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Do you want to find out how to start affiliate marketing?
And do you want to know who is offering the best affiliate marketing course right now?
Great!
You’re at the start of an exciting journey.
But!
(yeah, there’s always a but)…
…you’re going to have to put in some hard work, and you’re going have to learn some cutting edge online skills.
It’s not the year 2000 anymore.
You can’t just throw up some ropey old website of no value and expect affiliate marketing success.
And the competition is fierce, but by no means unbeatable.
The Difference Between Affiliate Marketing Success And Failure
As you may already be coming to realise…
…there are very few things online with more rubbish being told and sold about them than affiliate marketing.
Every man and his dog are on the internet trying to sell you their affiliate training program, and claiming that their’s is the best.
Most of them won’t get you anywhere quickly…if they’ll get you anywhere at all!
Sure, most of them will offer you endless amounts of content.
But you’ll find they mostly get pretty thin and sketchy when it comes to a couple of massively important areas:
How to get traffic to your website;
and…
…how to convert that traffic into buying customers.
Do You Really Have 2 Years to Waste?
Stick with me here and you can potentially save yourself a lot of wasted time.
A couple of years like I had, struggling to get any kind of affiliate marketing success.
That’s how long it took me to start getting any real traction…two damn years!
The good news?
It doesn’t have to take you that long.
Not anywhere near.
But to get yourself a head start, you’re going to have to avoid making a bad decision with your choice of affiliate marketing course provider.
Get this big decision right on day one, and you’ll be well ahead of your competition and well placed for future success.
(Note: If you’ve come to this article pretty early in your search, early to the point where you’re not even completely certain what affiliate marketing is and how it works, that link will take you to another post on this site covering exactly that)
Which Is The Best Affiliate Marketing Course?
In my opinion, the three training courses listed below are all fit to teach pretty much anyone with a sound work ethic:
Exactly how to start affiliate marketing,
and;
How to succeed in affiliate marketing for years to come.
Here they are…in my opinion…
…the 3 best affiliate marketing courses available right now:
#1. Authority Hacker
If you’re looking for affiliate marketing training that can take you, step-by-step, from beginner to expert…look no further!
The founders of Authority Hacker, Gael Breton and Mark Webster have created outstanding training split across three information packed, but easy-to-follow courses.
Each training course being aimed at people with different levels of affiliate marketing experience;
And who are experiencing different levels of success with their authority/affiliate sites.
I honestly believe that few people are better qualified to show you how to build a profitable authority site than Gael and Mark.
These guys are running a number of massively successful authority sites, each of them pulling in plenty of business.
You can check out one of their sites here: www.healthambition.com
These are the 3 affiliate marketing courses offered by Authority Hacker:
- The Authority Site System: A complete, step-by-step system for how to start, build and grow your own profitable affiliate and authority sites.
- Authority Hacker Pro: Aimed towards more advanced users who already have a well established website which they are looking to progress further. It provides detailed blueprints on how to grow revenue and take your site to the next level.
- Authority Hacker Pro Platinum: Genuine high-end stuff here where we’re talking about one-to-one mentoring etc.
What I love about the way these guys have split the training up into separate courses, is this;
It keeps you totally focused on only the critically important aspects at each stage of your site development.
It’s too easy in affiliate marketing to let yourself get pulled in different directions, and end up getting absolutely nothing meaningful done.
Let’s take a look at what’s inside each course in a bit more detail:
The Authority Site System (Building A Stage 1 Authority Site)
- Follow Along Case Study – Watch and learn as Gael and Mark build a brand new authority site from scratch, using the exact methods they teach in their training.
- Over The Shoulder Lessons (85 Video Lessons across 5 Modules) – Extremely in-depth training that gives absolute clarity on what needs to be done, organised exactly in the order you need to take action on them.
- Pre-Built Templates – Each fill-in-the-blanks template has been built and optimised over time to massively speed up your implementation.
- Trello ‘To-Do’ System – A well structured and easy to follow checklist, making sure you keep taking exactly the right action at the exactly the right time…and ensures that you do actually take action, instead of just continuing to consume content.
