Top Affiliate Marketing Training System Reviews

Affilorama By Mark Ling, is it Just Another Scam?

Affilorama: The Membership Overview

Affilorama, started by Mark Ling in 2005, is a community dedicated to affiliate training. After years of success as an merchant owning products like “Jamorama” and “Rocket Piano”, Mark set out to create a platform that would help train his affiliates within these respective niches.

There are several levels of the Affilorama Membership and different products to choose from including the very basic entry level to more advanced options that features several plug in tools. Unlike other programs that simply do not evolve, Affilorama is one of the better products in the industry at keeping up (although they do not do a perfect job) and within this review I am going to be walking you through the program along with the many “upsells” within this affiliate marketing product.

But first, let’s have a quick look at the positives and negatives of this program, then I will go into detail discussing the different aspects of the membership.

The Pros vs. Cons of Affilorama

Pros:

Easy to follow educational resources including software applications
Access to one of the largest affiliate marketing communities
Free option allows you to explore the basics without investment
Payment options for the Premium program includes a three year payment plan for convenience
Owner is very well respected in the industry

Cons:

Too many options can make choosing the right program difficult
Basic program is quite limited compared to the paid programs
Some blatant misinformation (and harmful) training to your business
Program costs can become really expensive once you start adding in the additional “offerings” & upsells
Your “support” is handed off to a support team, you don’t get to connect with Mark directly

Want to Become a Pro Affiliate Marketer? Go Here!

First, What Type of Marketer is Affilorama Program Intended For?

With several levels to choose from and training at each of them, Affilorama is meant to be employed by anyone who wants to make some extra money online as an affiliate marketer. The training within the Affilorama is geared towards everything from the fundamental website set-up to more advanced promotional techniques.

There is no need to have prior knowledge of website building, hosting, marketing or content management. The training is based on knowledge from an experienced and very involved affiliate marketer, Mark Ling, who has a significant track record of not only just being a merchant (having affiliates) but promoting his own products and services himself (a good thing).

The Breakdown of the Training Within Affilorama

Affilorama’s training starts with the basic program which combines videos and other online tools to follow step by step. In addition there are a number of software apps that can be used as well (site ranking and analysis tools).

The Affilorama Premium level offers additional training, interviews with various successful Internet Entrepreneurs, and the bootcamp videos. This level also includes content which has been created for your chosen niche.

Additional tools include the Affilorama Jetpack which is the customized website creation and hosting package and Affilorama Theme which is another version of that service.

These are discussed in much more detail below.

Can You Expect Support From Mark Ling Inside Affilorama?

All levels of Affilorama have the support from the community of members, many of which are free members. This can be a good thing and a bad

Is Mark Ling Available Within Affilorama

thing. Often times someone will be there, but not all the time someone will be there to give you direct help. The nature of a forum allows for “delayed” support and sometimes it can take several days for your query to get responded to, but sometimes this can also allow for more thorough help (versus telephone or live chat style support)

All discussions, questions and comments can be shared within the community via forums and message boards. Mark Ling on occassion will join in on the discussions, but you should not expect a response from him in a timely matter (if at all) if you are posting questions. He is a very busy entrepreneur and at any given time he has MANY different projects on the go.

How Much Does Affilorama Cost?

This is where it can get a little bit confusing as Affilorama has MANY different product offerings and upsells within their program. This is something that I usually do not agree with simply because I do believe that when you pay for a product, you should get access to EVERYTHING. These products are quality, but they are definitely inferior and more expensive than my #1 ranked program for affiliate marketing training.

Below I am going to explain in detail what is included within the different products and outline their different price points.

Affilorama Premium ($67 per month)

The Premium membership (month to month billing at $67 per month) is the core offering at Affilorama. This package includes training, software, limited hosting, and forum access.

As you can see from the above photo, the included Items are the Affiliate Training, Blog Bootcamp, Premium Tools, Website Hosting, and PLR Articles. Although some of this training is absolutely excellent, there are some critical “training” flaws in the offering at Affilorama Premium membership that can actually adversely impact your business.

The first item is the emphasis of Link Building within the Blog Bootcamp. In fact, 1 of the 4 bootcamp lessons is dedicated to training you about backlinking strategies. That is 25% of the entire course.

The problem here is that backlinks can get you in A LOT of trouble these days with Google and although this strategy may have worked in 2012, it has long since lead to people losing their entire business and rankings online. This outdated misinformation will lead you to failure if you follow it and that is never something I like to see. With every Google Panda or Penguin update, more and more websites that put ANY emphasis on backlinking strategies are being removed from the search results. NOT A GOOD THING.

