Affilorama Review
Name: Affilorama
Price: $1 for thirty-day trial and $67 monthly onwards
Upsells: AffiloTheme $97, AffiloBlueprint $197, AffiloJetpack $497, AffiloBlueprint+AffiloJetpack $997
Owners: Mark Ling
Overall Rank: 80 out of 100
Product Overview
Affilorama is a membership website providing lessons in affiliate marketing.
It is founded in 2005 by a successful entrepreneur, Mark Ling, who has years of success with his own products such as “Jamorama” and “Rocket Piano”.
Affilorama attempt to offer step-by-step training videos and training manuals to help out and guide their members to navigate the affiliate marketing world.
PROS & CONS of Affilorama
PROS:
- Step by step training program resources that are easy to follow
- Access to a very large affiliate marketing community.
- Free Basic Package available for exploring the basic features without any payment
- Three-year payment plan options offer good convenience
CONS:
- Options are aplenty, but not necessarily a good thing. The customer may be confused and can have a difficult time choosing the right program.
- The basic package is a bit limited when compared to the paid package
- Some training information can be downright harmful to your online business
- The cost of the training program can be really expensive if you are to add the additional “options” or upsells
- Supports are handled by a support team and Mark is hardly there for direct support
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Who is Affilorama For?
Affilorama is intended for those who are looking to earn extra income online as an affiliate marketer.
Affilorama is useful for beginners and seasoned or experienced online marketers alike.
This is because the training in Affilorama is very comprehensive. It starts with the basic website set-up for newbies and goes up to more advanced promotional techniques.
Affilorama Tools & Training
Introduction – A good thorough introduction on the basics of Affiliate Marketing divided into several subtopics
Market Research – Good introduction on how to start your market research the right way. The tips shared are really good and useful.
Content Creation – Page for tips on creating good and quality content for your sites. All articles and videos contain very good tips except the one on Private Label Rights (PLR) which makes me feel uneasy. Further elaboration later below.
Site Building – Lessons on setting up websites and web hosting, through the overall structure of your websites and pages. Upsell on AffiloTheme on this page.
Marketing Ideas – Pages on affiliate marketing strategies such as blogging, email marketing, newsletter, and WordPress plugins.
SEO – Thorough walk-through on the basics of Search Engine Optimization. All articles and videos are pretty good except for the articles on Backlinks that make me cringe. My elaboration later below.
PPC – Very good information on the basics of pay per click (PPC) and some can be readily applied.
Affiliate Outsourcing – Tips on how to outsource your work as you become more successful as an online marketer.
Guruviews – Insights, and tips from successful internet “gurus” as they call them.
Support at Affilorama
Supports at Affilorama are available for all levels from the members of the community at large.
Most of the members though are free members.
The forum is fairly lively and seems to have a large number of members.
However, with the way the forum is structured, it is more of “delayed” support that you are getting and it is not uncommon for your question to get answered only after a few days.
This can be frustrating, especially if you have several questions in hand that needed to be responded to urgently to move forward.
How about direct support from the owner himself, Mark Ling?
He rarely ever shows up there and suffice to say don’t count on him for a response, if ever.
Mark Ling is a very busy entrepreneur and he has many other projects at hand, and Affilorama has been just one of them.
Cost for Enrolling at Affilorama?
Affilorama has quite a few packages on offer and this can easily make for a confusing choice decision for their members.
Different people have different budgets and financial capabilities.
Most people who enroll in such a program may be in a dire financial situation and such discriminating price packages are simply not fair at all in my opinion.
Yes, I agree that the packages offered are of high quality, but still cost a bomb and sure to burn a huge hole in your pocket before you can start to get some kind of success.
Check out my no.1 rated program for affiliate marketing program training for your comparison.
Premium by Affilorama ($1 for 30-day trial and $67 onwards)
There is a Free Membership package for new members and revolves around teaching the basics of the Affiliate Marketing business.
The Premium membership package covers the basics mentioned in the Free Membership package in-depth with many hours of video training courses.
Both beginners to advanced affiliate marketers can benefit from the training provided in the Premium Membership package.
The below table shows the difference between the Free package and the Premium package.
The issues I have with Premium information
Now, although the Premium Membership is really good and quite comprehensive in its training module, I saw some big issues that can present a big problem for the members moving forward.
- PLR or Private Label Rights – Think twice before you use
The first issue that I found disturbing is the fact that they promote “Private Label Rights” or PLR in short as being a good idea.
What’s more, you are to get 30 new PLR articles every month! PLR is now no longer a good idea at all because it is simply an outdated and very wrong marketing strategy.
Continuous use of PLR articles will only result in the content marketing failure of your website!
The content in PLR is duplicate and using duplicate articles for your website will result in loss of ranking to your website.
A PLR is basically outsourced content and it means that it is an unoriginal article. Nothing beats an article content that you create yourself no matter how good a PLR is.
Why you might say? Because when a search engine detects a PLR or duplicate content, it can quickly de-rank these websites and there goes your hard work!
