Free Affiliate Insider - R.I.P.

I thought I would have to put this post up here today as I still get lots of comments on my original post about Free Affiliate Insider, and about 95% of it is NOT GOOD. I am also subscribed to a thread about the program and Michael Beeson over at Yedda, and I urge you to have a read of it.

When I made my first post, I had just signed up with the program and had to overcome a few stumbling blocks, and the first 2 months or so it looked it might be a legitimate program, but after my own experience and reading through all the comments here on my blog and on Yedda, this is my final verdict of Free Affiliate Insider:

SCAM. Do not sign up for it. It’s not worth your money or the hassle.

If you want to make money on the Internet and you are serious, be prepared to put in some work by learning how to set up and manage your own website or blog, and you can be very successful. I mean you are trying to make money online, and that is only possible through websites/blogs, that’s the name of the game. Don’t you think it would be worth learning how to do that? There is no quick fix, and certainly not with Free Affiliate Insider. It takes a little bit of effort and time to get in the game, but it will be worth it to learn it yourself as then you yourself will be in control of your online business, not somebody else.

With this in mind, and knowing that most of you won’t have all that much money to spend on training manuals etc, I urge you to sign up for Affilorama, which is a FREEtraining and community site for aspiring affiliate marketers. Here you get taught everything about building a website or blog. Affilorama “… was founded in 2006 by well-known super-affiliate Mark Ling, and features step-by-step lessons, interviews with gurus of the internet marketing industry, a bunch of useful affiliate tools and a lively forum.”

I am subscribed, and I think it’s a wonderful site with lots of support and tons of free material and training to achieve success in affiliate marketing.

So, to be clear: I have officially put my site DietReviewCentral from Free Affiliate Insider on my pile on the office floor that gets no attention from me any more. Done and dusted, R.I.P. I have made sure that there won’t be any more future charges to me in any way (renewal of hosting or domain), and just let it run its course now.  If you have signed up for more than one year of hosting, it might pay off to ask for a refund of some of the hosting fees ( it’s not worth it for me because my hosting company for that particular website does charge a cancellation fee which is about as high as the hosting for one year ). Also, have a think whether you could use your domain for another – better – website which you will build yourself. After all, if you sign up with Affilorama, you will learn how to do it!

I wish you all the success you deserve.

Honestly, I did absolutely not believe that this could happen, after having been burnt so many times. So right now it looks like everything with Free Affiliate Insider is ok and back to normal. So my alarm bell is still on high alert, but I am not in panic any more. I will monitor this site closely over the next few days and see what happens.

So, to Michael Beeson, if the 403 – Forbidden access was simply a problem with the hosting company, I hereby duly apologize for thinking that your program was another scam. But on the other hand, if there are problems like that, a simple email to all your members telling them about what’s going on could prevent something like this from happening in the future. Fair enough?

I will keep you all posted should any new “things” happen here.

Internet scams

IMPORTANT UPDATE on 17 February 2008: All sites are back up and running, Free Affiliate Insider had a problem with the hosting company, but everything has been resolved now. This is my genuine apology to Michael Beeson and his program – they are the real deal and I am still a member Michael emailed  me personally and I do understand that me thinking I got scammed has caused some problems for him. So with this I want to let all of you know that it looks like I was wrong! – Petra

30 June 2009 – You wonder why I deleted my comment above? After hearing all the comments on this blog, and reading personal emails some of you guys have sent me about their experiences, I feel that I should take my genuine apology down. I cannot say with certainty that Free Affiliate Insider is a scam, but now I can honestly say that it is not a program I want to recommend to anyone. Leaving the apology up would feel to me like I am misleading some of you into believing that this program will deliver. I do not want to give anybody that impression. If you are interested what others have to say, please read on. Petra

******************************************************

15 February 2008 – I am sure that nearly everybody involved in Internet and Affiliate Marketing even just for a short time will have come across some forms of  Internet scams. I guess it’s just the “normal” nature of what we do – the spammers come with the territory (unfortunately!).

The reason why I am starting to post about Internet scams now is because it looks like I personally have been had – once again! I say “once again” because – I admit – it has happened before and I am quite flabbergasted that it should have happended again, even though I thought I have learned so much over the last year and a bit. Talk about being blue-eyed (I actually am ).  (No, I am not saying “and blonde” now because I would be shooting myself in the foot – ’cause I am! ).  – Hey, you can stop grinning now!

Anyway, back to what might be another Internet scam. Last month I got this email advertising the setup of a Review Website in the weight loss and diet market, and a guarantee of $100 within the first few I don’t remember (days, probably).  The program advertising it was called “Free Affiliate Insider”. The sales page read quite good, so I thought, why not, I’ve got nothing to lose, let’s try it. So I signed up and went through the setup process. Had a few small hickups along the way but noting major, so after spending around $47 for a years hosting and a domain name, my site was built and went up live. So far so good.

The site was all about the reviews of different types of diets and offering free trials of diet pills and potions. It was actually quite good, I was supposed to earn money every time somebody went through and signed up with one of the offers. I could log into the Affiliate Program and check my stats and earnings. And yes, I was starting to see some visitors to my site, and after a few days there were the first $100  as promised (BTW, payout threshold $200…).

But here it goes: Yesterday, I wanted to log into my Affiliate stats and check out traffic and earnings, and all I got back after typing in the URL was the error message “403 Forbidden – you don’t have permission to access /partner/affiliates/index.php on this server.” I got the same thing when trying to view my website  DietReviewCentral. What the #@**# was going on??? After digging a bit deeper, I have found out that the account of Free Affiliate Insider with iPower Hosting has been suspended. BANG – the red warning light is on right now!

Because their hosting acount has been suspended, and they have redirected my domain to their server, I cannot see my site any more. Really, why am I so trusting all the time?? At the moment now I am trying to cancel my hosting with the host I signed up with in the process, and to get at least part of my money back. Thank god I didn’t invest any more!

But is this really an Internet scam? – At the moment I don’t know yet, all I can say it doesn’t look good. My alarm bells are ringing, and I am on high alert. I guess I will have to see over the next few days how things progress and what happens next. BTW – if you clicked on the links to the sites I provided, of course you saw nothing else but the “Forbidden” message – I told you so!

Now, the guy I was in contact with during the whole setup process etc. was a Michael Beeson. I am now starting to wonder whether this guy might actually be the same guy that did a program called Affiliate Junktion, which turned out to be a real scam. His name was Michael, too. I can’t remember his last (fake) name.

So please, whatever you do in Internet Marketing, if you come across offers that you like, take the time to suss them out properly, don’t just hop in and buy like I did, more often than not you will regret it. Choose wisely what you do with your hared earned money.

I hope you will appreciate my honesty here, because this doesn’t make me look all that good (like – “how could I have been so stupid?!”), but I just wanted you all to know about it and hopefully it helps somebody else NOT to make the same mistake.

You can also check out my blog post “My First Venture Into Making Money Online” for some more gruesome internet scams.

I would love to hear some comments!