Is Affiliate Marketing a Scam? No, and here are 3 obvious reasons why…

The answer to “is Affiliate Marketing a scam?” a resounding NO.

Affiliate marketing is absolutely not a scam, never has been, despite what the internet may say.

And yes, I’m an affiliate marketer, so it’s in my best interests to tell you that affiliate marketing isn't a scam.

But before you click off the page thinking I’m just another B.Ser let me tell you exactly why affiliate marketing isn’t a scam.

Despite many people believing it to be so

A few reasons why affiliate marketing isnt a scam:

It’s free to start, so there are no upfront costs.
You will NEVER have to pay to promote products.
Big tech giants use affiliate marketing to their advantage, like Amazon, which you probably shop with every day.

These are just a few of the reasons why affiliate marketing is obviously not a scam,.

The big two here being because it’s free to start and the fact that people like Jeff Bezos utilize affiliate marketing and associated affiliates for his own business, Amazon.

The reality is, the only people that say affiliate marketing is a scam are the people who could not make it work for them.

They’ll tell you it’s a scam as a way of coping with them failing at this awesome business model.

They might even tell you its just a pyramid scheme, which of course is a complete lie, something ill dig into a bit later.

But these people actually failed, not because affiliate marketing is a scam, but because they either didn’t know what they were doing because they didn’t have a trusted teacher like me guiding them through it or they were just simply too lazy to do all the upfront work needed to succeed.

Yes, shocker, affiliate marketing takes work.

And lots of it.

Just like every business model ever.

Its not a get rich quick scheme, it never has and never will be.

Despite what the ‘affiliate marketing experts’ tell you.

If you’re looking for actual trusted advice on affiliate marketing, how you can get started and see success as soon as possible, then check out the website you’re on right now, Affiliating From Home.

Is affiliate marketing a pyramid scheme?

No – Affiliate marketing is absolutely not a pyramid scheme because when you join the affiliate program of your choice, you will usually do so for free, unless in some rare cases where you might have to pay for a premium service; though you can avoid these programs if you want to (i’d suggest you do.)

A pyramid scheme is a sketchy and unsustainable business model, where top-level members recruit new members to the scheme, forcing these new members to pay an upfront free to those who enrolled them.

Then, these members go off and recruit people, forcing these people to pay to be a part of the scheme.

The original recruiter takes a cut of this money and the rest of it is then split with the people above them in the ‘pyramid’.

The recruiting process of affiliate marketing does not work like this; people are just recruited based on the fact that they get the opportunity to promote products by specific brands, which is enticing enough.

They don’t need to be sold by any false promises like these pyramid schemes tend to do.

And any money that the affiliates do make is based on the products/services they sell, not the amount of people which they bring to the affiliate marketing program.

3 big reasons why affiliate marketing isn’t a scam

1. Its free to start

Although you will have to pay the price of a Starbucks coffee if you wanted to run a website like this one for your affiliate marketing niche, you don’t have to if you don’t want to, there is a free option you can choose to go for instead.

You can create a FREE social media account of your choosing and promote your products on there instead.

I’m not suggesting you spam links to your Facebook friends on your personal Facebook account, although you may make a few sales here and there, these people are probably not going to fit the target audience of the products you’re wanting to promote and sell.

Unless of course you’re an Apple affiliate and you’re friends with rich college kids who want to buy the latest Apple goods, then promote on here like crazy!

But if this doesn’t sound like your sort of situation, then I suggest choosing a niche, creating a brand new social media account on your chosen platform (Twitter/Instagram are great choices), and obtain a large following so you have someone to promote your affiliate products too.

Sounds simple, right?

Sort of – I won’t talk about more about the social media method here, but Its something I’ve written about on this blog before, so check out this article if you’re interested.

2. You won’t need to pay to promote products

Almost all affiliate programs in existence will be free to sign up for, simply because you’re doing them a favor by encouraging someone to buy their products.

They’d be stupid to put up a paywall, especially with all the competition out there offering affiliate programs too.

Although, that does not mean that there are’nt companies out there who charge people to use their affiliate platform.

And if you find one of these programs, I’d tell you to avoid it like the plague.

Perhaps 10-15 years ago when the internet was a much smaller place, you might have been expected to pay a free to join an affiliate program.

But as for affiliate marketing in 2021, there are so many options to choose from you are bound to find an affiliate program that is both going to be free and exactly what you’re looking for as an affiliate in your particular niche.

