Introduction
This is a review I’ve been looking forward to doing for a long time. As an Affilorama member for a number of years (and someone who also has all of their premium/paid tier products) I think I am in a great position to give a full and accurate review of Affilorama.
Video Review
What Is Affilorama?
Affilorama is an online training portal for aspiring affiliate marketers, and is run by legendary “super affiliate” Mark Ling.
Now the structure of Affilorama and its constituent products can be slightly confusing, so here’s the layman’s explanation.
When you join your first step will probably be creating a free account – although you can go straight into the paid product options if you wish, which I will outline below.
From your free account, which could more accurately be described as a portal, you can then purchase paid modules that become accessible through your login.
Here’s a quick guide to the different options available:
- Affilorama aka Affilorama Free – this is, as the name suggests, the free section of the site (and what I am covering in this particular review). You get free affiliate marketing lessons and forum access.
- AffiloBlueprint – a more detailed training course that focuses on teaching you Mark Lings’ preferred method of earning affiliate commissions.
- AffiloJetpack – this is the “big daddy”, and the most expensive Affilorama-branded product. It is basically a collection of done-for-you content and research that is designed to help jump start your efforts at creating profitable niche sites. You basically get ready made funnels in various niches, which have been researched to be profitable by the Affilorama team. Reviewing AffiloJetpack is a mammoth commitment, but something I will be doing in the near future.
- Affilorama Premium – a monthly subscription product that provides additional training, bundled hosting, beta access to AffiloTools, and premium form.
- AffiloTools – currently free to trial (or get beta access through Affilorama Premium). A SaaS SEO platform that is designed to help you do things like track your rankings, find new keywords, and uncover link building opportunities.
Who Is It For?
As you might expect, Affilorama is really aimed at anyone who wants to learn to make a living from affiliate marketing. This is where you promote products on behalf of a publisher, often through the use of a marketplace such as Clickbank or Amazon Associates, and are rewarded financially for sales that you refer.
Who Is Behind Affilorama?
Affilorama is the brain of Mark Ling, who is known in the affiliate marketing industry as being a popular guru/super affiliate.
The company that runs and maintains Affilorama (and of which Mark Ling is a key player) is called Doubledot Media. They are also behind some other well-known products in the Internet marketing sphere, including Traffic Travis and SaleHoo.
How Do You Join
Joining Affilorama is super easy. Let’s walk through the process now:
Firstly, [eafl id=208 name=”Affilorama Free” text=”click here to go to the Affilorama website”]:
From there you need to click the “Join now – It’s free” button. You will then be prompted to fill in some basic personal information:
You then need to follow the rest of the basic instructions in order to complete your sign up. Once everything is done and dusted, you should be able to log in and see a screen like this:
Now the exact screen you see will obviously be different, because I’ve already got all of the paid Affilorama products added to my account. However, you should at least get a feel for what you will be seeing.
So what about the free content and features that are the focus of this Affilorama review? Let’s take a look at them now.
You access the free lessons by clicking the “Lessons” drop-down tab from your account screen. You should see something like this:
There are over 100 free lessons on offer, broken down into various categories like basic concepts, market research, website building, SEO, PPC and so on. The aim of the Affilorama team has clearly been to provide a comprehensive overview of the steps you need to follow to get started in affiliate marketing.
Each of the lessons looks a bit like this:
So what you are getting with each of those free lessons is:
- Video content (the main component, with narration and imagery to help you understand the lesson)
- Accompanying written content with links to resources
The Affilorama platform is set up with the intent of guiding you from one lesson to the next, so that you progress in a linear fashion. Along the way, you will be encouraged through upsells to buy the premium products like AffiloBlueprint and AffiloJetpack.
As far as the lessons go, there really isn’t too much more to say. Everything is produced to a professional standard, and there are lots of lessons to work your way through as you expand your knowledge of affiliate marketing. I will talk more to the quality and usefulness of the content later on.
What Else Do You Get?
