Are you looking to jump into an affiliate marketing course but want to find the best course available so you don’t get ripped off?
Right now is an AWESOME time to get into affiliate marketing. Not only because there is still TONS of money to be made – but also because there are some awesome legit Affiliate Marketing training courses out there to teach you the ropes.
Unfortunately, there are still LOT’s of courses that are nothing but a money grab that is either recycled trash or is filled with outdated info that you could find anywhere else on the internet.
Even worse, there are plenty of people out there selling courses they know are outdated and filled with information that will do nothing but WASTE YOUR MONEY!
Over many years, I have literally spent THOUSANDS of dollars on a wide variety of affiliate marketing programs...most are a complete disappointment.
But what sucks for ME is good for YOU because now I have first-hand knowledge of what marketing courses out there are great and which are less than average. So hopefully we can help you save money by avoiding some of the real stinkers out there.
These courses have been carefully curated since I become an affiliate marketer back in 2016. Most of these digital marketing courses were not available back then. I had only discovered them in the past two years or so – which coincidentally – is when affiliate marketing started to really take off for me.
I totally revised the affiliate marketing training list in early 2024 to reflect which courses have held up the best, and which ones haven’t.
Here are the 3 best affiliate marketing courses available to become a successful affiliate marketer.
Authority Hacker’s The Authority Site System 3.0 (TASS) isn’t just another affiliate marketing training course.
TASS 3.0 is the brainchild of Gael Breton and Mark’s Website who used to run) the popular Health Ambition blog. They also run another successful affiliate website and have a popular podcast.
I got turned on to Authority Hacker from listening to their excellent podcast and hearing their story of how they went from using PBN’s to rank websites to completely white hat techniques after losing all of their income after getting a Google penalty.
After that, they went completely white-hat (although it can be argued that intentionally building links is technically grey hat). They focused on building great content and reaching out to other bloggers to get links to their own sites.
The Authority Hackers TASS course is very organized and well laid out for beginners. Authority Hacker has three different courses:
The awesome thing about the Authority Hacker courses is that it is a one-time fee, and it is updated all the time. In fact, they just re-released version 3.0 of The Authority Site System, and it is completely free to everyone who paid for the 1.0 version. That is truly a refreshing way to do business for a digital product!
The parts of the course that I found most valuable was around content creation templates and outreach templates. These are the exact templates Mark and Gael use to make high-quality articles and reach out to other bloggers to get FREE links back to their sites.
Learn more about TASS 3.0 and get a limited-time discount of $400 by clicking below.
The Affiliate Lab (TAL) really blew me away. I couldn’t help but wish that this online course had been available when I first started back in 2016.
The course creator Matt Diggity is a well-known blogger in the internet marketing community for sharing his insights, especially when it came to building Private Blog Networks (PBNs).
However, Matt has really moved away from focusing solely on gray hat link-building techniques and launched his own outreach services called Authority Builders a few years ago.
TAL doesn’t pull any punches when teaching you what you need to know to build a successful affiliate website in 2024. Using his extensive knowledge in all things link building, TAL really provides a comprehensive look at all the best ways to build links to your site for the long term.
The Affiliate Lab even has an entire mini-course called the Outreach Masterclass with over 65 videos teaching nothing but whitehat techniques.
From niche selection to content creation to buying and flipping websites – there isn’t one topic I can think of that TAL doesn’t cover in detail.
If you are looking to make a start with the Affiliate Lab, we have a special $200 discount that you can use right here:
Income School’s Project 24 is a course I purchased a few years ago solely for review and comparison purposes.
It is the brainchild of Jim Harmer and Ricky Tesler.
In the past had seen their Youtube channel and might have watched a video or two, but I have to be honest, I wasn’t really sold.
They seemed like nice guys, but they seemed almost too nice that it seemed a bit off to me. It wasn’t until a friend of mine was talking about the course that I decided to take a closer look.
That friend of mine is just like me and has tried so many different products out there... he is just as jaded as I am. So when he actually recommended something, I knew it had to be special. I simply bought the course and jumped straight in.
I jumped into the program and was instantly hooked. The course is very professional and well done. It is a great course for beginners because you don’t need to spend any money on extra tools or services, perfect for those without a big budget.
Check out my Income School Project 24 review here.
