I have a lot of respect for a guy like Alex Becker, but in this review that goes over his Source University program want to explain why I disagree with how he teaches people achieve success online, in this case that being through SEO and why I think it’s risky.
Quick Report on Source University:
Creator: Alex Becker.
Price: $47/month with 1 up-sell for a Source Hunter that has a 10 day trial period, then $37 a month.
Overall Rating: 4 out of 10 stars.
I still disagree with some of Alex’s major points of view on SEO from the niche marketing standpoint and you’ll see why, but the videos he and his associates did on local marketing were brilliant at times, so that really redeemed the program.
Source University in a nutshell:
This is mainly an SEO course (here is one that’s better and it’s called Wealthy Affiliate), but it covers different aspects of it, the biggest being local and general niche marketing.
You get a lot of videos on both topics as well as case studies which show the strategies recommended being used to reach high rankings. Besides Alex being in many of the videos, there are also I think 2 other people who do the presentations.
I haven’t always agreed with Alex Becker’s methods to making money online and here’s why:
I have reviewed 3 products prior to Source University of Alex’s and I’ve never recommended any of them, not will I give a full recommendation to this program either because one major issue continues to come up whenever I go through any of his programs:
The issue is that his approach to SEO seems to be really out of date in my opinion because a lot of focus continues to be on things that aren’t really that powerful to use anymore and there’s also a greater chance of these strategies causing problems for a website.
For example:
He has a program called Source Phoenix which in addition to (at the time) costing close to $1,000, also focused a lot on teaching about PBN’s, a very risky form of SEO that I completely do NOT recommend anyone use.
His product, SEO Zen which I think isn’t sold anymore, I found to be completely black hat.
He also has a program I was a member on, for 7 months before I left, which is Market Hero. That is a bit different, but the same idea behind risky ways of making money online is present in that program too. And because it was outdated in many parts, I decided to leave not too long ago.
These products approach to making money online in my opinion point to a continued risky strategy that I’ve seen a lot from Alex more than once, including from Source University. The risk in my opinion is high of a Google slap/penalty occurring to websites which use them.
Inside Source University:
Before I show you what’s inside this program and it’s courses, I want to say that I don’t believe a lot of the information inside this program has been changed or updated for awhile and this is something I have seen in more than one program made by Alex Becker, such as Market Hero.
I think the only things that are added are webinar videos and maybe a few extras into the training, but a bulk of them have stayed the same and that was an important thing to notice because the training which I feel is outdated continues to still be taught.
There are 5 main courses and 1 page with many webinar videos inside Source University:
Course 1: Beginner Classes.
There are 7 videos within this area that briefly go over the starting points of making money online. It just so happens though that out of all the courses I viewed in this program, the beginners classes had the most amount of information I did not agree with.
The basic training in this area recommends building a website, optimizing it with a keyword in the domain title and basically building backlinks to it. To be fair, Alex is not suggesting the super bad kind of backlinks which are guaranteed to get your site screwed, but the is emphasizing that it’s one of the biggest things to have a high ranking website, when in my experience that is just not true!
The biggest thing is quality content, not backlinks or any link strategy.
And the word content, I barely saw being used in the beginner videos. Nothing is more important in my experience than to make that point about content known for beginners, otherwise they are going to go and look for tricks and loopholes and that’s how they will fail.
Lack of him mentioning content was really disappointing and because of that, if you’re a beginner, I do not recommend Source University at all.
Course 2: Intermediate Classes.
I’d actually say many of the videos here are for experts, not even intermediates, but overall, this section of the site really refueled my hope in Source University because there were many ideas that were very accurate and could make good money.
There are a wide variety of topics covered here (27 videos, all related to SEO):
- Case studies.
- Private blog networks (they are also called PBNs and I don’t like using them).
- Local marketing.
- Having websites which sell “space” to clients in different areas.
- And other things about (ironically) Google penalties.
Out of all the videos in this section, the one about having your own high ranking page to sell “real estate” space on for clients looking to increase business through the internet was genius. It was basically another way of doing local marketing but being more in control.
Course 3: Link building.
15 videos concerning link building, but mainly it covers the topic of PBN’s. This strategy, in addition to the big focus in the beginner classes on link building were the 2 things I really did not like about Source University.
Course 4: Client Getting.
26 videos concerning how to receive clients so you can make and rank online businesses for them and have them pay you or you do what I mentioned above in having your own central site where you can sell space to clients for money.