Forum Access
When you join Affilorama, you’ll get to access the member only forum. This is basically a place you can come and “shoot the $hit” with other aspiring affiliate marketers, swap ideas, ask questions, and just generally expand your knowledge of the game. The biggest downside to the forum is that it is rather light on in-depth content. Most of the threads seem to be people complaining about not seeing the easy progress they thought they would
Affilorama Member Deals
Another, lesser-known benefit of joining for a free Affilorama membership is that you also get access to some special deals that have been arranged with other service and product providers in the Internet marketing sphere.
Once you’re registered, if you go to this page, then you will find a whole bunch of deals that can be helpful to your affiliate marketing efforts. Here are some of them:
Considering you don’t pay for membership, these deals are nice to have.
Affilorama Blog
Okay, so this is technically free for everyone (even if you don’t register a membership account). However, the Affilorama blog is nonetheless worth a read from time to time.
Make sure that you go and give it a read here.
Good Things About Affilorama
- Lots of lessons. Over 100 lessons gives you a lot to work through. Most key aspects of building affiliate websites are covered. There is an abundance of content to sink your teeth into!
- Better than many paid training products. This is one of the main reasons why I’m a fan of Affilorama. In all honesty, it contains more useful training content than a lot of paid products, especially those dreaded Warrior Special Offers (WSOs) or JVZoo-type products. You’re not paying a red cent, and in return getting a good grounding in basic affiliate marketing best practice.
Bad Things About Affilorama
- You’ll receive a LOT of upsell and cross-promo emails. One of the main complaints about Affilorama that I have is you will receive a large quantity of up-sell and cross promotional emails. This is an unfortunate facet of the affiliate marketing industry, as most major product owners spend a lot of time pitching their buddies’ products in a sort of reciprocal cycle (some have used the term “syndicate”, others prefer the less polite term “circle jerk”). Because Mark Ling is a big name in the affiliate marketing sphere – at least within the context of the style of affiliate marketing he promotes – he has a lot of affiliate partners who have big lists and followings, and who promote his products. In return, he does them same for them. Expect to see a huge number of emails on subjects like:
- Unmissable training webinars
- Webinar replays
- Final calls for amazing courses
- Unmissable products that are making loads of people 6 figures without lifting a finger
- You get the picture
- The training has a narrow focus and is outdated in places. Affiliate marketing is a diverse industry (and I don’t mean diverse in the way that Silicon Valley tech companies never stop harping on about). There are so many different ways to make money, even though the basic formula is always traffic + offer = earnings. Affilorama’s free training focuses on what many consider to be a fairly “tired” strategy; finding an offer on Clickbank’s affiliate marketplace, building a small site around that niche (e.g. dog training) with mainly info keywords, and then monetizing with pre-sells and a list. Without a willingness to invest lots of time into SEO, especially link building, or the financial ability to pay for traffic via platforms like Facebook Ads and Google Adwords, you might find it very slow to see results. However, I do think that the methods offered on Affilorama.com are good for any beginner to learn the basics of affiliate marketing, and get some inspiration towards making further progress.
Conclusion – Is It Worth Joining?
Overall, I have to say that I think Affilorama is worth joining. In fact, I would suggest you grab yourself an account today. It won’t cost you anything, so what have you got to lose?
The only real downside of the free membership (beyond the occasionally weak training content) is that you are opening yourself up to a barrage of guru-style offers. Expect to see a lot of webinar replay and final call emails in your inbox … thank goodness for spam filters! If you hate getting these types of emails, then it may well pay to sign up for your Affilorama account with a throwaway email address.
However, considering it doesn’t cost you a pretty penny to join, and that there is some useful content on offer that will help you to learn the basics of affiliate marketing, there really is no reason not to make an account and spend a few minutes each day absorbing the lessons.
What are you waiting for?
Video Review Transcript
Hey what’s up? This is Sam Frost here from reviewsboss.com. In this video we are going to be doing a review of the Affilorama, so I’m going to be talking you through this very popular affiliate marketing training platform. I’m gonna be talking you through the various different products that constitute the Affilorama platform. And I’m gonna be giving you my overall feedback on Affilorama as a whole, and then I’m gonna have more videos coming where we will be breaking down the individual products as well.
