The internet has been the perfect safe haven for scammers and schemers since the dawn of e-commerce. It’s easy to see why. You’re buying something from someone you cannot see and if you get ripped off, there is often little you can do about it (if anything at all). Of all of the internet scams lurking within the search engine result pages, affiliate marketing scams seem to trump them all.

“How to make money scams” top the list of affiliate marketing scams. These are the easiest types of scams to profit from. Why? Because, by the time you realize that you’ve been scammed,  the money back guarantee offered with your course has long since expired.

Building an effective affiliate marketing campaign takes months and if you’re working with outdated (or outright bad) information, you’ve not only lost money but time as well. Time you will never get back!

How Can YOU Avoid Affiliate Marketing Scams?

For myself and many of my colleagues, we had to learn the hard way. After being burned several times, we began to spot patterns in how these courses are pitched. They are masters at selling the dream!

Since we are visual creatures by nature, they use images to sell the dream.

Big Homes
Expensive Cars
Dream Vacations

They know that if they can hit your “hot button”, you will rip out your credit card and type those numbers in faster than you ever thought you could type! You have to admit, when you first purchase one of these courses, there is an immediate but temporary feeling of relief. As if you know that all of your financial problems will now vanish because you have the solution!

The easiest way to avoid becoming a victim to these sales pitches is to approach your decision to purchase an affiliate marketing training course based on logic rather than emotion. I realize it’s easier said than done. Money is often an emotional subject for most of us. That’s how they getcha!

Autopilot?……… Sign Me Up!!!

Autopilot is a pretty popular “buzz word” in the affiliate marketing industry. (Popular among scammers that is) It is usually based on the notion that you can build a 3-5 page website, build a bunch of backlinks, and watch the money pour in. WRONG! ….. That may have worked 10 years ago but it will not work today!

Even though this method of affiliate marketing has been obsolete for some time, courses that teach these methods are still around and still selling quite well. You cannot stop bad information from being sold online, but you can educate yourself and avoid becoming a victim.

Loopholes

Many of these questionable courses talk about search engine “loopholes”. They want you to believe that buying their course will make you somehow privy to secrets that are only known by a small, select group of marketers. Let’s face it, SEO takes work and we could all use an advantage over the other guy (or gal) right?

These so called loopholes are just a clever way of referring to what  is also know as “gaming the system”.  This method also becomes less and less effective over time. Google has closed the doors on many of these loopholes. Google did this because it is in their best interest to do so.

If Google wants to remain a viable source of information, they need to provide the most relevant search results for users. People who used “gaming” techniques to earn high rankings often flooded the search results with a lot of sub-par articles and sites. If you want to win favor with the search engines, there is no substitute for writing your own quality articles.

Wait….. You Can Buy Now For $37…..$27…..$17

Some of you have probably seen this before. You try to leave the page and you are automatically offered a lower price. Sometimes for less than half the original price (if you try to leave enough times). If their program was so great, why would they do this? And why would they allow some people to pay more than the one’s who tried to leave? Maybe I’m wrong but it seems a bit unethical to me.

Products with these kind of “hard sell” tactics are usually followed up with lots of up-sells. In other words, you’ll want to buy “this” much more expensive program if you REALLY want make money. Don’t you just love these?

If you really want to avoid affiliate marketing scams, don’t buy into hype and promises of easy money with hardly any work. People know that this isn’t possible with a traditional, bricks and mortar business, but for some reason they believe it is possible with an online business.