I signed up for the course Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing about a year and a half ago and have continued to reference it since I originally completed it.
As the name suggests, the course is all about understanding affiliate marketing. The reason I was so interested in taking this particular course is that the creator of the course, Michelle from Making Sense of Cents makes over $50,000 a month on affiliate income through her blog.
I was really interested in learning more about earning more affiliate income from this blog and now that I’ve been able to see some results from the course, I thought it was the right amount of time to be able to write a comprehensive review of Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing.
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Review
The Course Curriculum
The course curriculum covers everything you could possibly want to know about affiliate marketing. The thing that I really admire about this course is that it’s helpful for people who have no idea what affiliate marketing is as well as for people who have been blogging for a few years.
I had been blogging for about a year and a half on this website before I took the course. I was somewhat familiar with affiliate marketing, but I was only making about $100 a month (and that was if it was a good month!). Some months I made less than $50 a month from affiliates.
It goes through what an affiliate program is, how to apply for them, and Michelle even lists tons of different affiliate programs you can apply for depending on what your blogging niche is. While I found a lot of this helpful, the most helpful part of the course for me comes later in the curriculum.
Michelle teaches you how to grow your traffic through Pinterest, what sort of blog posts convert best for affiliate links, how to convert people into buyers, and how to promote your blog posts once you’ve written them (to the people who actually want to buy things). I had never really thought about any of these things when I started adding affiliate links to my blog posts. I just thought that if I had enough traffic and I used affiliate links in some of my blog posts, then people would buy things. Obviously, that wasn’t really working for me.
Snapshots of My Favorite Modules in the Course
This is one of the best chapters to figuring out what companies to use for affiliate
This section changed the blogging game for me. It truly showed me how to use affiliate links in a way that really converts.
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing also walks you through how to improve your conversion rates and make more money around different holidays. The course talks about seasonal posts that will continue to rank for your year after year. And even better, the course has continued to be added to since I signed up for it in 2017.
It now also includes an amazing section on using Pinterest properly (which helped me hugely grow my Pinterest reach in the last 6 months) and how to use Facebook Ads (which I’m currently using to promote my own course).
You can see the full course curriculum here.
The Pros of Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing
The first thing I love about the course is that it is self-paced. You can skip around (although I recommend going through it in order for the first time). I loved that I could do three or four lessons in one day and then come back to it again in a few days. I’ve taken other courses in the past that make you wait a week to get access to the next section and it’s frustrating in my opinion.
Another pro of the course is that whenever it gets updated, you get immediate access to new content. You only pay for the course once, but over the course of your blogging lifetime, you get to learn even more about not only affiliate marketing, but about other blogging necessities.
It’s very reasonably priced. In my opinion, for what you get, a course like this for less than $200 is insane value for money. Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing walks you through absolutely everything you need to know about making passive income on your blog through affiliate links.
Everything in the course is actionable. She gives you clear, concise, step-by-step methods to follow to make sure that you make more money through affiliate marketing.
IT ACTUALLY WORKS. I’ll talk more about this below, but this course works. There are testimonials all over the sales page, but sometimes it’s hard to believe if those are really true. However, I am a blogger who has used these methods and has found incredible success with them. My plan ever since completing the course has been to continue to implement them in new blog posts that I create and I have noticed a HUGE leap in affiliate income.
I no longer feel like I am just sort of guessing and putting links in wherever they might fit. I have a solid plan and think about it in a much more business-minded way thanks to this course.
The Cons of Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing
I’m really struggling to think of any cons for Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing. It’s thorough, it’s actionable, there’s no fluff or filler. I love that everything in the course is there for a reason and there are no chapters that I skipped over thinking, “yea, that’s obvious.”
One of the only cons that I can really think of is that as a travel blogger, it perhaps didn’t focus as much on that topic. I knew when I signed up for the course that it was a general overview and not specific to help travel bloggers. So it wasn’t really a surprise. But it would have been nice to have a few more options for affiliate companies in the travel industry. Michelle blogs about finance and some lifestyle things, and while she does travel full-time, it’s not really a large part of her blog.
Read: How I Make Money as a Blogger
The Results 18 Months After Implementing This Course
I worked my way through the course towards the end of 2017. I was already signed up for a few of the affiliate programs recommended in the course (Booking.com, Amazon, and Get Your Guide). I then signed up for several more after doing some research and thinking about what other things I love to talk about around the topic of travel.
In November 2017, I had approximately 10,000 monthly page views. As of May 2019, I currently have about 90,000 monthly page views.
I went from making less than $100 a month from affiliate marketing to averaging between $800 and $1200 USD per month on affiliate marketing. My Pinterest traffic has grown hugely and I am focusing my content on posts that convert.
I know that some of this is just natural growth because I have been working on growing my blog overall. However, I also know that a lot of the tactics that I learned in this course have hugely contributed to that amount of income. My blog posts have so much more direction and focus. I am much more aware of what I’m writing. I’m much better at planning out my content, and I focus a lot more on writing posts that convert. I would never have done any of those things without this course.
Michelle is a true expert when it comes to affiliate marketing and growing your blog. If you are interested in signing up for the course you can sign up here.
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