Once again, as with pretty much all of my reviews, this is done as a screen capture video. There’s a little bit of embedded web cam just so you can see my ranting and raving, but it’s pretty off the cuff. This is as honest as it gets.
Now one thing I do wanna declare right off the bat is that at some stage in the past, I don’t wanna show my age but, it was a number of years ago now, I actually worked for Affilorama. Well to be more correct, I worked for the company that creates Affilorama and owns the brand. So I actually had some involvement with some development of some of their products in previous guises. I thought it was probably worth me mentioning that.
It’s not gonna affect my opinion of the review. I’ve long since left that job. I will say I had a great time working there. The brains behind Affilorama are really really nice people. Very smart. They really do care about helping people succeed with affiliate marketing. But I’ve been out of the game long enough to be able to give my honest feedback on this.
So basically what I’m gonna be doing is just giving my feedback on Affilorama, letting you know what I think about the product, and we’ll be taking it from there.
So basically to start with, what do you do? You got to Affilorama.com, if you’re feeling generous you could actually go to the link in the video description and join via my affiliate link, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to. Just go to Affilorama.com and you’re greeted with this.
So basically what is the pitch? Learn how to make money online as an affiliate and that’s really what Affilorama is about. It’s affiliate marketing training. It pitches itself as the largest affiliate marketing training community on the internet. And it pitches you what you’ll get if you join as a free member.
So you get a quick start affiliate marketing guide. You get a download of [inaudible 00:02:15]Roadmap to Success. You get video lessons. And you can create a free account. And who doesn’t like free?
There are some nice little testimonials here. There’s the old, you know, where have we been featured kind of things that you see in just about every single info product that’s for sale these days. And basically what Affilorama is, at a very high level, is a free membership training platform for people who wanna learn how to make money from affiliate marketing.
But what effectively is happening is when you sign up for free, you are basically just signing up for really the presale to the premium products. Now allow me to explain more. So basically if we go through the site, the first thing you’ll see here is it’s got breakdowns of the kinds of lessons you’ll get to see. So here is the lesson introduction section. So basically if you want to learn how to do affiliate marketing, you could start here with the introduction lessons and if we try and go through, what we will see is that we can’t actually watch this lesson yet. We can’t watch Affiliate Marketing for Beginners, the first lesson. What we need to do is actually watch it, either a preview and see if we like it, or we join for free. So, either or, it doesn’t really matter what you wanna do. But to actually access the lessons, you need to join Affilorama, which is free to do. And the same thing applies to all the[inaudible 00:03:40].
I think it’s quite good that they’re basically giving you the breakdown of what your going to get, actually giving away quite a bit of information for free without you even needing to sign up. That’s quite good. So you know if you look at this, and you read through the lessons, and you look at the video preview and you think, naw, this just isn’t for me, you haven’t lost anything. But basically the lessons are there just to wet your appetite. Or the lesson preview is there to wet your appetite. If you want to access them, you will need to sign up for free.
Now the next piece is the product. So Affilorama offers some premium products and the premium product offering has changed quite substantially in relatively recent times. So as I said just before, the free piece of Affilorama is really, it’s about getting you in the door, into their funnel for the premium products. And they’re pretty effective at how they work this, the Affilorama company. Basically, the free lessons are a good pre-sales tool for them, so they’ve kind of just gone down the path of what you normally see with make money online training, which is where you get something for free and then you get up-sold if it’s done on a larger scale.
So, what I’ll do here shortly is talk you through the premium products and give you a bit more insight into those. There’s also a blog, so you can access their blog posts. Basically it’s a relatively reasonable blog that’s got some interesting content about affiliate marketing. It’s updated roughly, two or three times a month. Sometimes a bit more frequently. There’s lots of examples of affiliate programs you can join and tips and all sorts of things.
Here’s one, ten alternatives to ClickBank. You might notice here, if you’re hawkeyed that I’m actually still the top contributor on the blog in terms of comments. And if we look at the most viewed articles, most of these, apart from I think, this one here, have been written by me in the past. Maybe this one wasn’t as well though, I can’t actually remember. No, this one was by Jason and he must have done that about the time I was working there, but this was definitely mine, I remember writing this. There you go. One of the most widely read articles on Affilorama. But I digress, that’s not why you’re here. To allow me to relive my glory days.