Income School Project 24 costs $449 annually.
Project 24 is reasonably priced, but you have to pay to keep the course yearly. I don’t normally like this type of system, but it is not unreasonable given the number of updates.
2022 Update:
The website I made using Income School's techniques from about 2-3 years ago has become pretty stagnant. Although initially ranking and generating affiliate commissions it quickly slowed without continued regular attention (and to be fair, more than I was willing to put in for my chosen products).
So, if you're a more serious affiliate marketer, you will definitely benefit more from The Affiliate Lab or Authority Hacker.
This area is for those affiliate marketing training programs that are good but didn’t make the Top 3. These are solid courses, but I would only recommend them for people in certain circumstances.
Ahh good old Wealthy Affiliate (WA), this was the starting point for many affiliate marketers. Some look back at it and laugh; others look back at it and are thankful for what it gave them.
If you spent a minute looking at an affiliate marketing blog, you have no doubt come across “WA as the #1 way to make passive income online.”
However, this is simply not true. The real reason people promote them so much is because of their generous affiliate platform and payouts.
That being said, WA is not a bad place to start if you don’t already have a website and hosting because their membership comes with website hosting included with their training.
WA is good for people who need their hand to be held step by step, but this can be annoying for people who already know about content marketing and SEO.
WA has a monthly webinar, and new features are constantly being added. But the actual material inside of their course is fairly old and needs a revamp to keep up to date with better digital affiliate marketing courses.
You can read my full review here.
Wealthy Affiliate costs $19 for the first month and $47 per month afterwards. You can also it for $299 for the year on black Friday
I wanted to include Affiliate Secrets 3.0 in this post because it is different from the rest of the courses as its main focus is NOT on building a website.
Yes, you can be an affiliate marketer WITHOUT building a website. Spencer Mecham built his successful digital marketing business mostly using CPA marketing with AdWords and YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. Spencer is one of the top affiliates for Clickfunnels, and it’s been estimated he makes over $100k per month from Clickfunnels alone.
While most courses focus specifically on Google search the main idea taught through AS is to use free and paid traffic – like Facebook ads and Google ads to go after offers with good payouts.
This means that you won’t be using a typical affiliate network like Amazon affiliates.
To get the most benefit out of the course, you should be comfortable being in front of a camera because YouTube is a great free traffic source. If you are camera shy (like me), you can still benefit from Affiliate Secrets 3.0 ideas and teachings, but it may not be effective as you probably won't put it into practice.
The cool part of this course is that you can incorporate what it teaches you with what you learn from other courses to give you an edge over your competitors who might just be relying on Google search.
Affiliate Secrets 3.0 currently costs $1,497 and unfortunately there is no free trial available.
Nobody wants to get scammed...ever! It's no different when looking to invest in a course for your future, you must be vigilant.
Buying so many crappy courses over the years has taught me a few lessons on what to look out for and how to avoid getting ripped off when looking for an Affiliate Marketing course. Here are my top tips to avoid getting scammed…
This is the single biggest thing I look for when buying an affiliate course or any course for that matter. It is also what I try to make hustlelife.net – a trustworthy source for affiliate marketing information.
The #1 way to find good courses is through people that you trust. For example, when my friend Arnold told me that Income School was a good course, I didn’t even read the sales page or look for testimonials before I bought the course.
It didn’t take me long to figure this one out, but be VERY wary of websites that only recommend one product as the “#1 best way to make money online”.
The fact of the matter is that there is no #1 product to make money, and if you look at their other articles and they are all recommending just one product – this is a good sign that this website is motivated by money and not by helping you make an informed choice.
If you are like me, you probably use YouTube to find out how to do things. YouTube is great if you’re looking for things like how to fix a toilet or how to install a door.
But for things related to SEO, it is not so great because there are a lot of sales pitches disguised as informative videos.
I have seen many people put together a flashy video and call themselves an affiliate marketing guru that promises easy passive income...but are they simply wasting your time and money?
Then they use the big dashboards of their affiliate commission from their own course as “proof” of how good they are as a marketer. They then get you into their sales funnel by offering a “free affiliate marketing course” and then use paid ads to try to get you to buy their course.
It is a self-propelling cycle that people can get caught up with if they don’t know the “game.”
