Let's Choose Between The Affiliate Marketing Mastery And The Wealthy Affiliate
Affiliate marketing is a lucrative venture, but you need proper guidance and effective tools to pursue this endeavour and ultimately earn profits. You have a lot of options to choose from for a system that will provide you with the essential education, tools and support. If you are trying to choose from the Affiliate Marketing Mastery or the Wealthy Affiliate, you have come to the right place. Read on.
Origin
For any product you buy, it goes without saying that you will want something that comes from a reliable source.
AMM | wealthy affiliate | |
|---|---|---|
Creator | Stefan James | Carson Lim and Kyle Loudon |
Additional Creator Information | No | Yes |
The man behind the Affiliate Marketing Mastery (AMM) is Stefan James, an entrepreneur from Canada. His primary business/brand is Project Life Mastery wherein AMM is only one of the numerous products he offers on affiliate marketing, online business and self-development. You can find a lot of information about him on the internet.
Carson Lim and Kyle Loudon are also entrepreneurs from Canada. At Wealthy Affiliate, Kyle will walk you through the affiliate marketing training and on creating your successful online venture. Meanwhile, Carson is the one who works with the technical team.
Education
AMM | wealthy affiliate | |
|---|---|---|
With In-depth Affiliate Marketing Education? | Yes | Yes |
Main Offer? | Step-by-step lessons | Step-by-step lessons, all-in-one platform |
- With Affiliate Marketing Mastery, you first register for a free Masterclass and then decide whether you will go on with the paid course.
Figure 1
The screenshot above shows what you will discover in the free class. The paid course, on the other hand, consists of 7 modules and other great bonuses.
Module 1 will help you to have the mindset and learn the strategy to succeed in this business. Stefan will teach you the principles and the blueprint for a sustainable business.
Module 2 will tackle market research and keyword research. You will choose the niche you may pursue, which aligns with your passion. Learn to find the best keywords for a niche, and look for the lucrative digital/physical products in a niche.
Module 3 will guide you in building your online brand/presence and learn the marketing channels where you could appropriately promote your chosen niche. You will also decide on an exciting brand name, start your blog, YouTube channel and find out how to gain free traffic from Google.
Module 4 will teach about content creation, getting visitors with articles, obtaining YouTube and other social media followers.
Module 5 will discuss getting traffic, attracting visitors and subscribers, and ranking on search engines and YouTube. You will also learn about Stefan’s Kindle marketing, Facebook and Instagram promotion strategy, and email marketing.
Module 6 is about affiliate marketing monetization in different channels. Find out what laws to follow to market and sell products successfully. Learn what mistakes to avoid and find the profitable programs you can promote.
Module 7 will let you know about tracking your performance and what steps to take to optimize your performance.
The Wealthy Affiliate also has free and paid membership offers and each will provide you specific access to various educational resources. For the Online Entrepreneur Certification, which is a 5-phase, 50 lesson-course about the fundamentals (getting started, building a website, making money, mastering social engagement, achieving success through content creation), free membership will give you access to 10 lessons while premium membership lets you finish all 50 lessons.
The Affiliate Bootcamp Training has a total of 70 lessons all accessible to premium members while free members could only have 10 lessons.
At Wealthy Affiliate, there are also 12 classrooms that offer diverse training for anyone to learn about business building and monetization. These classrooms cover a wide variety of topics such as SEO, local marketing, drop shipping, e-commerce, Facebook Ads, Adsense, pay-per-click, lead generation, and email marketing. Free members have access to 2 classrooms while premium members can access all 12 classrooms.
Premium membership also gives you access to other educational tools and resources at Wealthy Affiliate, including weekly live interactive classes.
Support and Keyword Research tool
Support is crucial for beginners and even for intermediates. Thus, a product with better support to members is always the better option.
amm | WEALTHY AFFILIATE | |
|---|---|---|
Reliable Support? | No | Yes |
Type Of Offered Support? | Community | Community, Live Chat, Personal Message, Technical Support |
Keyword Research Tool? | No | Yes, Jaaxy |
- The figure below is a screenshot from the FAQ on Affiliate Marketing Mastery at the Project Life Mastery website.
Figure 2
It shows what support is available for those who signed up for the product. Rather than personal coaching from Stefan, there is a Facebook group page where members can inquire and ask questions that other more experienced members may answer (not Stefan himself). This means that right after you settle the bill for Stefan’s course, you will have almost zero chances of contacting him for advice.