The second potential issue I have with the Premium package is the fact that they are promoting the idea of PLR (Private Label Rights) content (you get 30 new PLR articles every month) being worthwhile. This is also an outdated and blatantly wrong strategy that will lead you to content marketing failure.

This content is duplicate and if you even consider putting any of it on your website, you will lose all rankings. Also, it is outsourced content meaning that it will never have the same impact that content you create will have. PLR may have been OK back in 2010, but not this year and using it will adversely impact your business. . NOT A GOOD THING.

And the Affilorama Premium tools…

There are also 15 tools that are available within the Premium membership, some useful and some that will provide you with meaningless data. For example, there is an Trusted Site Tool which analzyes the Page Rank within Google (also known as PR). PR however is an outdated metric and in no way indicates whether or not a site is “trusted” in Google any longer. It is apparent that the “tools” within the community are not being updated at the same speed that the affiliate marketing/internet marketing world is evolving.

There is also a tool called “Social Snoop” that finds social sites that you can again, get backlinks to. This is not good for SEO or an online business and has been deemed an irrelevant marketing technique since late 2012. And you have an article spinning tool…that will absolutely KILL your business if you even think about using it. There could be other applications where this could be useful.

This really bothers me and I really wish the folks over at Affilorama would update their training and their tools to reflect the current state of SEO and the online business world. They are in many cases doing more harm than good to your business.

And now come the upsells…

There are also several other offerings or “upsells” that are promoted to you within Affilorama, something that I am not a big fan of. My line of thinking is that if you are paying $67 per month, you should get access to the full system and all of the tools, but you be the judge. The $67 price point is also much higher than more cost efficient services that are available to you as an aspiring affiliate marketer.

Upsell #1: AffiloBlueprint 3.0 Membership ($197, then $67 per month)

The package includes 13 lessons, 85 videos covering topics from affilaite marketing, niche marketing and research, free traffic methods like SEO, PPC via Google’s content network, and 6 WordPress themes that are geared more towards PPC than SEO.

This is then followed by an upsell (when you join) of the Affilorama Premium. AffiloBlueprint does not actually come with any support, so if you want the additional support and help for this particular product, you will have to pay the additional $67 per month.

Upsell #2: AffiloJetpack Membership ($497)

The AffiloJetPack is a high ticket “niche marketing” package that Mark Ling has created to help you with the promotions of his products and services. These packages do contain some good information and within the membership you are going to get access to the following:

Your Choice of 5 Niche Packages (out of the 10 available)
15 Newsletter Email Series, one per niche
3 e-books, 3 per niche (these are intended for free reports)
Access to Affilotheme
Graphics for each niche
20 PLR Articles

This is a great way for Mark to train you how to become his affiliate (and earn him more money). In my opinion this should be a service that is included in his membership since he does have a motive and his is going to benefit from your hard work. Nothing wrong with offering this sort of set-up, but something that probably should be included in particular because of the high price point. These packages do seem to be a bit dated in respect to their offerings and at $497, they are vastly overpriced.

At $497 you really do need to decide whether or not this is worthwhile to you as you could get access very thorough and useful alternatives in the world for an entire year for a fraction of this price.

Upsell #3: Affilotheme ($97)

The last major upsell you will be approached with inside of Affilorama is the Affilotheme. This is a Worpdress theme that comes with supporting training showing you how to properly use it. It also comes with one year free hosting, beyond that you will be encouraged to join Affilorama Premium to maintain your hosting. I really do love the fact that they have piggybacked the WordPress content management system because it is bar none, the best out there.

Here is what is included within this package:

Affilotheme WordPress theme
Training videos on how to use it
Private Members Only Forum
Graphics Creation tool
One year of hosting

As you can see, Affilorama Premium is just the initial component of the offering inside of this system. If you take them up on all of their offers, you will be looking at spending $791 + $67 per month for the Premium membership. This is something that you need to consider prior to getting involved with the training.

My final opinion of Affilorama

This is a great product which offers a good deal of tools, training and support. Although I may be a little critical of just a few different aspects of their system, Mark Ling and Affilorama are definitely one of the more legitimate groups within an industry that is known for “shiesters”. He is definitely one of the good guys of the industry.

However, because of the sheer number of upsells and some what could potentially be deemed as “misinformation” or “outdated” within the training techniques, it can be confusing to the beginner where to get started. This is one program that should be approached with a careful and well thought out plan of action, and you should be starting with the very basics (Premium Membership) if you do decide to join and then adding on additional tools and products if you feel comfortable enough and have a suitable budget for it and Remember that you have money back guarantee.