This article is a review of affiliate marketing, which includes the anatomy of an affiliate link as well as tips for effective placement. Affiliate links are virtual advertisements that can take multiple forms, such as text ads or banner ads on websites, search engine ad placements and targeted email campaigns.
“Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Review” is a blog that reviews the top affiliate marketing programs. This blog has been around for quite some time and offers reviews on what it’s like to work with these programs.
Are you searching for an honest review of Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing? You may have heard about Michelle Schroeder-Gardner if you desire to generate money online. However, you may be wondering whether she is a con artist.
There are courses out there that provide false information, saying that you can earn a lot of money using their technique or buying the products they propose, but they aren’t worth it.
I extensively investigated Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing so that I could tell you more about it to assist you make a better educated choice.
I’m not linked with Michelle Schroeder-Gardner, just to be clear. It implies that I was not compensated for writing this review. As a result, you can be confident that you will get an impartial and honest assessment from me.
I’ll also tell you about the finest alternative to Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing that has allowed me to create a full-time passive income online at the conclusion of this review.
Review of Affiliate Marketing: Making Sense of It – Key Takeaways
- Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing is the name of the course.
- Michelle Schroeder-Gardner, Michelle Schroeder-Gardner, Michelle Schroeder-Gardner, Michelle Schro
- Price: $197, or $99 in two installments.
- Pros: The community is vibrant and welcoming.
- Cons: The training is brief and general. There aren’t enough over-the-shoulder examples.
- Overall Score: 2/5
- The Best Alternative: An All-in-One Online Passive Income Platform
In this Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing course review, I’ll go through the following topics.
What is Affiliate Marketing and How Does It Work?
Michelle Schroeder-Making Gardner’s Sense of Affiliate Marketing course is designed to assist bloggers in earning affiliate money.
On the sales page, the course is touted as a step-by-step guide to building and profiting from your own affiliate marketing plan. Michelle, the creator, claims to explain all of the ins and outs so you don’t have to worry about what to do next while implementing your marketing plan.
This seems to be quite promising. However, there is no mention of anything useful. You won’t know ahead of time what type of unique methods Michelle will show you that will offer you an advantage over other bloggers in terms of Google rankings.
Of course, she can’t tell you everything before you buy the course. As a reputable course designer, she should, at the very least, tell you the tactics the course excels at. Some experts, for example, excel at Facebook advertisements while others excel at establishing connections to websites.
Nonetheless, the course has proven to be quite popular. Michelle’s revenues from the course in February 2019 were as follows, according to an article:
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing receives roughly $37k per month on average, based on 6 individuals joining up every day.
Recommendation: This Is The Most Effective Alternative
What is Michelle Schroeder-background? Gardner’s
Michelle is a personal finance blogger who contributes to MakingSenseofCents.com. She is able to travel full-time in her RV because to the popularity of her blog.
Her blog has been operating since 2014, and in March 2018, she earned $241,659 alone from it.
Affiliate marketing contributed $187,785 to the total.
Michelle introduces herself as follows on the sales page for Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing:
Michelle’s blog has detailed earnings throughout the years, up to December 2018.
Since 2016, she claims to have earned $50,000 per month or more from affiliate marketing alone.
Recommendation: This Is The Most Effective Alternative
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing: An Overview
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing is a text-based course that includes workbooks, exercises, and blog-building ideas.
Each lesson delves into a certain aspect of affiliate marketing. The modules are as follows:
What Is Affiliate Marketing, and How Does It Work? Module 1: What Is Affiliate Marketing, and How Does It
This lesson will define affiliate marketing, as well as why and how businesses use affiliate programs.
Module 2: How to Find Affiliate Programs and Apply for Them
This session will show you how to locate affiliate programs and choose appropriate goods to market.
Module 3: Obey The Laws
A legal disclosure statement is required by the FTC in affiliate postings. This module will go through the necessary disclosures.
Module 4: How Do You Convert Your Readers?
This section will show you how to attract customers to buy from your affiliate links by clicking on them.
