20 Best Affiliate Marketing Courses on Udemy

3 problems with affiliate marketing courses on Udemy

Having spent ~5 hours researching Udemy’s most popular affiliate marketing courses, I can’t in good faith recommend ANY of them.

Three primary issues I found while researching 10 affiliate marketing courses on Udemy…

Average course ratings are meaningless

Going into this, I assumed that the average rating of a course on Udemy was a reliable indicator of its quality.

Take this course, for example:

Wow!

Average rating of 4.5 based on more than 5500 reviews – that’s gotta be a great course, right?

• Wrong.

The course has only three hours of content, the instructor shows ZERO proof that he’s earned good money as an affiliate himself, and one of the preview videos looks like it was recorded way back in 2014.

Despite that, you still get students dropping 5-star reviews:

Notice anything strange about those reviews?

They offer generic praise for the course, with no indication that the students have successfully implemented what they’ve learned or earned ANY money from affiliate marketing.

From what I’ve seen, that’s the norm for 5-star reviews on Udemy.

Examples from other affiliate marketing courses on the platform:

Takeaway: don’t assume a Udemy course is good just because it has lots of reviews and a high average rating.

Most of the courses are outdated

This wouldn’t be an issue if it was obvious which courses are outdated and which aren’t.

But it seems a Udemy course creator need only make a tiny change to their course to have the “last updated” date change accordingly.

For example, this course is labeled as having been updated in 2019…

But you’ll find the occasional review complaining that it actually hasn’t been updated since 2015 (which I found to be true):

It was a similar story for most of the affiliate marketing courses I researched on Udemy.

Takeaway: don’t assume a Udemy course is up to date just because the “last updated” date is recent.

Who the hell are these course creators anyway?

I researched a bunch of them and found either NO or VERY LITTLE evidence that they’ve made good money from affiliate marketing themselves.

This was the best I found:

Unfortunately, the creator of that course earned his money by (a) using cracked software to scrape email addresses, then (b) spamming thousands of people with his affiliate links.

His course shows you how to do the same 😕

Hence this review:

Yet somehow, the course still has an excellent overall rating:

Here’s another Udemy affiliate marketing course with an impressive average rating:

Andrew Williams: an SEO expert, eh?

Let’s check out his ezSEONews website in Ahrefs:

Hmm, about three people visiting his site every day from search engines 🤔

Not what you’d expect from an “SEO expert.”

As he goes through his Udemy course – recorded in 2016, btw – Andrew builds a new site called Fishy Fats so you can see step-by-step how he does it.

Here’s the resulting site in Ahrefs:

2 visitors per month nowadays, down from a peak of 22.

Amazing.

I wish Andrew was the only fake “expert” teaching affiliate marketing on Udemy, but he seems to be the rule rather than the exception.

Out of the ten courses I researched, I failed to find a single impressive website or significant affiliate earnings proof for ANY of the instructors 😕

Takeaway: just because an instructor has a popular course on Udemy doesn’t mean they know what they’re talking about.