What Is the Best Affiliate Marketing Course for Beginners?
Starting your affiliate marketing business is always exciting and you can’t wait to see the results already. You are probably cautious enough to know that if something is too good to be true then it probably is. I have been there, I spent months trying to find out what is the best affiliate marketing training course for beginners.
So, what is a good affiliate marketing course for beginners like?
- It must be free or affordable
- It must be easy to follow
- It must have proven results by plenty of REAL people
- It must filter out the noise and focus on the points that I need to start my affiliate marketing business
This post is a LIVE post, meaning that I will add more and more as I test affiliate marketing training courses for beginners. I will only feature those that I recommend and vouch for, highlighting the pros and cons.
The not too long list of the good affiliate marketing courses
Yep, I have added 2 training courses so far:
I have tested, but did not add:
- Miles Beckler (free): it’s alright but there I did not like that it sent a different message to what I expected based on Miles’ YouTube videos. Read my full review here…
- SFM / Six Figure Mentors: Very expensive. Beginner package has no added value and you must upgrade to get something worthwhile out of it. Read the full SFM review here…
Related post: Where can you learn affiliate marketing for free?
What makes a good course the best course?
It is hard to define, there is certainly a personal, subjective element to it. I, for example, prefer a combination of video & text.
Video: easier to visualise how the next step works out, what I need to do etc.
Text: easier to slow down, go back or jump to the next part, I can progress at my own pace.
So, what’s best for me, may not be the best for you.
If A Training Seems To Good To Be True…
I have seen and tried many of the plethora of training out there. After some time I could judge a training by the way it was pitched. If you ever tried affiliate marketing, you know that it is simple yet needs a lot of work (and patience to see the results). Any training course that says different, tries to appeal to your desire to get rich with as little effort as you can. Sadly, those ‘training’ courses never work.
A decent course would tell you that if you want results, you need to put the work in. Now the sort of work, and the order of implementing certain methods can make a difference in which training program suits you the best.
Everyone has a different work ethic, approach to work, level of motivation, resourcefulness. Some training courses are more rigid in terms of (not) letting you explore and jump back and forth; you must follow every step after another in a particular order. Others have some sort of flexibility, let you experiment and only give you a framework within which you can build your online empire.
If I can give you a piece of advice, try as many as you can, to see, which one works for you. Each training course has a different approach, focusing on different aspects of affiliate marketing, or online marketing as a matter of fact.
A lot depends on the niche or niches you have chosen, and your personal skills and preferred ways to create content / drive traffic to your affiliate links.
Free & Affordable Affiliate Marketing Training Courses
There are only a few decent free affiliate marketing courses (I outlined my personal favourites in this post). The ones that actually have a step-by-step learn and implement approach are these;
IncomeSchool – Project 24
Cost: 1 year for $449 then $199 / year
Owner(s): Jim and Ricky
Sign up Here (aff link), or
Read my Full IncomeSchool – Project 24 review here
Project 24 is NOT an affiliate marketing training. However, the methods and techniques they teach are the same that you would use for building a website specifically for affiliate marketing anyways.
They have a unique take on content marketing and SEO, as they prefer a more ‘manual’ method of optimising the content for search engines.
They also very honest about how soon you can expect significant results, and I mean a full-time income by this: that’s where the program got its name from. 24 months may seem many, but if you think about it, it really is not a lot at all to completely change your life. You may not get better results any sooner with other training courses anyways, but those don’t tell you this.
It is a little bit a ‘hope for the best, prepare for the worst’ scenario.
The training is packed with information that you will not find ANYWHERE else, those guys give you a really in-depth look behind the curtains of their 5+ years of online marketing.
They have an exquisite amount of Youtube videos freely available as well, but the real deal is the 60-step blueprint of your progress. It tells you exactly where you should be in 3-6-12-18 months in terms of traffic & income, so that you can see if you are on track or not.
It is great because most new online marketers / bloggers don’t see the results they expected in the 6th – 12th month, and they quit. It is quite possible that they were ahead of where they were supposed to be, but they did not know that. If they had stuck with what they were doing they could have a full-time online income by the end of the 2nd year.
P24 also focuses on how to build multiple sources of income, in terms of the number of websites, the type of websites, and the methods of monetising them.
This method ensures that even if one leg does not perform well, the others will pick up and provide you with a semi-passive online income.
They offer personal (skype) consultation as well, not just for Project 24 customers.
Even their Youtube channel is full of extremely useful, easily adaptable information on how to build niche websites. In the Project 24 training course you can view more in-depth videos. You also get the 60-step blueprint that tells you exactly what you need to do, how to do it, and what you should see at each phase.
You may find some of their lessons familiar such as the Content Mix: I have shamelessly ‘adopted’ it because it is great, and it works.
While I am drafting the full Project 24 review, if you need more information you can have a peek at Jim & Ricki’s website at IncomeSchool.com/project24. There are loads of other useful stuff too, like their newest superfast WordPress theme, so it’s worth having a look around.
