Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Free
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Bottom Line
Making Sense Of Affiliate Marketing empowers individuals to generate passive income by leveraging the power of affiliate marketing, offering a valuable resource for those seeking to monetize their online presence and achieve financial independence.
Pros
- Amazing course on affiliate marketing
- High ROI price point
- Easy to follow and implement
- Thousands of successful students
Cons
- Mostly text based
- Lack of content on email marketing
Our honest take from a Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing review will show you how great the course is and how it can change your money-making strategy.
We now make a full-time income from affiliate marketing and blogging after taking the course, and can’t recommend it enough!
Whether you are looking to start your own blog or already have one we highly recommend you consider increasing your income by utilizing affiliate marketing.
Learn how to build a six-figure online business without millions of followers or selling your soul.
In our review of the best affiliate marketing course for beginners, we are going to go over what is included, our experience/results, pros & cons, who the course is for, and FAQs.
By the end of our review, you’ll have a better understanding of what affiliate marketing is and how you can start making extra money this month.
If you are looking for a good blogging jumpstart, you can also check out our Start Your Blog Bootcamp to get a strong start on money-making!
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Review
Blogging can be a great side hustle or become your full-time job if you do the work- but what work needs to be done?
Not many people understand how bloggers make money from writing and what affiliate income is.
We were there once, and Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing changed the direction of our blog, and we went from making nothing to making thousands!
We regularly tell new bloggers & business owners the most important thing you can do is spend money on educating yourself, so you know where to put your time and get money from it.
If you are looking for a high-quality in-depth affiliate marketing for beginners course, this is the one you need to increase your income from your blog.
Learn how to build a six-figure online business without millions of followers or selling your soul.
Let’s dive in and discuss who created the course and what you’ll learn from it:
Who created the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Course?
Michelle Schroeder-Gardner is one of the BEST personal finance bloggers on the internet. She runs Making Sense of Cents and created the “Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing” course back in 2016.
Michelle has been a HUGE inspiration for us since starting our blogging & business journey.
She was one of the first people we met in the blogging community and has always been extremely helpful. We owe much of our success to her and the course she created.
Michelle routinely makes $100,000+ from her blog every month! You can check out her latest income reports to see how she does it, and she goes into the details on the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing sales page (where you sign up for the course).
When we first ran into her blog, we were completely shocked that you could get paid to blog and make that much money. She is extremely hard-working and deserves every dollar she earns.
Course Cost
Taking this course, it’ll cost $197 or 2 payments totaling $210. That covers all 6 Modules (over 30 lessons), all 11 Bonuses, a workbook for the course, and more.
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing may seem like a big investment, especially for a new blogger.
Still, the return on investment can appear quickly once you get to work on improving your blog and start earning income from your affiliate products!
You can also get a free eBook with our affiliate link: a 36-page book that explains what affiliate marketing is and answers some of your questions before you commit to the full affiliate marketing course.
Learn how to build a six-figure online business without millions of followers or selling your soul.
What You Will Learn: Course Curriculum
The Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Course has a welcome and six modules:
- Welcome
- Module 1: What is Affiliate Marketing? (affiliate marketing for beginners)
- 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 to Promote Affiliate Links
- Module 6: Rinse and Repeat
One of the best parts about Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing is how easy it is to follow!
Michelle also goes into her favorite tools she uses to drive traffic to her blog and convert readers into income.
For new bloggers or bloggers who are struggling with affiliate marketing, Module 2 may be the best resource.
Michelle not only lists some popular niche websites you can create, but she also lists affiliates that bloggers typically use that provide quality to their readers and gets clicks for affiliate commissions!
Another key lesson that bloggers need to consider is in Module 6- what NOT to do! The Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing course gives you great information to incorporate into your blog, but it also tells you things you shouldn’t do.
Here’s a quick list of what we took away from this section:
- Write honest reviews- if you only include the positives, everything sounds too good to be true, and readers aren’t prepared for the reality of what they buy and sign up for. Don’t make affiliate marketing promises that people may not get from the program, and don’t avoid letting them know what they don’t get. Like in this review, we include the cons because you deserve to know the negatives about signing up.
- Don’t have call to actions/advertisements everywhere- if your site is just a bunch of ads, people are going to X out from your site because it doesn’t answer their pain point (what they need to know or want to fix). Yes, you want to make affiliate commissions on your site, but ads must be mixed in with the good stuff and provide value to readers.
- Make sure you actually use your affiliate link (not the main website link) and track it to see how many clicks earn affiliate marketing commissions. You may need to update your affiliate links or change the description so that people click and sign up for your affiliate.
But if you want to learn affiliate marketing no-nos, then you definitely need to take the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing course!
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Bonus Section
Truly the bonus section alone is worth the cost of the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing course. The amount of material to help you reach affiliate marketing success is unbelievable!
Here are the 11 bonuses you can get with the course:
- Bonus #1: Access to the private Facebook Mastermind group ($250 value!)
- Bonus #2: Free Group Coaching Sessions ($100 value!)
- Bonus #3: Pinterest Strategy – How To Drive Thousands Of Visitors From Pinterest a Month ($136 value!)
