This post contains affiliate links.
One thing on my blog bucket list is to look into affiliate marketing to monetization. I don’t want to be someone who spams my readers with products that have no value and/or are low quality, that’s not my style. I also don’t want to go into a new marketing program on the blog without understanding how to use it correctly. That’s not beneficial to anyone. With my only basic knowledge about affiliate marketing I wanted to glean some information from an affiliate marketing expert.
I decided to look into the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing course by Michelle Schroeder-Gardner owner of the personal finance blog Making Sense of Cents. Michelle’s income reports show she makes $50K+ a month in affiliate sales and spends her time traveling the world with her husband. This course explains exactly how she makes it happen. In this review I’m going to walk you through my experience, what I liked, what I didn’t like, and give you an idea if this course is going to be right for you.
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Course Review
- Course: Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing
- Instructor: Michelle Schroeder-Gardner
- Intent: Educate social media influencers, including bloggers, business owners, and social media marketers, how to utilize affiliate marketing as a monetization method.
- Cost: $197 or two payments of $99 each
Why did I decide to take an affiliate marketing course?
My time is precious so I didn’t want to just throw myself into affiliate marketing blindly. Many people who try affiliate marketing go into it by just dropping links throughout their blog posts, then rarely make much money on it. This is not the approach I wanted to take. I knew what affiliate marketing was, but I didn’t know how to organize that information into a plan to make it all work for me. I heard from other bloggers, who took this course, a plan is exactly what Michelle offers.
If Michelle’s figured it out I might as well see what she has to offer. While I don’t expect to earn $50K a month right away, I can tell you it’s not a bad goal to aspire to. I would love to travel the world, and it’s a goal my husband and I have that when he retires from the military in 7 years he won’t have to go back to a civilian job.
When I worked direct sales I learned to pay attention to the people who are a success at what you want to do. Figure out how they did it, understand it, then learn how to make it work for you. Well, that’s what I did with this course and I’m ready to see if I have what it takes to make that $50K a month in affiliate sales and make our travel dreams come true too!
Who is Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing for?
If you’re reading this review, there’s a good chance you’re already considering taking this affiliate marketing course. The information is presented in a way that it can be applied to any blog or business niche or style.
New Bloggers/Affiliate Marketers: New bloggers will find this information beneficial, especially if they want to start monetizing with affiliate programs immediately. I would also suggest making sure you understand the basics of blogging first, such as content creation, traffic, and analytics. There is some information in this course that can help you with some aspects of those things, however it will not fully teach you what you need to know for blogging in general.
Intermediate Level Bloggers/Affiliate Marketers: Bloggers who already knows a little something about affiliate marketing but it hasn’t worked for them in the past will benefit from this course. You will especially benefit if you already have marketing, branding and traffic figured out, however none of those are a requirement to utilize the information in this course. You can still do affiliate marketing without tons of traffic.
Expert Affiliate Marketers: Experts at affiliate marketing who already make a good income on affiliate marketing may not benefit from this course, unless there are some areas of affiliate marketing to brush up on.
I’m going over the details of this course and my experience with it so you can decide if it’s the format that will work for your learning style. I’ll also give you a little glimpse of what information is included in the class to help you decide if it’s an area you want to work on.
My first impression of the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing course.
Once I purchased the course I was able to log in immediately. I received an email with the link and the class was right there when I clicked on it.
The course is broken up into six modules.
- What is affiliate marketing
- How to find and apply to affiliate programs
- Follow the rules
- How to get your readers to convert
- Strategies and ways to promote affiliate links
- Rinse and Repeat
Each module is further broken down into separate lectures and workbook pages. There is no video or audio, it’s a text based class with some graphics.
There is some bonus material and information if you’d like to become an affiliate at the end of the course.
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Pinterest Strategy – How To Receive Hundreds of Thousands Of Visitors From Pinterest a Month
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9 Things You Must Do When Something Goes Viral
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How To Increase Your Page Views
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Worksheet – My Affiliate Products And Services
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Worksheet – The Perfect Affiliate Link Checklist
Navigating through the modules was easy. It took me a minute to realize there was a continue button at the top of the screen to move forward. You can also click through the lectures on the sidebar. The class is work at your own pace so you can take as much or little time as you need. I also love that you have lifetime access to this course, so you can refer back to this information whenever you want.
My personal flow was to read through the entire course in just a few days, instead of printing the workbook pdfs, I decided to recreate them in my bullet journal since that’s the organizational method that works best for me. Now that I’m through the class I can go back in for greater detail and application.
Communicating with Michelle.
One thing I love about learning from Michelle is that she is accessible for questions. As a student in this class you can join her VIP Facebook Group where you can discuss affiliate information from the class with other students. Michelle also goes in the group and hangs out there for an hour or so at a time so you can ask her questions and get immediate answers. She even sent out an email to let everyone know she would be live.
I couldn’t find the answers to some questions directly on the site, so I sent Michelle a quick email. She responded within just a couple of hours. I was expecting a response, but not that fast! Her customer service is wonderful.
Pros of the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing course
After taking the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing course I compiled a list of pros regarding this course.
