Affilorama has been around for years and is the course many respected affiliate marketers used to get their start. We take a deep dive into what we think of this popular affiliate marketing course.
Has lots of good content mixed in with content that badly needs to be updated.
Monthly costs are a bit steep, but includes hosting and other useful tools.
Mixture of text and video training. Easy to navigate but feels dated.
Support is responsive and has a pretty active forum.
If recent statistics are anything to go by, affiliate marketing is not dead. On the contrary, it is thriving but if you’re looking to make money via affiliate marketing, you’ll have to move with the times. Successful entities in this sphere understand the need to constantly change the game if they wish to continue finding goldmines.
If you’re a blogger/solopreneur, chances are, a significant portion of your online revenue comes from passive income via the promotion of online services and third-party products. If this isn’t the case, perhaps you need assistance? If so, or else you’re a newbie, there are a variety of programs designed to help. Affilorama is one of the best known but is it worth your time and money?
See the best affiliate marketing courses here.
It is an online course created by a famed affiliate marketer, Mark Ling, back in 2005/2006. It is effectively a one-stop shop for all your affiliate marketing needs. It is initially free to join and its information should prove useful to neophyte and experienced marketers alike.
The training lessons come in the form of blog posts, long & detailed articles, and videos. It is theoretically possible to earn a six-figure income from scratch if you utilize all the tools Ling lays at your disposal. Affilorama’s community exceeds 300,000 people globally at the time of writing and with affiliate marketing also set to grow, it seems certain that Affilorama will follow suit. Let’s take a look at what’s on offer.
At the time of writing, the site offered five packages including its much-vaunted Free Membership option. It used to include Affilotheme, a premium WordPress theme, for $97 but it has been absorbed into the AffiloBlueprint package.
What sets Affilorama apart from most of its rivals is the depth of great information you receive for free. Once you sign up, you receive instant access to the following:
Overall, there are over 20 hours of free content. While there is plenty to like about getting lots of information for free, we were a little surprised at how much of it is outdated. If we were cynical, we would say it is a case of getting what you paid for!
You could argue that this membership is Affilorama’s flagship product. You can begin by investing just $1 for a 30-day trial and then it costs $67 a month.
As you can see, there is a 60-day money back guarantee for extra peace of mind.
What we really liked about these initial packages is that you have lots of time to absorb the very useful information before committing financially.
We recommend eking everything you can from the Free Membership before the upgrade.
However, it is the Premium Membership option that gives you the information needed to hang with the professionals.
With Affilorama Premium, you receive the following, among other things:
As well as being available with your Premium Membership, AffiloTools is a standalone product designed to help you boost your search engine ranking. Please note, we don’t recommend utilizing AffiloTools unless you’re a relatively experienced marketer with an up and running website.
If you’re an affiliate marketer that doesn’t track data, you’re making a huge mistake. You can connect AffiloTools to a Google Analytics account and keep track of the following information:
There are four options ranging from the Free ‘Basic’ account to the ‘Gold’ package which costs $97.
As you can see, the Basic option is fine for newcomers to affiliate marketing as it monitors one website, ten keywords and two search engines per site with monthly ranking retrieval. Clearly, you’ll need to upgrade once your business expands.
According to the site, its Jetpack option can “earn you a huge income on autopilot” and it’s yours for a one-time cost of $997. However, click on this Affilorama link and you receive a $250 discount! Mark Ling also offers two guarantees:
With Jetpack, you receive a variety of tools including:
Ling believes that you can create your business in less than six days when you use Jetpack, compared to the minimum of six weeks it takes you without it. Also, you receive Jetpack in 18 profitable niches which certainly increases your chances of success. To sweeten the deal, Ling allows users to choose five websites in five different niches.
