For many bloggers, affiliate marketing is basically the holy grail of blogging income. It’s the kind of income you earn while sleeping or sitting on the beach drinking something out of a pineapple – that’s the passive part you hear so much about. But, learning how to do affiliate marketing well isn’t as easy as slapping links on your website and hoping for some click-throughs. It’s building your blog, your audience, and learning from the best… that last part is where this Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing review comes in. Enjoy!
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Review
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing is a comprehensive course that teaches you the ins and outs of affiliate marketing, while not selling your soul. Through six different modules, creator Michelle Schroeder-Gardner of Making Sense of Cents guides you through finding your first affiliate to promoting your links. She teaches the same strategy that she used to build a multi-million dollar blog in just a few short years.
The blogger behind Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing
If you’re a personal finance blogger, then you’ve probably heard of Making Sense of Cents – Michelle is an award-winning blogger, winning the Plutus award for Blog of the Year in 2016 among many others. Awards aside, Michelle is one of the most driven bloggers and nicest human beings out there.
Michelle started Making Sense of Cents in 2011 as a way to journal about her personal finance journey, including how she was working to pay off nearly $40,000 in student loan debt… she did this in seven months! She never intended to make money blogging, she was doing pretty well as a financial analyst, but after making $100 from an advertisement deal, she realized she wanted out of the 9-5 grind and got serious about her blog
She eventually quit her job to blog full time, and now she and her husband live on a sailboat (!!!) and are currently cruising around the Bahamas with their two dogs.
Until recently she was posting monthly income reports, and in those you saw how her blogging income grew, a lot of it from affiliate income. She even had a month where she took in $187,785.13 in affiliate income. That’s insane!
It’s clear from her affiliate income reports that this girl knows what she’s doing. Fortunately for us, Michelle took what she learned over the years and created the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing course in 2016 to help other bloggers do the same.
What you’ll learn from Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing
Michelle decided to use the Teachable platform for her course, which is the same platform that most of the higher quality courses you’ll see advertised these days are using. Both the Facebook Side Hustle Course and Facebook Ads for Bloggers course are taught through Teachable as well.
Teachable is great because as the course creator you can make several different modules that students can go through at their own pace. There’s no need to rush through all the modules, unless you really want to.
The six modules in Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing are:
- Module 1: What is Affiliate Marketing?
- 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
Those modules break down into 30 different text-based lessons. They feel really similar to reading Michelle’s blog posts, which means they’re all really easy to read and implement, leaving any nonsense behind. If you wanted to, you could probably work through the course in a day, but because you have lifetime access to the course, you can go back and refresh yourself on things as needed.
As you can see from that list of modules, Michelle takes you from the very basics of affiliate marketing to how you’ll use those skills to keep growing and earning more. That means the course is great for everyone from those who are new to affiliate marketing to those who have already had some experience with it.
Click here to sign-up for the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Course.
Free bonus material you’ll receive
Alone, the modules in the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Course are super informative and easy to implement, but the bonuses are really where you get some bang for your buck.
Here are the nine pieces of bonus content you will get with Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing:
- Access to the private Facebook Mastermind group
- Free group coaching sessions
- How To Always Get Approved To An Affiliate Program
- Pinterest Strategy – How To Drive Thousands Of Visitors To Your Blog With Pinterest
- 9 Things You Must Do When Something Goes Viral
- How To Increase Your Page Views
- How To Maximize Your Reach, Your Impact, And Your Revenue With Facebook Ads
- Worksheet: My Affiliate Products And Services
- Worksheet: The Perfect Affiliate Link Checklist
All of this bonus content is incredibly valuable, but the Facebook Mastermind group is seriously amazing. It’s where you get direct access to Michelle in something she calls “Ask Michelle Saturday,” and it’s when she answers any questions you might have related to the course, your blog, your business, etc. It’s also a place to connect with other bloggers to talk about strategies that work for your blog, and many bloggers say that the Facebook group alone is worth the cost of the course.
