Affilorama – affiliate marketing training program review. Is Affilorama legit?

You’ve probably heard of affiliate marketing and are wondering if it’s a legitimate way of earning money online. I can tell you it is a legitimate way of earning money and can be very profitable.

The next question you probably have is as a beginner how do you start. There are a number of online training programs that will teach you how to create a website and get started. Affilorama is one of these websites.

In this review,  you’ll discover if this is the best training program, what’s included and if there are any alternatives.

Let’s get going!

This post may contain affiliate links, which means, at no additional cost to you, I may receive a commission if you click a link and purchase something that I have recommended.  For more information visit my disclosure page.

What is Affilorama?

Affilorama is an online marketing course, designed by Mark Ling, a well-respected affiliate marketer.

The course will teach you all about affiliate marketing and how to start an affiliate marketing website.

There are several different products that make up the platform. Starting with free training and three paid products.

Affilorama is aimed at everyone who wants to become an affiliate marketer and make some money online.

The training within the Affilorama is geared towards everything from the fundamental website set-up to more advanced promotional techniques.

You don’t need to know anything about affiliate marketing you are taught all the secrets right here.  If you think that affiliate marketing is the ideal way for you to make money online, then Affilorama might be for you.

This is a legitimate product that has been well rated since 2006. An online course that has been around that long is rare but Affilorama is still going strong.

There have been some changes in the last few years, but unfortunately, it does have one or two flaws. Read on to see if it’s for you.

Affiliate Marketing?

Before starting the review let’s just make sure we understand what affiliate marketing is.

Affiliate marketing is promoting other peoples or companies products. You find a product you are happy to promote. You include a special affiliate link on your website. Then you earn commissions when someone clicks on your affiliate link and goes on to make a purchase.

As an affiliate marketer, you promote one or more products. You then try to attract visitors and convince them the products you are promoting are good value so they are ready to buy. One common way to do this is by writing reviews.

For this, you need a website or blog and traffic to your website.

The best way to bring visitors to your website or blog is to have your reviews or articles ranking in the first places in the search engines. This will bring you free organic traffic. This may sound easy but it’s not!

You will have to write quite a few reviews/articles before the search engines trust your website and give you good rankings. You also need to have your posts optimized for the search engines.

Other ways to get visitors to your website are by using social media or paid ads.

You should only promote products that are genuine and will help your readers. You see many affiliate marketers ready to promote anything to make a quick buck. This isn’t recommended!

You want visitors to trust your recommendations and come back again when they are looking for something relative to the subject of your website.

A good affiliate marketing training program should cover all these points.

Affilorama owner – Who is Mark Ling?

Mark Ling is one of the good guys in the internet marketing world. He built his first website in the late 90s and started earning an income. Mark continued building more websites and was soon earning a six-figure income with his online business.

After a bad decision, he lost everything and had to return to a day job. Not one to be kept down he decided to try again. Now, Mark is a world-renowned affiliate marketer earning a seven-figure income and teaching people his marketing techniques.

Who is Affilorama for?

Affilorama is for everyone interested in creating revenue through a home-based affiliate marketing business. The program is suitable for beginners or experts and has for vocation to show you the steps to build an affiliate marketing business and generate income.

The training and tools

Affilorama offers 4 different levels of training and tools.

1. The free Affilorama lessons

You get access to over 100 videos and PDF text files. Some of the subjects covered are:

• an introduction to affiliate marketing
• researching to find your niche, keyword research, finding affiliate programs
• content creation including making videos
• creating your website
• different marketing strategies – blogging, email marketing, social media
• search engine optimization – subjects covered include sitemaps, 301 redirects, robots txt file, getting backlinks
• pay per click marketing
• outsourcing

Training Overview

The training is free, quite detailed and would definitely help a newbie. For that reason, many would consider it a good place to start.

Each topic is broken down into different sections and you can see what’s covered in each section. This makes it easy to navigate.

As you navigate to the different pages, you will see a tab at the top which says completed or uncompleted. This indicates if you have seen the video or not.

They do offer some useful information but also some training is out of date and no longer recommended.

It will give you the basics on how to start a blog but some information dates from 14 years ago and things in the blogging/site building world have changed drastically in that time.

Overall, it gives you a good insight into affiliate marketing and allows you to see what they have to offer before considering one of their paid options.

Outdated content

As I mentioned some of the training is outdated and this could be a big problem.

For example in the section on building your website they use the Dreamweaver software or the other example is using HTML code. These may have been good choices 14 years ago but today there are many better and easier choices.

You could easily spend hours following the site building training (and learning some useful stuff). But you would probably be demoralized and ready to quit as it would take you so long to get your site built. Today there are platforms such as WordPress or online site builders that make building a website easy and rapid.

Another example of outdated content is in the content creation section. They recommend the use of PLR articles. You must not use these articles on your site or it may adversely affect your site’s rankings. Although to be fair to Affilorama they do say that you should heavily edit the articles to create unique content before posting on your website.

I would suggest using the PLR articles for some ideas but create completely new unique articles to avoid duplicate content problems.

The Premium Courses

2. Pathway to Passive

An e-book that teaches you how to build a successful website.

You will learn:

• how to choose a profitable niche and products to promote
• how to compete in a competitive niche
• to create content that ranks well in the search engines
• a blueprint for writing product reviews and how to write reviews for products you don’t own
• how to create a content funnel
• the different ways of monetizing your posts
• how to create content that will attract links

This e-book which takes a couple of hours to read can be for beginners or experienced marketers.

For beginners, you will get instructions on what you need to do, how to do it and why you should be doing it.

