Scam or Legit? Checking on an Affiliate Program
There so many affiliate scams out there it is hard to wade through the pages and pages of reviews, promotions, products, blogs to try and figure out if the affiliate program I am interested in is a scam or not.
That’s when an idea came to me – there is an old website that has been active for years called the WayBack Machine. I used it years ago for fun when the internet first became popular and also to retrieve a website I published years ago and did not back up. The WayBack machine archives web pages and you can go back in time to view web pages that have been taken off the internet. WayBack machine also keeps certain information and statistics on a web page, including when the web address became active or crawled by WayBack.
Recently I have been promoting Wealthy Affiliate and giving other product reviews as well. If I review a product and put my own "stamp" on it as being legit I not only want to join the program but check out as many facts as I can in order to be as honest as possible. I do not want to take word of mouth of others, email claims or testimonials (for example: “I have been using this product for XX years”) for fact without a little fact checking of my own.
I decided to give a visit to the WayBack Machine and check it for myself. In the search menu I entered www.wealthyaffiliate.com. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the website has been active since 2006 per WayBack capturing and that the WayBack machine has actually captured and archived the website “75,125″ times from “2005 to 2017″ (as of the date of this blog)! This information was free and worth checking on. I feel that my "legit" stamp on my review has been validated once more by an outside source. I was happy to get the confirmation I was hoping for. Operating successfully for 12 years you can make certain assumptions. Consumers are very savvy now.
While this one technique is not a 100% indicator that any particular program is not a scam, it is one tool that does help validate legitimacy. Using this tool along with other methods, will help you decide if a website is legit or a scam.
The WayBack Machine in addition to offering some free information now also offers subscriptions to view those archived web captures if desired.
Recent Comments
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thanks for sharing -- that tidbit of information helps me moving forward in my searches for validity.
Yup, WA started as a keyword subscription service. It has gone through many iterations in its day.
It is thoroughly legitimate.
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