- Bonus #4: How to Always Get Approved To An Affiliate Program
- Bonus #5: 9 Things You Must Do When Something Goes Viral
- Bonus #6: How To Increase Your Page Views
- Bonus #7: My Affiliate Products And Services
- Bonus #8: The Perfect Affiliate Link Checklist
- Bonus # 9: How To Maximize Your Reach, etc.
- Bonus #10: Editing And Writing Strategies (Content Writing)
- Bonus #11: How To Legally Protect Your Blog (read more about blogging laws to set up your safety net)
Course Details
The course relies on text- there isn’t any videos. There are no videos in this course (besides the bonuses). If you are a visual learner don’t worry she has tons of screenshots she uses to help convey her lessons. This course goes in-depth on how to naturally promote affiliate products/services on your site.
Everything about the course is self-paced. There are no open or close dates for enrollment- you can take a week to read the lessons and revisit them as often as you need. We have found this is by far the best way to take courses!
Everyone learns at different speeds, so this is very helpful, but not having to pay for a membership afterward is great when you want to change your marketing strategy after a while and need some pointers.
The course is designed for everyone, you don’t have to be in a certain niche to take it. This course is truly designed to help you learn how to make money through affiliate marketing. We wish we took it before starting our blog to get a jump start, especially since Michelle recommends using WordPress to the fullest!
This isn’t a ‘how to start a blog’ course. If you can’t tell by the title of the course, you’ll learn how to make affiliate income, not set up your log start to finish. If you have not started a blog yet, you should check out our step-by-step tutorial.
The worksheets help– if you actually use them! For example, my favorite worksheet is from Module 4, it’s called Improving Your Top 10. You can use the worksheet to incorporate new affiliates or update the affiliates for better click-through rates.
It’s a great reminder that the articles you have may be making you money now, but you can always do more to keep making money. You have to continually improve your work to keep ranking!
Read and incorporate what you learn. Just like in high school, all the information is given to you on how Michelle has made her blog successful. You only see results if you put affiliate marketing strategies into practice and incorporate what you’ve learned!
Don’t let it be in one ear and out the other; using her strategies and even altering them to fit your blog better can only improve your content.
If you want, you can check out the most frequent questions and answers on her course (scroll to the bottom of the page to get to the FAQs).
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing: Our Experience & Blogging Results
We can’t have a Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Review without telling you how it changed our affiliate marketing strategy and improved our blog income!
As we stated above, we owe much of our success to Michelle and her course and think we could have earned more affiliate income from the beginning if we’d known Michelle’s tips sooner.
For the first six months we started our blogging business, we struggled to make any amount of income. After taking her course, our blogging income more than doubled within the first month.
It has continued to grow each month since then, and we’ve continually made money from our blog.
We were able to master affiliate marketing thanks to Michelle and make our blog our main source of income!
We are now at the point where we earn thousands of dollars every month from our blog alone.
It’s crazy to think just a few years ago, I quit my day job to run our site!
Before taking her course, we had no idea what we were doing with our blog. Without Michelle’s course, this would have never been possible!
The picture below is my “time off request form” when I quit my job to run our blog full-time.
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Review: Pros vs Cons
Pros
- Self-paced
- 30-day money-back guarantee
- Lifetime access to the course and updates
- You can earn a 40% commission as an affiliate to the course (~$80)
- Mastermind Facebook group to ask questions
- Bonus lessons on driving massive amounts of traffic
- Extremely easy to follow and understand
- In-depth course on how to get paid to blog
- You can pay in two installments
- You won’t struggle for months/years to earn income blogging
- Her course worked wonders for our blog!
Cons
- $197 price tag (not cheap when first starting out)
- Mostly text-based learning
- Not a “how to start a blog course”
- Veteran bloggers will find most of the value in the closed Facebook group rather than the course itself
- You cannot fill the worksheets in online, you have to print them off
- The affiliate marketing course is just that- it’s about affiliates, not SEO, writing content, sponsored posts, etc.
FAQs: Making Sense Of Affiliate Marketing Review
Now that we’ve gotten all the details of our Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing review out there for you, here are some questions we’ve gotten about this affiliate marketing course that you may have:
Who is Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing for?
This course is for anybody looking to make affiliate marketing income- meaning you have a website or social media that uses affiliate links to earn money.
We’re bloggers, and you can start a blog and earn money from affiliate marketing, sponsored posts, merch, printables, and more.
We started out as a mom and dad looking for a profitable side hustle. Because of our affiliate marketing strategies, Brittany is now a working stay-at-home mom, and I quit my job too!
So this course can benefit students, stay-at-home parents, new bloggers, and even experienced bloggers who are struggling to increase their monthly income.
Is the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Course going to help me make more money with my blog?
Unfortunately, we can’t answer this question for you. It would be foolish for us to promise that after taking this course, you’ll instantly start making an income from your blog.
The fact of the matter is after taking the course, you’ll have the knowledge and education on affiliate marketing that you’ll need to be successful.
From there, it’s completely up to you to use that knowledge for your blog.
You must put work into your blog, connect with readers better, create more optimized content, and use the tools the course gives you to grow.