A PLR content strategy may work way back in 2010 but with the recent algorithm by the search engines, this strategy will backfire you big time. You can read what Google has to say about duplicate content here.
- Backlinks – No longer a viable strategy anymore
This is another gravely outdated information and training program by Affilorama.
Since Google introduced Google Panda and Google Penguin, many poor websites that heavily rely on back-linking strategies got to see their search results removed from Google before their very eyes.
With such outdated information, to my surprise, 25% of the Blog Bootcamp lessons are dedicated to back-linking strategies!
What does this tell you? Is it worth paying for a course that is severely outdated? You tell me.
Upsells by Affilorama
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AffiloBlueprint ($197)
This package by Affilorama includes 13 lessons and 90+ hours of video training that covers many topics such as SEO, PPC, and traffic generating ideas and concepts.
AffiloBlueprint also offers some free affiliate marketing tools and software such as Traffic Travis.
The package comes with free AffiloTheme and a 30 day free trial to the Premium membership if you are not a Premium member yet.
This package will show you how Mark Ling builds his affiliate marketing from the start and the videos can be used as a guideline for you to start building your own affiliate marketing website.
However, I notice that many of the topics and training videos overlap with the training structures at the Premium Membership package.
So if you are a Premium Member already, I don’t think you can get much-added value by taking up the AffiloBlueprint.
So who is AffiloBlueprint for then? From the look of it, this package is basically for those who just want to learn the basics of affiliate marketing without having to commit to the monthly membership payment.
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AffiloJetpack ($997)
AffiloJetpack package is the most expensive of all the Affilorama packages have to offer.
It claims to be an “All Done For You” package and targets the folks who may not have much time to go through all the many courses and hours of video training and only interested in making money online without much effort.
Do AffiloJetpack claim waters? Maybe it does, but there is a catch here.
You pay that much to essentially do promotions of Mark Ling’s products and services.
It is obvious because while there are so many untapped niches “gold mine” out there, why he does only lets you go for the 18 “selected” niches?
This does not really make much sense to me because I have seen people making money from the most improbable of niches.
Untapped niches with great potential can be identified quickly and easily with the right keyword tools and techniques. You can read my article post about it here.
This package does have some good information and at AffiloJetpack membership, you will get these access:
- AffiloTheme access
- You get to choose 5 Niche Packages out of 18 available
- Free shared web hosting for 12 months
- 3 free eBooks (intended for free reports)
- 1-year email newsletter
- 20 PLR articles
Although some of the features look great, I have a few reservations with regard to this high ticket price package by Mark Ling.
Firstly, I would rather take time to learn the rope about the basics of affiliate marketing and be a good marketer myself in the long run.
Secondly, the fact that you are enrolling a very expensive ticket price on AffiloJetpack to do promotion on Mark Ling’s other products and in turn make him more money is a bit disconcerting.
This service of his should be already included on the Premium membership since he is going to benefit (profit) from your hard work.
At $997, you really need to think carefully if the package is a worthwhile investment for you as there are other better options out there at a fraction of AffiloJetpack price.
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AffiloTheme ($97)
AffiloTheme is basically a WordPress theme and along with it is the training on how to best make use of it.
There are some nice features such as Squeeze/Opt-in Creator, Affiliate Link Cloaking, Header Creator, Easy Layout Options, and Pop Over Generator.
While you can create a beautiful website with AffiloTheme, it is by no means a necessity.
It is more of an accessory to building a website and I don’t think it is worth $97 just for that.
My Final Thoughts of Affilorama
Affiloma as a whole is definitely a very good avenue for learning affiliate marketing.
There are a lot of information and training materials that can help both beginners and seasoned online marketers.
With that said, there some really bad and outdated information still taught at Affilorama that can hurt your online business today.
This makes me question their methods and ability to stay current and updated.
Too many upsells or options can be confusing to a person who is just starting.
Prices for products are also very expensive in my opinion.
If you want to join Affilorama, start with the Premium first.
Only if you are more ready, then only you can add your tools and products, provided that you have enough budget that is.
Summarized Overview
Name: Affilorama
Price: $1 for thirty-day trial and $67 monthly onwards
Upsells: AffiloTheme $97, AffiloBlueprint $197, AffiloJetpack $497, AffiloBlueprint+AffiloJetpack $997
Owners: Mark Ling
Overall Rank: 80 out of 100
VERDICT: LEGIT!! A very high-quality program overall, but with a few “noticeable” faults
Want to Become a Pro Affiliate Marketer? Click Here!
Thank you for reading my review on Affilorama. If you have any questions, comments, or personal reviews and opinions, I would be more than happy to hear and discuss with you.
Your friend,
Dominic
Thanks for the review. I hadn’t heard of affilorama although you have clearly done your research.
I also agree that 97 for a theme is extremely steep.
Greg
You are welcome Greg. That’s right, $97 for something that is more of an accessory than a necessity is just too expensive for me.
dominic@dlansing