For more experienced marketers you will learn simple tweaks that will improve your rankings and results.

The price of Pathway to Passive is $37. There is a 60-day  money back guarantee.

3. AffiloTools

Free for members of Affilorama, AffiloTools provides web stats for online marketers.

• comprehensive rankings data to see which keywords are most important to your business
• track rankings in different search engines
• you can also see the long-term trends for your rankings, traffic, social activity, and earnings
• keep an eye on the “health of your website” when you log into AffiloTools you will get a warning if there are any problems (technical problems or SEO problems)
• keep track of your Clickbank earnings
• see how many Facebook likes or Twitter retweets your posts are getting
• see where your competitors are getting backlinks
• a link finder to find high-quality sites in your niche

All in all, you do get some useful information from AffiloTools and if you’re using Clickbank it could save you some time by having all the information in one place.

Some of the information they give I don’t monitor or I get via Google Analytics or other free tools.

4. AffiloJetpack

Membership $997 with a 60-day money back guarantee

The AffiloJetPack is a done for you “niche marketing” package where you get to choose 5 niches from a choice of 18 known profitable niches given to you by Mark Ling.

The package uses the email marketing model to get sales.

#A visitor lands on your website. They are offered a free report or a gift. They need to enter their email address to obtain the freebie. Your visitor receives the gift and is very happy. You start to email them every few days providing interesting and informative information. Little by little you visitor starts to trust you and your opinions. You start to include affiliate product recommendations in your emails. If your visitor buys a product you earn a commission. You keep sending emails with useful information and affiliate product recommendations.

This is a totally legitimate affiliate marketing model.

What’s included

This system does contain some good information and the membership gives you access to the following:

• choice of 5 Niche Packages (out of the 18 available)
• 90 Newsletter Email Series, the products you promote to your subscribers have already been selected
• 3 free 10,000 word reports you can offer to entice new subscribers
• 3 e-book graphics
• build a WordPress website in a few clicks and then customize it as you want
• access to Affilotheme a custom built affiliate marketing theme
•  header graphic tool to design your own logo
• you own your website which means you can move it to another host if you want
• 12 months of hosting
• 20 content “cheat sheets” that contain all the research, ideas and “gold nuggets” of information to create valuable articles. Will save you some time researching but you will still have to write unique articles.
• access to Mark Ling’s writers if you want to outsource some of the writing
• training on getting traffic

This is made to sound very easy but as often with affiliate marketing, the success is dependent on getting traffic to your website. There is training on getting traffic but it is never as simple as it sounds.

Another point I don’t like is the products you are promoting are already picked by Mark Ling. Maybe you will be happy promoting them perhaps not. It’s your website and your subscribers, so you must be 100% confident in any products you are promoting.

The Price

This may seem expensive but shared hosting alone for 5 websites would cost you about $100 for the first year. A premium theme could cost up to $100. Add to that the email series and the other content you get the price is probably correct.

One thing you will need and there is no mention of is an autoresponder. This will cost about $20 per month.

Guarantee

As I mentioned there is a 60-day money back guarantee and also a “system failure guarantee”. To qualify for the “system failure guarantee” you must prove you have tried the strategies. If you have followed all the steps and are not making money in 60-days Mark Ling will refund your purchase +$100.

Which Affilorama product is right for you?

Someone starting online would probably be confused about which product to choose. To help you, Mark Ling has included a very simple questionnaire.

• How much experience do you have?
• How much have you learned so far about affiliate marketing?
• Have you had much success yet?
• What do you need right now?

Depending on your replies you are directed to the free training, Pathway to Passive, AffiloTools or AffiloJetpack. Unfortunately, even this isn’t kept completely up to date. Some replies suggest you start with AffiloBlueprint. This now redirects to Pathway to Passive.

It’s nice you are not automatically directed to a premium product. A complete newbie is recommended to start with the free training.

Help and support

At all levels of Affilorama, you can receive help from other members via the forum. The assistance may not be immediate, it depends on who and also on how many community members are connected when you ask your question.

All discussions, questions, and comments can be shared within the community via forums and message boards. This is one of the biggest communities dedicated to affiliate marketing and it is possible to get good advice and help. Mark Ling might join in on the discussions from time to time.

There is also a support center where they have the answers to over 250 of the most common questions or you can email the support center with your question.

How much does it cost to join Affilorama?

If you need it there is a link below to get a free basic Affilorama account to see what they have to offer.  If you like what you see, you can then sign up for one of the other products.

Sign up for a free Affilorama account.

What their customers are saying

I searched for some feedback from existing customers. On Trustpilot, there are more than 180 reviews of which more than 90% are 5-star reviews. One point that is made by the majority of these reviewers is that they are very happy with customer support.

My final opinion

Affilorama is a good program and definitely a legitimate product. If you intend to get into affiliate marketing, then Affilorama would be very useful.

This is a product which offers a good deal of tools, training, and support. The only downsides are that the training and some tools are not kept completely up-to-date. Plus the AffiloJetpack is too expensive for most beginners.

However, because of the different products, it can be confusing to the beginner to know where to get started. For me, you should start with the free membership, which provides some good information. Then upgrade to one of the paid products if you are impressed with the training.

Although I’m a fan of the Affilorama free training, I am perfectly happy to continue with my top recommendation, Wealthy Affiliate. They offer step by step training that takes you from choosing your niche and building a website right through to making money from your site. They also offer some free training and give you 2 free websites.

If you’re unsure which to choose sign up and have a look at both for free. See which is the best fit for you.

If you have had any experience with Affilorama, any other of Mark Ling’s products or have any comments on my review I would love to hear from you.