
This is a review of Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers, an online course by Carly Campbell of Mommy on Purpose.
(Have you taken this course? Add your rating!)
Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers is a short course sharing Carly’s knowledge and experience making money online via affiliate marketing on her own blog – to the tune of about $3000 per month.
If you want to know:
- The pros and cons of Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers
- How much it costs (including hidden costs)
- If real students are actually getting results
- How it compares to other affiliate marketing courses
Then you’ve come to the right place.
Let’s get started.
Jump to…
About the Author
Hey, I’m Niall Doherty.
I quit my last 9-to-5 job back in 2010.
Since then, I’ve earned my living online in various ways. Revenue for my latest business is at $1+ million and counting.
I’m on a mission to accurately rate and review all the best “make money online” courses. My team and I have spent 1000’s of hours investigating these courses and getting feedback from real students.
All that to say: we know a thing or two about such courses and making money online.
How does Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers help you make money?
Affiliate marketing is when you promote other people’s products or services, and collect a commission for every successful referral.
Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers assumes you already have a blog with some content and traffic, and are looking to monetize it with affiliate marketing.
The course is mainly Carly sharing her own knowledge and experience. She doesn’t dive very deep on any particular topic, mostly giving a general overview of affiliate marketing and pointing you towards other free and paid resources to learn more.
In my opinion, the most valuable and in-depth part of the course is the section on email marketing, where she breaks down how she earned $5404 in commissions in only 8 days back in 2017. Carly mainly did this by sending out several emails to her list of ~2200 subscribers, promoting a particular product she was an affiliate for.
Below is a rare video interview with Carly so you can get a feel for her…
Who is Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers for?
Having gone through Carly’s course, I’d say it’s mainly for people who have been blogging for a while already, but have very little knowledge of or experience with affiliate marketing.
It’s best if your blog is already getting some decent traffic, as Carly doesn’t really cover traffic generation in the course.
Also, since a big chunk of the course is about affiliate marketing via email, ideally you’d also have started building an email list. Carly doesn’t cover how to grow your list, but does show how to monetize an existing list with affiliate offers.
Lastly, I’d say the course is best suited for people who are blogging about their passion. Carly herself is well known as a mommy blogger, and much of her audience seems to blog about family life, a hobby, or some other topic they are passionate about.
Carly describes Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers like so:
I felt that there was need for an intermediate course on affiliate marketing. This course focuses on CONVERSION STRATEGIES. (How to actually get people to BUY things from your links.) It also has a detailed module on how to use affiliate marketing in EMAIL.)
I’d advise against taking this course if you’re looking for an easy way to make money online, or comprehensive affiliate marketing training.
Does Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers have a good reputation?
It’s hard to find anyone online saying a bad word about Carly Campbell or her affiliate marketing course.
Carly does seem very genuine and transparent. Starter Story has a good interview with her which reveals how she became a successful blogger.
In short:
- Carly started her mom blog while pregnant in 2016
- She initially spent 60+ hours per week working on her blog
- Within 9 months she was earning a full-time income as a blogger
- Eventually her blog was earning as much as $10,000 per month
- Pinterest has long been her main source of traffic
- Display ads have usually been her primary source of income.
(Btw, I’m pretty sure all the numbers Carly shares are in Canadian Dollars)
Carly reveals to her email subscribers that she was earning about $3000 per month from affiliate marketing through 2019 and 2020, and earning about 2-4x that each month from display ads.
Carly is perhaps best known for her ability to generate traffic from Pinterest, and indeed she has a few other training programs related to this. All of her courses are sold under her Blogging Like You Mean It website and brand.
There isn’t a lot of talk about Carly’s affiliate marketing course online. The few reviews you will find for it are generally positive but usually from affiliates of the course.
Having gone through the training myself, I find that it pales in comparison to many of the other affiliate marketing courses I’ve reviewed. It’s not an in-depth or comprehensive course by any means, and is probably best viewed as a general overview of affiliate marketing.
That said, it is one of the cheaper courses out there, and provides a decent amount of value for the price.
Are Carly Campbell’s students getting results?
I spent several hours researching Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers, looking for earnings screenshots and testimonials from students, and searching for other reviews online.
Unfortunately, I didn’t find any students reporting good results from following the training in recent years.
Nor did I find anyone criticizing it.
My takeaway: either the course isn’t very popular, or it isn’t very impactful.
How much does Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers cost?
You can buy Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers for a one-time fee of $79.
Be aware that Carly does recommend quite a few paid tools and training programs throughout the course, such as SEO books by Debbie Gartner, a list-building course from Jennifer Maker, and keyword tools like Jaaxy and SEMRush.
To be fair, Carly seems genuine in her recommendations – she regularly reminds students to only promote products that they use and love – and you don’t necessarily need to buy anything she recommends.
But, if you want to emulate her success, you will need to spend quite a bit more than the $79 course fee, as there’s a lot to learn about affiliate marketing beyond what’s included in the training.
Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers Discount?
$79 for lifetime access seems to be the usual price for Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers.
I’ve seen reports that Carly sometimes offers a $15 discount for Black Friday. If you want to avail of that, the best thing would be to sign up to her email list and keep an eye out.
Also, you can buy Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers along with two other courses by Carly for $95 total. The other two courses in the bundle are:
- Pin Design Rules to Start Breaking
- Pinteresting Strategies
That’s probably the way to go if you’d like to learn how Carly gets most of her traffic from Pinterest.
Refund Policy
I didn’t find any info about a refund policy on the Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers sales page or the Terms of Service linked from there, so it seems all sales are final 😕
If you’re not happy with your purchase of Carly’s course, you could try emailing her and asking for a refund, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll get your money back.
How is Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers structured?
It’s a pretty simple course layout that looks like this after you sign up…
There are about 30 lessons overall, about 80% text and 20% video.
The course is broken into three main sections:
- Getting Started
A general overview of affiliate marketing. - Affiliate Marketing Through Blog Posts
Mainly about how to get more clicks on affiliate links in your blog posts. - Affiliate Marketing Through Email
Featuring the aforementioned case study, with PDF downloads of the emails Carly used to generate $5404 in commissions in 8 days.
The course doesn’t have a private community for students, but Carly does have an active blogging group on Facebook that anyone can join for free.
Green Lights 🟢
A few things to like about Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers:
- Inexpensive compared to most other affiliate marketing courses.
- Carly Campbell is genuine and transparent, walks her talk.
- Decent high-level overview of affiliate marketing.
- Good case study and examples of affiliate marketing via email.
Red Flags 🚩
Several things about Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers that should give you pause:
- Quite shallow training overall.
- Lack of student success stories.
- Most of the examples and case studies are from 2018 or earlier.
- No refunds.
- No private community for students.
- Unclear from sales page who the course is best suited for.
- No mention on sales page of expenses beyond the price of the course itself.
Other things you should know
- It’s a short course that you can easily consume in an afternoon if you read and watch everything straight through.
Should you join Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers?
I’m hesitant to recommend this one since it doesn’t really go in-depth on anything.
It would be a good budget option except Carly links out to many other paid resources that she recommends for diving deeper on certain topics.
That said, if you are a fan of Carly’s blog and want to learn more from her specifically, then you’ll likely find the course worthwhile. And in that case you might want to buy her course bundle so you can also learn about her approach to Pinterest, which seems to be her main area of expertise.
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