Spotting the Affiliate Scammers: Part 1 – Guide Websites
As I mentioned on my previous post; when I first started there were only a couple of guide websites around which offered to link you to offers and provided information to get started on matched betting for a monthly subscription fee.
Since then I’ve been amazed at how many new sites have started up all offering promises of indepth information and excellent customer support. What has been surprising is the completely different levels of quality of these sites. Some look extremely professional with very extensive guides while others look like they’ve been thrown together in 15 minutes with a load of copy & pasted content.
Some of these sites even offer to give you the information for free as long as you are sure to click through their affiliate links for all of your signups and offers.
The problem with these new guide websites is that alot of them have been created by people who have little or no experience with matched betting and are producing/copying content without any understanding of it. A great example would be a recent Paddy Power offer which involves placing a horse racing bet several days in advance in order to then get a free bet on the day. Anyone who has been betting a while will know that placing a racing bet days in advance is a massive red flag to the bookie and likely to lead to a swift gubbing.. however the amateur guide sites will happily publish the offer and talk about how much profit they will make you.
Another problem with these new sites is that they are often being created by one-man bands as a side business. I run every guide site I come across through the Whois lookup which gives you details of the site owner. Surprisingly alot of the new sites are being created by individuals without any registered business accounts and through Googling turn out to be university students. I’d question how they are going to be able to provide a decent level of support and if the site is even going to still be operating actively in a few months.
My advice would always be to stick to one of the ‘big 3’ guide sites (PA/PM/OM) who have a proven track record of producing original content with excellent support.
7 thoughts on “Spotting the Affiliate Scammers: Part 1 – Guide Websites”
Hi Guy, Just subbed and really enjoying your blog and tips, do you still do any coaching or even just a chat? Im brand new and looking for some advice.
Thanks for all the info.
Cheers
Daniel
Hello Daniel, Thank you for your kind words.
I don’t offer any formal form of coaching anymore as it was taking a long time to mostly just reiterate the information given through Profit Accumulator. I’m happy to answer any questions you may have though and please feel free to post them in the comments here so that others can benefit from the information as well. If you would be more comfortable though do feel free to email me directly: guy@matchedbettingguy.com
Thanks for the reply, just wanted to know a bit more info and advice on keeping my accounts as long as possible really. I have not started yet apart from the very first Coral offer so still under the radar but i wonder if you use any thing like Jolly Lock and also how much mug betting do you do per offer?
Thanks again
Hi Guy, saw your post about matched betting on reddit and now I’m here.
I like your ideas and even learnt a lot from you.
Do you mind if I tranlated and post some of your betting content on my website?
Of course I will credit you.
Thanks!
Hello Matt,
Sure, no problem as long as I am credited and a link provided back to this site
Hi mb guy, I recently started my own matched betting blog/ guide site and I also have some affiliate links on some of my guides, I am literally trying to figure out how to make a disclosure for my site as I’m very new to the whole website malarkey. I just want to say that I don’t fully agree with you about the majority being just in it for the money etc, at least I hope people don’t think that about my site. I just thought I could offer easy to understand guides and some that maybe are not discussed for various reasons on some of the big sites, if my affiliate links pay enough for my web hosting etc then I will be happy.
Hi Oddssmasher,
I like your optimism! However from my experience a majority of the sites I’ve come across have given out bad information or mislead about their affiliate links. It’s an interesting point that UK law actually requires affiliate relations to be disclosed and yet a surprising number of the guide type sites do nothing of the sort. I’m glad to hear that you are going to be open about it.