Module 5: Affiliate Link Promotion Strategies and Methods
This lesson will teach you how to advertise your affiliate items effectively so that you can earn more commissions.
6th Module: Rinse and Repetition
This lesson will show you how to sustain a long-term affiliate marketing plan. This section includes a checklist for keeping affiliate strategy up to date.
In addition, the course comes with worksheets, checklists, and supplementary materials:
- How to Get Approved for Affiliate Programs Every Time
- How to Use Pinterest to Attract Thousands of Visitors to Your Blog (Video)
- When anything becomes viral, there are nine things you must do.
- How to Get More Page Views on Your Website
- Products and Services Offered by Affiliates (Worksheet)
- Checklist for the Perfect Affiliate Link
- How to Use Facebook Ads to Increase Your Reach, Impact, and Revenue
- Strategies for Editing and Writing That Will Take Your Content To The Next Level
- How Can You Legally Safeguard Your Blog? (Video)
Recommendation: This Is The Most Effective Alternative
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing: 12 Reasons Why I Don’t Recommend It
1. Michelle’s Affiliates are the ones who write the positive reviews.
You’ve undoubtedly read some other Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing reviews, and the most of them are positive.
Those bloggers, on the other hand, get compensated handsomely if you buy Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing via their links. As a result, their statements are often skewed and untrustworthy.
The evaluations are just sales pages that fail to disclose the hidden fees or the difficulties of profiting from Michelle’s methods.
You could find a website named The Savvy Couple on the first page of Google when searching for Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing review:
Take care! They are a super affiliate for Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing, which means they earn thousands of dollars in affiliate commissions by advertising the program.
The 9/10 rating is only a marketing ploy. Should you put your faith in someone who has a conflict of interest and is paid a lot of money to “review” a course? No, most likely not. This isn’t a review; it’s a deal!
As a result, I suggest reading the evaluations of Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing made by non-affiliates.
I attempted to find genuine customer evaluations of Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing on Trustpilot, the most reputable review site:
However, there are no reviews at all on Trustpilot, which is strange. This is uncommon for a school that claims to have assisted thousands of individuals with affiliate marketing success.
If this is accurate, there should be a lot of positive feedback.
2. The instruction is very basic and generic.
Despite claiming to be a “step-by-step affiliate marketing training,” the course is lacking in depth and detail. Almost every subject covered in the course may be obtained for free on the internet.
Michelle’s course, “Teaching With Tutorials,” is possibly the finest example of this. As a consequence, without any screenshots, the lecture is just 612 words long.
With 1182 words and four screenshots, Michelle’s tutorial on writing reviews isn’t much better.
Every course in Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing provides the same amount of value.
Yes, Michelle has gathered all of your information in one spot for you.
But I lost faith in the training to the point that I had to rely on Google for more thorough and up-to-date information.
3. No technical assistance
If you’re new to internet marketing, you’ll undoubtedly need some technical help from time to time. Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing, on the other hand, solely provides training and not technical assistance.
As a result, if you have technical issues with your website, you have no one to turn to. This is something that newcomers to internet marketing should be aware about.
You will feel powerless after paying so much for the training and expecting to get all types of assistance.
My top recommendation for a platform is unique. With your website, you will get technical assistance 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
They have a technical support staff available at all times to assist you with any technical issues you may have. It’s almost as if you’ve hired a technical staff. There is also a million-strong community to assist you if you have any questions.
4. A lack of real-world examples
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing has numerous assertions and suggestions, but few reference or clear instructions.
You’re instructed, for example, to assess the administration of each affiliate program you’re interested in, but you’re never shown how.
Michelle claims that interviews are a good method to market affiliate items, but she offers no evidence or examples to back up her claim.
You’re advised to “build your list” and “monitor your progress” all the time, but you never get any walkthroughs or directions on how to do so.
There’s a comment that says it’s vital to “be an expert,” but that’s the extent of the “training” you’ll receive on how to do so.
Despite the fact that you are informed that certain social media methods do not work, no examples or screenshots of these strategies are provided.
