One thing I have looked at is how do these scams like Dazzle White, Make Money with Google, Profit Profusion, Twitter scams and others move around the internet and what makes them so prolific. The answer is simple and I blame affiliate marketers. While I have done some affiliate marketing I will attempt to make sure the product I am pushing will be beneficial to both the consumer as well as myself however most affiliate marketers are only looking at one thing and that is the payout.
Scams like Dazzle White use affiliate networks to push the offers to the affiliate with payouts like $40.00 per free trial signup, now mind you how can anyone offer a “free trial” and pay out to an affiliate $40.00? Because they know they are going to take you for your money. The landing pages look good to affiliate and they do have high conversions so these affiliates are making serious money from these offers.
What does affiliate marketing mean to the company running the scam? They get lower advertising costs yes they may have to pay for the conversion but they are not paying for the majority of Pay Per Click traffic in Google Adwords or other advertising engines. These are being run by affiliates. These affiliates are the scum of the earth because they are only worried about the money they make.
Here is how it works?
Company X puts up an offer with affiliate networks like NeverBlue, Linkshare, Commission Junction, and others affiliates log into the system see new offers and start looking at them. Some networks show the 30, 60, 90 earnings for affiliates and what the averages are, the affiliates quickly join the program and get the information they need.
Some create fake blogs and litter them with affiliate links and others create landing pages which links to the payment page and some others just do PPC to test out the offer. They will let these tests run a while and see if they call for more time and effort. After they realize that these offers are converting they will double or triple the efforts until the internet is swamped with these offers. If you are a good at affiliate marketing I have seen affiliate links get indexed with good search engine results and they continue to pay off.
So now the company can say that those are affiliate pages and not from the company themselves and they can even say that they do not support the methods that affiliates are using to gain traffic but they will not get rid of the affiliate because they are converting for them.
So what can we do?
We can stay away from the scams for one but the other thing we can do if we are an affiliate marketing guru is we can vet the offers we are looking at and make sure they are not scams and that they do what they are supposed to do, I do not understand how some of these affiliates can continue to sleep at night, I would bet that a lot of them do not even look at the offer in-depth and only understand high payouts so they may not know. So here is one thing we can do. As we find affiliates that are promoting these scams with fake blogs etc, we can send them an email stating what they are doing and why it should not be supported. Remember most of these people will not care and will probably send you emails that you do not want to read but if we can stop the proliferation of some of these scams we have done a good deed.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Good post. Just to point out that Commission Junction and Linkshare are good affiliate networks and don’t carry the scammy offers like Dazzlewhite, Acai, Google Kits (as far as I know). These offers are all on the so called CPA Affiliate Networks. I have even heard that some of these networks actually encourage their affiliates to create fake blogs, fake testimonials etc. Really shady outfits.
Some of the CPA courses also encourage fake blogs and other shady stuff like spamming Craigslist. They call it “creative marketing”. I call it fraud, lies and deception to trick people into signing up for a scam.
To find out which CPA networks are running an offer try offervault.com or findaffiliateoffers. Eg: One of the current versions of Dazzle White is called ‘Premium White’ [same company: Just Think Media].
So if you search here http://www.findaffiliateoffers.com/index.php?function=search&search=premium+white&= you will see that Clickbooth, Copeac, Market Leverage, motive interactive and Neverblue CPA networks are all carrying this offer.
Companies like Just Think Media and Pacific Webworks are the biggest clients of the CPA networks and responsible for most of their revenue.
The FTC really needs to go after the CPA networks and their affiliates in a big way if they want to try and stop these scams – as well as going after the companies like Just Think Media and Pacific Webworks of course. But if they only go after the latter then plenty more will pop-up to take their place.
I use CJ and Linkshare and do not find the massive scams as I have seen in groups like Never Blue and others however I do not believe them to be “free” of scams, I also agree that the FTC should go after CPA networks that are promoting these.
So I guess in general I just agree today :)
True – no matter what affiliate network you are using you still need to do ‘due diligence’ and be responsible for what you are promoting (at least if you are an ethical affiliate). I always try and ensure that what I promote represents a ‘good deal’ for the consumer and is from a reputable company. So thinking about it , yes I have come across companies on CJ and Linkshare who I was not comfortable with promoting – so I kept looking for other advertisers.