Do you feel comfortable with the company or companies you represent as an affiliate. I would caution to take a minute and think about that. If you work at home for yourself do you have a legitimate affiliate home based business?

In this article we are going to talk about what happened to me and how I now understand why representing legitimate affiliate programs is so very important.

When I first set out to make money online in the fall of 2002 everything was foreign to me. I certainly did not have a website of my own and even sending email was a chore. It didn’t bother me because most of my friends were not any better than me and I was willing to work and learn as I went.

What I quickly learned to like was the concept of affiliate marketing. Because I did not have any products of my own I liked the idea I could get paid to sell products for companies and get paid for it.

I was an outside sales rep that had built up one of the largest territories in the country selling over $3 Million a year in products. I had a solid customer base that ordered from me on a regular basis. it was pretty close to residual income, so I decided to look for affiliate programs that could create residual income.

Finding things to sell that people buy and then pay for every month was a little harder than just selling products like eBooks, leads. or clicks. Selling hosting was a good affiliate program because people who build a website and host it for any period of time usually will not drop it. So the commissions come every month just for making one sale. I liked that.

Flash forward to the fall of 2007. I have my own full time home based business now. I have a website that ranks very high on Google bringing me great traffic. I am an affiliate for Google Adsense which brings me easy income when people click on ads on my site.

I am an affiliate for Max Bounty and earn commissions when people fill out short lead forms online. I have joined several affiliate programs that earn me residual income like the Plugin Profit Site, My Power Mall, SFI, Host4profit and others.

In 5 years now I get paid every month on time because these companies are reputable. Think about that for a moment. Why is it important?

1. You work hard to make sales so you deserve to get paid for your efforts.

2. You never deal face to face with the companies you represent so you have to trust that they will pay you.

3. Your customers trust you to deliver what you say you will and you rely on the affiliate company to back you up with that.

The internet is full of scam artists and companies that are not reputable. I have a pretty simple formula for how I deal with that. Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice shame on me.

In five years the only company to stiff me out of my commissions is Article Marketer. They offer a article submissions service, which I sold because I used it and I liked it. That is another criteria I use on my main affiliate programs I represent. I like to be a customer as well as an affiliate which allows me to pre-sell from a perspective of first hand experience.

Article Marketer is not a legitimate affiliate business for several reasons.

1. They do not pay on time or at all.

2. They ignore emails from their affiliates leaving you hanging high and dry.

3. They continue to let you make sales for them and then they keep all of the money knowing they will not pay you.

Number 3 is probably the worst. You work hard to make sales, you put their banners on your website, blog, inner pages, ezine ads etc. so it is very hard to go and find all of those and replace them. It’s great for them because you just keep making them money!

Thankfully there are way more legitimate affiliate programs than there are bad ones. In my case being stiffed out of almost $1000 dollars in commissions hurt, but it is not the end of the world.

It just reinforces the importance of trying to know more about who you represent. Do you due dilligence if it is going to be a major part of your business. To run a legitimate affiliate home based business your reputation and income depend on it!