If you are tempted to buy a product from a YouTube personality just because you look at them and they seem like nice people – STOP and ALWAYS do your research first!
Did your momma ever tell you, “if anything ever seems too good to be true, it probably is?” Well, the same thing applies to affiliate products.
NEVER buy anything that promises you anything that offers you anything that seems like it solves all of your problems.
If you want to be successful in your affiliate marketing strategy – you want a course that covers all the bases and will give you at least enough knowledge so you can make your money back.
Before buying an affiliate marketing course, it is always a good idea to see what other people think of it. This includes not only websites like this one but also Facebook and Reddit forums.
So if you are learning about one of these courses for the first time, I am telling you to do more research for yourself!
Get all the information you need to make a GOOD, INFORMED buying decision. But when you do, make sure to reward the blogs that give you real information by clicking through their affiliate link (even if it’s not mine) because you should reward REAL reviews and not ones motivated only by money.
Hello, I am Jeremy Harrison; I first started online marketing in 2016 by trying out a few different things. The first thing I tried (and failed) was doing drop-shipping.
I then tried publishing books on Amazon, which I ended up doing fairly well with. However, this didn’t last for very long, and I got into affiliate marketing almost by accident.
I knew that my Kindle Publishing business wasn’t sustainable, and I needed to learn a different skill. That is when I took my first affiliate marketing course called “AM Revolution.”
At the time, I was absolutely blown away by what I learned. It all seemed so easy, start up a Youtube channel, start up a Facebook page and WordPress website, and write reviews about products that I used (and didn’t use).
Believe it or not, I almost instantly started to make money! Even though I really didn’t understand what I was doing, I started making money, and I thought I had it all figured out.
I was making around $700 a month just with a YouTube channel! I caught the wave of finding the right product at the right time, and I had the results to show for it.
So I decided to start a blog, thinking that if I could do what I did on YouTube, I would be able to easily double my income.
Unfortunately, this didn’t happen. My website was atrocious; I couldn’t BUY a visitor to my site. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong.
I then read a review for CB Passive Income and how you can have a “turn-key system” that can make you money just by duplicating Patric Chan’s “business” system. I set up a landing page, started an email list, and started buying solo ads to enter my funnel so I could start profiting… and that didn’t work.
I soon realized that the whole system was a sort of Ponzi scheme, where the “business” you were sending traffic to was… CB Passive Income! I literally bought a course that taught you how to get other people to buy the same course you just purchased!
After that, I discovered Wealthy Affiliate. I learned about writing to get your articles discovered and ranking highly on Google and the importance of doing keyword research and competitor research. Once again, my mind was blown away because this was THE FIRST TIME I ever heard of these things.
I again thought I had it all figured out and went full steam ahead on my blog. I thought I had a cool brand and a cool logo, and it was only a matter of time until the money started rolling in…
Unfortunately, it was just a trickle. My articles were now showing up on Google and getting some traffic here and there, but they weren’t ranking HIGHLY.
“Imagine if I were able to get on the first page for this term, then I would REALLY be rich!”
I then stumbled across this guy strolling around YouTube in a BATHROBE. “Who the f*!? is this guy, and is he really expecting people to take him seriously?”
But from watching his videos, I was INSTANTLY hooked. Dan Brock – The Deadbeat Super Affiliate. I still remember the video like yesterday, “Buy Expired Domains: Private Blog Network SEO Tip” It was a video that led me down a DEEP, DEEP rabbit hole that I am only now starting to come out of.
“What is a Private Blog Network?” I thought, so I clicked on the video, and I was hooked. Buying expired domains to get instant search engine rankings? YES PLEASE!
I bought the Dan Brock’s course for $29, and I was ready to start ranking. I learned that backlinks or links were essential to getting your website ranking.
“No wonder!” I thought, “That’s what I was missing”...
I was building sites, but I wasn’t building links to my sites. I was missing the key ingredient!
It was toward the beginning of 2017 when I first bought the course, and I ignored that it was already a couple of years old. After all, how much could things change in a year or two?
It turns out A LOT can change, and buying expired domains and Fiverr links isn’t enough to rank a site these days…
I did some more research on Private Blog Networks and heard that you could rank sites just by using them. Then became familiar with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and realized that to rank sites in competitive niches, you needed a lot more than Fiverr links.
