Another Day on the Darkside of …

… “Affiliate Marketing” is the completion of this posts title.

I checked recently the trackbacks that were flagged as spam by the filters for my ReveNews.com blog. I do that from time to time out of curiosity. Next to the usual “PPC” (Pills, Porn, and Casino) spam were there also spam messages from a so called “affiliate marketing professional”.

He spammed from Christmas Eve to the days after Christmas. The advertised pages reside on Cliconomics.com. Promoted on the site are “great” eBooks that might be valuable because of the money spent on them, but certainly not regarding their value for somebody who would like to learn more about affiliate or internet marketing.

I would not consider eBooks such as “Affiliate Project X”,”Day Job Killer”, “AdWords Miracle”,” The Rich Jerk” and “Google Cash” prime reading and I suggest to anybody who reads this post, not to waste your money on them. There are unfortunately not many good quality eBooks out there, like the ones by James Martell, Jeremy Palmer (who stopped selling it since October 2007, unfortunately), Rosalind Gardner or Joel Comm.

He also promotes software like “SEO Elite” and “Keyword Elite”, which are old “friends” and target of another trackback spam case, which I wrote about back in March last year.

There was no reference on the site, what the name of the expert is. The “About Us” page shows under construction. The Links page is funny, because it refers to ClickBank, ClixGalore and Trackback Spider by Jared Croslow (the tool that he probably used to spam the ReveNews.com blog). It is funny, because none of the links are affiliate links; ClickBank has a referral program, just FYI.

Well, I did a quick “whois” check and voila, there it is, Charles Haywood from Columbia, South Carolina. Dude, if you are resorting to spam, then spend the few extra dollars per year to keep your registration information hidden. Well, he also tried to demonstrate authority by putting up a badge from eZineArticles.com to signal that he is an expert writer. The problem is that anybody who creates an account at eZineArticles.com can get the badge. He did not include a link to his expert writing, but that was not too hard to find either.

He wrote one article about affiliate marketing and how to make money by writing an affiliate marketing eBook. He recommends that you just search for “affiliate marketing ebook” in Google to find good results. Sorry mate, your site only made it to rank 48, which results in virtually zero traffic. Position 34 in Yahoo! is better, but still not enough, and nowhere within the top 1000 in MSN or Ask will also result into zero traffic. The trackback spam was also caught by filters easily, which is probably the norm and not the exception – no luck there either, buddy.

Let’s see what the expert has to say about the subject. Here is the conclusion from his article.

“Affiliate marketing is perhaps the cheapest and easiest way to start making real money on the internet. The good news is that affiliate marketing is not that difficult once you’ve adopted and mastered a few essential techniques. The time to learn these techniques, however, is before you launch a marketing campaign, not after it is in progress. To avoid costly mistakes, find the right affiliate marketing ebook eBook that will give you the strategies and techniques you need to know to generate massive profits as an affiliate marketing professional and catapult you to the top of the affiliate marketing food chain.”

I am not surprised about the misconceptions and prejudges of people towards affiliate marketing after reading statements like that. It also demonstrates that the quality control of free to publish article directories is somewhat questionable.

“Charles Haywood is an affiliate marketing professional who prefers actually doing affiliate marketing over writing ebooks eBooks…so, instead, he buys a lot of ebooks eBooks.”

… and he happens to sell some too, how convenient.

The only good piece of advice in the whole article is this one.

“But BEWARE: Just because an eBook is popular or a big seller, doesn’t mean it is the best choice for you.”

He has another 83 domains or so and I hope he will be smarter when it comes to monetizing them.

This is just another bad example of why affiliate marketing has a bad name. Using tricks, deception and spam will not get you anywhere but a place called “trouble”. If you want to become successful, be prepared to work hard for it. Affiliate marketing is not easy, but there are many information and tips out there, many free, that can help you to avoid mistakes and to grasp some concepts that are important to be successful. Read sites like Shawn’s AffiliateTip.com, ReveNews.com, and CostPerNews.com. Check out online forums like ABestWeb.com, 5StarAffiliatePrograms.com or WickedFire.com.

I also made a post back in March that might be helpful and put a collection of mostly free resources for newbie’s in the space on my website.

Just as information about my post from March 2007 titled: “A Day on the Dark Side of…“.

ClickBank never responded to my emails when I reported affiliates who severely violated their terms of service and/or the law and industry ethics, but the sites I mentioned; getkeywords.org, keywordssearch.org and easykeywords.org are down now.

The owner of those domains, Mr. J. Ting, owns 357 domains so I guess he and his partners are still jamming and spamming. It’s a pity and makes it harder to overcome the reputation problem of this industry. If you are a successful and ethical affiliate marketer, do something to improve on that without thinking about how much commission you will get out of it immediately, because the immediate reward is $0, but the long term benefits will be priceless.