(Understanding the Pitfalls for Affiliate Marketing)
Copyright © Walter Gemmell
http://www.WCGem.com

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Understanding the Pitfalls for Affiliate Marketing

While work at home moms are often the favorite target for Internet scammers,
website owners are a close second. You own a website and are possibly paying
a bit of money to keep the site running. Do you not wish you could make some
money with the website you work so hard to maintain? Imagine how wonderful
it would be if you could turn your hobby into a real business that would
not only pay for itself, but even offer you a few extras that could be put
to good use for the kids, or your family. To a webmaster, affiliate
marketing is almost always the answer to this dilemma. In and of itself,
affiliate marketing is a wonderful opportunity share in the profits of a
reputable company by displaying their links and banners, and allowing
interested parties to visit those sites and perhaps purchase a product. When
they do so, the company will often offer you a small percentage of the sale
as a finder’s fee.

Yet there is a bit of a seedy underbelly to the affiliate marketing industry
that will actually jeopardize your good name as a webmaster and will also
result in payouts that are pennies on the dollar. For example, have you ever
been surfing the web only to suddenly stumble across a website that touts an
amazing nutritional supplement that does it all? Weight loss for the
overweight, hair growth for the bald, an increased sexual stamina for those
lacking it and a host of other items are cured or corrected with a pill
after breakfast, lunch and dinner. These miracle cures are touted on the
website via a long list of testimonials, and you can almost always recognize
the feel of these sites simply by the long list of text they sport, the
varying fonts employed, and also the different colors these words are
written in. You may simply shrug your shoulders at such a site until – about
halfway down – you see a copy of a commission check the webmaster has posted
and suddenly he or she has your undivided attention. The check is small
enough to be realistic yet big enough to have you consider what you could to
with the money and how it could ease the tension at home from lack of
disposable income.

When you are hooked, the spiel usually involves a site owner who is so
successful that he or she has decided to take on two or three qualified
novices and train them to do the business as well. This involves selling the
miracle product to your friends and neighbors and then just sitting back and
waiting for the money to roll in. Additionally, you will need to post
banners on your website. What has just happened, in a nutshell, is an
affiliate scam that ties your success directly into a multi-level marketing
scheme. While your links will attract more interested parties to the
originator’s website, you are meanwhile alienating your friends and families
by the legal drugs you are peddling. This is not what affiliate marketing is
all about, and it is important that you understand the implications of your
putting links or banners of any business on your website.



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