Ownership

Add the verification meta tag or DNS record we generate for you. This proves the site is yours and unlocks campaign attachment.

Two methods, both fine:

Meta tag. Paste the generated tag into your site’s . Fastest option if you have access to your theme or a header-injection setting. On WordPress, most SEO plugins have a field for exactly this.

DNS record. Add the generated TXT record at your DNS provider. Slower to propagate — anywhere from minutes to a few hours — but survives theme changes and redesigns, which makes it the more durable choice for a site you intend to keep connected.

Common reasons verification fails:

• The tag is in the body, not the head. It must be inside .
• A caching layer is serving an old version. Purge your cache, then re-check.
• The tag was added to a staging site, not the live domain.
• DNS has not propagated yet. Wait and retry rather than adding a second record.
• The domain does not match — www versus non-www, or http versus https. Verify the exact URL you registered.

Set Your Category

Your category determines which campaigns you are matched with. Choose the one that genuinely describes your audience, not the one with the highest payouts.

This is the decision that most affects your long-term earnings, and the temptation to game it is obvious. It does not work, for a mechanical reason: campaigns matched to the wrong audience produce reviews that fail verification, and a low approval rate limits which campaigns you are offered at all. Picking a lucrative category you cannot serve costs you access to the ones you can.

Pick by asking what your audience could genuinely evaluate. If your readers are hobbyist photographers, you will produce far better reviews of camera software than of enterprise HR tools, and the reward tiers will follow the quality.

If your site spans several genuine areas, choose the one where your audience is deepest rather than the one that is broadest.

Go Live

Attach the verified site to a campaign and publish. Most sites see their first matched campaign within a few hours.

Before you attach, walk the path a visitor will actually take:

1. Load your site on a mid-range phone, on a normal connection
2. Check the page a campaign will point at is the page you intend
3. Confirm nothing important sits behind a login a visitor will not have
4. Make sure the page is finished — an unfinished page produces feedback about being unfinished

Reviewers and visitors see your site exactly as your audience does. A slow or half-built page is the most common reason a first campaign underperforms, and it is entirely avoidable.

What Happens Next

Matching is not instant-and-then-static. The pool of campaigns you are offered changes as your approval history builds, so the first week is not representative of the steady state.

Two things to expect:

A slow start is normal. Your first few matches may be lower-reward campaigns while the platform has no history to go on. This is not a permanent tier.

Quality compounds. A consistent approval record unlocks higher-reward campaigns automatically. This is the single largest factor in long-term earnings, which is why how verification keeps reviews honest is worth reading before your first submission rather than after your first rejection.

Checking It Worked

After attaching, the Campaigns tab shows the site’s status and any matched campaigns. If nothing has matched after a day:

• Confirm verification is still passing — a theme update can strip a meta tag
• Check your category is not so narrow that few campaigns qualify
• Confirm the site is publicly reachable and not blocking crawlers

If you have set a notification reward threshold in Settings, matches below it will not notify you even though they appear in the dashboard. Worth checking if the dashboard and your inbox disagree.

Connecting More Than One Site

Each site verifies separately and carries its own category. That is deliberate, and it is usually the right structure: a photography blog and a general-interest newsletter should not be matched to the same campaigns, and forcing them into one category weakens matching for both.

Two things worth knowing:

• Approval history is account-level, not site-level. A strong record on one site benefits campaigns matched to your others.
• Do not register the same site twice under different categories to widen matching. It reads as duplicate-account behaviour to pattern detection, and the downside is account-level.

If a site genuinely spans several areas, pick the category where your audience is deepest rather than the one that is broadest. Depth is what produces reviews that pass verification.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which verification method should I choose?

Meta tag is fastest if you have theme access. DNS is slower to propagate but survives redesigns and theme changes, which makes it more durable for a site you plan to keep connected.

Verification was working and now it fails. Why?

Most often a theme or plugin update stripped the meta tag, or a caching layer is serving an old version of the page. Re-add the tag and purge the cache. This is the case for preferring DNS on long-lived sites.

Can I change my category later?

Yes. Matching adjusts from the next campaign cycle rather than retroactively, so expect a short gap while the new pool applies.

How long until my first matched campaign?

Most sites see their first match within a few hours of going live. If nothing has matched after a day, check verification is still passing and that your category is not unusually narrow.

Why are my first campaigns low-reward?

The platform has no approval history to go on yet, so early matches are conservative. This is not a permanent tier — a consistent record unlocks higher-reward campaigns automatically.

Related Reading

A beginner’s guide to the ZetPulse dashboard covers where to find all of this. Publisher rewards: how payouts work covers setting a payout method — worth doing now rather than when you first hit a threshold. How to earn rewards for reviews covers making the matches you get count.