Having spent years building up a successful career as a reputable affiliate marketer, you better believe I’ve seen more than my fair share of affiliate marketing scams in my time.

On the one hand, this doesn’t surprise me.

The affiliate marketing industry is said to be currently worth $17 billion. So it isn’t much of a shock to discover that such a profitable industry will attract plenty of fraudsters and crooks looking to make a quick buck using underhand strategies and black hat tactics.

Still, though it may not be surprising, it saddens me that affiliate marketing can be a legitimate way to make good money from a blog or website. 

That’s why I’ve put together this complete guide to the eight most common affiliate marketing scams that publishers, content creators, and affiliate marketers need to know about in 2022.

Suppose you’re a blogger or content creator looking to use affiliate marketing as part of a winning blog content strategy. In that case, I’ll tell you about the four biggest swindles new affiliate marketers tend to fall for and how to avoid them.

Top 4 Most Common Affiliate Marketing Scams Publishers and Content Creators Need to Avoid

1. Pay-to-Participate Programs

To understand why being asked to pay to join an affiliate program is usually a scam, it’s helpful to remind ourselves how affiliate marketing works in the first place.

As an affiliate marketer (also known as a ‘partner’), your job is to drive potential customers to a brand’s products or services.

When those potential customers become actual customers (i.e., they make a purchase), you earn a percentage of the sale as a commission fee.

Online retail giant Amazon makes as much as 40% of its revenue from its popular Amazon Associates affiliate program. In comparison, this form of marketing is said to be a top 3 source of new customers for over 50% of brands.

In other words, the more affiliate partners a company has promoted its products, the more new customers it acquires and the more revenue it generates.

So, why would any company want to limit one of its most successful marketing channels by charging potential partners a fee to join its program if that’s the case?

They wouldn’t, so any time you come across an affiliate program that charges you to join to make money as an affiliate, there’s a high chance it’s a scam.

These dodgy platforms usually charge a tidy sum on the promise of exclusive affiliate opportunities with influential brands or extraordinarily high commission fees, then take your money and disappear, generally delivering very little (or perhaps nothing at all) in return.

How to Avoid Pay-to-Participate Affiliate Marketing Scams?

The main thing to remember is that brands and even leading affiliate marketing networks like Clickbank want you to sign up and make them as much money as possible, so they’re not putting you off by charging you a fee.

Yet if you’re convinced that a pay-to-participate program is legitimate, do your due diligence first. Google the platform in question and read online reviews to see what others say.

It may also be a good idea to contact the company’s customer support team and talk to them. If they don’t have support available, that’s your first red flag.

If they do, but you don’t get a good vibe from them, keep your credit card in your wallet and use my guide to the best affiliate marketing programs and marketplaces to sign-up for in 2022, all of which are 100% free to join.

2. Get Rich Quick Schemes

It’s probably only a slight exaggeration to say that get-rich-quick schemes have existed since immemorial.

Even before the Internet, we can go back to the roaring 20s to find examples of fraudsters who promised substantial financial rewards for little-to-no effort.

So while such schemes are hardly new, they’re certainly rife in the world of affiliate marketing and are undoubtedly the most common form of affiliate marketing scam newcomers fall for.

How they work is pretty simple:

Scammers create websites (often, but not always, cheap-looking ones) that make incredibly bold claims promising that you can make thousands -if not millions- of dollars in a short amount of time for hardly any effort.

So, you sign up and get nowhere near the unrealistic return on investment promised. 

You may even find that these schemes are little more than data-theft scams or, worse, are another form of pay-to-participate in which the only people making any real money are those you hand your credit card details over to. 

How to Avoid Get Rich Quick Schemes in Affiliate Marketing?

The old adage that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably certainly applies here.

It’s possible to make an excellent income as an affiliate marketer, but it takes a lot of time, energy, and effort to succeed.

So, no matter how tempting a claim may be, you’ll never become a millionaire overnight.

For me, one giant red flag that sets alarm bells that I’m running into a scam is the quality of the website. Usually, they are poorly designed by modern standards, feature lots of cheap, repetitive stock photography, or maybe riddled with a poorly written copy. 

