This may come as a shock to you, but affiliates who employ spam tactics often find themselves on the receiving end of the ban hammer. It’s not as if they are being discriminated against, or that the affiliate network itself is shady, but rather the leads and sales that they generate are poor quality, and the merchants who work with the affiliate networks have to deal with the consequences.

No, Craigslist spammers aren’t well regarded in the affiliate marketing community. I don’t maintain an opinion of them, be it good or bad, as I believe that there are ways and methods to earn an income from every possible source of traffic, and people have been using Craigslist as a very lucrative cash-cow. Bravo.

Spamming Criagslist may create short term profits, but if you plan on developing an affiliate business that is sustainable in the long term you are going to have to learn to branch out and conduct other marketing methods successfully.

I really got to thinking about this when a reader sent me a video that was associated with the Rich Jerk’s new venture, Rich Jerk Evolutions. The video was rather anemic, literally going over the spamming process step by step. It showed you every little detail, down to how to create an auto-responder with Yahoo e-mail accounts. It then went over the sale of a fictional dog, and sent any responders to a ClickBank hoplink.

This tactic is probably one of the easiest ways to make a buck online, but any half-decent affiliate network will ban your account the moment they realize what you’re doing. With other methods of free promotion existing, such as article marketing or SEO, why someone would resort to this type of marketing is beyond me. A quick buck, maybe, but it is definitely not sustainable in the long term.

If your affiliate account gets shut down in the future, don’t freak out and start posting on forums about how X affiliate network is a scam. Focus on your marketing- why were you shut down? If you operate on Craigslist, you already have the answer.