3 BEST Affiliate Marketing Training Courses + 5 SCAMS [2020]
Looking for the best affiliate marketing courses on the market RIGHT NOW? I have spent THOUSANDS of dollars and give you the top 3 so you can SAVE YOUR money!
Best course for advanced marketers
- COMPLETE linkbuilding training
- Includes website flipping training
- Full Conversion Rate Optimization technics
- LOTS of golden nuggets
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Best overall course
- Updated CONSTANTLY and improved
- TONS of blueprints
- Focus on LONG TERM white hat link building
- Great advice for beginner marketers
- Best Overall Presentation
- Top-Notch SOP’s and Blueprints
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Best for beginners who focus on uncompetitive niches
- Easy to follow formula
- Focus on great content
- Updated constantly
- Good price
- Great for long term
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Are you looking to jump into affiliate marketing, but want to find the best course available so you don’t get ripped off?
Right now is an AWESOME time to get into affiliate marketing. Not only because there is TONS of money to be made – but also because there is awesome training out there that DOESN’T rip you off!
Unfortunately, there are still LOT’s of affiliate marketing courses that are nothing but a money grab that is either recycled trash, or is filled with outdated info that you could find anywhere else on the internet.
There are even worse people out there that put out courses that they know are SHIT and are filled with information that will do nothing but WASTE YOUR MONEY!
If I sound pissed, it’s because I am. Why? It’s because I have literally spent THOUSANDS of dollars on a wide variety of affiliate marketing courses and that PISSES ME OFF.
But what sucks for ME is good for YOU because I have spent the money to get a really good sense for what affiliate marketing courses are out there, and can hopefully help you save money by avoiding some of the real stinkers out there.
Please note that there are of course affiliate links on this page, and I will make a commission if you make a purchase.
Why should you trust me? Because I believe that honest, transparent reviews are the best ways to sell something and it is something that is lacking in online marketing.
These courses have been carefully curated since I started in affiliate marketing back in 2016. Most of these courses were not available back then, and I have only discovered them in the past two years or so – which coincidentally – is when affiliate marketing started to really take off for me.
I actually totally revised the list in 2020 to reflect a course that I just took that really opened my eyes to a lot of different things, and that is The Affiliate Lab (TAL) by Matt Diggity.
The amount of information, and the breadth knowledge you get really puts it near the top of the list.
Authority Hacker’s The Authority Site System 2.0 (TASS) isn’t just another affiliate marketing course.
The Authority Site System the brain child of Gael Breton and Mark Website who (used to run) the popular Health Ambition blog. They also run numerous other successful affiliate sites and have a popular podcast.
I got turned on to Authority Hacker from listening to their excellent podcast and hearing their story of how they went from using PBN’s to rank website to completely white hat techniques after they lost all of their income after getting a Google penalty.
After that they went completely white-hat (although it can be argued that intentionally building links is technically grey hat) and focused on building great content and reaching out to other bloggers for getting links to their own sites.
The Authority Hacker’s Authority Site System course is very systematic and is also well laid out for beginners. Authority Hacker has three different courses:
- The Authority Site System: A step-by-step course on how to start, build and grow an affiliate site. It is meant to give you everything you need to make make income replacing level websites ($3k/month)
- Authority Hacker Pro: This course is for established affiliate site owners who already have a website making at least $3-5k/month and are looking to take their site to the next level. Unlike the Authority Site System, it is not systemized. Instead, it comes in modules designed to help site owners deal with specific challenges.
- Authority Hacker Pro Platinum: A high-end course meant for affiliate site owners who are making at least $5k per month and are looking to expand past simply ranking on Google. This course includes additional modules like in Authority Hacker Pro as well as one-to-one mentoring and other goodies design to take your business to new levels.
The awesome thing about the Authority Hacker courses is that it is a one-time fee, and it is being updated all the time. In fact, they just re-released version 2.0 of The Authority Site System and it is completely free to everyone who paid for the 1.0 version. That is truly a refreshing way to do business in affiliate marketing!
The parts of the course that I found most valuable was around content creation templates and outreach templates. These are the exact templates Mark and Gael use to make high quality articles as well as reach out to other bloggers to get FREE links back to their sites
- Step-by-Step Blueprints – Authority Hacker does a great job giving you templates you can use to outsource to VA’s, writers and link builders.
- Systematized Process – Authority Hacker is very systems oriented. So everything is replicable and easy for you to follow.