Can I get a discount code or promo code for the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing course?
Currently, there aren’t any promos for the course, and while you may be tempted to sit and wait, just remember that your time is money.
If you want to learn about affiliate marketing and find concrete strategies to monetize your blog, it can hurt to wait in this case!
You can get a free eBook to learn some basics on what affiliate marketing is, or even take our Start Your Blog Bootcamp to give your blog direction before investing in Michelle’s course.
Is the Facebook group a way to get help directly from Michelle?
Michelle is a big part of the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Facebook group, but she doesn’t comment on every post that comes up in the group.
You can still get a lot of value from the group- as a whole, it’s a great way to get feedback and directions from other experienced bloggers and stay in the know about the blogging world.
We started our own Facebook group, Blogging With Purpose, for the same reason- so that you can see what others are doing on their blogs, talk about blogging resources like Jasper or SurferSEO, and ask questions when you’re hitting a wall.
Will the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing course teach me about SEO (search engine optimization)?
No, Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing doesn’t teach you about SEO or creating SEO content for your website.
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing is primarily focused on teaching you to get affiliate links and incorporate them on your blog, in addition to tracking the income from affiliates and introducing new strategies to up reader click-through rates.
If you’re interested in learning about SEO, we took the course Stupid Simple SEO to find out what SEO was really all about and the main strategies we needed to not only engage our audience, but help our content rank on Google so more people could find it!
What other affiliate marketing courses are out there?
We’re frugal people, so we know it’s a smart money move to check out your options before paying for a course, regardless of what you’re trying to learn!
Our Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Review wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t give you some other options to check out.
We use SkillShare to take courses (for blogging and beyond!) and recommend the site in general, but here are a few courses and the cost for your to compare your options:
- ClickBank Success–Affiliate Marketing Without A Website: $119
- Affiliate Marketing For Beginners-Simple Steps to Success: $84.99
- Authority Hacker-Site System: $1,494
- The Affiliate Lab-The Beginner’s Lab: $997
The list goes on as there are so many courses on SkillShare, Udemy, and elsewhere- you can check out an in-depth list of affiliate marketing courses here.
As you can see, there are some smaller courses with lower costs you could try out, and some huge courses carry a hefty price tag for a blogging beginner.
We like the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing course because it’s in-depth, and you get more information than a small course without paying hundreds more.
The saying ‘it takes money to make money’ is very true with blogging- like in college or trade school, you need to pay and learn some skills before you can reap the benefits of blogging.
Is blogging a quick way to make money?
Blogging can become very profitable, especially when you master affiliate marketing, but it isn’t some get-rich-quick scheme where you don’t work at all and make a bunch of money.
Starting your blog and maintaining the content takes time and effort, just like any job.
There are tips and tricks, and we’ve collected many blogging resources to help us along the way, but you need to write engaging, optimized content and attract people to your blog if you want to make money from it.
Gaining
Where can I learn to start my blog?
Well, you’ve come to the right couple to learn about blogging! We’ve certainly had our ups and downs along the way, and we’re happy to teach you all about blogging in Start Your Blog Bootcamp.
You can find tons of articles on blogging; we have plenty on the subject ourselves! We recommend reading up and joining blogging communities on Facebook, but taking our email Masterclass can help you get a hold of your niche and start you log on better footing.
Are there programs that can help me incorporate affiliate links on my WordPress blog?
Yes, rather than copy and paste affiliate links from a spreadsheet every time you want one in your articles, there are plug-ins in WordPress you could use.
Michelle recommends using Pretty Links on WordPress for affiliate marketing. You can essentially highlight hook text, click Pretty Links, and it has every affiliate program you add into it for easy access.
We use Pretty Links, but we’ve also found a new plugin called Lasso that has some extras that make affiliate marketing even easier.
It helps us list our affiliates, including affiliate links in articles, plus can create tables, call-to-action buttons and boxes, and a few other things that can make affiliates stand out on WordPress.
What programs do you use to create SEO content for readers?
For SEO content, we use SurferSEO, which happens to be an affiliate program of ours.
It’s a program that can take a keyword, like “make money fast,” and gives us the top 10 ranking articles on Google to check out and research.
Not only that, SurferSEO creates a list of words to include in our articles- so if we want to tell readers how to make money fast, the list will mention dog walking if top-ranking articles have written about it- because that’s something readers seem interested in trying out!
If you want to learn more, you can see our SurferSEO review, where we use pictures and walk through how we use the site to create better content for our readers.
Final Thoughts: Making Sense Of Affiliate Marketing Review
Blogging is not a get-rich-quick scheme like many think it is. It takes a lot of hard work and determination to learn how to make money online and get paid to blog.
With that being said, we wholeheartedly believe that with the right work ethic and determination, anyone can be successful blogging once they have the practical knowledge to monetize their work.
And now that you’ve read our Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Review, I’m sure you can see why we recommend it as the best course and just one of our top-notch blogging resources!
With a money-back guarantee, you have nothing to lose by investing in your own skills and education and everything to gain with this course.
This course completely changed our lives! Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing is worth its weight in GOLD!
Learn how to build a six-figure online business without millions of followers or selling your soul.