Course 5: Guest speakers.
3 videos with 3 different people narrating them. The topics cover link building, local client accumulation and anchor text.
Last section: Q & A Webinars.
27 long webinars.
Final Rating: Source University
Yellow Flag
4 out of 10 stars. I don’t recommend that beginner training on making money online they have, but there are sections in the intermediate, and client getting courses that are VERY useful if you’re doing local marketing. I would only recommend those parts of this program to people.
I also though the training in this program wasn’t very organized beyond the beginner level training. It might be not an issue if you’re experienced and you can basically take whichever ideas from videos you like and apply them, but when there’s no real step 1, step 2 approach, in my opinion, it should be labeled that way.
The way Source University looks now is like a bunch of good and bad ideas (well in my opinion…) were mixed together on some pages.
What is way better in my opinion:
Instead of Source University, I would strongly recommend a better SEO course, which also teaches how to get clients, and it is Wealthy Affiliate:
My final thoughts:
And I actually think Alex is a cool guy. He’s charismatic and a very successful marketer because of his reputation and his products, but the rules Google has set in place are really going more and more against his teachings, particularly on link building and PBN’s which again, are the 2 BIGGEST problems I have with this whole program and a large portion of the training is revolving around them.
Why continue to teach strategies that continue to accrue a higher risk of penalties when a simple update on the training that basically re-prioritizes content > link building instead of the opposite (the bad way) which is it is right now, and keeps the rest of the good things? If that were to happen, I’d happily recommend Source University.
But that’s not happening right now, there’s still focus on those things that have gotten so many websites destroyed and building any sort of website with those risks is just invoking trouble in my opinion…
But on the other side, if you exclude those 2 things and focus on the local marketing, you may have a lot of success.
Again, I recommend Wealthy Affiliate over Source University. Here is why:
Wealthy Affiliate is better because it’s:
- Better for beginners and also goes through updates.
- Has equally if not better local marketing training.
- I find the SEO training in WA to be more long term focused and my income results with Wealthy Affiliate there show that.
- Also has a $47/month membership, but a free trial too.
- Has far more training than Source University.
While I will probably look back at Source University for ideas in local marketing, if you’re doing general SEO, Wealthy Affiliate has much safer and really 100% risk free SEO strategies if you follow them.
I’ve just left Wealthy Affiliate. As an absolute beginner it’s great, it goes through the basics of setting up a website. After that though I got very little from it. It seems that most people that make money from Wealthy Affiliate do so by selling Wealthy Affiliate. It also had a very narrow focus. Either sell WA or become an Amazon/ClickBank affiliate. There was no diversity. I’m going to look into Beckers course to build on what I’ve already learned from WA. I like how you’ve broken what he offers down, it sounds like there’s some interesting topics in there.
Hi Hutch, I would recommend going back to WA because what you described seeing there was just the level 1 lessons and there’s higher levels of training with PPC, local marketing and the focus goes beyond what you said. You can get so much more from that program if you just explore it further.
The more I learn about SEO and how we truly can’t control it because it’s always changing and always competitive. I figure that it’s really about gaining followers and building an email list. And that’s done a lot faster through other means, like social media, creating VERY sharable content and just continually adding to the pot. I don’t invest in any sort of courses SEO related anymore because I know the basics. And that seems to be enough.
Hi Sarah, some website topics are better marketed on social media vs doing SEO and I completely agree that if you can collect an email list, your business will be better, but those happen later and knowing SEO is really going to be important at first because it will lead to continual flow of traffic that will keep your list and success growing.
Hi Vitaliy
Thanks for a brilliant review. Call me silly but what is PBN?
So this is basically another outdated training course that puts the focus on things like backlinks?
I’m seeing a lot of training programs reviewed where some of the training appears to be good, but some of it is black hat. I personally found this very problematic when I first started working online. I was not able to distinguish between what was the right way and what was wrong. In fact at the start I had no idea things could even be detrimental to my website!
This is why outdated training really ticks me off, there are newbies out there that will not only lose their money to a shoddy program but also cause more damage than good to their business.
Hi Lynne, a PBN is basically you making your own backlinks through a number of personal websites. It’s black hat too.
Hi Vitaliy,
Great review couldn’t agree more Becker’s stuff isn’t for beginners.
Curious… do you do any backlinking to your content?
Or, is good content enough to get you ranked?
Hi Richard, I put all of my focus on content and keywords.