12 Minute Affiliate Review. Is it a Scam? I Bought it

Name: 12 Minute Affiliate Review. Is it a Scam? I Bought it
Brand: 12 Minute Affiliate
Price: 9.95 USD
Availability: InStock

To find out what all the hype was about, I decided to buy into the 12 Minute Affiliate program for the small investment of $9.95 and in this review, I’ll share what’s inside, how it works, if it’s a scam and more.

The short story is that I know quite a bit about what it takes to make affiliate marketing work, so from my experienced eye and point of view, 12 Minute Affiliate in my opinion is not a program I’d recommend using for several reasons I’ll discuss in this review.

I will also be recommending another option instead too, which can also teach you affiliate marketing, but in my opinion in a far better way that is far safer on your wallet (and has a lot of success behind it too).

The short review and summary of 12 Minute Affiliate:

Creator:

Devon Brown.

Price:

$9.95 for a 14 day trial (what I bought), then $47/month.
$39 upsell for a “3x increase in profits offer”.
$376 one time payment upsell for a lifetime membership to this program.

Additionally, there are other expenses you need to buy after you join if you wish to start using this system (which I will detail) and they can range from $99 to nearly $4,000.

You’ll see that in this review too.

My rating for 12 Minute Affiliate: 1 out of 5 stars

Do I recommend it? No.

In my opinion, while it’s an easy to set up system, there’s so many up in the air factors to it and you paying a lot for it, that the odds of this system making good money is highly unlikely and you have to spend a lot more money to have any chance at this program working.

I’ll explain how it works, then explain to you my many experiences with this subject so you understand where I’m coming from with my warnings about it. But there are alternative systems which I do recommend over 12 Minute Affiliate anyway, and the best one is this:

Alternatives:

The detailed review of 12 Minute Affiliate (video):

Long story short: I wasn’t happy with with 12 Minute Affiliate and that video encapsulated everything. As for alternatives, I did mention them (Wealthy Affiliate). I still think it’s the best choice, especially since we’re on the subject of affiliate marketing programs:

Click here to learn more about Wealthy Affiliate (in my opinion the top alternative to 12 Minute Affiliate).

Need more info? No problem! Here’s a detailed 12 Minute Affiliate review:

I’m going to explain this in 3 different parts:

First is how the program is presented on the sales page.
Second is how it really works (from the members area).
And the last is how I personally look at this method of making money online and why I don’t like it.

What you’re going to see is that as I start with the sales page explanation of this program which makes it seem overly simple, as I get to the last part about how I look at this formula and why I don’t recommend it, the story really changes and this is something that is often the case with these types of make money online programs: The hype often doesn’t meet the reality.

But let’s not jump ahead just yet. Let’s start from the beginning:

1) How the 12 Minute Affiliate program is presented to you (the sales page):

If you’ve seen the sales page, you may get the impression that it’s hyped. I personally think it is because in many ways, it doesn’t really explain the details of how it works. If I were to summarize what I saw on the 12 Minute Affiliate sales page, here’s what I’d say:

You’re shown a lot of testimonials and success stories (they’re said to be legitimate, and I didn’t see any area that said there were actors, so I will assume they’re legit).

You’re told that making money online is hard because people need to have a website and get traffic to it so they can promote stuff on the site (affiliate marketing), but most people leave the site before buying.

So what the 12 Minute Affiliate does is that it uses a special system to collect the email of the traffic coming to your offers so you can keep pitching it to them via email and that is how you’ll make the sale.

The basic message is: This system is done for you affiliate marketing, very easy to set up and anyone can do it basically. Easy money seems to be right around the corner (allegedly).

2) How the 12 Minute Affiliate really works (an inside look):

For starters, you have to go through several up sell pages after buying it (I didn’t get any of them). And second, before you access the members area, you need to provide some personal info (I didn’t like that and left some info blank).

But once you enter, here’s what you see:

This is the first page you land on after buying the program and after looking over it, here’s the full explanation of how 12 Minute Affiliate works:

You basically get a done for you email marketing system with 12 Minute Affiliate.

1) First they help you set up a Clickbank affiliate account and email collection system.

2) Then they give you a squeeze page which collects emails for the email collection system.

3) Then they sell you traffic packages which buys you visitors.

4) Those visitors go to your email collection page and if they sign up, you have their email and the 12 Minute Affiliate also gives you emails to send to these subscribers so they are “inclined” to buy the product you’re promoting from Clickbank.

You can select which Clickbank product you wish to promote and it can be inserted in the online sales funnel through this program.

5) Every subscriber you get who buys from one of these emails makes you a commission.

6) The more traffic packages you buy means more people can become subscribers to your email list and potentially make you more money (that’s the theory, but I’ll break down why there’s a lot more faults to this idea).

Here are the prices they charge for that traffic:

So even though there is a $9.95 entry fee to try this program ($47 a month after), to really use this program, you’ll need to also get:

A) An autoresponder (It’s Aweber and they have a free trial but $20 a month after).

B) Traffic packages starting at $99 all the way up to $1,997. And it just so happens this is for the niche I chose (Home Business). Other options include weight loss and personal development and those prices range from $100+ to over $3,000.

These are insanely high prices, even by paid per click standards!

3) 4 reasons I don’t believe the 12 Minute Affiliates works as easy as it looks:

This is the part of the review where I will give you my experienced input on the method used in this program and how in my opinion, it’s not likely to work nearly as well as it’s pitched on the sales page. So here we go:

1) The traffic you buy has many holes, but above all, no guarantee it’ll convert.

You may end up spending a ton of money and not be able to pay it back with the commissions you earn on the back end. This is often the case with any paid traffic generation method and the type used in 12 Minute Affiliate gives me pause because I literally have no clue where it’s coming from.

