Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Affiliate Junktion. Scam? my final word (I hope)

<<<<< EDIT: my latest blog on Affiliate Junktion is here - You can find more up to date inforamtion on Affiliate Junktion here.>>>>>>


To save you time, I'll start with the summary and work backwards.

Is Affiliate Junktion a scam? Legally speaking I think it walks a fine line, but what you probably really want to know (legal or not) is if it will make you money. Sorry, it won't ((EDIT: Oops, di I say that ??? I'm now making €100 a day with it!)). What qualifies me to say these things ((EDIT: Good question! seeing as how I was WRONG!).

  1. I tried Affiliate Junktion and lost money. Later, after I had learn't more about google adwords and just to make sure I hadn't missed something, I tried again (and lost a little more money) I did this purely to put the Affiliate Junktion saga to rest safe in the knowledge that I tried sufficiently.

  2. I am a tech guy, and learn very quickly. I am well capable understanding the system and following it correctly.

  3. I don't work (I make some income off the Internet – but not with Affiliate Junktion, with sites like www.youtukan.com and www.reicohnearbeit.com), so I have plenty of time to promote the system.

  4. I am a successful businessman who has already retired (in my early 30's)

  5. My businesses were Advertising businesses.

  6. This blog is genuine, It started out as some ramblings about Apple Macs etc and then I found Affiliate Junktion and decided to give it a go. I blogged the whole unhappy experience.

Ok whether you believe me or not just understand one important concept. Don't be quick to believe positive comments about Affiliate Junktion. Making a blog is easy. If you owned Affiliate Junktion, you would make some blogs to sing it's praises and inform people “its not a scam”?

Likewise the new recruited Affiliate Junktion members do the same. The believe if they give Affiliate Junktion a rave review they in turn will make convert a customer and receive a commission from Affiliate Junktion. How can you believe anyone who says they are making any sort of commission is genuine when they have a stake in saying that?

Internet copywriters know about this. They understand if you read “it's not a scam” and “I'm making...” enough, then you will start to believe it. Internet scams pray on your underlying will to believe. If someone says they are making a lot of money and they will show you how, we all want to believe it. We want it to be true.


But here are the facts about Affiliate Junktion:

  1. Payouts are only made after your Affiliate Junktion commissions exceed $150, I would be willing to bet, that its about the time that people reach $100 in commission, they realise they are spending more money on advertising than they are receiving in commission (ie running at a loss) that people quit.

  2. All payouts are in $NZ dollars (about US$.816292 – but the kiwi dollar is at an all time high)

  3. Prices of advertising for fast money making schemes are soaring on the back of all the new affiliate program members. You can try to get cheaper clicks by using other keywords, but then your targeting the wrong people and can expect very few to join off your affiliate link.

  4. Not only are the clicks hard (or expensive) to get, but getting someone to click a second time to follow your affiliate link to the Affiliate Junktion website reduces the amount of raffic even further.

  5. Legal grey area: If a person offers you something for free and then requires you to make a purchase in order to get it... I'm no lawyer, but I think that means it's no longer (legaly) free, this has many implications, false claims being the mildest of them.

*If you want to know how Affiliate Junktion (and other similar affiliate schemes) works, I debunked it here. Behind the scenes of Affiliate Junktion is a really good piece of software called Post Affiliate Pro which can be used to make you own genuine affiliate program for your product or service and is used by many genuine companies. It's probably the most useful thing I learned from Affiliate Junktion.

The last thing I want to say before I put this experience to rest. is that if you have had a bad experience about Affiliate Junktion (or any other Affiliate program) write about it. Helping people from falling victim to scams is hard on the Internet because so many people are lying to help boost the image (to try and get commissions) that bloggers who tell the truth won't necessarily get heard.

Good luck dodging the sharks infested waters of online money making.

Here are some links of note.

My previous posts on Affiliate Junktion:

Aftermath of an online opportunity

What makes Affiliate Junktion (and others like it) tick?

Affiliate Junkion Scam or Truth a real test day 1

Day two Affiliate Junkion scam or truth

Day three Affiliate Junkion scam or truth

More on Affiliate Junktion



11 comments:

Eastman said...

Thank you Teknoboy!
You just saved me time and money and i now realise that i should just focus on starting my own company as planned, instead of wasting time with online schemes that takes me nowhere.

Great blog, thanks!

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing your experiences with affiliate junktion amigo...
I can see that AJ is not really a free to join affiliate program and it's not advisable for newbie internet marketers like me.
I think Affiliate Junktion is a legal scam just like MLMs.

Aardvark said...

Yes, it's a scam. I have just written an expose' on AffiliateJunktion and the man behind it in my daily blog at: http://aardvark.co.nz/daily/2008/0404.shtml

Rest assured that the tax and other authorities in NZ are now aware of this person's activities (and it looks as if he was probably also behind Affilate-Inc, albeit using a different alias).

Anonymous said...

Hi,

Thanks for being the good samaritan. You are doing a valuable service to Internet users. Keep it up, Tekboy! You saved me in the nick of time from losing some hard-earned money. Thanks again!
MM

Ydiana said...

Hi Teknoboy

Thanks for sharing this experience. I came acoss their add and was wondering whether I should sign up. My instincts gets the best of me and I googled first. Glad I did....

Tekno Boy said...

@ydiana and everyone else.

It would seem I'm a hypocrite, but I now appear to be making money with Affiliate Junction (although as I write this it is the first month I'm over the payment threshold and can't confirm payement until after 30th May when I'm due for payment from Affilate Junktion).

I left all my older blogs to show that it may not be for everyone.
Definitely read this blog:
http://teknoboy.blogspot.com/2008/04/affiliate-junktion-scam-test-re-loaded.html

Anonymous said...

Hi,

Thanks a lot for your valuable information I was going to open an account @ AJ and just took a Google search to find out about it.

Great blog, by the way.

Thanks a lot again.

Menol
[ menol.blogspot.com ]

Unknown said...

I joined affiliate junktion with big dream of making money, Initially paid up $59 for ipower account, later on received a webpage from affiliate junktion which they told me to host into the domain with ipower, they told me start advertising with google adwords and yahoo search marketing did every thing as per the instruction, I spent about $2000 in advertising, I started in april and got NZD 300 paid on september, almost after 5 months, my affiliate junktion account was showing that i had earned NZD 1591 but they paid me only NZD 300 explaining most of my leads where unsubscribed.

summary of my business
total expenses for 4 months $2059
got returns NZD 300, just imagine you work hard day and night spend so much of money on advertising and finally get paid only 10% of what you spent, by the time you realise, you would have spent a lot of money only to make affiliate junktion rich, every body gets fooled in the beginning, you should rise voice against these guys, I its one of the biggest leagal scams

Anonymous said...

Thank you Tekno boy for you information. I think because of your efforts they have close their website and move for some other business. They can easily set up another website and bring traffic all around the world becuase they have billioin of people around the world who have opt-in email during sign up.

I have earned commission for NZ$ 20,000 for 3 months and insted of paying me money they just disqualify me.

Pleaese be inform about these cheating people and please do continous research on them. they might come wiht new programs because they have billion of people opt in email id and they will try to fool the people once again.

Anonymous said...

After I bought into the scam with the hosting plan from another company, I never got my login info. After months of unanswered emails, I got fed up and used 4 letter words to describe my feelings about their scam. I finally got a response! They just threated to ban me from the service and I never got access to use it after all that. NEVER USE AFFILIATE JUNKTION!!! SCAM OR NO SCAM!!!

Kenny said...

Thank you so much. Keep posting.