There is a “number to compute,” but no instructions on where to locate the data needed for the computation.
You suggest creating a “help sheet,” but you never describe how it should appear or what it should include.
Many more instances of TELLING without SHOWING will be shown throughout the course.
Learning affiliate marketing this manner is like to learning to fly an aircraft by reading 100 pages of text plus ten illustrations.
5. There is no SEO training.
Unlike all other affiliate marketing courses I’ve seen, it doesn’t provide any SEO instruction.
According to statistics, Google is the leading source of internet traffic in most sectors, accounting for more than half of all traffic. Google generates eight times the amount of traffic as all other social media sites combined.
The majority of top blogs get 66.47 percent of their traffic from search engines, with 99.77 percent organic and 0.23 percent sponsored traffic.
As a result, you’d expect Search Engine Optimization to be included in an affiliate marketing course (SEO).
However, there are just two references to SEO in Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing:
Michelle confesses that she hasn’t depended much on organic traffic to her website, which might explain why she made this mistake:
She just began studying SEO in 2019. Do you believe you’d want to learn affiliate marketing from someone who isn’t familiar with SEO?
SEO accounts for the bulk of blog traffic. Michelle’s, on the other hand, looks to be relying heavily on social media, notably Pinterest.
This explains why there are two courses regarding Pinterest in Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing.
6. Text-heavy with very little video
In today’s online classes, video is often employed as a teaching tool. The majority of the courses in Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing, on the other hand, are text-based.
Most of the classes look like this: walls of dull text with just a few screenshots to break up the boredom.
While video may not be appropriate for every subject, it would surely be appropriate for a number of them, including:
- Can you produce a screencast illustrating where each of the main metrics in the Google Analytics interface can be found?
- Creating Content – An in-depth look at Michelle’s content creation process would be fantastic.
- Social Media Marketing – What if Michelle recorded a screencast of how she chooses and arranges her social media updates?
- Email Marketing — Michelle spoke on the significance of email marketing. A screencast illustrating how she prepares and sends out an email would have been fantastic.
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing currently only features three video courses, none of which are from Michelle.
7. A scarcity of student success stories
While Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing says that many of their students receive benefits as a consequence of the training, there is no proof to back up this claim.
Some evaluations may include screenshots from their Facebook group as evidence of their success. However, there is no way of knowing whether or whether they are accurate findings.
Additionally, some students who enrolled in Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing are not novices and already have a well-established website.
As a consequence, their outcomes may not be attributable to the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing program. That implies that even if some people succeed, it’s doubtful that you would if you are a total novice.
8. There Are No Tools Provided for Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing does not provide any tools for creating an affiliate website.
One of the most crucial tools in affiliate marketing, for example, is the keyword research tool. A keyword research tool, such as Ahrefs, might cost upwards of $99 per month.
The lack of tools in the course is due to the high cost of building tools.
Furthermore, they may propose appropriate tools to you and earn affiliate income when you buy such products using their links without giving you with any free tools.
They will be able to earn more money from you as a result of this.
My #1 suggested platform is unique in that when you sign up, you will get a free keyword research tool. They design and build their own tools, which are very complex and simple to use. All of this is included in a single monthly membership charge. There are no upsells at all.
In addition, the web hosting quality of my #1 recommended platform is similar to some famous brands like WPEngine. When hosting on their servers, the website performance is much improved.
9. Invisible Costs
There are no extra expenses mentioned on the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing sales page.
Once inside, you’ll discover a list of paid items and services that are suggested, including:
- ConvertKit – $29 per month (ConvertKit offers a variety of options.) For example, Mailchimp has a free plan that allows you to email 2000 subscribers. Michelle seems to be in the murky area of pushing what is lucrative first and then whether it is useful to the reader, according to her pupil.)
- Tailwind is a monthly subscription service that costs $9.99.
- $100+ per month on Facebook advertisements (Michelle recommends paying $10 to $20 to promote a Facebook post). However, getting them to function for affiliate items is becoming more difficult.)
