AffiloRama Review 2020
If you have been looking for an in-depth Affilorama review it is likely that you are just starting to learn affiliate marketing, but you are not sure where to start. Is Affilorama a good place to start? And if so, which package you should buy into? There are a variety of Affilorama packages ranging from free to $997.
In this guide I’ll help you to get some clarity over Affilorama and how to start affiliate marketing in general.
Quick Summary
AffiloRama
Affilorama is a great place to start affiliate marketing. The free learning material is thorough, giving you plenty to digest and to get your head around online marketing and affiliate marketing in general. I love the fact that Mark Ling (the founder of Affilorama) is an advocate of giving value first – the sheer amount of quality material on the website demonstrates this ethos better than anything. (Even though some of the stuff is kind-of outdated and/or not particularly unique).
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So if you head over to AffiloRama.com and you like what you see, do not hesitate, join Affilorama for free. No risk whatsoever.
Affiliate disclosure:
I AM an affiliate for Affilorama. My recommendation is purely down to the fact that I honestly think that AffiloRama has some decent products that are useful for new affiliate marketers, albeit AffiloRama is NOT my #1 recommendation for someone who would like to start affiliate marketing. You can assume that all links on this page are affiliate links of products that I recommend. For more details please have a look at the Affiliate Disclosure.
So let’s have a detailed look at what you will get for free, and what you will get if you pay.
AffiloRama Review
In this Affilorama review:
- Affilorama – review of the free content
- Affilorama – review of the packages
- Affilorama Pros & Cons
- What Others say about Affilorama
- My recommendation versus Affilorama
Before jumping right in, just one thing. Affilorama tends to change the subscription packages and the products quite often. Other Affilorama reviews that you may have seen, even the ones that were updated in 2019, may talk about completely different products and prices. The free stuff that’s available today is one of the bests on the internet. SO pay attention.
I consider this Affilorama review a snapshot of Affilorama today (early 2020) – in terms of products and prices.
Affilorama Review | Free Content
Blueprint
Prime example of the constantly changing product range. I few months back the Blueprint was a paid-for product ($47 if I remember correctly). Mark Ling has decided to turn it into an e-book and give it away as a freebie. Very nice of him!
The blueprint is packed of useful, valuable information, but to be honest – similarly to everything in this niche – will only be able to reach its full potential if you implement those techniques, tips and tricks.
Right now, you can get the AffiloRama Blueprint if you register a free account. The link is sent via email.
Quick-start Guide to Affiliate Marketing
If not for the Blueprint, this 32-page e-book in itself makes it worthwhile registering to AffiloRama. Its super-informative, easy to understand and tells you everything you need to know about affiliate marketing.
As it is an ebook, it obviously has its limitations in terms of how easy it is to apply what you learn. Although, even if you already know most of the stuff about affiliate marketing that this book details, you may find a few helpful tips and tricks on how to actually start affiliate marketing, rather than just reading about it.
I honestly think that others would sell an ebook like this for $15-$20 on Amazon, because it is such a professional piece of work.
Along with the other resources I recommend under Resources and in this article – Where can you learn affiliate marketing for free? – it is a golden piece of content that really helps get the ball rolling if you are on a budget and have little to invest apart from your time and brainpower.
AffiloRama blog articles (free information on affiliate marketing)
Some of the articles are quite useful, but there are a lot, that – sadly – are very outdated. I did not go through all the free articles, and most of them are ‘evergreen’…but a proper overhaul of the information shared on AffiloRama really can’t wait any longer.
Just one example: ‘Latest SEO techniques’ was written in 2014. Although keywords are still keywords, and competition is still competition, but SEO has changed a lot since 2014. (Think about the importance of E-A-T – Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness – the principle of all SEO nowadays.)
In that regard, the free information and training available at Wealthy Affiliate is much valuable and up-to-date, despite that their training library has some older, less relevant content as well.