Cons: No money-back guarantee if you don’t like it. So, buying into Project 24 needs a bit of a leap of faith and strong commitment that lasts for the years to come. On the other hand, these guys don’t sell lucky-dip: anyone can check out their free videos on Youtube, those speak for themselves.
Wealthy Affiliate
Cost: Free Starter Membership or $359 / year (+other monthly or 6-monthly payment plans)
Owners: Kyle & Carson
Kyle & Carson have been in the online marketing business for 14-15 years now. They started Wealthy Affiliate over a decade ago as a hub for affiliate marketers. The fact that WA is still around shows that they managed to create something that lasts. It sure has evolved a lot over time, nobody can afford to lay back in this industry, only those who always keep on top of the trends can survive this long.
Despite the name, Wealthy Affiliate is not just about affiliate marketing, but one of the most useful hub for all online entrepreneurs. Aside from the training (later on that) there are a huge amount of extra resources packed into the monthly subscription:
- WordPress hosting of 25 websites
- Domain registry
- Keyword tool
- Community hub
- Affiliate Program
Each of these is one of the bests in the industry in their respective field, and there is no other platform that offer this value for the price all in one place.
Full review to come later, until then feel free to try WA out yourself: the free account gives you access for 7 days to most of what I listed above. This is more than enough to see it for yourself if WA is for you or not. After the 7-day period you can either ‘upgrade’ to keep full access ($19 for the first month which is crazy, or $29 monthly if you pay the full year…) or stay on the free account. This can be a great solution if you’d need two wordpress sites on a free domain without ads for an unlimited time (for your landing pages, or email marketing campaign for example).
About the training.
The free account lets you complete the 10-lesson long Module 1 of the 5-module long Online Entrepreneur Certification. By the end of Module 1 you;
- Will have a generic understanding of what affiliate marketing is, why it is the best way for beginners to earn money online
- Will be able to do keyword research to find low hanging fruit keywords (low competition, easy to rank for) and write captivating content targeting those keywords
- Set up a website on WordPress: install any theme, manage generic settings and optimise your website for search engines
- Will have your own website
When I completed this training, I was blown away by how effective it was compared to others that I had tried. I had been trying to figure out how to even begin to become an affiliate marketer, but no other training could explain it with the clarity and simplicity as WA did.
It was no question that I wanted to carry on with the training.
Take Action
There are tasks to complete at the end of each lesson, and although you can step to the next lesson, I advise against it. Kyle & Carson’s 14 years of experience is something that you can trust: the website that I was building as I was going through the training started earning money after only 3 months, that paid for the subscription fee…
The rest of the training is very similar to the 1st Module. Despite that they look simple and are easy to understand, they go in deep. If you do your homework and complete all the tasks, it will take more than 2-3 months to complete the Online Entrepreneur Certification alone.
On top of that there is a training called Affiliate Bootcamp that focuses on the affiliate marketing side of the business, and there are plenty of additional training material.
My personal opinion is that the training alone is worth the money. What Kyle & Carson teach works, there’s no better way to put it, and in my case the training started to pay for itself only after 3 months. But WA is not just training: thanks to its active and helpful community I did not quit after 2 months when I did not see results of my efforts.
Cons:
On top of the step-by-step online entrepreneur training, WA has a huge library of training courses that include webinars created by WA members too. It really needs a spring clean now, as some of the training dates back to 2015, so they are outdated and/or irrelevant in 2019. Having said that, never have a bigger problem in life.
My Recommendation on the Best Affiliate Marketing Course
Compared to Project 24 ,Wealthy Affiliate has a different approach. You can start earning money as you learn much early on with WA. You can do the same with P24, however they advise you against it, the monetisation part comes later in the course.
On the other hand, the route Project 24 takes you through is better laid-out for you to build a full-time online income. WA simply teaches you the foundations, and after that, you are somewhat left alone to figure out how to take it to the next level. They have all the resources, but it is up to you in which order you learn the lessons and implement them.
As for picking the best course for affiliate marketing… Speaking strictly about affiliate marketing, WA is unique on the market. For the price of a course you also get state-of-the-art hosting, keyword tool, content manager, domain registry with emails and lots more. It also has unlimited free access, and a 7-day trial free of charge. So for affiliate marketing, WA is a clear winner. (Sign-up link under Resources)
If you don’t prioritise how you would want to monetise your website, and you just want niche websites, Project 24 gives you the ‘transferable skills’. It is better in teaching how to build up your content to rank better in Google, drive traffic to your website and monetise it in different ways to get the most out of it (including paid ads, affiliate marketing and creating your own product). It outlines clearly how to put your site on auto-pilot while you start working on your next website, creating a passive / semi-passive income. Project 24 is more methodical, slower, but has a clearer vision on where you are heading.
Whichever you choose, you can’t go wrong. I started with WA and the Project 24 training complemented it nicely. I did not regret my decision: all my websites are still hosted with WA and at the moment, I don’t see that I will need to change this in the near future. Project 24 was a great add-on with its unique take on creating content for success.
Question! What about YOU? What is the biggest obstacle holding you back from starting to learn affiliate marketing?
- 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