So anyway, there’s a useful blog. I mean that’s totally free. You don’t have to join or pay anything to access it, so I just thought I’d touch on it and the other point is there’s a forum as well. So there’s a free section of the forum and there is a paid forum depending on what products you pay for access to, if any. The forum’s not bad. There’s some okay content in there, but it’s not the most active forum out there. And I wouldn’t recommend you spend too much time in it. There’s a lot of newbies, a lot of beginners, who are probably just really the kind of people who are asking too much, and doing too little if that makes sense. You’re better just to get stuck in and really start working at things.
Now if we go back to the home page, the process for actually getting an account with Affilorama is very simple. All you do is you join, and once you’re done, you’re gonna be sent a password to login. Now what you have to bear in mind with Affilorama, this is probably the first key point of this review, is as soon as you sign up you’re gonna start getting offers for things, you know I can’t remember the exact cadence because it’s been a while since I did sign up myself, but you are gonna start seeing some offers come through thick and fast for not only Affilorama’s products that they offer, but you will also see promotions come through for products that Affilorama recommends. It kind of makes sense. They’re an affiliate marketing company, so I guess they probably would be inclined to do affiliate promotions of other products. But you really need to bear this in mind.
If you’re the kind of person who thinks, “Oh, I don’t wanna receive offers in my inbox. I don’t wanna be sold to, too aggressively.” You could possible get annoyed here with Affilorama because they do have quite a high cadence of promotions, both of their own products, and of their partner products. So just bear that in mind. But once you’ve signed in, or once you’ve joined I should say, what comes next? Well let’s login and I’ll show you what the back end of the account looks like.
So hopefully screen flow doesn’t accidentally reveal my password, and we will login. And this is roughly what a Affilorama dashboard looks like. Now mine will look different to yourself because I have access to some of the premium products, but what we’ll do first is we’ll go back to the lesson section, and now if we try and access that first lesson, we can see that we can actually play the full video now. So pretty cool there.
We can also tick it off if we’ve completed it or not. And we can now work through the process. We’ve also got all of these resources here as well. So there’s actually quite a bit of content. As far as the actual quality of the training goes, it’s actually quite decent to be honest. Sure it ultimately is a pre-sell for the paid products, but I actually quite like it. It will ground you in some of the basics of affiliate marketing. It will help you wet your appetite and determine if this is right for you. So if you sign up for Affilorama for free, you can still get value without having to pay anything. You just go through these lessons here. You maybe absorb a bit of information on the blog, have a look around the forum, and at the very least, if you’re starting from nothing, it will give you a good idea of what affiliate marketing is like and whether or not it might be right for you. It’s just not the most advanced training.
Now the real piece that is a big focus for a lot of people, if we go back to the home page, is the paid product. So as I mentioned, the goal with Affilorama or Affilorama’s goal is to get you to sign up for the free lessons, demonstrate their knowledge, demonstrate their trustworthiness, and then sell you the premium products. And the premium product offering has changed a little bit.
Once again, this isn’t a full review of all the premium products. I will do separate video interviews for each of those. And I will also touch on the fact that what was perhaps their most popular premium product, which is AffiloBlueprint, isn’t actually available any more. It’s changed to this here path to passive, which I’m actually gonna purchase, I haven’t gone through that yet, and I will buy it and do a separate review on that.
But basically to run you through things, Affilorama offers a few different premium products, and they have offered other ones in the past. So there’s a product called Path to Passive, if we open this up, basically it is a guide, well my understanding is it’s a guide to sort of organic search focused, relatively passive affiliate marketing, I don’t like the term passive ’cause it implies you don’t ever do any work, but without having gone through the product, my understanding is the focus of affiliate … sorry, Path to Passive, or Pathway to Passive will be on basically picking a niche, building a website, finding questions people are asking. Answering those questions, and then using that to pre-sell affiliate products and also sign people up to your newsletters is basically what was the old AffiloBlueprint product I believe, but just updated. So AffiloBlueprint was one of the products I helped build. It went through a few iterations. I think there was a second or third version of it released. And that was the one I helped work on. And basically, you can’t buy AffiloBlueprint anymore. What you can buy instead is this Pathway to Passive Product. So I will definitely be buying that very soon and going through it with a fine tooth comb, doing another one of these off the cuff sort of live reviews and showing you what I think. But you might want to check this out.