Ling makes some pretty incredible claims when trying to sell Jetpack. For example, he suggests that the ‘big shots’ go through a seven-step process and if you follow his instructions to a ‘tee’, you could earn up to $20,000 in a single day! For the record, the process looks like this:
Despite what Ling claims, you have to put a lot of work into your business even if you purchase Jetpack. While it does have a host of useful tools, it is not the ‘magic bullet’ that Ling claims.
Ling claims this is a ‘foolproof’ blueprint for creating profitable affiliate marketing websites.
Once again, this is a product backed by a 60-day money back guarantee. For a fee of $197, you have lifetime access to hundreds of informative videos that show you how to create your site, write excellent content, and ensure it ranks well. Ling suggests that his system is:
One of the best aspects of the Blueprint is that you’re given ‘homework’ after each lesson which is tremendously helpful. Here is a quick overview of what to expect with the Blueprint:
As a bonus, you receive AffiloTheme which used to cost $97 by itself. It is designed to help you create beautiful looking websites that include SEO-friendly layouts. There is a total of six themes in one so you have the flexibility to develop something special.
The Free membership is very helpful for newcomers because it contains plenty of useful information. Its content is well-laid out and easy to follow, even for those with no affiliate marketing experience. Of course, if you’re vastly experienced in this industry, there is probably nothing new in the content.
Mark Ling IS a well-known marketer with 14 years’ worth of experience and he brings it all to the table. Therefore, you know that Affilorama is most certainly NOT a scam. You learn the following without paying a cent:
However, and we can’t stress this enough, you WILL need to invest money in Affilorama if you want to bring your business to the next level. The Premium Membership option is where the best information is located and you can pay just $1 for a month’s trial. We were very impressed by the amount, and quality, of content received and believe it is well worth paying the full price of $67 a month. If you follow Ling’s advice, you will make your annual fees back in weeks or less!
You also receive a reasonable level of customer support. Get in touch with the Affilorama team via phone or email. You can also go to the forum which is fairly active. For example, at the time of writing, there were a few replies within the last 24 hours on different topics.
There are numerous positive testimonials on the website and online. Customers enjoy:
Incredibly, Ling and his Affilorama team have done nothing to eliminate the outdated information that has been on the free version of the program for years. In some cases, members are warned that the content they are reading or watching is out of date.
Why doesn’t the site remove it? Examples of outdated content include information on creating PLR (Private Label Rights) articles and creating backlinks. PLR content is nothing more than copied content and while you can tweak it to avoid search engine penalties, it offers nothing to your visitors.
To be fair, backlinking is still an important aspect of SEO, as long as it is utilized correctly. Things have changed in this sphere. Once upon a time, adding a ton of links from anywhere on the Internet increased your search engine ranking.
Today, backlinking is more nuanced. Relevancy of links is crucial but is only part of a more complicated SEO tactic. We don’t believe that Affilorama’s information on backlinking is up to date in the free version. You need to pay for the Premium membership if you wish to get a better handle on things.
We were also not impressed with the additional fees and the confusion over pricing and what you actually receive. For example, AffiloTools is supposed to be free with a Premium Membership but it is also available as a free trial with Blueprint. Marketers have also complained that Ling sends them emails promoting services and products from known scam artists. This does nothing for his credibility.
Overall, it IS worth your time and effort to join Affilorama. We advise you to spend as much time as you need absorbing all of this useful information before deciding whether or not you wish to upgrade.
We believe that the Premium Membership option is essential for serious affiliate marketers and $67 a month is a bad price to pay in our opinion. It is a bit more expensive than Wealthy Affiliate, but has more useful features.
If you wish to move to the next level and have money to spend, the Jetpack and Blueprint packages are fine options but you have to decide if it is worth the cash. For example, a $997 one-time payment is a lot of money to throw away if you don’t get the most out of it. On the flipside, if you get it right, four-figure days are a genuine possibility.
We're An Affiliate - We are reluctant to allow advertising on this blog, which we believe will spoil the user experience. Instead (so that we can continue sharing our knowledge and expanding our content), we have decided to include affiliate links for the products that we use and/or rate highly.