A legitimate company will always invest in its online brand if they want to succeed and won’t be happy presenting you with something that looks so bad.

After all, if they’re really making thousands upon thousands of dollars for their affiliates, don’t you think they could invest in a better online presence?

Again, use Google. Search for the program you’re looking at and read honest reviews. You may even want to type in “[program name] scam” to see what comes up.

I’d also recommend using Google to find programs to join, as the search engine does a pretty good job of eliminating scams and schemes from its results. 

This is a much better option than clicking on some flashy ad on Facebook or YouTube, where you will find the majority of these scams advertised.

3. Low-Quality Courses 

As someone passionate about helping others to succeed in their online business, it always saddens me to see people getting ripped off by low-quality training courses which, much like get-rich-quick schemes, promise the earth and deliver garbage.

Again, you’ll find a lot of course peddlers on YouTube, probably telling you that they made thousands of dollars in record time using some top affiliate marketing secret that nobody else knows about.

Nobody, apart from people, pays to learn precisely how they did it through an entire course or training program.

Excited, you hand over your hard-earned money only to learn that there is no secret and everything you’ve just read you could have learned for free from any blog or website.

Naturally, getting your money back isn’t an option.

How to Avoid Affiliate Marketing Course Scams?

Look, I’m not saying every course out there is a scam. Some genuine people love helping others succeed, but you’ll find that their claims are far more realistic than those promoted by scammers.

If they’re anything like me, they’ll tell you the same thing I just told you:

There is no secret to affiliate marketing. There’s no magical technique or little-known strategy that only a handful of people are using. Instead, it’s about creating excellent quality content, combining it with relevant affiliate products, and promoting it.

Once again, avoiding these scams all comes down to doing your research.

• What kind of reputation does the course seller have?
• What podcasts/YouTube series have they appeared on? What kind of reputation do they have?
• Is there anyone out there who can vouch for the quality of the course content?

If not, save your money, as you can learn everything you need to know to be a successful affiliate marketer online for free.

4. Fake Sites and Products

Few things are more likely to kill your chances of being a successful affiliate marketer than falling for a fake product site.

Scammers will create websites and landing pages offering products that don’t exist.

Many will promote themselves as an official partner of a much larger brand. At the same time, some will even go so far as to replicate that brand’s entire online store and host it under a domain name that is very similar to the official one, perhaps even one that you could easily visit by accident if you were trying to visit the legitimate company’s website and made a typo in the domain name.

These fraudsters rely on ads and affiliate marketers to send customers to their websites. These customers then buy the non-existent products, meaning the scam artists get their money, and the customers get nothing.

Meanwhile, you’re left with your reputation in tatters because you sent people to a fake website where they got ripped off.

How to Avoid Fake Site Scams as an Affiliate Marketer?

The critical thing here is to pay attention.

Double-check the URL to ensure you’re at the right place if you believe you’re on a major brand’s official website.

Are there contact details? Can you speak to an official company representative about their affiliate program?

If you’re on a site promoting products from another brand, can you find those products in the brand’s catalog?

Do you find anything that would make you think twice if you Google “[major brand name] affiliate scam?”

Pay attention to customer reviews as well. Unfortunately, most fake websites feature nothing but positive reviews, which is something not even the best brands in the world can legitimately say they do.

How to Avoid Affiliate Marketing Scams: A Final Word of Advice

I hate to be the one to say this, but the absolute best way to avoid falling victim to an affiliate marketing scam is to use common sense.

Although we all get into this to make money, the lure of shady programs that promise to make you rich overnight can prove too much to resist for newcomers.

Rather than diving right in, always exercise a note of caution and do your research, only signing up for programs that seem realistic and legitimate, such as the ones you’ll find listed in my unbiased guide to 2022’s top affiliate marketing programs and marketplaces.

Finally, remember that just because you’re not going to be an overnight success, that doesn’t mean you can’t make a legitimate income with affiliate marketing. 
So put the work in, focus on combining relevant products with high-quality content, and an investment in effective SEO, and that success can undoubtedly be yours.