Well, I’m not going to lie to you. My review and opinion of The Affiliate Academy will probably be biased. And the only reason I say that is because of everything that I have learned from it, and from its founder, Vic. With what Vic has taught me, I have been able to make a steady and decent amount of money every month. Enough to keep my wife home from work, and to keep me from having to find a second job. And with new things that I am learning everyday, and with all the amounts of opportunities that pop up at the academy, 2009 is looking to be a great year.
The forms of monetization that I have made money from so far is BANS and adsense, just a couple of the techniques taught at the academy. The 100 .info BANS idea came from Vic, and since he has developed a somewhat large following, many poeple jumped on the bandwagon and created BANS sites. This pretty much flooded the search engines with literally thousands of BANS sites within a course of a month. Then that caused google to go on a BANS slaughtering rampage, deindexing anything that even smelled like a BANS site. That is why so many say that Vic broke BANS. I disagree however. Vic didnt break BANS. He simply made it harder, and in some cases A LOT harder, to get indexed in google. I still create BANS sites and make money from them. In most cases, especially the .info BANS, most of the traffic I get is from yahoo. But who cares where they come from as long as they buy, right?
The only sad story with BANS is the affiliate program for which it promotes, EPN. It recently changed its system for how it pays on new signups and this has affected many. I havent felt the sting yet, but since it changes from month to month, who knows what will happen. But, in my case, only about half of my earnings with EPN come from new signups at the $25 price, so I think there is still some decent money to be made. Setting up a BANS sites takes only about 15 to 20 minutes, and with a few techniques, getting ranked in yahoo for buying keywords doesnt take a whole lot of link building. Set ‘em up, get the links, and move on. 3 months later, if you built quite a few .info BANS sites, you should have a decent amount of income coming in.
And as for adsense, Vic was right as this is not something for the noob. I only put adsense on one site of many that I built specifically for adsense, and in a little over a month has made over $75. While this is still more then what most people make in a month with adsense following other internet markters, this was crap. Why? Because I was smart priced. I was only getting an average of about $.15 a click, when I should have been getting at minimum $.50 a click, and the upper end at around $2 a click. If I knew what I was doing, that $75 should have been around $700. That is why I have put adsense on hold while I work on another form of monetization that I learned from The Affiliate Academy, the $7 script.
The $7 script is a pretty sweet concept, and it ensures that you get payed. One of the biggest problems with going through an affiliate program, like commision junction or pepperjam, is that you never know if they are screwing you, and by that I mean not paying you your full commisions. Lets face it, if you are driving traffic and nothing is converting then it is either your keyword, or your affiliate program is nutty. With the $7 script, the money goes straight to you so you know you are not being screwed. I plan on building these types of sites heavily over the next few months, and am excited to see the results.
I know I have rambled quite a bit in this post, and not a whole lot about The Affiliate Academy. I did this in hopes that you see what kind of things you are taught in the academy. Vic is big on diversification, and rightfully so. Imagine if all you had was BANS sites when google decided to go on that deindexing spree and when EPN changed its pay structure. If all you were depending on was that, you would be in some serious trouble. I know of some affiliates that went to making a lot to nothing overnight. Now, if you had a network of adsense sites, BANS sites, $7 sites, and many others, you would build yourself some protection from the search engines and affiliate programs, which DO change.
The Affiliate Academy is also a wonderful place to interact with fellow internet marketers, some that are beginners(we all gotta start somewhere), to advanced internet marketers, and everyone else inbetween. We also have a few programmers and developers, so we also sometimes get some awesome and exclusive deals on programs and products. There is also a library full of ebooks and classrooms filled with video tutorials that will give you step by steps on a lot of subjects. Then dont forget the live classroom, where we get to pick Vics brain and hear techniques and ideas that are both innovative and eye opening. We also have access to the other admins at the Academy, all of which who have had great success online.
I would highly recommend The Affiliate Academy, and would put it on top of your list of things to invest in. Yes, I said invest. Even though this business is online and not your traditional business with a store and a bunch of headaches, this is still a business, and you should take it seriuosly. Invest in the future of your online business. And for what you get at The Affiliate Academy, you are still paying WAY less then a lot of the other crappy SEO/Internet marketing programs out there.
Willdini | 
03 11th, 2009| 