AffiloRama | Pathway to Passive
Pathway to Passive is a reading-based training. For a ridiculously low price (with 60-day money-back guarantee) it gives more than other – much more expensive – training courses provide you with, in terms of theoretical knowledge.
There are a lot of stuff detailed in the material that you can apply to your existing website too. Pathway to passive is not just for complete newbies, but for more ‘experienced’ affiliate marketers too, who may want to improve their affiliate sites.
Without copying the salespage entirely I would just like to highlight a few things. Pathway to Passive teaches you;
- How to select a profitable niche
- How to attract the right (ie. ready to buy) people
- How to generate traffic (free and paid), including keyword research
- How to create a sales funnel to increase sales
- How to earn backlinks (to improve SEO)
And a lot more. For the price it’s really a ridiculous amount of knowledge, there’s no better word to describe it, it really is a no-brainer.
Unless…
- you prefer a webinar format video guide-type training
- you have already read ‘everything’ on affiliate marketing and did not get you anywhere. Another textbook won’t make any change to that
- you are ready to take action but still don’t know how. That analysis-paralysis won’t go away, unless you take a course that focuses on taking action.
If you are ready to take action, my #1 recommendation is Wealthy Affiliate.
So again, Pathway to Passive is a great training course with a lot of valuable information. But if you have been struggling to find out how to start affiliate marketing step-by-step, P2P may not be the most ideal training course for you. Keep it in mind, because a lot of stuff it talks about will make much more sense later, months down the line when you will be comfortable creating websites in WordPress, you can set up your plugins and widgets etc.
Sadly, P2P is NOT the course that will teach you that…partly because there’s another AffiloRama product called AffiloJetpack, that is designed to take the need away to learn all that ‘fluff’ by offering ready-made websites that you only need to fill up with your thoughts (ie content).
But before jumping onto reviewing AffiloJetpack, let’s have a look another product that can be used with the free membership level, but you can also subscribe for the more advanced version for a monthly fee and have a shed-load of tools in one hand.
AffiloRama | AffiloTools
If you already know the ‘theory’ part but you need the right tools to do the job, AffiloTools is designed for you. It’s not really a tool for affiliate marketers, but for any online marketer in general. A limited version comes free with your membership (you basically need an email address to register with).
Its a keyword tool-meets-analytics, meaning that it automatically tracks your rankings in greater depth and in more search engines. It makes it easier to see results of SEO efforts, so if you are constantly analysing Search Console then it is a great tool to get real insight of ongoing changes in terms of rankings, popularity, impressions, competition, location.
So if you find it somewhat difficult or complicated to dig deep into your data with Google Analytics and Search Console, AffiloTools has it all-in-one.
If that’s not enough;
- You can connect your FaceBook and Twitter accounts, to track social media outreach
- You can connect you ClickBank account, so you can track your affiliate sales (at least the ones through ClickBank)
Having said that, I am not sure that you need this sort of in-depth view. To make any analysis worthwhile you need data. The more the better. And data in this example is viewers and their behaviour.
If you already have visitors to your website (or through social media), you must have figured out something already.
If you don’t have visitors, AffiloTools won’t miraculously get you more. The less ‘data’ you have, the more likely any analysis would give false results and may send you in a completely wrong direction.
Actually, unless you have a brand new website, the only way to fully leverage AffiloTools is to allow it to access your Google Analytics account, so that it could pull the data off GA.
To be completely honest with you, I was not prepared to allow AffiloTools access to my Analytics account, given that some of that information is quite sensitive (ie keywords I rank for, traffic volumes etc.). I manage a handful of websites under my Analytics account, and AffiloTools wasn’t very clear on what data it required access to.
But anyways…
I managed to add keywords manually (you can add up to 10 with the free account), and AffiloTools would keep track of those keywords in 2 search engines from now on. This can be quite useful, and you would not normally get this feature with a free tool.