To make even more money with affiliate marketing you’ll need to grow your audience. That’s where the Facebook Ads for Bloggers Course comes in, teaching you how to create high-quality Facebook ads to target and grow your audience.
The cost of the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Course
To make sure it’s accessible to as many bloggers as possible, Michelle is offering her course at a pretty middle of the road rate of $197, or two payments of $105. Remember, that’s for lifetime access, and Michelle occasionally adds in more bonuses, which are really cool.
That cost may feel like a lot to bloggers who are earning little to nothing from their blogs, but if you want to make money from your blog, you’ll have to put money into it from time to time. If you treat it like a hobby and cross your fingers hoping you’ll be living on sailboat one day too, then success is probably always going to be just out of your reach. Blogging as a hobby is fine, but to make money, you’ll need to treat it like a living, breathing business. That means occasionally investing some money to see real returns.
To help ease your mind about the cost, Michelle offers a 30-day full money back guarantee on her Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Course. That means she’s pretty confident that you’ll enjoy the course and get a return on your investment. You can sign-up for the course here.
Real results from the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Course
In addition to hearing what the course is about, this review wouldn’t be complete without sharing some real results.
In the first few months after implementing the strategies in the course, Millennial Money Man went from around $1,000 a month in affiliate income to earning around $5,000 a month. In total, ten months into Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing, M$M earned $37,252.73 in affiliate income.
And if you like thinking about things in terms of ROI, taking the cost of the course ($197) with the income earned in the first ten months, that’s an 18,810.02% return!
That number looks absolutely insane, but it’s real. However, and this is one of the things Michelle talks about, to get to the point where you’re making real money from affiliate marketing, you’ll need to have already grown your blog to a certain point.
This Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing review isn’t going to promise you returns like that, but the point is that it’s possible, and Michelle shows you how.
The reasons Laptop Empires loves Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing
Just putting this out there, there are way more reasons to love and buy this course than there are not to. With that being said, here are the strongest features of the course:
- Accessible content for all levels. Michelle makes learning about affiliate marketing easy for newbies, but she also presents some more in-depth strategies for those who are already into it.
- A no fluff approach. When you pay for a course you want to get straight to the material, and Michelle does a great job of just telling you what to do and how to do it.
- The Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Facebook Mastermind Group. This is legitimately one of the best resources you get with the course. It puts you face to face (screen to screen?) with other bloggers who are doing the same thing you are. You aren’t just learning from Michelle, you get to learn from others too. This hivemind factor you get from her mastermind group is super valuable.
- You don’t need a huge audience to make money with affiliate marketing. This is a big one because many newer bloggers are scared of affiliate marketing because they just don’t think they have a large enough readership. Making Sense of Cents doesn’t have one of the largest audiences out there, but she still makes a really decent amount of money from affiliate marketing. This is due to the organic approach she teaches in her course.
- This is an evergreen course. Being that Laptop Empires has a heavy focus on marketing, it’s always interesting to see how others are doing it. The Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Course is evergreen, meaning it’s always for sale without any big launches, webinars, relaunches, etc. It pretty much relies on word-of-mouth advertising, and the fact that Michelle has reached so many bloggers speaks to the quality of the course.
Where the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Course falls short
Again, not much to say here, but there are a couple of very minor issues:
- More than text. If you are a visual learner, this course still has a lot to offer, but it might not suit your style.
- Higher-level content. While seasoned bloggers can learn from this course, you might want just a little bit more. Should that stop you from buying the course? Not necessarily. It can still help you hone your strategies and learn from one of the best affiliate marketers out there.
Now really, will Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing make me rich?
You know that promises like that are BS, and more than anything, making money blogging is more than learning and implementing one strategy. However, after seeing lots of feedback from bloggers in a variety of niches, it’s clear that their affiliate income has grown after taking the course.
Also, while affiliate marketing can feel really passive, the reality is that it takes a considerable amount of work to grow your blog. The strategies you learn in the course will take time to implement, but you also have to understand that the time you’ve put into your blog already is a time investment in itself.
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