I was skeptical when I started looking at Andrew Hansen’s Forever Affiliate, mainly because…
The sale’s page was very old school in the sense that it was all text, hype about how much money you can make, screenshots of sales, testimonials, ect…
But as I started looking further into the program, I was pleasantly surprised. Even though it is not a scam, I do have some problems with it I want to warn everyone about.
Forever Affiliate in a nutshell:
You learn to build affiliate websites and follow a 3 phase plan in which you create the website, have it rank on search engines, earn commissions, rinse and repeat the same formula for other websites.
The training within the member’s area of Forever Affiliate is very in-depth. There is a lot of high quality training that is very much aimed for the beginner to online marketing, which I like.
Note: Here’s 5 other programs even better than this one for the same topic.
Inside the product:
There are a number of things that make up the members area, but the most important are:
The welcome page: This is the first page you see when you buy the program. It provides a welcome video from Andrew Hansen
in which he explains where to go and what to do on the site to get going. My first impressions of him are pretty good, something I don’t usually find myself saying.
Theory: Here you get the basic idea of how the system of Forever Affiliate works. Everything you do within this program will be divided into 3 phases. This section just summarizes the 3 phases to let you know the big picture.
There is also a whole explanation of how the world of internet marketing changed since 2012. What happened was that there were many people finding loopholes within Google & other search engines and abusing it to have their websites rank high.
Unfortunately, a lot of these websites were of low quality which would ultimately damage the reputation of the search engines. As a result Google started implementing changes to do away with many of these loopholes many people call black hat methods.
The whole approach to Forever Affiliate is having your website rank high in the post 2012 world, but as you’ll find out, it’s not as updated as it could be.
Phase 1: This is really for those who are absolute beginners. Here you learn the basics:
Finding a niche.
Building a WordPress website focused on that niche. There are excellent tutorials on how to properly set up your WordPress site.
Finding affiliate programs to promote to that niche. Andrew goes beyond places like Clickbank and shows you how to find affiliate offers you can promote on your website.
Phase 2: Once you have a website set up, this tutorial will run you through things such as adding content to the site and building it out in order for search engines to start ranking this content and the site to start amassing traffic.
Now one thing you should note is that there’s different types of websites you can make: Authority websites & mini websites, both of which are focused on particular niches.
Authority websites are going to be pages that have massive amounts of content on it and promote several products. Here’s more info on becoming an authority site.
Mini websites are going to be aimed at promoting just 1 thing.
Example: A review of a product.
Generally mini websites rank higher because there is less competition within this niche. But overall, there is more profit potential in authority websites. Furthermore, mini websites are also known as micro niche sites and they generally do not rank well anymore when using this approach anymore.
Now one thing I didn’t like within this phase was that Andrew endorses article directories and writing for them and linking back to your website. This is a form of backlinking which is pretty much dead nowadays. This will probably not do you much good and I would recommend always putting all of your content ON your website.
Phase 3: This is basically going to be enhanced ways to get your website ranked higher and receive more traffic, then afterwards “rinsing and repeating” the same formula for other websites/niches.
While there are some good ideas on using social networks, getting comments and writing high quality content, a lot of the focus within this phase is again backlinking, but not through article directories. Instead it’s focused on posting links back to your sites through comments on high page ranked websites, doing things like guest blogging and other things related to the backlinking subject.
Even though this guide is post 2012, a lot of newer changes have been made since and some of what phase 3 talks about may work in the short run, but in the long run, they will likely do nothing or worse cause your website to get Google slapped.
The thing about backlinking is that when its done the cheap way, it temporarily “fools” search engines into thinking you have a high quality website and even if that REALLY is the case, the fact that you’re using tactics that are frowned upon by Google will be the main reason they will catch you and cause your website to lose all of it’s rankings, making it almost impossible to get back to that spot.
Google is becoming better and better at noticing & catching which websites use these forms of black hat marketing. You should never risk doing backlinking. I learned that the hard way through a program called Bring the Fresh.
Pros:
- A lot of high quality training.
- You can make money through the tactics recommended within this program (absent the backlinks).
Cons:
- Not every strategy is up to date and some methods can hurt your website’s rank.
Final Rating: Forever Affiliate
Yellow Light (Use Caution)
4 out of 10 stars. Overall good program, but because it still recommends outdated methods of SEO, I can’t give it a green light. See my #1 recommendation which is up to date.
Final Thoughts:
While researching this program, I saw A LOT of similarities between this and Bring The Fresh’s Fast Start Guide in that the walk through’s and strategies suggested are very similar. And even though a lot of the methods do work, I can’t give it my approval because some of the tactics are very outdated (backlinking).
I’m going to be perfectly honest: I want to give this program the green light. It’s not a scam and there’s a lot of good stuff but unless it updates it’s training to 2014 standards, I just can’t do that. And if they do, there are still better alternatives.
Having said that, overall my thoughts on Forever Affiliate are mostly positive. After reviewing SO many bad products out there, it’s nice to see there are still legitimate programs being produced out there. If Andrew updates the training, I will be more than happy to give this program my thumbs up!
If you have a review/question about Forever Affiliate, please let me know in the comments section below.