3. Tech giants like Amazon utilize affiliate marketing for their business

Lastly, one of the obvious reasons as to why affiliate marketing isn’t a scam is because Mr.Bezos aka Mr.Amzaon utilizes affiliate marketing and affiliate marketers like me to sell his products every year, a company which you trust and buy from each year.

Now I don’t want to get into this specific affiliate program right now, because I’ve done that before previously, I simply want to point out if a trusted company like this with such a big reputation was using a scheme to scam people, you really think the media wouldn’t be all over it?

And if it were the case, why would you use Amazon pretty much every week to get your home essentials?

If this one doesn’t change your opinion of affiliate marketing then I dont know what will…

3 Reasons why people THINK affiliate marketing is a scam

As I mentioned in the beginning, there is a lot of misinformation out there, and because of this there are lots of people who generally believe that affiliate marketing is in fact a scam.

And I want to go over the most common ones and ‘debunk’ them right here, right now.

1. It doesn’t work for them

There can be many reasons why affiliate marketing doesn’t work for someone wish will lead them to believe it to be a scam; it could be that they don’t know what they were doing, they didn’t give things enough time or they tried to cut corners and skip some important steps – these are just a few of the common ones.

It’s a natural response for someone to fail something and instead of blaming themselves, they choose to blame anything else.

And in this case, they hastily come to the conclusion that affiliate marketing is a scam.

Whatever helps them sleep at night I suppose.

2. It seems to good to be true

From an outsider looking in, I have to admit, affiliate marketing does seem too good to be true because I can totally see the thought of earning money from anywhere in the world, by simply having an internet connection and having a decent grasp of the English language does seem impossible.

But the fact is, there are many affiliate marketing out there that are doing this right as you’re reading this.

Sure they may not be Jeff Bezos rich, but they are pressing keys on their keyboard and getting paid to do so, whilst bringing happiness to their clients who may have found a life-changing product thanks to them.

And I’m living proof of this reality too.

I didn’t belive I’d get to this point when I got into the affiliate marketing game, but I’m glad I did.

3. They’ve had a poor experience with an online ‘guru’

This is an unfortunate one, but one of the sad reasons as to why people think affiliate marketing is a scam is because they’ve had a bad experience with an online ‘affiliate marketing guru’.

These ‘gurus’ tell their ‘students’ everything they want to hear; how to get rich with affiliate marketing – which we both know isn’t true.

Essentially they sell them some quickly made, terrible put together course, stick a huge price tag on it and promise people it will make them rich.

And as mentioned, affiliate marketing isnt a get rich quick scheme, so this of course doenst happen.

So what happens is these people pay for this expensive course, inevitably fail at AM and instead of putting all the blame on this ‘guru’ they instead believe affiliate marketing is a scam.

Which also means these people who spent their money on a crappy course could of instead spent it building a website, hiring writers to create them content, and could of easily began building a sucessful affiliate marketing business.

But no, they call affiliate marketing a scam, and then proced to work their soul sucking job for the next 30 years of their life before they retire.

Is affiliate marketing legal?

From where I reside (USA), affiliate marketing is completely legal just as it is in many different countries such as the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

Although of course just like with any sort of business, there are some things that I have to comply with if I want to make sure I can do this completely above board and avoid any legal disasters down the line.

This includes following the rules laid out to me in the GDPR, PIPEDEA and making sure that any customer details that I may collect are done so with the up most of care and with the customer being in the know about what details I may or may not store.

On top of this, I will also need to disclose any products that I actually do advertise, the same way YouTubers have to let you know about whether or not a product or service they’re using in a video is paid for or not.

I won’t talk much more about the legal stuff behind affiliate marketing, since I’m no expert, though there is a great resource I’d like to point you to if you’re interested: Affiliate Marketing legal considerations.

So, is affiliate marketing a scam? Summary

No, affiliate marketing is not a scam, and hopefully if you were someone who just wondered or perhaps someone who thought affiliate marketing was a scam, I’ve managed to change your opinion on this to the right one.

Of course, there is no shortage of bad publicity about affiliate marketing thanks to online gurus, but hopefully, if you’re someone interested in getting in the affiliate marketing world, you can now trust that there are good people (not to plug but people like me) who have all information and tools you need to become an affiliate marketing success story.

Tzhis article was first published on www.affiliatingfromhome.com/ which you can find here: Is Affiliate Marketing a Scam? No, and here are 3 obvious reasons why…

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