The good thing is that Pathway to Passive is quite reasonably priced. It’s $37.00. You get the ClickBank required 60 day money back guarantee, but I will definitely go through the process and review the product in more detail. But there is just an example of their premium products. Without having gone through it, I’d be willing to bet a fair amount of money that probably Pathway to Passive is just selling you a much more in depth version of the training that’s available for free, so just bear that in mind, but hopefully you see the principle of how Affilorama operates. You sign up for free. You get enticed by the lessons you learn about and then you upsell, or they upsell you to the premium products.
The next piece is a product called Affilo Tools. Now Affilo Tools is an interesting one. I’m not gonna spend too much time dwelling on this. Basically, Affilo Tools has been in beta for quite some time now. It’s like an online marketing tool kit for [SEO 00:12:05] analytics, social media, all those kind of things. I haven’t used it in a long time. Because of the client work I do with my marketing agency, I have access to a lot more advanced tools than Affilo Tools. I’m not even sure how much it costs to access Affilo Tools anymore. I think you can just sign up for a free trial through, by going to Affilorama.com/tools, if we just double check, and we go here, we might be able to have a look and see what comes up. See what goes. Here we go, yeah, you can try Affilo Tools for free, so worth bearing that in mind. Polls and data. I haven’t used it in a very long time. So you do with it what you will. I think there are better products out there though ultimately. But I will, once again, spend some time going through it.
And the final big product that Affilorama offers, and this is sort of the Mac Daddy of their products is this thing called Affilo Jet Pack. Now Affilo Jet Pack is a really interesting one. What Affilo Jet Pack is and I’ve reviewed Affilo Jet Pack in a lot of detail in the past, but I will elaborate on it again further. Basically Affilo Jet Pack is like done for you niche websites. So, Affilorama’s basic philosophy is based around this idea that what you do is you create a website that’s in a niche, so a niche is something like dog training or baseball training or golf tips or whatever. Or it could be something even more compact than that, like Labrador dog training or putting tips for golf, or whatever, but the concept of a niche is crucial. You pick your niche. You find questions people are asking in that niche. You answer those questions with content on your site. You upsell people. You basically get people coming to your site via organic traffic, via paid traffic, if you wanna do it social media. You then funnel people into your email newsletter sequence, a bit like Affilorama does with the free content, and what you do is you do it by giving away something like a dog training ebook, or a golf tips ebook, or a video course, or anything like that.
And then what you start doing is you start hitting those people with affiliate offers in their inbox. Now Affilo Jet Pack basically has taken that principle and tried to make it faster. So if we access Affilo Jet Pack, what you’ll see next is quite interesting. I’m not gonna dwell too long on it. Basically I have an Affilo Jet Pack membership and what you’ve got is a whole lot of niches, and what you’re able to do with these niches is then pick a certain number of them, I can remember how many it is, I think it might be 10 you can pick from, although it all depends on when you purchase the product. I think when I got it you had access to more and I think these days you might not get so many. But they’re all big evergreen popular niches with huge money potential in them, so, some are bigger than others but things like dog training or internet marketing or golf are massive. Same with wholesale sourcing, dating tips, weight loss. I mean, these are not niches that are going anywhere anytime soon.
What you then do is you actually unlock the niche, and then you can go through the process of basically using Affilo Jet Pack to automatically set up a framework of a website. So when I do my Affilo Jet Pack tutorial and updated video review, I’ll actually take you through the process because it’s kinda cool. I hadn’t used it before when I first worked with the product. It was being talked about, sort of theoretically how can we build this system that lets you pick the niche you want, select a domain name, import all of the newsletter content with your affiliate link straight into a auto responder program, like Campaign Monitor, or AWeber. For Affilo Jet Pack, they use something called Flutter Mail ’cause I think the Affilorama owners are part owners of Flutter Mail, something like that, I can’t remember off the top of my head.