If you have a new website, it is absolutely worth setting AffiloTools up. If you struggle to get visitors, it is still worth setting AffiloTools up, but don’t expect miracle. It may help you understand why you don’t get as many visitors as you want, so you can plan the next steps.
If you ever get stuck, there are at least 2 links on top of every page that link to the relevant training module.
In terms of value for money…
So the free account is a great add-on for anyone. Yes, you can have everything that AffiloTools offer anyways through other, free (or paid) tools, but you can only have the insight on separate platforms. AffiloTools has it under one roof.
If you have one or more websites, and you need that sort of detailed monitoring on a weekly / monthly basis, then it’s definitely worth paying that $17 – $97 a month.
AffiloJetpack
AffiloJetpack is your shortcut to a successful affiliate marketing business. According to Mark Ling. I must admit, AffiloJetpack is quite unique on the market, not necessarily in a good way. It feels a bit like that when everyone zags, AffiloJetpack still zigs.
AffiloJetpack is a done-for-you package of ‘everything that works’ in affiliate marketing. Mark Ling has picked the ‘successful’ and most lucrative niches for you. You are given the website for it. They give you the content. What else you need?
I am not a great fan on done-for-you affiliate programs or websites, because building a brand, building an audience, building authority cannot be done by a copy & paste method.
It sounds like it is a money-making machine to earn you income on autopilot. Sounds too good to be true? I’m with you…
Let’s have a look what’s inside the AffiloJetpack box:
- You can choose between 18 tried&tested profitable niches.
- 90+ pre-written emails for your autoresponder sequence. The copies are written by professional copy-writers to maximise conversion.
- The freebies / giveaways to get people subscribe to your email list (although the example on the AffiloJetpack website is far from being GDPR compliant: you should not send anything to your subscribers that they have not consented to. If they give you their email address to download a pdf, you are not allowed to send 90 (or even 1) more emails by law.
- A website on a premium WordPress theme. Hosting included for the 1st year, domain not included.
- Article cheat sheets and ‘research done’. So you still have to write the articles, it is just made easier for you.
What You Must Consider?
In terms of costs, you must add the cost of your autoresponder (although there are cheap or completely free autoresponders – see Resources for my recommendation for the best ones for every budget). This is typically around $30-$40 a month ($400 a year)
You must also buy a domain name ($15 for a year), and from the 2nd year, you must factor in the cost of hosting of your WordPress site (for free hosting solutions I recommend SiteRubix, Wealthy Affiliate’s own premium hosting service).
Despite that AffiloJetpack states that you don’t need to worry about Google Rankings, it is not true – unless you are happy to run paid ads.
As the ‘articles’ are more or less done for you, you don’t need to worry about keyword research. Again, except if you’d like to rank on Google.
But you won’t learn keyword research with AffiloJetpack.
The problems with every done-for-you package is that you compete against others who have bought the same package. Although there are 18 different niches you can pick from, I can guarantee that whichever you choose there are already hundreds who have chosen the same niche. And they used the same article ‘cheat-sheets’, were given the same research material. They have access to the same ‘goodies’ or ‘baits’, and the same email sequence awaits the visitors on the other side, etc…
So it all boils down to how good you are at adding the personal touch, at writing ad copy, and what your budget is for running ads on various platforms.
On the other hand:
- You can always add you own article with a personal touch
- You can always add a few update-emails to the sequence, to earn the trust of your readers.
- The done-for-you website is a great way to show you how it’s done, so that you can replicate the method (not the ‘end-product’).
- You have 60 days to simply change your mind, if you don’t like the AffiloJetpack system. No questions asked.
- Mark Ling also offers a lifetime ‘Total System Failure’ guarantee. So if you do everything by the book, yet the money does not start rolling in, you get your money back.
Is AffiloJetpack Worth the money?
With the money-back guarantees I just mentioned, it currently costs $997. If you are on a budget, you probably think that this might not be the investment you are after.
Although there are cheaper training courses, those are very much DIY, compared to AffiloJetpack.
