Edit: The editors at Ezine Articles have made this review of The Affiliate Code a featured article!
Note: If you are here for the value-added bonuses you have heard about, go to The Affiliate Code Bonuses. If you stumbled upon this without knowing what Affiliate Marketing is, check out my Introduction to Affiliate Marketing (important) before reading this article!
With so many ‘get-rich-quick schemes’ all over the Internet, it is hard to differentiate the good stuff from the shams, and the real reviews of money-making products from the ‘affiliate trying to make a quick buck’ reviews. Today, I’m going to talk about The Affiliate Code. I was contemplating making this post about affiliate marketing as it’s not really about ’selling stuff’ per say. My website was originally meant for providing information to beginners about selling physical stuff through online auctions and communities. You know, about selling real physical goods.
Back to my post. This post is about ‘affiliate marketing’, or how to make money selling affiliate products online. I figured I would blog about it since in a way, it is still about ’selling stuff online’. Except that this time it is about selling digital products. Digital products are simply products that are, after being paid for, delivered via a download from a website (a protected member’s site). These products range from a multitude of niches, from weight loss, to playing the guitar, to affiliate marketing itself. An affiliate marketeer makes money promoting these products (being an affiliate). He markets these affiliate products and gets paid for each sale. I have been doing research about affiliate marketing, and to summarise what I gathered to you my dear readers in the simplest possible way, this is how it works:
1. Set up a website to promote a digital product (lets say an eBook about how to lose weight fast).
2. Include a link to the order page for the weight loss eBook (this link is tracked so that the merchant knows which affiliate it belongs to).
3. When the web surfer who clicked on your link makes a purchase, you keep a percentage of the sale price as commission. For digital products the commission is usually as high as 50% or 70%.
4. Sit back, relax, and wait for the next web surfing person to chance about your site promoting the affiliate product.
There are many people who make a full-time living being an affiliate, with an income so sustainable that they quit their full-time jobs. A number of people have been reported to make hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars a month. These people are termed ’super affiliates’ in the industry. Whoaaa! Sounds like an easy way to make some spare cash right? WRONG! If ONLY being an affiliate marketeer is as easy as throwing up a website and waiting for cash to roll in without you doing ANYTHING (apart from throwing up the initial website). We’ve all been enticed by super affiliates showing you screenshots of how much money they have in their Clickbank, pictures of that beachfront house and those fancy cars and exotic holidays. The truth is, it’s going take lots of hard work to achieve that kind of success, and most beginner affiliates do not understand the many other facets of affiliate marketing aside from ‘throwing up a website’.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind:
1. Traffic – Where is your traffic going to come from? You might have a great website with great resources about losing weight. You have a page that ‘reviews’ a certain weight loss eBook, praising it for how effective it is, along with convincing ‘testimonials’ from past ’satisfied customers’ giving it 10-star ratings. And then you include an affiliate link to the product. But without any traffic or any way for people to know about your website, you will NOT be making any sales. The truth is – you will need to do a couple of things to get enough traffic to be profitable.
2. Are you promoting the CORRECT kind of product? Different products sell differently – some sell well, some sell badly. If you were promoting a lousy product right from the start, your chances of making sales are diminished.
3. Alright, lets say you manage to get some traffic to your site. The average ‘conversion rate’ for most products is 1 – 2%. Which means, for every 100 visitors that goes to your website, only 1 or 2 will buy. And this 1% conversion rate only includes those who went to your website looking for specific information about the topic they were looking for. You need to find a way to boost this conversion rate.
4. Are you marketing effectively? Do not expect first time visitors to buy a product on their first visit to a sales page. Example: Let’s say you are looking for a way to make money as an affiliate, and you chance upon The Affiliate Code (opens in a new window). Sure, the sales pitch may be super enticing and convincing. But most people are gonna go ‘whoaaaa, hmm.. this looks like a great product but I’ll need time to consider, maybe I’ll check back again.’ The fact is 99% of people won’t. They just plain forget, or lose interest in the product altogether. How do you get these people back again? How do you continually market to these people to increase your chances of making a sale?
5. Another major loss of revenue is a result of people actually buying the product, but not from you. Competition is stiff and people are looking for multiple opinions before they buy. Suppose a customer reads about The Affiliate Code on your website. He’s gonna think ‘Ooooohhh so this guy thinks The Affiliate Code is a great product to get started with affiliate marketing. But why should I trust him? I’d better Google for more reviews on it before deciding’. He proceeds to check out several websites, finally clicks the link of another affiliate, and the commission goes to your competitor.