But basically the way it works is you unlock the niche that you’ve paid for, or you use a credit that you’ve got so you get x number of niches, you unlock one that comes with your total balance, but principle is very very simple. And then what you’ve got is a framework of a site that you can then go and start creating content, loading content onto your site, optimizing it, making it look more unique and then you hopefully will start driving traffic and getting people onto those newsletter lists and making money.
It’s pretty cool what they’ve tried to do in terms of streamlining things. There are some obvious downsides in so much that, you know, there’s gonna be tons of competition in these niches, but at the same time there’s huge money. And I do know of people who are doing really well with this product. I don’t wanna dwell on it too long in this overview of Affilorama, just because I would rather review the ins and outs of Affilo Jet Pack in a separate video and talk you through the set up process. But this is the big Mac Daddy product. It’s their most expensive one. It is quite an interesting concept and yeah, I’ll refrain from making any further comment on the value or worth of it for this video, but yeah, I’ll definitely be coming back to it. You get some bonuses as well. There’s a whole lot of interesting stuff in there, so that is how Affilo Jet Pack works. There’s a help section. There’s a specific forum. It really is quite a step up from the base Affilorama product.
But if we just go back to the home page. And if we just recap, really what is Affilorama? It’s a simple straight forward affiliate marketing training platform. The content or the quality of the free content, I think is pretty good. It’s not the best thing in the world, but it’s certainly not the worst. If you are new to affiliate marketing and you’re sitting there thinking, “Is Affilorama worth joining?” I think it is. You’re gonna have to bear in mind that you will be pitched a lot of offers. That’s probably the biggest downside to it. These guys are quite, I wouldn’t say aggressive, but much like many businesses in the make money online space, where they make their money is on upselling you.
One thing I have noticed as well is a real trend with Affilorama towards pushing much more highly priced products, like Mastermind courses that can cost into the thousands of dollars and all sorts of things. In the past I feel like they used to just promote more mainstream kinda stuff. Like we recommend this person’s training methods on Amazon FBA selling or whatever, and you might be pitched a two or three hundred dollar course. Now it can be some really expensive stuff.
I mean it’s not just Affilorama. I think this is a trend that’s happening in almost the entire make money online industry, that things are moving towards, either these free funnel building offers or these hyper expensive high end products. The sort of good honest fifty dollar ebook or twenty dollar a month membership site is dying out a little bit it almost feels like. But that might just be my interpretation of things.
But yeah, to recap this Affilorama review. I think if you are interested in learning affiliate marketing, you want to get a start for free, it’s a good place to begin. I think some of the premium products are quite good. I’m excited to try Path to Passive. I’m excited to revisit my Affilo Jet Pack review and talk you through more about what the product is like. Yeah, it’s a high quality product they’ve got on offer here. As long as you can accept the fact that the content isn’t always kept as up to date as it could be. That is definitely a downside.
Affilorama is good from a theoretical perspective in terms of teaching you the key concepts of affiliate marketing with niche sites, but it isn’t the best platform in the world in terms of keeping content really up to date. Especially in the free products. If you can deal with that, if you can deal with the fact that you will get pitched a lot of promotions as well, and as long as you’re recognizing of the fact that the free tier they offer is really just to get you in the door to pitch you the expensive stuff, with the upsell products, as long as you can look at that objectively and say hey I can still extract value from the free membership, I think you’ll have a good time with Affilorama.
So yeah, I recommend it. If you want to help me out, you can sign up via my affiliate link, which is in the video description, but also if you think, hey this guy’s an idiot and I don’t wanna help him out, just go to Affilorama.com and sign up. If you found this video useful, please give me a like on this video. Please subscribe for more reviews. I hope that my sort of off the cuff talking it through naturally style is passible to you or somewhat enjoyable. I’m trying to sort of stick away with this channel from doing very manufactured stuff. And yeah, I look forward to seeing you on future videos. Drop a comment below if you think Affilorama is good, bad, ugly, or whatever. And if you have requests for products you would like to see me review, please drop comments as well.
Thank you very much. And I’ll see you next time.