Affiloblueprint 3.0 Review: Will You Make It Work For You?

Update Feb 2014: My first Affiloblueprint 3.0 site made its first sale 10 weeks after launch and now makes on average of $300 a month. I put the initial work in whilst following the course then moved to launch other projects. I intend to revisit the first site and build on its successes.

As some of you may know, these past few months I’ve been slowly working through Mark Ling’s Affiloblueprint 3.0.

It’s a very comprehensive online marketing course teaching how to create profitable niche affiliate sites from scratch.

As I have now nearly finished the course and it’s still fresh in my mind, I’ve put a candid Affiloblueprint 3.0 review together to help guide any would be buyers.

–>> Check Out The AffiloBlueprint Course here

The Reality of Internet Marketing

Firstly, I was drawn to this course as it is not pitched as a get rich quick scheme. Instead it talks about growing a sustainable business in Internet Marketing and humbly says to expect to earn $50 a week or so after the first 3 months or so of the site being live.

This is quite different to some of the claims made by other courses seen on well some well known forums.

The reality is that there are methods out there that can generate money quicker, but these probably wont have much longevity.

Affiloblueprint on the other hand introduces you a broad range of techniques allowing you to build long term passive income from “authority” style sites. This and the knowledge gained will set you up for a career in Internet Marketing should you wish to pursue it.

The reality is you will probably build one or two sites using this method then evolve your own style based on what works for you and what you most enjoy doing.

In truth, making money online takes time and a lot of effort. Don’t be fooled into thinking there is easy money to be had, as people may try to make out. If they are saying this, then they are probably trying to make easy money out of you. So be warned…

In my experience, making money through niche marketing comes from hard work and perseverance. It involves putting in the hours and making a lot of mistakes. It is from these, providing we learn from them that we become experienced internet marketeers.

The Course

The Affiloblueprint 3.0 course is a well laid out product consisting of instructional videos and links to resources. It is broken into chapters outlining the various stages from choosing a niche, product choice, keyword research, content creation, site design then the various techniques for driving traffic including SEO, PPC, and Social Media.

Alongside this is a check-list so you can track your progress and performance. All nice touches.

The Affiloblueprint course has been around a while, and has evolved alongside internet marketing practises and more importantly updates in Google algorithms and social media.

It is very thorough and covers all aspects of online marketing, which is no mean feat. Although I do advise you research ideas further to get better insight, especially SEO which is currently in a massive state of flux.

AB sells itself as being Penguin and Panda friendly. Previously the course would have focussed on article spinning and blog networks for ranking sites, but that has given way to more sustainable white hat practises.

For those that don’t know, simply put, the Penguin and Panda updates effect how Google now works. It has invalidated some previous effective techniques used to gain back links in order to attain high search engine rankings as well as put an end to poor content, or “thin” websites that offer nor real value to the user.

As such, Google is now much harder to “trick” so therefore gaining back links to achieve better rankings has to be done very carefully to avoid your site being penalised.

Fortunately these are covered in detail. Plus Google is now not the only big driver of traffic. The explosion of social media such as Twitter and Facebook, alongside YouTube means there are lots of other ways to drive quality traffic. These are more often quicker to get results from too.

Afiloblueprint spends a lot of time looking at these different sources and how you can leverage them to begin to make money online.

Cost

I paid about $200 which is very reasonable seeing as how much valuable information is contained within the course. Even for intermediate Internet marketers, they’ll be things you didn’t know.

Extras

You will be provided with hosting if you need it and the WordPress Affilotheme that has everything you need to put a decent looking site together. I tried Affilotheme and thought it was a good affiliate theme.

Mainly as it has so much built into it, such as a cool header design software and some great plugins for squeeze pages that would cost a lot to purchase standalone.

Here is Affilotheme in action on my site:

It looks excellent. However I opted not to use Affilotheme as I have considerable experience with WordPress and already have other themes I like to use.

Also, Affilotheme is not responsive as yet.

You will also get access to a free version of Traffic Travis V4.

Don’t be deceived by the name, this is actually quite a good tool. I was in fact very surprised, as have used many similar industry tools that cost a lot more money but don’t have half the functionality Traffic Travis has.

It has some very handy SEO research features plus I also found the results to be very accurate. It also has some very cheeky competitor PPC campaign analysis.

Here is what I use it daily for:

• Keyword Rank Tracking on all my sites
• Spidering of site for SEO issues – don’t rely solely on SEO by Yoast to tell you a page is optimised. You need an external view of the site. I have come unstuck a few times with this in the past
• First Level Keyword Analysis and SERP investigation for competition
• PPC Competitor analysis
• Back link analysis

I am now using other software that is more specialist in each area as my understanding grows.