- Up To Date Information – SEO is constantly changing and Authority Hacker just released The Authority Site System 2.0 which updated all their templates and blueprints
- White Hat Link building – Links are a crucial signal Google uses to determine where you rank in their search engine. Authority Hacker gives you an in-depth blueprint for getting high quality links from good websites
- Active Facebook Group – Authority Hacker’s private Facebook group is full of helpful active members.
- One-Time Payment Structure – You only have to pay once and get access to all the updated course information.
Learn more about The Authority Site System and get a limited time discount of $400 by clicking the link below!
- Great for serious and beginner affiliate marketers
- Easy to follow step by step process
- Best presentation overall
- Excellent ideas for gaining links
- Constantly updated each year with more info
- Some linkbuilding techniques are only available in upsells
Get $400 Off Authority Hacker TASS
The Affiliate Lab (TAL) really blew me away. I couldn’t help but wish to myself that this course was available when I first started back in 2016.
The course creator Matt Diggity is well known in the SEO community for sharing his insights, especially when it came to buiding Private Blog Network (PBNs).
However, Matt has really moved away from focusing soley on gray hat linkbuilding techniques and launched his own outreach services called Authority Builders a few years ago.
The Affiliate Lab doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to teaching you what you need to know to build a successful affiliate site in 2020. Using his extentsive knowledge in all things linkbuilding, TAL really provides a comprehensive look at all the best ways to build links to your site for the long term.
It even has an entire mini-course called the Outreach Masterclass that has over 65 videos teaching nothing but whitehat techniques.
From niche selection, to content creation to buy and flipping websites – there isn’t one topic I can think of that The Affiliate Lab doesn’t cover in detail.
- Built for Beginners and Advanced Marketers – With over 180 videos and 5 mini-courses, including a while mini-course for beginners – there is something for everyone.
- Outreach Masterclass – Matt doesn’t just talk about building PBNs, he has a whole mini-course dedicated to whitehat linkbuilding
- Website Flipping – TAL has Matt Diggity and Greg Elfrink go over how to flip affiliate sites that can save you ALOT of headaches down the line
- Blueprints and SOPs – Throughout the course you are given downloadble SOP’s and blueprints that you can use yourself or outsource to VA’s and really scale your operations
- Active Facebook Group – TAL has a very active and helpful Facebook group, which shouldn’t be a suprise as Matt himself is very active in most of the groups he is in
If your looking to invest in TAL, we have a special $200 discount that you can use by just clicking the link below:
- TONS of linkbuilding ideas
- Easy to watch videos
- Includes very actionable white hack link building tips
- Great info to help you buy and sell websites
- Lots of great blueprints
- Special section for beginners
- Helpful Facebook group
- No refunds
- Still recommends Thrive Themes for new site builds
GET $200 OFF ON THE AFFILIATE LAB
Income School’s Project 24 is a course I just purchased a few months ago. It is the brain child of Jim Harmer and Ricky Tesler.
I saw Youtube channel before and might have watched have seen a video or two, but I have to be honest I wasn’t that impressed.
They seemed like nice guys, but they seemed almost too nice that it seemed a bit off to me. It wasn’t until by friend Arnold told me that it was a legit program that I decided to take a look at it.
I didn’t look at any of their videos, I barely took a look at their sales page, I just bought the course and jumped in.
Why did I buy it so easily? It’s because Arnold is like me and has tried almost everything, is just as jaded as I am. So when he actually recommended something, I knew it had to be special.
I jumped into the program and was instantly hooked. The course is very professional and well done. It is a great course for beginners because you don’t need to spend any money on extra tools or services, so it is excellent for beginners or for those that don’t have a big budget.
But most importantly, they give you a COMPLETE roadmap to growing an affiliate site and go over how to accomplish it without breaking the bank or risk getting penalized by Google.
The most controversial and eye opening thing that they do is that they create these sites WITHOUT building backlinks. How is that possible? Through creative highly engaging content that both Google and readers will love.
Check out my Income School Project 24 review here!
- Lots Of Training – Project 24 gives you lots of training that takes you from the very basics of setting up a site, to step-by-step instructions on how to write amazing articles.
- Active Community – The Project 24 forum is a very lively place that people interact with daily. Excellent place for newbies to ask questions.
- Invested Course Creators – Jim and Ricky are both active users on the forum and they are there to answer almost every question, especially ones that are more advanced. You can tell they are really committed to the course.
- Podcast – Project 24 has a podcast only members can listen to. This is where Jim and Ricky reveal a lot of small nuggets of gold and gives you insight on what they are doing.
- Transparency – Ricky and Jim show you what niche sites they worked on before, and even show members the websites they are currently working on.