- Facebook Community – Lifetime access to a very active student community.
- Regular Q&A’s – Hosted by the course creators these are the perfect opportunity to ask any questions you may not have been able to get answers for from the FB community.
One of the most valuable parts of this course lays inside one of the pre-built templates:
The ‘Niche Research’ template.
When you consider that a huge percentage of people who want to get into affiliate marketing never even get out of the starting blocks because of one recurring reason…
…failing to select a niche (that’s right, many aspiring affiliate marketers get stuck at niche selection, and that’s as far as it goes for them)…
…you start to see the massive power of having a pre-filled niche research spreadsheet, complete with automated scoring system, and everything you need to consider in order to find your perfect niche.
This alone is worth it’s weight in gold!
Authority Hacker Pro (Progressing To A Stage 2 Authority Site)
- 18 Advanced Blueprints – All built so that you can implement them in your already successful online business for even greater success.
- 200+ Over The Shoulder Video Lessons – Training that will teach you step-by-step how to implement the new blueprints for maximum success.
- Access to Pro Members Community – Being able to talk with people at the same stage of you is invaluable when trying to progress your business. This community makes certain you have somewhere to turn.
Authority Hacker Pro Platinum (Progressing To A Stage 3 Authority Site)
Okay, I’ve not actually done this course. So I’m not going to BS you that I’ve got in-depth knowledge about the content.
Suffice to say that this final part of Authority Hacker’s affiliate marketing training is super advanced.
Realistically, for the strategies being covered, you’re probably only looking at needing this course once your site is pulling in something like $20k each month, and you want to push on from there.
What really makes Authority Hacker so good?
- Always fully up to date and completely current.
- Field tested – These guys are running their own affiliate sites in a number of different niches.
- In-depth and fluff free training – Absolutely nothing is missed, all the pieces of the puzzle are given to you.
- Step-by-Step – A lesson, a template, a list of actions needed to be taken before progressing to the next lesson.
- Practical – It works, simple as that.
What you’ll find with all of the Authority Hacker training is that they have an extremely well defined strategy for how to develop a website through each stage of it’s growth.
Most courses out there do not have a core strategy to follow, which means you end up getting confused about exactly where you should be concentrating your efforts.
You bring the motivation, commitment and time…combine it with the Authority Hacker training…
…and you will get success in less time than you thought possible.
Best Affiliate Marketing Course for:
Beginners and Intermediates: The Authority Site System
Price: $997 (discount to $599 sometimes available via the link directly above)
Rating: 9.5/10
View: Authority Hacker Free Training Webinar
#2. RankXL Authority SEO 2.0
This is another super high quality affiliate marketing course.
Chris Lee was the founder of RankXL and put the original version of this course together, and he did a hell of a job.
But Chris sold up to Andrej Ilisin during 2019 and I have to say this guy has done an outstanding job of updating the whole course and introducing more monetisation strategies.
Like The Authority Site System above, this is another course created by people who actually built their success following the exact same strategies that they now teach.
Here’s a quick look inside the RankXL Authority SEO course:
RankXL Authority SEO 2.0
- Module 1: Niche & Keyword Research – This opening module is made up of 18 easy to follow sections. Tried and tested strategies to make sure you get your niche selection and keyword research right.
- Module 2: On-Page SEO & Site Structure – 12 sections on making sure you get your site set-up and structured for success.
- Module 3: Off-Page SEO & Link Building – Systemising your link building to make sure your efforts reap maximum results.
- Module 4: Monetisation & Growth – A 14 section module all about how to optimise your site to make sure you actually make money from it.
- Module 5: Bonus XL Strategies – Facebook learning group access, Outsourcing Guide, Conversion Rate Optimisation Guide.
This course is text-based rather than video, and all of the training is well-written, uncomplicated and easy to follow.
Similar to how Authority Hacker put their courses together, with Rank XL you are taught ethical business practices that will keep the search engines on-side.