- Legal Website Templates – $100+ (In a webinar session, which is really a sales pitch, it is suggested that you purchase a bundle of “website legal templates,” which would cost you more than $100 even with the discount coupon.)
10. The Course Is Ineligible For Beginners
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing will be useful whether you’re a novice blogger or an established one. The course, on the other hand, isn’t really helpful for novices.
The training has very little advice on how to get visitors to a new blog. There’s no information on how to start a blog from scratch.
In reality, it looks like the whole course is based on the assumption that you already have a site with some traffic but don’t know how to monetize it.
That was Michelle’s predicament at the start of 2014. She had been writing for almost three years, and her site was attracting 100,000 monthly visits.
She, on the other hand, had no clue what affiliate marketing was and was barely making $1,000 a month from it.
If you’re in a similar situation as Michelle, you may find Michelle’s course useful.
However, whether you’re a beginner or a veteran, it’s not the ideal approach to learn how to blog.
11. PDF Learning Materials of Poor Quality
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing has several PDF “worksheets” and additional “lessons.” In addition to the PDFs’ (at best) subpar substance, the presentation will leave you scratching your head.
Some PDFs, for no apparent reason, require you to handwrite whole paragraphs.
I’m not sure why these “worksheets” aren’t available as Google Docs or Google Sheets that students can simply copy, upload, and update.
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing has certain “bonuses” that are also available as PDF files for no apparent reason.
I’m curious as to why such “lessons” aren’t just web pages linking to the course content.
I’m guessing that adding such sparse text to a PDF gives it a more solid appearance.
Bonus that isn’t real
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing deceives its clients in a variety of ways, despite its numerous “excellent perks.”
When you’re promised you’ll get a PDF describing what you should do to improve page views, for example, it turns out the PDF just comprises two pages of basic information.
The following are my notes for the remaining eight bonus courses in Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing:
#1. How to Ensure That You Are Always Accepted Into An Affiliate Program
It’s a good text lesson from Justine Grey, who has worked with affiliate marketing networks for firms like Shopify and FreshBooks.
Although the lecture is informative and insightful, I’ve never had trouble being approved into an associate network, so I’m not sure how effective it is.
#2. Using Pinterest to Drive Thousands of Visitors to Your Blog
Lauren McManus’ Create and Go screencast class is 33 minutes long. It was out of date in several parts, but the graphic examples made it simple to understand.
Lauren’s Pinterest course is promoted in this video. (Take note of the last two minutes.)
#3. When anything becomes viral, there are nine things you must do.
Two pages of general advice like “reread” and “enjoy yourself.” It would have been more beneficial to have a proper training program on how to create and promote viral content.
Worksheet #4 – My Affiliate Products & Services
The PDF is barely one page long and completely useless. It would have been more efficient to utilize a Google Sheet in this case.
#5. Worksheet – Checklist for the Perfect Affiliate Link
Here’s another one-page PDF that shouldn’t be a PDF in the first place.
#6. How to Use Facebook Ads to Increase Your Reach, Impact, and Revenue
In this 39-minute video course, Monica Louie, a “Facebook advertising coach and strategist,” provides a comprehensive introduction to Facebook advertisements.
#7. Strategies for Editing and Writing That Will Take Your Content To The Next Level
Ariel Gardner, a professional blog editor, offers a guest lecture. It’s essentially a wall of text with no examples or images, and it’s devoid of any concrete instances.
#8. How to Protect Your Blog Legally
Liz Stapleton, a lawyer and blogger, explains why privacy and terms of service are important for your site in a 21-minute video and then sells her $100+ template package. (You can learn how to do this for free in other affiliate marketing classes.)
Recommendation: This Is The Most Effective Alternative
Is Affiliate Marketing Made Sense a Scam?
This book, Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing, is not a rip-off. Their course is beneficial in certain ways. You could learn anything about blogging and affiliate marketing if you purchase their courses.
Many bloggers, mostly their affiliates who can make substantial money, are also endorsing the course.
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing, on the other hand, has not been updated often since its inception in July 2016. I often checked Google to see whether the material in the course was still applicable.