At Wealthy Affiliate, free members may ask questions from the community inside the platform and also access the live chat facility for 7 days. Upgrading to premium membership will give you the chance to send a private message to any members for help. Premium members also get answers to questions, website hosting and technical support, and mentoring from the founders Kyle and Carson.
My favorite form of support in WA is access to timely (super fast) website technical support. This is crucial for newbies since your site can break (especially if you are not following the training for any reason). It happened to me as a beginner several times when I keep on installing "risky" plugins. Luckily, technical support is always on time to respond and get back my site up and running smoothly again.
Keyword Research
In Module 2 of AMM, you will learn about finding profitable niches, digital product niches, and physical product niches. You will know which niche is best to choose. Moreover, this module will teach you about how keywords work and how you can find the keywords that will work best for your niche. While it is good that AMM will discuss keyword research to you, reviewers noted their disappointment because there is no keyword research tool included. At most, the module could only share the knowledge or point you to where the keyword research tool is (which they are most likely an affiliate of).
The Wealthy Affiliate will not only teach you about finding and picking the ideal keywords that will help rake money, but also gives you one of the best tools there is on keyword research. With a free account, you can do 30 keyword searches and 30 scans for tracking your website rankings. For premium Wealthy Affiliate members, you get access to Jaaxy Lite, which is already good enough to work as a keyword research tool without having to resort to more expensive paid tools for keyword research.
Website Creation and hosting
AMM | Wealthy Affiliate | |
|---|---|---|
Has Website Creation Tools? | No | Yes |
Website Hosting Included? | No | Yes |
A website is the basic tool of an affiliate marketer to begin the venture of "making money online." Learners need to know how to create one that will continuously serve its purpose.
Figure 3
Affiliate Marketing Mastery will teach you how to build your online presence through blogs and YouTube videos. As Figure 3 shows, the AMM team can also "build your website for free" and install some necessary plugins to get you up and running. This free website is just the website itself, which you would normally get from "1-click installs."
While the AMM team will install your website for free, you are REQUIRED to sign up thru their Bluehost affiliate link. That means that if you already have an existing Bluehost account, you need to create a new account again and click on their Bluehost affiliate link (to make sure they get the referral credit which can go from $70 - $100 or more for big-time affiliate marketers).
If you come to think of it, doing so is like "paying them" to do the install, which you can also do by yourself easily. However, since they will give you a free Studiopress theme (which can cost around $50 plus), plus the Genesis framework (making it a value of $100 plus), it seems only fair that you click their affiliate link to sort of compensate the "bonuses."
Note that when you avail of their free offer to install a Bluehost site, you are no longer eligible for their 30-day money-back guarantee. You also need to pay for the Bluehost hosting.
Since they will also install the "11 necessary plugins," they are in complete control to use their affiliate links for the plugins which have a "paid version" - and in return, get commissions if you become a paying customer of those plugins.
After setting up your website, you are on your own to maintain them. Should you have any problems (I saw the "Jetpack" plugin in the list of plugins, a no-no plugin in the Wealthy Affiliate hosting platform since it is too heavy it can break your site), you may troubleshoot the problem on your own, or as they put it in their FAQ page, hire an Upwork developer.
At Wealthy Affiliate, you will likewise know how to build a website, but they will not make you one. Instead, you need to build it on your own, but with the use of SiteRubix.
Free members may have one SiteRubix website while Premium members can have 10 websites.
On SiteRubix, you can easily create your website (which makes it great for beginners) by using thousand of beautiful and ready-to-use themes. Free members can only access 12 themes while paid members can access 3000 plus themes.
There are 4 easy steps to complete building a website on SiteRubix. First, enter a domain name. Second, give your website a name. Third, choose the theme. Fourth is to click “build now.” Here's the easy step-by-step guide.
Premium members have access to tools and facilities that will optimize their websites’ performance and security.
A website is more than just the design and the theme. A website can only perform its best if it has compelling content. At Wealthy Affiliate, you will not only learn how to make great contents, but you will also have the tools to do it. Free members have access to "SiteContent" for building and managing contents, grammar and spelling checker, website content templates, and a plagiarism checker. Premium members can also get thousands of free graphics/photos to integrate into their contents.
Hosting
Hosting allows a website to become available online.
Figure 4
From the image above, you know that Affiliate Marketing Mastery offers no hosting service for your website, although it can build you one for "free" as mentioned in the previous section.
