Back in January, I introduced you to a little white paper called The Great Affiliate Marketing Sham which the author offered as a product preview for his upcoming product. I later used the report as an example in a marketing lesson.

Although I wasn’t overly impressed with the author’s offensive approach and foul language, I summarized the report as being a “worthwhile read”, noted that “the point that he makes about how SMART Internet marketers use affiliate marketing channels is absolutely bang-on” and I looked forward to reviewing the final product for possible promotion.

The author however took great exception to my marketing lesson… greater than I realized until yesterday…

Yesterday I received an email from PayPal notifying me that Factor X Marketing, LLC had finally paid for leads that I generated for the report. Payment took almost FIVE months!!!

That isn’t the worst of it, however. When I tried to log in to my affiliate account to confirm that the correct amount had been paid, this is what I saw…

“Sorry, you can’t login because your account has been disabled”

Wow! So, of course, I checked my links and they no longer worked and were being redirected to a page on 1ShoppingCart.com.

Hmmm.. imagine what would happen to affiliate marketing if a merchant disabled affiliate accounts any time an affiliate had a less-than-favorable comment to make about their product.

Fortunately, this is a one-in-a-million occurrence and can be attributed to the fact that this merchant is a liar, thief, scam artist and extraordinarily over-sensitive little boy who can’t take a lick of critical comment. Poor him.

What do we learn from this? That we shouldn’t make honest, un-biased product appraisals?

No.

What we should learn is:

• To regularly check our affiliate links to make sure that they are still working, and to remove links that no longer work immediately.
• Furthermore, when your gut tells you that the merchant may be a scam artist, don’t affiliate with them.
• Lastly, do whatever you can to alert other affiliates to the scam.

Any other suggestions? Please post your comment below.