Michelle also fails to provide any evidence or reasoning to back up her advise to advertise affiliate items on Instagram.
Instagram, as far as I’m aware, is famously awful at generating traffic.
Furthermore, Michelle seems to exclusively consider commissions when recommending tools.
Over the years, Michelle has made more affiliate revenue from Bluehost than from any other provider. Though I don’t have a problem with Bluehost, it was amusing to observe so many concerns about the hosting service provider in the MSoAM members’ Facebook page.
Michelle may want to provide her pupils additional possibilities for making comparisons.
Actually, there’s no need to buy Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing when there’s a superior option that’s not only cheaper but also provides a lot more value and will help you achieve quicker.
In the next part, I’ll go through my top-recommended platform in further detail.
Recommendation: This Is The Most Effective Alternative
Final Verdict on Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing
Make Sense of Affiliate Marketing is not a course I can recommend without reservation, particularly because there are better alternatives.
Though there is some good teaching and concepts in the course, nothing is covered in detail, and the substance is severely deficient. You can easily get better free training online for 90% of the subjects addressed.
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing would be a far better $10 booklet or Udemy course, as a follow-up to the previous point.
In both arrangements, the training would still be mostly worthless, but at least it wouldn’t be prohibitively costly.
Given the weak course materials and the scarcity of success stories, it’s doubtful that many Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing students are succeeding.
However, since Michelle is so appealing, few individuals are ready to criticize her strategy for fear of blowback.
Is There a More Effective Way to Understand Affiliate Marketing?
So, what’s the greatest option to Affiliate Marketing Made Simple? Wealthy Affiliate is the platform that I recommend the most.
Wealthy Affiliate is a one-stop shop for starting an affiliate marketing company from the ground up.
When you join Wealthy Affiliate, you’ll have access to a first-class site hosting service, keyword research tools, community support, thorough training, writing tools, and other technologies to assist you step-by-step develop an online company.
Wealthy Affiliate offers a free account that allows you to get started with affiliate marketing right now without spending any money.
If you like the site, you can subscribe to a premium membership to have access to all of its features. After then, there are no more upsells.
However, how much money can you make with Wealthy Affiliate? A 21-year-old Wealthy Affiliate student earned $7,395 in only one week, equating to more than $1,000 a day…all while following the Wealthy Affiliate training.
Wealthy Affiliate, in comparison to Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing, has a considerably longer history, having been around for 15 years and boasting several success stories over the last decade.
Wealthy Affiliate now boasts over a million users, demonstrating the platform’s popularity.
Here are some more inspirational success stories from Wealthy Affiliate members to offer you additional examples.
If you don’t believe me, check out Trustpilot to see what other people have to say:
Wealthy Affiliate is now rated 4.8 out of 5 stars, which is fantastic. With over 400 reviews, it’s astonishing to have such a high rating.
If there are just two or three positive reviews, you may conclude that they are fraudulent. However, you can’t make it up when there are over 400 reviews. Remember that Trustpilot has a sophisticated mechanism in place to identify false reviews.
What is the best way to join Wealthy Affiliate?
Wealthy Affiliate offers a very straightforward price structure. There are two levels of membership: free and premium. Premium membership is just $49 per month or $395 per year.
If you’re interested in learning more about Wealthy Affiliate, you can join up for a free starting membership by clicking here (no credit card required). You may choose to be a free member for an indefinite period of time.
As a starting member, you’ll get immediate access to the community, live chat, over 500 training courses, two classrooms, networking, comments, one free website, and the keyword tool.
You may take advantage of all of these benefits without spending any money.
So I highly urge you to create a free account and check it out for yourself.
Recommendation: This Is The Most Effective Alternative
Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online, but it can be hard to understand. This article will help you make sense of affiliate marketing reviews. Reference: making sense of cents.
Related Tags
- making sense of affiliate marketing reddit
- making sense of affiliate marketing free download
- honest affiliate marketing
- best affiliate marketing coach
- fourpercent com reviews
