An interesting aspect about affiliate marketing is that you can add a storefront to feature your promoted products. It gives a great overview for the visitors and allow them to shop easily. When searching the web for ‘how to create an affiliate store’, I found a particular course on Udemy under the same name.
What can you learn from this tutor and is the price worth paying? Let’s find out more.
The Course Overview
This course is hosted by Udemy and conducted by an internet entrepreneur called Juri Fab who also teaches other topics such as Facebook and YouTube marketing. It consists of two segments – setting up a website and creating a webstore. These are some of the topics that will be covered.
Website Setup
- How to install WordPress on cPanel manually
- Increasing the WordPress memory limit
- Install WordPress theme and WordPress plugins
- Change WordPress permalinks
Create a Web Store
- How to start with Rakuten affiliate network
- Setting Up External Products and Affiliates in WooCommerce
- Adding affiliate products to an online shop
- Modify website design (basic coding experience required)
- How to make more money with affiliate marketing
- Add website to Google Search and start getting natural traffics and clicks
- Motivate customers to buy with this simple trick
- How to get traffic for free
What I Like About This Course
(2) Using WooCommerce can be complicated for beginners, so seeing this process in a step-by-step manner is extremely helpful. I never knew it would integrate seamlessly like that so it was interesting to learn about this.
(3) Many people tend to choose the Amazon marketplace when it comes to affiliate program, but there are other brands worth considering too. In his example, Juri uses Rakuten Linkshare to search for merchants, so one gets to see what goes behind the back office.
In case you don’t know, Rakuten is a reputable affiliate network that partners with many familiar brand names such as The Body Shop, Lego toys and also Starbucks coffee. Each of these is an interesting niche idea for one to start an online business.
(4) While most online store platforms will tell you to link to Google Analytics, Juri make the effort to demonstrate the Google Search Console setup as well which can be complicated for most beginners. This step is crucial, especially if you care about how search rankings and keyword trends affect your website performance.
What I Don’t Like About This Course
(1) The first thing that struck me as unconventional is the process of installing WordPress manually that requires downloading the software and accessing cPanel. This is great if you are into the technical stuff, but most of the time, it’s just too complicated for beginners.
I don’t see why you can’t just use a good hosting company that provides a one-click installation method. The end-result is still the same and you could get things done faster that way.
(2) The second thing is about increasing WordPress limit which involves code editing. Again, I found this technique to be cumbersome because most hosting companies now have different package offers and you just need to pick one that’s suitable without having to mess around with codes. Remember, you are here to become an affiliate marketer, not a web developer.
(3) As for creating product pages, Juri actually advocates copying information from the merchant’s site and pasting it directly on your web store. I disagree with this because 1) you are not creating original content for the viewers and 2) you are literally creating duplicate content that can indirectly make Google penalized your site.
However, he did briefly mentioned about writing uniquely through the use of spinning software, but I won’t recommend this either. In case you aren’t aware, spinning is a (blackhat) technique that takes one original text and automatically modifying it to make it look/read like a totally different one. It is often used to mass populate content without actually having humans to write it.
While most of them claim to be Google-proof, I find that spun content are often not reader-friendly and the whole process of gaming the system is just downright unethical.
(4) In one of the lessons, Juri also shows how to place ads on a site and although it does seems like a good addition to the income stream, I would suggest to avoid doing this, even for the long term.
Online ads is a potential distraction to your viewers. Someone who has the intention of buying a product would suddenly click the ad, goes away to another site and might never come back to purchase from you. So, would you rather earn in cents from irrelevant ads, OR the bigger chunk of commission from your product review? Think about that for a minute.
(5) Last but not least, Juri even shows how to post comments as a fake user to get engagement for a product page. I am definitely not a fan of this technique as it’s absolutely pointless. If you want to build an honest reputation, write a good blog and invite real audience to leave genuine comments on your site. Don’t waste your time faking it.
Is The Course Worth Your Time?
The essential part about WordPress and WooCommerce setup is worth learning, but for the most part, the course is all about short cut techniques which I don’t think will serve any values to an online store.
At the end of the day, your site is going to look something like this;
This, my friend, is also known as a ‘thin site’ because all there is are product images and links pointing out. There’s no thoughtful content creation and absolutely no original engagement that goes into it. Sites like this will never attract Google ranking, much less, an audience that is interested in buying anything.
So, would you pay $200 to build an online business on such a fragile foundation? I am guessing not.
Instead, I would recommend investing in a proper training that will show you how to select a niche, build a website and write unique content that will not only create authenticity, but also attract streams of visitors to your affiliate business.
If you like to learn more about such training, please check out the features in my recommended platform review here to see how you can get started.
Have some thoughts or questions about this topic? Just leave them in the comment space below and I’ll get back to you.
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I literally had a problem for ages trying to figure out how to add a store page on my site. This helped massively, so thank you! Without your detailed review (even the negative aspects) I wouldn’t have made the decision. Great help. But, what are your views on the WooCommerce plugin?
Hi Dale, glad to help. Are you setting up a store for selling your personal products or affiliate products? Because there are some differences between the two. Either way, WooCommerce is a reputable platform for eCommerce, but it does get a bit expensive when adding more features. They do have a free plugin to try so test it out and see how it fits to your liking.
I really dislike how people who just make their site look exactly like someone else site. I do not see any added value in this course, which is a let down. The Udemy Course does walk you through the process and I do think that it shows you how to create an affiliate store. But I can’t see myself doing all that stuff. I would like to know more about your recommendation and how it works. Can you tell me about it?
Thanks in advance.
Hi Kendrick. The WA training teaches you to build content first for a website before setting up a storefront. This includes important pages about your company/organization and a blog where you can discuss information related to your niche. You will also learn a skill called keyword research where which will help to boost your business presence on the search engines as well as finding the right customers for your products.
This methodology serves as a crucial foundation for those starting their own local business store OR creating an affiliate storefront. Take a look inside the training – without any cost – to see if it’s the right fir for you.
Thanks for this review. I tend to agree that this will not be a great course to go for, personally I would also stick with your recommendation as it is a much richer and better learning platform with many more value adds.
It seems way too expensive and with little value to invest $200 in this. There are way better courses for much less that offer much more than just 2 hours of tutorials.
The course title look pretty deceiving at first glace. Being an online marketer myself, I can see that this course was build for newbies and do uses some bad practice which I also will not use personally.
If the Google algorithm change again, I am pretty sure that whoever uses this course to make an affiliate store will have a hard time ranking as the search engine did mention that duplicate content will be penalized heavily.
Paying $200 for the course doesn’t make sense. Only 2 hours of tutorial, really? The course rating also seems suspicious. I would think he probably fake them as well since some of his teachings involve getting fake comments.
This is an interesting review of the course. I would say that the cons for the course are enough to make me a little bit uneasy about purchasing it. Create a fake profile so that you can create fake comments? This is extremely shading and if search engine caught onto this, I’m sure a penalty may even be in order.
This just goes to show what people would do to get comments going for their sites. Some are even paid to provide such services but I found that the quality is extremely disappointing and it’s just a waste of money.