- No extra tools required – Since Project 24 is focused primarily on content creation, there are really no other tools you will need to complete the course.
- Content Creation System – Don’t want to create the content yourself? No problem get all your affiliate content made using Project 24’s writer training to get high quality writers at low prices (this stuff works!)
- Full Niche Research – This ALONE is worth the price of the course. A whole list of low competition, high valued untapped niches that you can create websites around.
Project 24 is reasonably priced but you have to pay to keep the course yearly. I don’t normally like this type of system, but it is not unresaonable given the amount of updates they do.
- Great for beginners
- Low price
- Easy to follow formula
- No extra tools needed
- Won’t break any of Googles rules
- Sustainable for the long term
- Niche research included
- Will take a while before earning money
- No talk on building links
- Not good for those with shiny object syndrome
Learn more about Income School
This area is for affiliate marketing courses that are good, but didn’t quite make the Top 3. These are solid courses, but I would only recommend them for people in certain circumstances.
Ahh good old Wealthy Affiliate, this was the starting point for many affiliate marketers. Some look back at it and laugh, others look back at it and are thankful for what it gave them.
If you spent a minute looking at affiliate marketing, you have no doubt come across” Wealthy Affiliate as the #1 way to make money online.”
However this is simply not true. The real reason people promote them so much is because of their generous affiliate payout.
That being said, Wealthy Affiliate is not a bad place to start if you don’t already have a website and hosting because their membership comes with website hosting included with their training.
Wealthy Affiliate is good for people that needs their hand to be held step by step, but this can be annoying for people who already know a little bit about affiliate marketing and SEO.
Wealthy Affiliate has a monthly webinar and new features are constantly being added. But the actual material inside of their course is fairly old and is in need of a revamp to keep up to date with better affiliate marketing courses.
You can read my full review here.
Wealthy Affiliate costs $19 for the first month and $47 per month afterwards. You can also it for $299 for the year on black Friday
- Good for beginners
- Comes with web hosting
- Monthly webinars are useful
- Easy To Implement Techniques
- It Just Works!
- Interface feels like it’s from 2010
- Material isn’t as useful as other affiliate courses
I wanted to include Affiliate Secrets in this post because it is different from the rest of the courses as it’s main focus is NOT on building a website.
Yes affiliate marketing can be done WITHOUT building a website. Spencer Mecham built his successful affiliate business mostly using AdWords as well as using Youtube, Instagram and Facebook. Spencer is one of the top affiliates for Clickfunnels and it’s been estimated he makes over $100k per month from Clickfunnels alone.
While most affiliate marketing courses focus specifically on Google search, Affiliate Secrets 2.0 is a little more agnostic to where you get traffic.
The main idea behind the course is to use both free and paid traffic to go after affiliate offers that have good payouts.
To get the most benefit out of the course you should be comfortable being in front of a camera, because Youtube is a great source of free traffic. If you are camera shy (like me) you can still benefit from Affiliate Secrets 2.0 but it may not be as effective.
The cool part of this course is that you can incorporate what it teaches you with what you learn from other courses to give you an edge on your competitors that might just be relying on Google search.
Affiliate Secrets 2.0 currently costs $897 for the first 100 purchases, but he has free training as well.
- Teaches how to get traffic from multiple sources
- Comes with case studies from successful affiliate marketers
- Not reliant on only Google for traffic
- Spencer Mecham is an excellent presenter
- Need to have capital to spend on Ads
- Must be willing to take losses early
Check out Spencer Mechan’s Webinar here
When you are looking at affiliate marketing courses to buy it’s important that you don’t get ripped off!
Buying so many shitty courses has taught me a few lessons on how to avoid getting scammed by affiliate marketing courses. Here are my top tips to avoid getting ripped off…
This is the single biggest thing I look for when buying an affiliate course, or any course for that matter. It is also what I try to make hustlelife.net – a trustworthy source for affiliate marketing information.
The #1 way to find good courses is through people that you trust. For example, when my friend Arnold told me that Income School was a good course, I didn’t even read the sales page or look for testimonials before I bought the course.
Because I know he wasn’t try to rip me off, I trusted his word and bought the course immediately and was very happy with the purchase.
I created this post, because I get asked all the time which courses I recommend and what I recommend here in public is EXACTLY what I would recommend to my friends and family.
It didn’t take me long to figure this one out, but be VERY wary of websites that only recommend one product as the “#1 best way to make money online”.
The fact of the matter is that there is no #1 product to make money, and if you look at their other articles and they are all recommending just one product – this is a good sign that this website is motivated by money and not by helping you make an informed choice.