One word of warning, do not take the keyword rank difficulty suggestion as gospel. It is just a very loose guide based on a few metrics. Use Traffic Travis to process a whole bunch of suitable terms and then export to excel. From here you can pull out the more interesting ones and go deeper into competition. You have to do this manually and use other tools. No software can tell you how easy something will be to rank.

For example, Traffic Travis says that a brand keyword will be “difficult” to rank for. I am actually ranked 4th with no off-page SEO. Just some tight on-page stuff.

Remember nothing beats your brain and NEVER rely purely on software to tell you what to try and rank for.

If you decide to use Traffic Travis, I suggest you buy the full version otherwise you’ll be too restricted when it comes to keyword research volumes.

You may want to consider some private proxies plus a Death by Captcha account as all the Google queries will start to generate a lot of Captcha requests. Its optional though.

Alternative software to consider if you don’t buy Traffic Travis Pro are:

• Market Samurai
• Long Tail Pro

These are both good at keyword research and offer more SERP metrics to examine than TT but they also lack in all round functionality. I’d use all the free versions and demos first before committing to purchase, especially if you are on a budget.

I did upgrade to the full version and now use it all the time as a tool of choice for a lot of the grunt work.

My Progress So Far

Just so you know, my AB site has been live for almost 2 months. As I have other work commitments I try to dedicate around one full day a week to working through the course.

Although the site has yet to make a sale, I am starting to get a good number of click through’s for the three affiliate products advertised. So it is just a matter of time now…

Here is a snap shot of the traffic so far:

It is in a very competitive skincare niche so I did not expect traffic to come rushing in from Google straight away.

Currently the only traffic sources are Google and Twitter. I am putting together a series of YouTube videos at the moment.

I have actually applied a handful of the principles from this course to an older blog I was doing nothing with and had little traffic. Now that is making about £300 ($500) a month from a single product and is hitting 2500 unique users a month up from just 500. I will soon be adding other monetization methods and hope to get it hitting $1000 soon.

The fact that this was with an older domain with more Google trust, made it quicker to be able to drive organic traffic.

Critism

My main crititsm with the AB 3.0 course is also it’s strength.

It literally covers everything you need to know about IM. The problem is this is a lot of ground to cover so at times can skim over concepts that are very important.

For example, keyword research is one of the most important aspects of niche marketing.

However I felt more time could have been spent explaining to beginners what terms should be targeted and how long-tail there keywords should be. Targeting 3,4 or 5 word terms should be your focus in the beginning. Especially of your niche is competitive.

It does cover the basics, such as buyer intent, however more time could be spent making it clear what keywords should have content written about, alongside how to structure the site.

Getting this wrong will severely hamper the time it takes to start seeing traffic and more importantly sales.

Keyword research focus should always be on product review terms and pages. These ultimately are what will make the money even if they appear harder to rank for. Creating too many informative pages may drive traffic and page views, but the sales will be slow in appearing.

Another minor bug bear is the constant up-sell to Affilojetpack throughout the course.

Hearing how Affilojetpack has fully researched keywords for its niche is not helpful while trying to crunch 2000+ potential search terms!

I bought AB to learn new skills in IM, not to have it done ready for me.

Conclusion

This course is great if you want an in depth, step by step guide to internet marketing.

Its all in there and is clearly explained and a lot of work has gone into producing this, and alongside the Affilorama forums, you will receive all the help you need to learn your new trade.

Because of my AB blog overhaul which is now already making good money after just two months, I have no doubts that my pure Affiloblueprint site will get its first sale any day now.

If you stick to the course it and don’t get distracted, which is very easy in this business, I have no doubt you will make money from following the Affiloblueprint course.

Not only that, you will learn some very valuable and interesting skill sets.

Pros

• Extremely thorough course
• You are getting a lot a valuable information
• Easy to follow
• Has everything you need to get up and running
• Should start to see a cash flow after 100 days
• Has some great tips on outsourcing
• Looks to create a business not a quick win
• Access to friendly dedicated staff members and community forum

Cons

• Takes a long time to complete the course
• SEO section is a little out of date so you must continue your research
• Constant prompts to buy Affilojetpack becomes annoying
• All resource links are affiliate however you should learn from this
• Google have changed the keyword research tool to keyword planner so course needs a quick update
• You wont see much of Mark Ling in the forums

Well that wraps it up. I have tried to be honest and objective so you have a real idea what you will be getting if you sign up to Affiloblueprint 3.0.

Good luck and I am happy to answer any questions. If you found this review helpful and are going to buy the course then please use my affiliate link below:

–>> Click Here for the course sign up page