My PayDotCom Experience

This is article documents the time I devoted to affiliate marketing.

For those of you who’ve not heard of affiliate marketing then you can read a much better description of it than I could ever give you here, courtesy of Wikipedia.

This was a more expensive venture. I had been trawling the website and found a site that claimed to make me large sums of money per hour. After looking through this website I decided to Google the company to make sure it wasn’t a renowned scam.

After deciding it wasn’t a scam, I signed up. It wasn’t a large amount of money; around the £15 mark (I can’t remember the website). After receiving my login details, I entered the member’s area. My initial reaction was disappointment. The member’s area wasn’t especially well presented and wasn’t exactly full of information.

This particular site had “5 easy steps” to make your money within the member’s area; this corresponded to 5 web pages. I hope you can imagine my disappointment; I had paid around £15 for access to 5 web pages. Badly presented ones at that.

In a nutshell, these pages told me to setup an account at paydotcom. PayDotCom is a website that gives you access to a massive list of companies that will pay you a commission for any customers you send their way and buy their products.

In the next step I was told which companies to promote and the ways in which to promote them. To promote these companies I was given a list of advertising websites on which I was told to post adverts in their business sections. These adverts generally went along the lines of:

“Earn up £300/hour! Follow this link to find out more....”

If someone followed the link, and signed up for the advertised product, I earned my commission. In order to earn a decent amount of money one would have to post adverts for many products on many advertising sites.

What I have described above is what I paid about £15 for! Please don’t make the same mistake.
Now for the problems with this money making idea:

1) The number of other adverts you will be competing against. Here is the home page of a free advertising website. Take a look at the number of adverts in the business opportunities section; they’re over 100 pages of adverts here. If you click on the business opportunities link you will see on the first page a number of featured ads, these adverts have been paid for to get such a good placement. There are over 25 pages of featured ads! Do you really think someone is going to scroll through this many ads in order to find your free ad? I highly doubt it.

2) Almost all ad sites will only allow your ad to run for 30 days. This means for every advert you create, and for every site you place that advert on you will need to renew it every 30 days. This may not sound like a big deal, but imagine if you’re advertising 5 companies on 5 different ad sites (you will need to be advertising on way more sites than this) then you will be re-writing your ads 25 times every 30 days...very tedious.

3) You will receive a great deal of spam. I mean loads. After posting ads I got emails saying people had replied to them. These replies where in the form of people sending me emails asking me to join their schemes. Highly annoying. Again, set up a separate email if you plan to do this.

Needless to say, I didn’t make any money with this. I promoted 3 companies on about 20 ad sites. This took a great deal of my time. Nearly all ad sites require you to register (name, address, etc) and then you have to enter your ad (this isn’t just a simple copy and paste either). Doing this for every site, for every ad, and then for every time you need to renew the ad takes a great deal of time.

I decided this was not worth the effort after about a month.
Another online money making idea that proved no good. I lost my initial investment and god knows how much time.