Review of Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Course
Overview
Blogging has become a popular option to make money online as it is remote, flexible and gives you the space and time required to have your own brand. Being your own boss and managing your content sounds dreamy because of all the control you could have over your own work. But how do Blogs make money ?
Majority of the successful blogs out there make money by affiliate marketing, also known as Cost Per Action (CPA) marketing. Although the idea of this business strategy is straightforward and clear, learning the foundations and basics of affiliate marketing takes patience and practice.
There are thousands of affiliate marketing training courses that you can purchase to show you how to create a profitable blog and avoid the pitfalls of errors. Michelle Schroeder-Gardner, a well known 7 figure lucrative blogger, has also put out a course of her own, based on the success of her personal finance blog called Making Sense of Cents.
MrMoneyMagnet.com tests and provides honest reviews of the best affiliate marketing courses for those people out there who seem unsure of which course to choose. The sheer number of online courses on blogging or affiliate marketing can seem like an information overload and one can easily feel lost with all the suggested strategies to increase profits on your website. So, follow this review to see if Michelle’s Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing is one of the best CPA marketing courses, or if it is worth your time and money.
What is Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing?
This affiliate marketing course is a beginner friendly training course that teaches you the basics and importance of affiliate marketing while also showing you how to think like a businessperson by setting realistic expectations. On makingsenseofaffiliatemarketing.com, the course promises to provide step by step guidance on how to to make a successful blog by teaching you the following
- What affiliate marketing is and how it works
- Why affiliate marketing is profitable
- The exact steps Michelle had taken to earn over $300,000 from a single blog post
- How to pick the right affiliate products to promote
- How to increase conversions
- How to build trust and not lose followers
- Required disclosures that you need to know about
- The one major tool you need for affiliate marketing
- Different strategies to use to promote your affiliate products
- How to use Pinterest to succeed at affiliate marketing (yes, this includes the newest Pinterest affiliate rules!)
Read this complete review of Making Sense of Marketing to see if it really delivers these claims and if their training truly does equip you to make bountiful profits.
Who is Michelle Schroeder-Gardner?
Making Sense of Cents has been a hit personal finance and accounting blog since 2011. This gives her a full decade of experience as a personal blogger. She quit her day job of being a financial analyst in 2013 to focus on her blog full-time. Being able to quit a corporate job to support yourself from online blogging really shows that this is a viable business option and adds to Michelle’s credibility.
Michelle takes her job as a blogger and blogging instructor very seriously. She teaches only safe and ethical marketing practices and encourages her students to do the same. Her course focuses on the legality of affiliate marketing and how to stay out of trouble in the industry. She believes ethical and legal work can build your brand reputation, help tackle the uncertainty of the market, and avoid any liabilities that come with the job.
Michelle does not beat around the bush in this course - she shows you the exact steps she took to earn over $50,000 per month, just from her affiliate links. Her strategy is popular despite being fairly basic, and tries to influence students to build a growth mindset that can help them earn affiliate income through a long term business model.
How Does Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Course Work?
This course is suited for both beginners with no blogs and also to those who have already set up and designed a blog but do not know how to scale it up. The course is offered through a platform called Teachable, which has a user friendly interface and is well organized. Once you are enrolled into the program, you can download the materials and join their Facebook Mastermind group. The content is mostly written information, with a few good videos. The best feature of their way of teaching is the homework they assign. Every week, you will be challenged to think about implementing the lessons into your own blog. Usually, online courses are dry and un-engaging if they just dump every bit of information on you, but Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing avoids this by keeping you productive along the duration of the course.
The first few modules are useful in giving you niche ideas for different affiliate programs and the basics of how affiliate marketing works. With enough traffic on your page, you can get approved by different affiliate programs and advertisers to promote their products. If their products are bought or affiliate links are clicked, you get a commission.
The third module guides on the rules and regulations that need to be followed in affiliate marketing. This information is crucial and Michelle does a great job shedding light and condensing the requirements and disclosures.
The fourth and fifth module cover basic strategies used by nearly all blogs that use affiliate marketing, including building your brand and identity and Pinterest strategies to increase your views. Given the range of courses that are available on this topic, Making Sense does a mediocre job delivering this nonspecific intel.
Finally, the sixth module tells you about how to keep your business running for the long term with steady growth.
The mastery of affiliate marketing involves strategizing on various levels and this course provides different perspectives from different experts in the bonus content. These are audio interviews with seasoned professionals that give great insights into the diverse nature of affiliate marketing. So, enrolling in this program gets you access to written material, videos, audio interviews, homework assignments and access to an exclusive facebook group for students.
Course Curriculum
The course is broken down into 6 models, as described below:
Welcome Module:
Module 1: What is Affiliate Marketing
Module 2: How to Find and Apply To Affiliate Programs
Module 3: Follow the Rules
Module 4: How To Get Your Readers To Convert
Module 5: Strategies and Ways To Promote Affiliate Links
Module 6: Rinse and Repeat
Bonuses (Interviews with experts)
A good part of this course is text-based, meaning the material comes in pdf documents. Aside from the materials, you can also email instructors with questions or ask doubts in the Facebook group.
How Much Does Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Cost?
For a CPA marketing course, Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing is sold at a modest price of $197. You can even pay them in two installments of $105 each. However, it gets trickier in terms of investment funds when you factor in the costs of some applications that you may have to purchase like ConvertKit. This course falls short by not providing any cheaper or free alternatives to the various services that need to be bought to run your blog smoothly. Considering there is no help on setting up a blog and web design, $197 seems a bit pricey. There are similar courses out there that cover more topics for a lesser price. But, it still holds some merit because they cover more on the legal aspect of affiliate marketing.
Pros and Cons of Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing
Conclusion
There are hundreds of affiliate marketing training courses available online, and information is offered through books and free material through the internet. Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing does a good job of covering how to start your journey with monetizing your blog. So, if you have a blog running and are wondering how to make the most of having an audience, this course will teach you how to promote products or services on your website. Not only can you make more money with the tips and tricks they teach you, but you can learn how to keep a steady reader base so that this business plan works for a long term.
The biggest selling point of this course is the intricacies that come with affiliate marketing. There are a lot of rules to follow and methods to make sure your business stays safe in terms of policies and regulations. If you are good at learning from text-based materials, then this course will suit you. However, if you are new to blogging and need more engaging content like videos and worksheets, there are other options available for similar prices. If you’re looking for an informative course that teaches you how to earn a 5 figure salary, Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing would be the right investment to make, provided you’re willing to punch in the hours.
