Finding the best affiliate marketing training that will suit your learning and financial requirements can be a daunting task given all the options available today! This post will help identify certain aspects of training that should be considered when choosing training that will accommodate your financial and learning needs.
Topics Explored In The Article
- Training delivery models-freemium vs premium and onetime fee offers
- Support options
- Value of training
- beginner vs advanced training options
- Tools you will need and don’t need
Training Delivery Models
Like I mentioned earlier in this post, there is a wide variety of affiliate marketing training platforms that offer three basic forms of memberships.
Freemium Memberships: There are just a handful of marketing training platforms that still offer Freemium memberships, most freemium membership platforms have gone the way of the dodo bird. Freemium memberships are essentially memberships that start you off under a free membership, usually with very restrictive training options for a limited time period. In most cases you don’t get access to training of any real value or certain tools needed until you go premium.
Wealthy Affiliate for example offered a free membership a few years ago that gave you 7 days of free limited training. This 7 day free offer gave you the necessary training to get a website up and running with adequate training to get your feet wet in promoting products online. Wealthy Affiliate is actually the platform that gave me my start online. The one attribute of a freemium membership like the one Wealthy Affiliate offered was that it gave you a real taste of what work was going to be involved in building your online business without the pressure of incurring costs while income generation was still a ways off.
Free But Not Free: Fast forward to the present and you will see a new marketing scheme that has replaced the freemium offer. If you search “free affiliate marketing training” you will find a multitude of offers pop up that I would characterize as “Red herring” offers. Free affiliate training offers are used by affiliate marketing training presenters for a few reasons.
- Set the hook: One reason companies throw out what appear to be free offers on the surface is to get you to commit, or take that all important first step. Marketing research shows that if you can motivate someone to take that first step the chances of them making a purchase in pursuit of their dreams is likely to happen.
- Email upsells: You will notice that every free training offer will ask for some personal info from you before you can access whatever free training they are going to provide, in most cases this free training comes in the form of videos for you to watch as long as you give up your email address. These videos are basically general tutorials on what you will be doing in affiliate marketing offering very little in the form of useful training. Why the need for your info? Simply put, they don’t care who you are and what your story is, they only want that valuable email address so that they can spam you with offers hoping you will take the bait. When I used to write on marketing scams online and I needed to get in and have a look at these offers, I would put in a fake email address with in most cases did the trick unless you get one of those programs that send links to your email to access there free stuff, this way there’s no getting around surrendering your email address.
What I found in free offers!
Free training offers usually take the form of a series of free videos on affiliate marketing, number of videos offered varies. I have seen 6-8 free videos in some cases. These free marketing videos set the plate for other paid offers to follow. Personally I would steer well clear of these types of free affiliate marketing training offers, they tend to consist of multiple membership levels that can get quite costly. The trick with these types of offers is, they give you just enough info to get you to move up to another membership level with a higher price tag. In some cases the training may be worth it, but in most I have found, it’s not!
One Time Membership Fee Offer: A onetime membership offer is pretty self explanatory, you pay a onetime fee for access to affiliate marketing training. These types of membership offers can end up being a very costly venue to get your affiliate training.
The downside of one time membership offers:
- Support: Usually sucks to put it bluntly. Support with this type of membership option will usually come in the form of facebook forums set up by the training platform which I have found are pretty frustrating and useless in my opinion. You will find with facebook forum support options that you only get inexperienced members bantering about issues that no one seems to have the answers too. It’s rare that these platforms put experienced marketers on their support venues. Time waisting is your #1 enemy when you are trying to create your affiliate business, trying to get timely support using a facebook book forum is a real time waster. Facebook support groups are the cheapest way to deliver support to your membership, this is why this form of support is so appealing to affiliate marketing training platforms.
- Upselling: Another issue that I have with one time membership offers is, they are rife with upselling. In many cases there are many layers and levels to these free programs. They may start you out free, but quickly expose you to videos that promote the need to “act now” to grow your online presence. These offers can quickly ramp up the cost of your training and still not give you the complete training that you need to make income online as an affiliate marketer.
- Tools: Inside free offers you will be pitched the need for tools such as traffic generation tools, social media tools, traffic funnel tools just to name a few. Word to the wise, you don’t need these tools. As an affiliate marketer I can tell you that you need very few tools other than a computer, internet access, keyword tool in some cases and a website. Your website doesn’t need to be over the top, it just needs to be functional for pay per click campaigns.
What You Do Need To Be Successful
We have covered a lot of info on what you don’t want or need so here is a quick rundown of what I feel you will need to find success in affiliate marketing and it’s not much!!
What to look for in a training platform
Expandability: What I mean by expandability is, you need to find an affiliate marketing training platform that serves both beginners and advanced marketers. You don’t want to get into a program that you will out grow as your experience level increases. Here are a few examples of training platforms that I feel offer the potential for success…
- Wealthy Affiliate
- Udemy
- Authority Hacker
- ClickBank
- Simplilearn
- Affiliate Lab
- Niche site profits
Each one of these programs offer a varying degree of training and support. Some programs focus on different aspects of affiliate marketing and some are specialized in certain areas.
A good example of this is Wealthy Affiliate, I will be honest and say I am a little bias towards Wealthy Affiliate for the simple reason it’s where I received the bulk of my training from starting out as a newbie to earning a nice income as an affiliate marketer.
Wealthy Affiliate offers a huge amount of training in all aspects of affiliate marketing. WA offers everything from extensive training in SEO and content marketing right through to pay per click and Youtube marketing. WA’s support is really second to none. You will receive support from staff, other members and even the two owners who you can ask questions directly.
A program that has some similarities to WA is Authority Hacker, a lot less bells and whistles for your money but none the less Authority hacker teaches you how to create websites, drive organic traffic to that site so that you have that opportunity to offer your product whatever that may be.
On the other end of the spectrum you have Niche Site Profits which shows you how to build a website and implement ads that pay you for that traffic. For example, you get roughly $30 for every 1000 people you send to that ad, doesn’t sound like much, but the more traffic you can generate the more money you will make. There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes when using this type of income generation model, it’s not as easy as it sounds.
Niche Site Profits is very focused on the ad income generation technique and doesn’t really dig into other affiliate marketing strategies such as Youtube and social marketing which in my opinion makes this more of a one trick pony type of offer. What’s the old adage? Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
This article could easily go on and on, but I do offer reviews on all of these programs which I would highly recommend checking out before you make any decision about your affiliate marketing training.
Here are my reviews….
- Wealthy Affiliate Review
- Udemy Review
- Authority Hacker Review
- Clickbank Review
- Simplilearn Review
- Affiliate Lab Review
- Niche Sites Profits Review
That’s A Wrap!
I hope you got some helpful info from this article, please don’t hesitate to leave me your feedback good or bad! Have a great day and wishing you success, cheers Mike.