This might seem a bit strange because aren’t all affiliate marketing course creators “affiliate marketers”?
Yes they are, but what I mean about “Affiliate marketers” are those Youtube personalities that refer to themselves as “affiliate marketers”.
99% of the time, if you see someone label themselves as an affiliate marketer, run the other way.
What a lot of unethical “affiliate marketers” do is sell themselves as some sort of affiliate marketing guru and sell shitty courses that just rip off other courses.
Then they use the dashboards of all the money they made from their course as “proof” of how good they are at affiliate marketing. Then use that to sell even more courses!
It is a self-propelling cycle of bullsh*t that people can get caught up if you don’t know the “game”.
Some of the WORST affiliate marketing courses I purchased were from these Youtube so called “affiliate marketers”
If your tempted to buy a product from a Youtube personality, ALWAYS do your research first!
Did your momma ever tell you “if anything ever seems too good to be true, it probably is” – well the same thing applies to affiliate marketing.
NEVER buy anything that promises you anything that offers you anything that seems like it solves all of your problems.
If you want to be successful in affiliate marketing – you want a course that covers all the bases and will give you at least enough knowledge so you can make your money back.
Before buying a course it is always a good idea to look and see what other people think of it. This not only includes websites like this one, but also Facebook and Reddit forums.
So if you learning about one of these courses for the first time, I am telling you to do more research for yourself!
Get all the information you need to make a GOOD, INFORMED buying decision. But when you do, make sure to reward the blogs that give you real information by clicking through their affiliate link (even if it’s not mine) because you should reward REAL reviews, and not ones motivated only by money.
Hello, I am Jeremy Harrison, I first started in online marketing in 2016 by trying out a few different things, the first thing I tried (and failed) was doing drop-shipping.
I then tried publishing books on Amazon, which I ended up doing fairly well with. However, this didn’t last for very long and I got into affiliate marketing almost by accident.
I knew that my Kindle Publishing business wasn’t sustainable and I needed to learn a different skill. That is when I took my first affiliate marketing course called “Affiliate Marketing Revolution”.
At the time I was absolutely blown away by what I learned. It all seemed so easy, start up a Youtube channel, start up a blog and just write reviews about products that I used (and didn’t use).
Believe it or not, I almost instantly started to make money! Even though I really didn’t understand what I was doing, I started making money and I thought I had it all figured out.
I was making around $700 a month just with a Youtube channel! I caught the wave of finding the right product at the right time, and I had the results to show for it.
So I decided to start a blog, thinking that if I was able to do what I did on Youtube, then I would be able to double my income easily.
Unfortunately, this didn’t happen. My website was atrocious; I could BUY a visitor to my site. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong.
I then read a review for CB Passive Income and how you can have “turn key system” that can make you money just by duplicating Patric Chan’s “business” system. I set up a landing page, starting an email list and started buying solo ads to enter my funnel so I can start profiting… and that didn’t work.
I soon realized that the whole system was a sort of Ponzi scheme, where the “business” you were sending traffic to was… CB Passive Income! I literally bought a course that taught you how to get other people to buy the same course you just purchased!
After that is when I discovered Wealthy Affiliate. That’s when I learned about writing to get your articles discovered and ranking highly on Google and the importance of doing keyword research and competitor research. Once again my mind was blown away again, because this was THE FIRST TIME I ever heard of these things.
I again thought I had it all figured out and went full stream ahead on my blog. I thought I had a cool brand, a cool logo and it was only a matter of time until the money started rolling in…
Unfortunately it was just a trickle. My articles were now actually showing up on Google and getting some traffic here and there, but they weren’t ranking HIGHLY.
“Imagine if I were able to get on the first page for this term, then I would REALLY be rich!”
I then stumbled across this guy strolling around Youtube in a BATHROBE. “Who the f*ck is this guy, and is he really expecting people to take him seriously?”
But from watching his videos, I was INSTANTLY hooked. Dan Brock – The Deadbeat Super Affiliate. I still remember the video like it was yesterday “Buy Expired Domains: Private Blog Network SEO Tip” it was a video that lead me down a DEEP, DEEP rabbit hole that I am only know starting to come out of.
“What is a Private Blog Network?” I thought, so I clicked on the video and I was hooked. Buying expired domains to get instant search engine rankings? YES PLEASE!
I bought the Deadbeat Super Affiliate course for $29 and I was ready to start ranking. I learned that backlinks, or links were essential to getting your website ranking.
“No wonder!” I thought “that’s what I was missing”
I was building sites, but I wasn’t building links to my sites. I was missing the key ingredient!