As you can see, the main obstacle to what seems like a wonderful system lies in a lack of traffic and conversions. No traffic = no conversions = no commissions, as simple as that. A huge horde of beginner affiliate marketeers face these problems. Hence, it doesn’t take rocket science to realise that there is a huge market for affiliate marketing training courses. Yes, this is very ironic indeed! There are tonnes of people promoting products that teach you to be successful as an affiliate marketeer. Yes – these are affiliate products that teach you to promote affiliate products. Apparently, this is a very popular niche. It’s like writing a book on how to get rich, and then the author of this book gets rich because he sells so many books teaching people how to get rich. Pretty ironic eh? A good example of this is The Affiliate Code. Check out the image below:
Yes, that looks like a LOT of CDs, boxes and materials that will make the $77 you pay (the cost of The Affiliate Code) seem like peanuts, considering you get 9 cool blue boxes and CDs. It certainly looks like bang for buck. Heck, it even looks cool to just have that huge chunk of stuff sitting on a display case even if there is nothing in those CDs. But no, you won’t be getting any of these cool boxes and CDs. The truth is this is a digital product. You pay the $77, and you get directed to a site with the contents of the product delivered through video downloads and zip files. However, I can’t blame Michael Jones (the creator of this product) for choosing to include this misleading picture on this website. You see, this is a good way to lure visitors to actually buy the product. If he left out this picture, most people would not be as willing to part with their $77. If he just said ‘click here to buy and start downloading my wonderful materials about how to make money doing affiliate marketing’, sales will go dramatically down. Having this bombastic picture is a good way of visually and mentally conditioning a would-be buyer.
The title of this post claims that this is the ‘most honest review about this product on the entire Internet’, and this is no small claim. Everything posted on this site is honest, and I never post or allege anything that I have not personally tried and tested. I personally bought this product about months ago as I was just getting exposed to this idea of affiliate marketing and researching about how it all works. I would say Michael Jones has a very convincing and alluring landing page for this product. I was totally sold. I bought it, and spent several nights studying the material as a total newbie at that time. The materials are delivered through a members only site, with lessons and resource downloads properly categorised. I would say I am very impressed. This is a preview of what the first module menu looks like:
The golden question – is The Affiliate Code worth $77? Yes and no. It would be very worth it if, at the point of purchasing this product, you were:
1. Totally or near-clueless about how affiliate marketing works and how to get started.
2. Do not know anything about autoresponders and email marketing techniques.
3. Do not know anything about Google Adwords / PPC marketing.
4. Do not know anything about getting a domain name / setting up a website
5. Do not know anything about driving traffic to your website.
6. Do not know what is a squeeze page / opt-in page.
7. Do not know what ‘list-building’ is.
8. Do not know the ‘visual conditioning’ techniques that make visitors put money in your wallet.
9. Do not know basic article-marketing and ‘deep-linking’ SEO techniques.
If you do not know part 1 plus at least 4 other points from 2 – 9, then yes, there is an high 90% chance that you will find the materials in The Affiliate Code very beneficial for the price of $77. The videos are very well-made and give a good introduction to affiliate marketing, choosing a niche, choosing keywords, finding affiliate products to promote, setting up landing/squeeze/opt-in pages, along with live demonstrations on how to get your first affiliate site up and running. But that’s about it. If you are moderately knowledgeable about affiliate marketing (points 1 – 9 above), this is not for you. After watching the entire course, it doesn’t take rocket science to realise that what Michael Jones teaches in this package is pretty basic (just like most or all of the affiliate products out there teaching affiliate marketing I’m sure). However, everyone starts with the basics, and if you are looking to get started, The Affiliate Code is worth spending $77 on. From the basics you learn here, you can then move on to set up your first affiliate site, and do lots of extensive research and testing. I can bet my life that pretty much every other product out there that promises that you can make 60k a month (impossible for newbies) from affiliate marketing is based on the same contents as The Affiliate Code. I’m not saying that these other products are copycats, but I’ve come to realise that affiliate marketing is pretty much entirely about points 1 – 9. It’s just getting traffic to your site that is the hard part, and this, I am researching myself too. So, my advice is not to waste money on any other product once you have bought The Affiliate Code. Pretty much everything else teaches the same thing, with rehashed material here and there.
I know this for a fact, because I went on to purchase Copy Paste Systems. What I’m trying to say is - just buy either one of the many affiliate marketing training packages out there, not more, because you will be looking at the same thing on almost all of them. According to statistics, The Affiliate Code and Copy Paste Systems are two of the most popular products out there, so you are probably safer purchasing either one of them.
By the way, this is the first affiliate site I just created for a ‘learn guitar’ niche – Learn Guitar Skills, using the knowledge I’ve learnt from The Affiliate Code. It doesn’t make me 60k a month, but I’ve more than broken even so far with PPC and video marketing techniques. I’m still waiting to see if it will ever get indexed by Google at all. Edit: it just did! I have set up the opt-in box and autoresponder using GetResponse.
And oh, in case you are wondering, the links you see in this post to The Affiliate Code and Copy Paste Systems are affiliate links, and I just did it to you again in this sentence. I told you, this is the most honest review out there. 
I wish anyone reading this all the best if you decide to try out affiliate marketing. If you have tried and had success / or failure, or would simply like to share your thoughts on this post, please do feel free to leave a comment below. I would love to hear from you. 
READ ON: In part 2 of my post I answer the most important question you are thinking of :
“Okay Nathan, I think your review sounds pretty unbiased. And the fact that you actually own a copy of this product means you know what you are talking about. I do want to give The Affiliate Code a shot. But can I really make money from this? I’m willing to go through the course faithfully and do what it teaches about getting my first affiliate site up. But something still bugs me, I just want to be absolutely sure that it works before I buy it.. After all, I’m not stupid. You are promoting this product as an affiliate yourself right? Of course you would want me to buy from you. Are you even making any money yourself? You mentioned you set up a guitar learning site following guidance from The Affiliate Code. How is that going for you?”
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