Wealthy Affiliate offers hosting service to its members. A free member may host 1 website with virus and malware protection. Premium members can enjoy other great hosting perks, including 24/7 managed monitoring on website performance, 24/7 automated monitoring to scan and find critical issues, 24/7 site support, and other services to ensure the security, health and performance of your website.
In Wealthy Affiliate, your website also has FREE redundant backups, which, in other hosting companies, can cost you an upsell. When you accidentally break your site and would want to revert back to a date you know it was still all good, i.e. if you break your site today, technical support can restore yesterday's version (or up to the last 1 week's version) as if nothing happened.
How To Apply/Join
- To register for a free Affiliate Marketing Mastery Masterclass, visit https://www.affiliatemarketingmastery.co/eg-masterclass-c. After this, you may take the next step of learning from the paid course by paying $997. There is another payment option of paying 3 monthly instalments of $397.
- To join Wealthy Affiliate, sign up here for free starter account. At the time of writing, they offer a huge discount for the first month of membership, wherein you will only pay $19. For the succeeding months, pay $49 monthly to enjoy not just the advanced educational and tools, but also the feature-packed website, hosting and support facilities of Wealthy Affiliate. You can save up to 50% if you choose to pay for a whole year of membership.
Potential Income
Affiliate Marketing Mastery gives you the education and teaches you the principles to apply to start your journey to affiliate marketing.
At Wealthy Affiliate, you will not just have step-by-step lessons to learn from. The platform is an all-in-one place because it also gives you a stage to make money. Once you reach your third month as a premium member, you can create your own courses, text tutorials, or video lessons as a Premium member. You can subsidize your monthly premium WA membership from what you earn through your courses (which Wealthy Affiliate will pay you for depending on several metrics such as likes, comments, shares, etc). I tried it several times to "share" basic lessons I learned while building my sites, and I got paid $5 to $10 per lesson I made.
A premium member can also have an authority Wealthy Affiliate blog. Your Wealthy Affiliate blog (sort of a Facebook post inside WA) can appear on search engines and could ultimately increase your revenue. Since you are the author of the blog post found in Google (which points to your post inside the WA platform), for example, if that reader ends up signing up for WA, you can have a referral credit.
Work Schedule
How quickly you can start making money from affiliate marketing will depend on the amount of effort that you invest into it.
The masterclass of AMM is about 2 and a half hours while the paid course is about 40 hours of lessons. Remember that to make money from what you just learned, you have to build your website immediately, fill it with good contents and drive a good amount of web traffic.
At Wealthy Affiliate, some members claim they started making money within 3-4 months. I believe that this is not just from affiliate marketing per se, but also from the ability you have as a premium member to offer your own training and lessons. Personally, I got my first $5 from Amazon 3 months after I built my first blog. Then, I started making "good" money from my first blog after 6 months of consistently publishing contents 3x a week, although I worked (training + writing) almost everyday for 12 hours plus.
Benefits/Bonus
Both products offer the additional benefit of earning money by becoming their affiliate.
Affiliate Marketing Mastery offers at least $498.50 in commissions. You cannot be an affiliate if you do not purchase the course itself.
Wealthy Affiliate lets you earn 50% per sign up. That means if someone availed of either the $19 promo, the normal monthly fee of $49, or the yearly cost membership, you get half of it. You don't need to be a premium member to get referral fees. Even free members get commission for referrals, but at a lower percentage. You can also get small incentives from domain purchases inside the WA (yes, you can buy a domain inside the WA platform). You can use these "credits" as cash. Wealthy Affiliate also has a "Site Comment" platform where members can ask fellow members to comment on their websites. You can be a "certified commenter" and increase your potential income from commenting to websites.
While the commissions offered by AMM are greater than that of WA, I believe that this is not easy to earn. I will have a harder time convincing other people to invest on a very expensive product that can only teach them to start affiliate marketing. I believe that it will be easier to make people become part of Wealthy Affiliate because it offers everything that will enable a person to make money online and through affiliate marketing. Also, WA commissions are recurring. That means, as long as your referral is a member, you earn 50%.
Conclusion
PROS
CONS
The Wealthy Affiliate is a better option for beginners and even for those with little experience on affiliate marketing. WA even lets you start earning money on its very own platform by offering premium members to make and offer lessons, which WA pays you for doing. Earnings from these paid lessons could cover the cost of the monthly membership.