It was toward the beginning of 2017 when I first bought the course, and I ignored that it was already a couple years old. After all, how much could things change in a year or two?
It turns out A LOT can change and buying expired domains and fiverr links isn’t enough to rank a site these days…
I did some more research on Private Blog Networks and heard that you could rank sites just using them. Then became familiar with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and realized that to rank sites in competitive niches, you needed a lot more than Fiverr links.
I then decided to go on a learning binge, I bought about 30 courses on Udemy on everything from affiliate marketing to social media marketing. I really wanted to “get” this online marketing thing.
Unfortunately most of the courses were a waste of time, and I swore off ever buying a course again.
I then went down another rabbit hole and discovered Bluechip Backlinks by Terry Kyle. This was a program that cost $99 per month, that would allow you to find an unlimited amount of expired “powerful” domain.
I was excited to find this and went all in. I probably purchased over 100 expired domains only to later realize that they were mostly “toxic” domains that actually lowered rankings instead of raising them. The training was beyond scattered and confusing and was missing some critical pieces of information.
After that I started to looking for real experts and got into Matt Diggity. From there then started following Lion Zeal and went down the path of grey hat SEO.
I later realized that I was a bit over my head with information, by that point I had taken around 15 different courses all on affiliate marketing – and all saying different things.
But that didn’t stop me. I then took another course by a guy who’s last name rhymes with “Bloate” and learned more about backlinks and tiered link building – but I later realized most of the information was useless and he was more of a snake oil salesman than a true SEO expert…
At this point, it was the middle of 2017 and I was very bitter from the experience in general.
However at the same time, my sites were starting to rank. I felt like I stumbled and fumbled my way into actually having some success.
Towards the end of 2017 I became aware of Greg Jeffries through some Facebook posts praising his SEO Affiliate Domination. I was instantly intrigued as other people were recommending his course in Facebook groups without any prompting.
I decided to check out his course, even though I didn’t really do much research on it other than looking at his website and checking out some of his impressive dashboards.
He just came across as a genuine person, not a know-it-all type “guru” who had all the answers. I took his course and he had all the tactics I already knew at that point with PBN’s, a bunch of tools and writing SEO articles.
If I hadn’t already taken 20 affiliate marketing courses I might have been impressed, but I felt like I had already seen most of it and was sort of disappointed.
But just for shits and giggles I decided to make one of his churn and burn style sites from an expired domain I had that wasn’t doing anything, and immediately started making a few hundred dollars per month.
I still didn’t think much of it because it felt sort of spammy. But I tried it again on another domain and then things really started taking off for me. These churn and burn type sites began making more money than my regular affiliate sites, giving me some breathing room to experiment with different things.
From the beginning of January 2018 to around October I decided to reinvest into learning even more about affiliate marketing as well as SEO. I took several additional courses and got some high level Youtube coaching so that I could take things to the next level.
The one course that really stuck out was the Authority Hacker course. It showed that using PBN’s really are not the be-all-end-all for ranking sites.
I learned that your content should be good enough that people actually want to link to it. So it completely changed the way I thought about writing content and earning links.
Then in November I bought the Income School Project 24 course and it forced me to rethink affiliate marketing yet AGAIN. The real take away from the course was that focusing on obtaining backlinks takes away from the time and effort you could devote to making great articles and earning links naturally.
This made a lot of sense to me, but of course there are some limitations to this way of building sites, especially in more competitive niches.
Going into 2019 I had 3 sites that were making over $1000 per month, and I thought I had finally cracked the code!
Unfortunately, one of my sites got hit TWICE by a Google algo update and I was left scrambling to try to fix it.
What I soon realized is that I had WAY too many sites I was trying to rank all at once, and I had to really focus or suffer the consequences.
That is why in 2020 I sold one site, retired another and focused on making this site a real go-to resource.
Althought I felt like I was pretty well versed in affiliate sites, I decided to take Matt Diggity’s Affiliate Lab and was blown away by the content and the amount of ideas I could use for my own sites.
I hope my story gives you a better sense of where I am coming from, and to see that when it comes to testing out affiliate marketing courses that I have been there, done that.
If you have experience making affiliate sites or want a complete course on the whole process, you can’t go wrong with The Affiliate Lab. If you just want to get started and like really high quality production Authority Hacker TASS 2.0 is your best bet.
If you think there is an affiliate marketing course that isn’t on the list, that should be on here please let me know in the comment section below!
If there is a really shitty course that your unhappy with, please let me know what it is in the comment section!