RankXL Authority SEO 2.0 is a serious affiliate marketing course, you bring the work ethic, learn what’s being taught, apply what you learn and I reckon your chances of affiliate marketing success are pretty high.
Best Affiliate Marketing Course for:
Beginners and Intermediates: RankXL Authority SEO 2.0
Price: $599
Rating: 8/10
#3. Affiliate Secrets 2.0
You’re probably coming to realise that the affiliate marketing training providers on this list have a few things in common:
They all focus on the important stuff and ignore the fluff.
They all keep their training uncomplicated and easy to follow.
And they’ve all built their own affiliate marketing businesses from scratch, and are willing to show you exactly how they did it.
Spencer Mecham’s Affilliate Secrets 2.0 is no different.
But here’s where it is very different…
The main focus of Affiliate Secrets 2.0 is not on building a website and attracting free search traffic from Google.
This affiliate marketing course is focused on using Youtube, Instagram and Facebook, as well as AdWords.
If building websites and doing SEO is your idea of a living hell…
…but your comfortable being in front of a video camera and getting busy on social media, this course could be for you.
Here’s what’s inside Affilliate Secrets 2.0:
- Module 1: The Game Plan – Overview of the affiliate marketing industry and your place in it
- Module 2: Finding Hot Buyers – Finding the right audience and targeting them with the right offers
- Module 3: Traffic Legion – Getting traffic – 5 traffic experts teach this module
- Module 4: Hidden Bank Account – Getting your traffic to buy
- Module 5: Automation Templates – Automating your business
- Module 6: The Products – Finding the best products/services to sell
- Module 7: Long-Term Business – System set-up so that your business can run practically on auto-pilot
- Module 8: Creating a Team /Automation – Full automation blueprint
If you haven’t heard of Spencer Mecham, he’s definitely the real deal.
He was the first ClickFunnels affiliate to reach $1 million in ClickFunnels commissions.
If someone can bag a million dollars from one affiliate offer I’m pretty sure they know what they’re talking about when it comes to affiliate marketing
So what we have here is a real affiliate marketer with real hard-earned success, a course stacked full of everything he’s learnt, and a course that’s laid out in a super-easy to follow way. You can’t ask for much more really.
This may well be the best affiliate marketing course using social media.
Best Affiliate Marketing Course for:
Beginners and Intermediates: Affiliate Secrets 2.0
Price: $897
Rating: 8/10
#4. Affilorama (extra course for anyone on a super-tight budget)
I’ve got this one in as an extra spot because while it doesn’t offer the same quality and depth as the courses in the first three positions, I felt it only fair to include a course that is available to somebody operating on a really tight budget.
So keep in mind, this one won’t get you to affiliate marketing success as quickly as the others above, but it will get you there if you put the work in…you’re just going to have to do a bit more figuring stuff out for yourself.
Mark Ling is the founder of Affilorama which has been running since 2005, making it one of the longest running affiliate marketing courses you can get your hands on.
Here’s a brief outline of the Affilorama course:
- Pathway to Passive: An entry level round-up on how to build a successful, high-quality, long-lasting affiliate website, and a passive income.
All of the training on offer form Affilorama is uncomplicated, to the point, and easy to follow.
I think very highly of the Affilorama training, they’ve got a few different packages available, starting with their ‘Pathway to Passive’ entry level guide.
Let’s look at what’s inside this course/guide in more detail:
Pathway To Passive (How To Not Screw Up Affiliate Marketing)
This is a ‘guide’ for beginner affiliates who want a blueprint on what it takes to create passive income generating affiliate websites.
This is great value and you will learn an absolute ton about how to get started with affiliate marketing.
The guide is presented around the following key areas:
- The 4 steps to success as an affiliate
- How to find profitable niches and products to sell
- How to build search engine optimised websites
- How to convert your visitors into buyers
- How to create content that attracts visitors and links
Best Affiliate Marketing Course/Guide for:
Beginners: Pathway to Passive
Price: $37 (low-cost because it’s a guide, not a full step-by-step course)
Rating: 7/10
The Missing Part Of The Affiliate Puzzle
I already touched on this earlier in this post…
...and it is important…
…for all of the the affiliate marketing courses now available online, there always seems to be one key area that is barely covered in any kind of meaningful detail.
