Don’t believe everything you read in this wonderful arena called the social internet.

Something I’ve noticed across multiple social networking sites is that a majority (not all) affiliate marketers will either lie or stretch the truth to get you to become part of their scheme. Every single one of them claims to be “the next big thing” on the internet and by getting in now you’ll make millions. The problem with that is all these big things are old things with some spit and a quick shine.

The truth is that there are a lot of ways to make money online:

• Legitimate business sales
• Product sales
• Ad revenue
• Paid blogging

The catch is that all these things require a special secret ingredient that MLMs and affiliate marketers seem to forget, originality.

Here is a classic example of what an affiliate marketer will do to make money.

1. Sign up to a site.
2. Create affiliate links to their ‘product’ or ‘ service’
3. Spam their links and propaganda
4. Deny doing any of this

What happens is they get a small percentage of the profit made off of that product or service if you buy it.

*Disclaimer* Affiliate marketing itself is not bad at all and in fact can be a great way to make an extra buck. It’s the ‘marketers’ that give it a bad name through their slimey methods and they’re spoiling the web with it.

Here is another example of an affiliate marketer, basically being stupid.

Inside Affiliate Marketing Says:

Hey nice blog my friend. Affiliate marketing is the fastest growing business in world. However its not that easy as it looks. Obviously you need advanced knowledge about affiliate marketing. If you are dead and broke , you can learn most of the startup tricks via marketing forums.

I’m sorry but I couldn’t have said it better myself. This was a comment on my previous post about affiliate marketing, which if they had actually read they would have seen it was speaking against affiliate marketing.

So here’s my nugget of gold for the day. Breath it in, swirl it around a bit, maybe gargle, and spit back out into a ceramic pot to keep for later usage. Social media is THE tool to meet people of like minds from all over the world and communicate in real time. That is all.

As more and more people look for the “easy solution to making money”, they find themselves exploiting affiliate links on their favorite social networking sites. Unfortunately these social networking sites are also yours and my favorite social networking sites. It’s sad to see the fruit of the web rotting in front of my eyes and, unfortunately, there is little I can do about it. CAN-SPAMM laws only protect us from e-mail spam (or try to), but will there be a move to protect your favorite social media site? One can only hope. If the educational fiber of sites like Plaxo, Facebook, etc gets permanently tarnished to the point where you can’t weed out the legitimate from illegitimate posts, then i might have to resort back to books :0 (god forbid).

What kills me is that affiliate marketers that exploit social networks don’t believe they are spammers. Well, I would let that slide if I wasn’t getting links shoved in my face for “Air Conditioners” inside a “Help Zimbabwe” group. Others try and say that the community “will benefit from these products”. Well, honestly, I think the marketer is the only one that benefits from these products and I guarantee you I could find a cheaper, better quality product than whatever your getting paid to promote.

So please keep your spam *cough* I mean affiliate links on your own websites and out of my networks. And, to all of the innocent, none the wiser, social media participants who DO want to purify they’re network groups, don’t be afraid to speak up.

*Note: For all the Plaxo members who have fallen victim to these links all you need to do is click the ‘hide’ button under the users link which you believe to be spam. Hopefully over time the spam will go down and we can clean up our community.