I then decided to go on a learning binge, and I bought about 30 courses on Udemy on everything from affiliate marketing to social media marketing. I really wanted to “get” this online marketing thing.
Unfortunately, most of the courses were a waste of time, and I swore off ever repurchasing a course.
I then went down another rabbit hole and discovered Bluechip Backlinks by Terry Kyle. This program cost $99 per month, which would allow you to find an unlimited amount of “powerful” expired domains.
I was excited to find this and went all in. I probably purchased over 100 expired domains only to later realize that they were mostly “toxic” domains that actually lowered rankings instead of raising them. The training was beyond scattered and confusing and was missing some critical pieces of information.
After that, I started to look for real experts and got into Matt Diggity. From there then started following Lion Zeal and went down the path of grey hat SEO.
I later realized that I was a bit over my head with information. By that point, I had taken around 15 different courses, all on affiliate marketing – and all saying different things.
But that didn’t stop me. I then took another course by a guy whose last name rhymes with “Bloate” and learned more about backlinks and tiered link building – but I later realized most of the information was useless, and he was more of a snake-oil salesman than a true SEO expert…
At this point, it was the middle of 2017, and I was very bitter about the experience in general.
However, at the same time, my sites were starting to rank. I felt like I stumbled and fumbled my way into actually having some success.
Towards the end of 2017, I became aware of Greg Jeffries through some Facebook posts praising his SEO Affiliate Domination. I was instantly intrigued as other people were recommending his course in Facebook groups without any prompting.
I decided to check out his course, even though I didn’t really do much research on it other than looking at his website and checking out some of his impressive dashboards.
He just came across as a genuine person, not a know-it-all type “guru” who had all the answers. I took his course, and he had all the tactics I already knew at that point with PBNs, a bunch of tools, and writing SEO articles.
If I hadn’t already taken 30 SEO marketing courses, I might have been impressed, but I felt like I had already seen most of it and was sort of disappointed.
But just for shits and giggles, I decided to make one of his churn and burn style sites from an expired domain I had that wasn’t doing anything and immediately started making a few hundred dollars per month.
I still didn’t think much of it because it felt sort of spammy. But I tried it again on another domain, and then things really started taking off for me. These churn and burn-type sites began making more money than my regular affiliate sites, giving me some breathing room to experiment with different things.
From the beginning of January 2018 to around October, I decided to reinvest in learning even more about Amazon affiliate marketing and SEO. I took several additional courses and got some high-level YouTube coaching to take things to the next level.
The one course that really stuck out was the Authority Hacker course. It showed that using PBNs really is not the be-all-end-all for ranking sites.
I learned that your content should be good enough that people actually want to link to it. So it completely changed the way I thought about writing content and earning links.
In November, I bought the Income School Project 24 course which forced me to rethink affiliate marketing yet AGAIN. The real takeaway from the course was that focusing on obtaining backlinks takes away from the time and effort you could devote to making great articles and earning links naturally.
This made a lot of sense to me, but there are some limitations to this way of building sites, especially in more competitive niches.
Going into 2019, I had a bunch of sites that were making over $1000 per month, and I thought I had finally cracked the code!
Unfortunately in 2020 after becoming a super affiliate and winning a Clickfunnels Dream Car, a few of my sites got hit by the dreaded May Google algo update and then again by the December update.
What it taught me is that there is no such thing as passive income in this industry. To be successful, you have to constantly keep learning and keep investing in yourself and your websites.
That is the reason so many people try and fail in digital marketing. Most people are drawn to the allure of easy money but get disappointed when they realize that the best affiliate websites are those that treat it like a real business.
I hope my story gives you a better sense of where I am coming from and shows that when it comes to testing out affiliate marketing courses I have been there, and done that.
If you think there is an affiliate marketing course that isn’t on the list, that should be on here please let me know in the comment section below!
If there is a really shitty course that your unhappy with, please let me know what it is in the comment section!
If you have experience making affiliate sites or want a complete course on the whole process, you can’t go wrong with The Affiliate Lab.
If you want to get started and like really high-quality production, Authority Hacker TASS 3.0 is your best bet.
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Jeremy Harrison started this blog to share his journey and encourage other ambitious solopreneurs. He shares his highs and lows from experience with Amazon KDP, affiliate marketing and eCommerce.
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.