Traffic!
Yeah, you can enrol on an affiliate training course that is high-gloss, super-slick and with an endless amount of material to work through.
But when it comes to getting traffic to your site…
…this is where you will often find that you’re pretty much left on your own.
On your own, trying to work out how to get people to your spot on the internet.
That won’t be your experience with any of the above programs.
Authority Hacker, Rank XL, Affiliate Secrets 2.0…they all have battle-tested traffic driving strategies that they will teach you.
They hold nothing back.
This is a big reason why I rate them all so highly and why they make my final list for best affiliate marketing course.
But Can’t You Get It All For Free?
You can find endless blogs on the internet, telling you that you can find everything that’s inside whatever course you care to mention, for free.
Of course, it may be possible in theory.
But I dread to think how long it’s going to take you, from sourcing the information, learning, testing and everything else.
Probably years.
Ultimately, what you want from any training course of this nature, and what you’re paying for, is to learn from someone who has already trodden the path you now want to go down, and who can also clearly show you how to do it.
But this combination, real experience and the ability to teach, not only how to start affiliate marketing, but how to grow and thrive for years to come, is hard to find.
And it’s what all three providers mentioned in this post do so well.
All three take this basic approach to how they build their courses:
- This is what we do and what we’ve done it for many years, successfully;
- This is exactly how we do it, right now, not five years ago;
- These are all the tools we use;
- Choose your niche and copy us.
Best Affiliate Marketing Courses – Wrapping It Up
Affiliate marketing is a very different thing to what it was ten, or even five, years ago.
Ten years back you could get into whatever niche you fancied, put together some ropey website and with just a little effort be pulling in traffic and bagging sales before you knew what was going on.
Those days are long gone!
And that’s a good thing for anyone with a good work ethic, because a ton of people are no longer interested in affiliate marketing because it now requires effort.
And it also requires a lot of knowledge and skill.
To get affiliate marketing success now, fully up to date knowledge and skills are what you should be trying to get from any affiliate marketing training.
But which is the best affiliate marketing training course for you?
It depends on a couple of things:
What level are you at? I would say beginners can have their pick of those listed above. If you’re more advanced I think you’ll want to rule out Affilorama’s ‘Pathway to Passive’
Your budget. Some are pricier than others, but this does tend to play through in the quality.
Your own preference. Have a good look around their sites, jump on their webinars and get a feel for who seems to really speak your language.
The truth is that I think all of the training courses listed in this post offer outstanding value.
Now it’s up to you.
Good luck.
Got something to add?
I’d love to hear about your experiences with any online affiliate marketing training courses…good or bad.
Who did you turn to when trying to find out how to start affiliate marketing?
Maybe you know of another provider who you believe is offering a better affiliate marketing course than those on this list.
Go ahead and leave me a comment in the box further below.
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Thank you so much for this information Andrew, do you know the savages affiliate from Franklin Hatchett?
Hi Sandra,
Yeah I know the Savage Affiliates course pretty well. I think it’s pretty decent.
I don’t rate it as highly as the affiliate marketing courses I have on my list but it wouldn’t be too far behind.
Andrew
Thanks for the informative article! Authority Hacker was the first affiliate course I ever bought and it was one of the best purchases I ever made. As a beginner everything was simple and easy to understand. There was so much knowledge that anyone could start from ground zero and, with work, have assets generating you money within a relatively short amount of time. I currently just enrolled in Clickbank University 2.0 and have been seeing exponential results and would definitely considerate it an “honorable mention”! Would also love to hear your thoughts on Franklin Hatchett’s Savage Affiliates Course!
Thanks Deandre,
Pleased to hear you too got great value from the Authority Hacker course.
