I got a few email queries about what I thought of Andrew Hansen’s new Forever Affiliate course. As I mentioned in my previous post, I didn’t know anything about it apart from the fact that he’d just released a new course.

The course I consistently rely on is Mike Johnson’s Profit Marketer as it’s detailed, gets updated constantly and provides members with pre-configured blogs, top-notch plugins and themes and great support (there’s more on it here). I still dip back into the Bring The Fresh course as it takes a different approach to building blogs (it too is a comprehensive course) but Profit Marketer fits my needs better. I have a few other affiliate marketing and blogging courses which I no longer use (or got much use out of), so I didn’t want another one.

Forever Affiliate Phase 1
Welcome page inside Forever Affiliate

Buying Forever Affiliate

But, in order to review Forever Affiliate, I needed to buy it. It’s $67 so not that expensive. There is an upsell for the course for $497 which gets you more techniques and strategies, weekly 3-hour mastermind conference calls (for 6 weeks), the ability to contact Andrew directly through email for advice (aside from using the general support helpdesk), having Andrew’s team do niche research and build a site for you – including SEO services – you’ll also hear from 6 other top marketers. And a commitment from Andrew that he’ll stick with you till you make your first $1000 per month. This offer is only open to 300 people.

I didn’t sign up for the offer as

  1. I’m fed up with upsells – I’d rather just know what the up-front, all-in price for a product is and…
  2. I don’t like being pressured into buying something because of scarcity before I even know if the basic product is any good or not

Now I did expect that there would be an upsell, as there is with so many products in internet/affiliate marketing, but not at that price level.

I’m also a bit cynical about the number of spots remaining that are displayed on a page because you can find if you refresh a page over time, the number never changes. So either the upsell isn’t selling or it is selling but scarcity is being used to sell more than the advertised number of copies.

Last night, when I reloaded the upsell page, there were still 106 spots (of the 300 available) still left, so that didn’t look too encouraging.

Today, however, that number has dropped to 44. So I think the page is reflecting real sales of the upsell (at least I hope it is).

The Forever Affiliate Course

The course consists of 60 videos broken down into 3 phases:

  • Phase 1: Doing Initial Research – this looks at niche and product research and testing. It details your core analysis funnel, how to prove market viability, and how to feed stuff into your funnel to find as many profitable market segments as possible, as quickly as possible.
  • Phase 2 – Testing & Validation – covers building your affiliate sites and starting to promote them. It discusses content, layout, appearance, early search strategy and more.
  • Phase 3 – Expansion – this is where you get into hardcore traffic generation and SEO strategies – link building strategies, ongoing content strategies, expansion into markets, and scaling for maximum profits.

Now I’ve only had time to go through most of Phase 1 (there’s 2 videos left I need to watch here). So these are my thoughts on what I’ve gone through so far:

Impressions of Forever Affiliate

I expected to see a lot of stuff about niche and product research I’d come across before – a rehash of existing research methods aimed at newbies. I was pleasantly surprised to find that most of what’s presented was actually new to me. Some are quite obvious things to do or look at when you think about it, but they’re strategies most of us miss.

Forever Affiliate Phase 1
Phase 1 page inside Forever Affiliate

Phase 1 is broken into two parts – 1) Where to find products and niches and 2) How to research what you find for profitability. As an example, these are the videos on Part 2 of Phase 1:

  • Analyzing The Size Of A Potential Market – This is exactly what you need to see in the “numbers” for a market to know that it’s worth you testing out. Here we talk about “how much is enough” when it comes to volume, what kind of keywords you want to see, how many… and more.
  • Profitability Testing A Market – This is a few simple calculations you can do to know before anything else, an accurate estimation of how much money you are going to earn in any given market. This allows you to plan properly and never waste a cent in your affiliate marketing.
  • Analyzing The Competition In A Market – This is an in depth explanation of how to tell if you’re going to be able to rank in the search engines for the keywords in your market. I’ll show two examples both of a “rankable” market and a non rankable one. Hint: Don’t rely on what keyword tools tell you for this piece of analysis. Being good at this technique can guarantee you profits for a long time to come.
  • Analyzing A Merchant’s Landing Page – This is the low down on what you need to check for on a merchant’s landing page to be confident it will sell the traffic you send to it. Hint: It’s probably a lot less than you think. And this one you’ll only have to use if the “idea” you first came across was a keyword and not necessarily an existing affiliate offer.
  • Making Sure There Is An Affiliate Program – Two quick ways to check if the product name you came across definitely has an affiliate program that you can use to make money with it. And, that’s your Analysis Funnel complete!

Videos range from about 6 minutes up to almost 30 minutes depending on the topic. I like the way there’s an intro to each video explaining what it will be covering, then the technique / strategy / information it has to impart, followed by a recap section that summarizes what you’ve learned from that video.

The videos are easy to listen to and watch and Andrew speaks clearly throughout. I would have liked the videos to be in HD but there’s nothing so small in them that you can’t read them or make them out. The reason they’re in Standard Definition is probably due to bandwidth constraints at whatever service is being used to serve the videos.

I also never felt that I was being overwhelmed by information (information overload) as each video tackles one topic and devotes as much or as little time as it actually needs. Watching several videos in succession (and taking notes) didn’t prove to be tiring as can happen with other courses.

As I mentioned, most of what I learned here was new to me, which was a surprise. Both newbies and veteran affiliate marketers will get something from this course. As I make my way through the rest of the course, I’ll add reviews of the other Phases to this blog post.

The reason I’m jumping the gun in posting this review before I’ve fully worked my way through the course materials is because the slots on the upsell are selling out fast and if you’re interested in this course, that might be a consideration despite the cost of the upsell.

Conclusion

Given the quality of the content in Forever Affiliate, I’m seriously thinking about opting into the upsell. I suspect it would be money well spent. I’ll update this post when I make my final decision, one way or another.

When I bought Forever Affiliate, I figured it would be just another “affiliate marketing with blogging” type course. From what I’ve seen so far, rather than this course being an alternative to Mike Johnson’s Profit Marketer, it actually works as a companion course. Profit Marketer is about building niche and authority type blogs as is Forever Affiliate. So they fit very nicely together.

Forever Affiliate: Recommended

Forever Affiliate Upsell: I can’t comment on this as I haven’t bought it but it looks good and I am considering buying it. Check back with this post in a day or so and you’ll know which way I went on it.

Update: I did buy the upsell – the MasterMind course which provides step-by-step instructions on how to make mini-sites the Forever Affiliate way. It also gives you direct access to Andrew Hansen via webinars and direct email contact. There’s also additional training provided to Mastermind Members not available in the main Forever Affiliate course. It’s now been 4 weeks since I signed up and I’m glad I did.

All the best,

Gary Nugent

P.S.: Don't forget, if you want to create an internet income of your own, here's one of my recommended ways to do that:

 

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