Whenever there is money to be made, criminals and con artist will find a way to turn it into a scam to make what they consider to be easy money. The only way to protect yourself is to know what the scams are and how to avoid them. Billions of dollars are lost each year to scams that are both online and off.

Affiliate Marketing Warning Signs

New affiliate marketers will almost always come across and fall for scams when they are new. Here are a few warning signs of a few common affiliate scams.

- An affiliate program that does not have a website to clearly explain their program and what it does should be ignored. Anyone can create a website, there's no reason that a company who has something to sell should not have their own.

- A common them in affiliate scams is that they will ask you to pay for the instructions to find out what will need to be done before you can start making money. After a while you will notice that the only product is trying to sign up other people like yourself who would like to make money. If that is the only product they have for sale, it is more than likely a pyramid scheme.

- Unlike MLM and other programs, affiliate programs should offer free signup. You are doing marketing the products for the company with a chance to earn commissions. You are not buying the product to sell face to face usually, so there is no reason as to why you should have to pay to join.

- If you have searched the entire website for a way to contact your affiliate program only to find that the information is missing, you should bypass this website. Customer support should be available and if problems arise in the future, how will you be able to alert the company of a lost check or other issues. This could also be a company who will receive sales before they neglect to pay you your commissions.

Affiliate marketing scams like anything else will always start off by offering huge amounts of money for no experience and very little work. You have to remember that if these claims were true, its doubtful that most people would be sharing such a secret.

Many affiliate scams begin with the con artist making claims that he became rich and to find out how they did it, you will just need to buy their ebooks. Once the ebook is purchased, you will realize that it contains information that is free all over the internet. It is very rare that these scammers will even bother to write a book for themselves. Many will steal content from other websites to create their product.

Being asked for a fee to receive instructions on how to become rich yourself is typical of these scams. Once you have paid, you will receive a list of outdated companies or you will be asked to find new suckers like yourself, so that they can pay for the same useless information. These scams have been around for decades, long before the creation of the internet.