But if you have a grand to invest with a quick return…the initial investment of $997 may come back in 1-2 months, and in an ideal situation you might be able to earn something in the region of $1000 a week minimum…I mean, that’s the aim.
The question is, how quickly and easily you’d like to get there, and if you are ready to pay the price for the comfort?
You can try out AffiloJetpack (and all the other products that are currently available) at AffiloRama.com
Who Is AffiloJetpack for?
For that reason, AffiloJetpack is ideal for those who have burnt themselves with dubious training courses before. Although affiliate marketing is not complicated, it is easy to get overwhelmed, especially as a beginner, and lose focus on things that will lead to making money.
With AffiloJetpack, lot of that ‘distraction’ is already dealt with, so you can focus on understanding the basics AND earning money. If you ‘knew someone’ who had a neighbour who saw someone on the other side of the street who suffered from analysis paralysis, then AffiloJetpack may be a sensible choice for ‘that person’
AffiloRama Pros & Cons
So if you go all in with AffiloJetpack…
Pros
- Takes off the pressure, less overwhelming
- Focuses on everything that is important for a beginner, nothing that is not (yet) important
- Plenty of pre-written email sales copies – higher conversion rate – more money, quicker
- Plenty of stuff right out of the box – it can save you months, if not years
- No need to worry about hosting (for a year)
- State of the art Analytics
Cons
- Some of the learning material is outdated
- Text-based learning material on Pathway To Passive – not ideal for everyone. The rest is well packed with informative videos.
- Community is kinda’ dead, so if you need help or you have some generic question yo may need to wait a bit longer to get answers.
What others say about AffiloRama
As I said, it is pretty hard to find a review of the current AffiloRama offers. There are quite a few, well-written reviews on Google, and whats common in them is that they highlight:
- How outdated some of the information is
- How misleading it can be to buy a done-for-you package: there is still a plenty of work involved
- Community is not very active
So there’s no surprise. I have not found one that would say that any product of AffiloRama would be a scam or a rip-off. Mark Ling, owner of AffiloRama is a reputable internet marketer and he honestly shares his story of becoming a super-successful affiliate marketer who works with one of the major affiliate marketplaces, ClickBank.
My Recommendation – AffiloRama vs Wealthy Affiliate
AffiloRama has some decent products that are useful for new affiliate marketers, albeit AffiloRama is NOT my #1 recommendation for someone who would like to start affiliate marketing.
In terms of done-for-you vs DIY – as you may suspect – I prefer DIY. Simply because it gives you much more insight, understanding and SKILLS to make money online in various ways, recognise trends within your niche and be able to adapt to those changes.
Wealthy Affiliate is much more thorough in teaching you – and making you understand – whats below the surface. You would learn how to create content that ranks on Google and that generates sales, rather than copying one that does that for you. If you are interested in that sort of ‘money machines’, you just gotta have enough money to buy an existing affiliate website and cash in at the end of every month.
It may be slower, but – I believe – DIY will pay back in the long term.
But it is not just that.
I have said it before, but if you are serious about making a long-term business, a community of like-minded people around you is crucial. The importance of having access to support is paramount. AffiloRama really falls behind on having an active community.
If you are ready to start affiliate marketing (or give your existing site a kick-start) then AffiloRama – especially AffiloJetpack is a great way to do that. But you must keep in mind that you may not have full insight of how to make money online, and you may not have the support you need when you get stuck.
For a complete beginner Wealthy Affiliate gives a much thorough walk-through with plenty of videos and other technical aides that are unrivaled not just by AffiloRama, but anyone in the entire affiliate training scene (ie, Affiliate Program finder, content publishing system linked to Google, 4500+ WordPress themes etc.)
- 12 Minute Affiliate Review – Too Good To Be True? - January 26, 2020
- The Cost of Becoming an Affiliate Marketer - January 23, 2020
- Learn Affiliate Marketing For Free in 2020 - January 18, 2020