- Affiliate marketing is explained completely. Everything from what it is, how to use it responsibly, how to find affiliate programs, and how to make the most of it.
- Workbook pages available for you to use as needed. They directly relate to the course to help you organize your own affiliate marketing information.
- Links to quality plug ins and third party products that are useful are provided. Some are affiliate links, but they are useful and I’ve heard good things about them, such as ConvertKit.
- Tried and true tips to make each part of affiliate marketing easier for you to implement for faster more efficient results.
- Definitions for many affiliate terms and explanations of the laws and rules of affiliate marketing including no follow, disclosure and sales tax nexus.
- Explanation of how to market affiliate links without spamming your readers.
- Bonus material will help boost the effectiveness of your current affiliate marketing strategies.
- Additional support through her VIP Facebook Group for this course.
- Lifetime access so you can review the information as many times as you need.
Cons of the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing course
Honestly, I didn’t have a lot that I didn’t like about this course. I feel I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t get nit picky and find a few things to mention. These cons were minor for me, almost to the point I don’t even need to mention them.
- A couple of times in the course there was verbatim repeated information. It was minimal, but noticeable. It was relevant though.
- For people who prefer video, there are no video lessons in this course. This was no problem for me but I know some people prefer it.
- Not a big deal but there are some aspects of the course platform that are unnecessary. Such as the ability to search for a course or even view all courses offered. This is the only course offered, which is why it’s unnecessary. It gave me hope there was more, but there weren’t. I hope this is a sign there may be more classes in the future. For now it just seems unnecessary to have.
See, I told you I was being nit picky! For me, none of the above mentioned cons affected my experience. For some people it may matter. Honestly none of it affected the quality of the class or ease of navigation.
Overall I loved this course, it was perfect for my learning style and you get a lot of information so it’s worth the price and I highly recommend it if you’re serious about learning and taking on affiliate marketing as a monetization method.
Check out the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing course if you’d like to learn more about the program or if you’re ready to take the course and maximize your affiliate sales now.
Do you have any other questions about my experience with this course? Let me know in the comments.
Just signed up through your review! Thanks so much for this honest review. 🙂
Awesome! I hope you get as much benefit out of this course as I did! She’s also added more content since I took the course. The lifetime access makes it well worth it for me.
In your honest opinion do you think a food blogger can benefit from this? I’ve been blogging for 5-6 years now, so I guess I’m an intermediate blogger I supposse but have made little money through affiliate marketing- I have my doubts I guess because of what I can promote ..but man so intrigued!
From what I learned, it’s all about what you choose to promote as affiliate programs. With that said, yes, there is a LOT a food blogger can promote! There are several food focused affiliate programs out there, just google terms related to food affiliate programs and you’ll find a lot. Then it’s a matter of how you promote them either in your blog, social media, etc. The course gives a lot of ideas on how to promote them, etiquette, and best practices. With the right programs you’d do fantastic! Do a little research into what programs are available and see what you can find. Good luck!
Thanks for the blog Mary… My question is: after you finished Michelle’s course, you did not mention (or I may have missed it) how it has increased your earnings as an affiliate.
How has it been beneficial to you?
I am interested in the course, but am very skeptical at the depth of the content. Could I get all the same info (as Michelle teaches) if I just googled it?
Excellent questions! For me the depth of the content was fantastic. I’m picky about what sources I turn to because I don’t like to waste my time with resources that don’t offer a lot of information and explanation. I felt that some of the information she shared I could find online for free, I already knew about FTC regulations, and the basics of what affiliate marketing is. That kind of information is readily available online, but she did elaborate on that info in a beneficial way, it wasn’t fluff filler information. Personally, I did learn a lot about how to utilize affiliates to make money and my earnings did increase, I also gained more confidence in the information I was already familiar with because her elaborations on the topics did provide the details I needed. Overall I would say this course brought everything together for me. I knew a lot of the basics, but I hadn’t figured out how to make affiliate marketing work for me. This course sort of organized all of the information for me so I could better utilize it, as well as providing new tips I hadn’t considered for how to do things. For me, I spent a lot of time googling affiliate marketing and I knew a lot about it but hadn’t figured out how to implement it in a way that worked for me. After Michelle’s course it all made better sense to me and I was able to create an affiliate marketing strategy that worked for me. Michelle even updates the course on occasion with more information, and you will have lifetime access. I have seen an increase in income, and it didn’t take long for me to make up the cost of the course, but I make no where near what Michelle makes. Everyone is different in how they process the information they find. Michelle’s course was perfect for me and totally worth the cost, however your knowledge base on the topic may be different than mine was. I went back to reread what I said in the post about who the course was for and I still stand by that assessment.
No videos? Hmmm, just wondering do you feel that learning how to do something just by reading it is harder than actually seeing how it’s done? Did you at any time think that if you had been shown how to do something rather than having to figure it out yourself just reading it would have been better? Or is the reading of it explanatory enough?
For me, I prefer to just read the content and it was extremely detailed to explain everything in a way to help me understand. In this case a video wouldn’t have helped me, personally. However, I know many other people are more visual/audio learners and do better with video. For me the class was exactly what I needed, if you’re someone who needs video to help grasp the concepts, then this might not be the class for you.