Coincidence…I’m currently going through both Clickbank University 2.0 and Savage Affiliates to see if they’re worth adding to this post.
Andrew
Hi Andrew, Have you any experience of Ryan Wegner’s Lead generation blueprint?
Hi Steven,
Yeah I now that course. The whole lead gen model just isn’t for me.
Best,
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
As a fellow ‘Brit’, I was looking to join the SFM programme having been through the introductory videos. Stuart Ross has a very easy going sales style! The price put me off. My question to you is this… Even the SFM system is priced in USD….. Will the training provided by Authority Hacker ( my preferred out of the above 3 ) be relevant to me living in the UK?
Best regards
Hey, Sorry for the late reply. I’m in the UK, so yeah Authority Hacker is completely relevant for the UK.
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for the detailed post. Honesty that slashes through the BS is highly appreciated. My wife is taking your advice and going only up to the Essential level of SFM and I am doing the Affilorama Passive Pathway. We will both be grazing Authority Hacker blog posts. Hopefully with a lot of time on our hands it will be enough to get some momentum.
Do you have a recommendation for Niche searches?
Do you believe in Amazon Affiliates (Associates ) program.
Thanks for your time and now that I subscribe I have a lot of Doublethink to catch up on
Hey Kfar,
Thanks for your comment and question, really sorry for the late reply…I decided to take a few weeks off with the wife and son and head off to Majorca…without the laptop! Back now though and raring to go.
Sounds like you and your wife are taking a solid approach to this.
There’s a heck of a lot to niche research: size of the niche market, amount and quality of competition (is there room for you to enter and compete), number and value of keywords around which you can write content, can money be made in the niche.
To be straight the best program I’ve ever found for covering niche research in serious depth is Authority Hacker, I use their approach every time i research a new niche and it’s not failed me yet. I’d love to go into niche research in much more depth right here but everything I apply in this area is Authority Hacker IP so it just wouldn’t be fair of me to do that.
I do believe in the Amazon Associates program, i have a site that uses only that as its monetisation strategy.
Best,
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
What about the wealthy affiliates program? What is your experience with that?
Regards,
Lotte
Hi Lotte,
Yeah I just found Wealthy Affiliate to be too similar to the SFM in what and how they taught…but cheaper.
I’ve done full reviews on both programs on this site.
Best,
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
Thank you for these usefull insights. What is your opinion on the Wealthy Affiliates programme compared to SFM and to the three programmes described above?
Best regards,
Lotte
Hey Lotte, Thanks for posting your comment.
I was an SFM member for two years…didn’t get any affiliate success while I was.
I joined WA…found it too similar to the SFM, albeit quite a bit cheaper.
I bought Authority Hacker’s TASS course…was making consistent monthly income three months later.
You could argue that when I joined Authority Hacker I already had some affiliate marketing knowledge and skills from the previous couple of years, and that’s why it all clicked so quickly.
I know that’s not the case though. When I joined the TASS course, I totally started over, just absorbed everything the guys had to teach.
As if I’d come to affiliate marketing completely fresh. What did Bruce Lee say?…”empty your cup so that it ma be filled”…that’s what I did.
All of that said, some people get on great with SFM and WA, but they’re not for me.
Best, Andrew
Hi Andrew,
Thanks very very much for all this fantastic info.
We did the traning from Peng Joon a few years back…and didn’t finish.
Now we saw the SFM programm and after a bit of research found you. Real happy with the info…without the fluff.
Just a small question. When you are starting from scratch how much time will it take to be up and running. We know our niche and the website is practically ready to go.
Hey, Sorry to take so long to reply. Just got back from holiday.
Your question, it’s a big question!
It’s really hard to say without knowing your niche, your traffic generation strategy and monetisation strategy.
For new authority sites I tend to use an extremely rough guide whereby I think that the first time a new site will start to make regular income is when it hits 3k visitors a month. A new site will spend a few months on the google sandbox so I reckon if you hit that traffic figure within 12 months from launch you’ve done a good job.
But hey, like I said, this is very rough guide stuff.