Could it be solo ads?
Could it be from a recirculating list they own?
Could it be some pay per click network?

I have no clue and that’s a big problem if you understand paid traffic generation (more questions = less chances of it working). Just because something is “done for you” and “easy” doesn’t actually mean that’s the best course of action and in this case, I see a lot of red flags with how this formula is presented (that’s my opinion).

2) There’s no proof you’ll get targeted traffic to your opt in pages:

They say you get great targeted traffic by buying it from 12 Minute Affiliate, but without knowing exact details, this is a risk I personally wouldn’t take and I know a ton about paid traffic methods. For example:

Long story short, I know my you know what when it comes to paid traffic and affiliate marketing.

In these 3 examples, I pay a lot less (in most cases) for targeted traffic than what 12 Minute Affiliate would charge you in their service (and they don’t even tell you the details of that traffic either.

For the prices they charge, I can get many more targeted clicks through my own methods and even though I prefer my approach to getting targeted traffic through paid methods, I’d never tell you my methods 100% work and in most cases, they don’t.

The 10% or less of cases that do, give me the profit and the 90% of campaigns I run I set up so when they inevitably lose money, it’s nothing crazy.

The paid traffic world is rarely a profitable venture and that’s just how it goes.

3) This system in my opinion is easy to set up, but very tough to convert:

The whole, set up an email collection page method is not new and has been used in other programs before. Sadly there’s way more details to making email marketing work than the simplicity it’s made out to be with the 12 Minute Affiliate program.

If you read my 3 steps to creating a profitable email funnel, you’ll see there’s many more details involved and why newbies shouldn’t bother with this until they are more successful and experienced.

4) Being a beginner in using this system is a double edged sword.

Even though you can fairly easy set up this program and have it running for you, you will be spending money to test it, and a lot of it and if things go wrong and you don’t make sales (which I think is very likely), you’ll need to adjust and improve your opt in page, perhaps your back end emails that convince people to buy and more and without experience in knowing how to adjust and do this, you being a beginner will work against you in the long run.

Again, in my personal opinion, a beginner affiliate marketer has no business getting into email marketing. Here is a better way in my opinion:

Conclusions on 12 Minute Affiliate:

I personally do not believe in this program. Despite 12 Minute Affiliate truly being beginner friendly and easy to set up, the material you are getting yourself involved with is very advanced, very expensive to apply, there’s way more to the story than is presented and in my opinion and experience, it all has a very low chance of success.

I’ve personally been involved with paid traffic and email marketing and even in the best of times, most of my campaigns didn’t profit and when you take into consideration that 12 Minute Affiliate is sending you traffic from a source you can’t identify and you are a beginner at this, there’s even more odds in my opinion of this not being very profitable.

At best, I’d predict a sale or a few, but an insane income from this?

It may only happen if you invest a lot of money into their traffic packages but that itself is a major risk and if you don’t have the money to spend on that, I would 100% advise against this program.

Alternatives? Yes! Why Wealthy Affiliate (why its easily the top choice):

If you want to learn affiliate marketing, just try Wealthy Affiliate. It’s actually free to check out and it will also help you become a successful affiliate. Be forewarned though, this is no get rich quick program and you will have to work (but it absolutely does work if you do this and there are many success stories that’ll you’ll find there).

One thing to note though is that it’s methods start you off on finding a niche you like and building a free traffic generating blog off it (which does take time), but trust me when I say the rewards from this are amazing and then later on you will learn how to do paid ads in ways in which YOU are in control of it.

That’s how I did it and here are my income reports for proof.

As for Wealthy Affiliate, they will show you the important fundamentals to succeed in this business, which is one of the MAIN keys to actually doing it. Lots of people want to do this business from done for you sources without wanting to learn how it truly works and in my opinion, that is a huge mistake. You need to know how this works, actually use it yourself, and that is what will fuel your success.

This isn’t an overnight thing and you will have to work at it. However, with Wealthy Affiliate:

You’ll learn the RIGHT way to do it (See Wealthy Affiliate’s success stories).
You’ll spend a TON less (you can get started for free).
You will have all the tools, help and support along the way to do this.
You will even my personal help along the way (see details).

Update: My poor customer experience with 12 Minute Affiliate.

I don’t like requesting refunds or cancelling payments, but with what I saw in 12 Minute Affiliate, I couldn’t stay there. But on top of that issue, I also had another to contend with. Here’s what happened:

After wanting to cancel my $9.95 trail with 12 Minute Affiliate, I headed over to Clickbank and requested it. What happens is that because this program is part of the Clickbank network, if I need to change, cancel or request refunds, I have to do it there.

My original request was to cancel my subscription and not to renew it.

I didn’t even want a refund from the program, but less than a day after opening my ticket, here’s what happened:

The vendor (whoever owns 12 Minute Affiliate) closed my ticket without closing my account.

In other words, had I not known this, I’d have to pay $47/month when my trial was done. This is something I rarely experience with product owners and it’s quite shameful for this to happen. Here’s the proof:

As a result of this, I went back to Clickbank and escalated the issue, this time to Clickbank themselves to solve it. Thankfully their support has this option if the vendor and customer can’t agree to something (unlike places like JVZoo which is why Clickbank is better).

This poor customer experience with 12 Minute Affiliate ended up worsening their rating in my book because customer service has to be paramount.

Even though it happens rarely, once in awhile, I deal with people in my business (via Wealthy Affiliate) who want cancellations and refunds, and it’s always honored, no matter what. This type of action is completely unprofessional in my opinion on 12 Minute Affiliate’s part and I certainly hope for their sake, that they make some serious changes in this regard.

And that completes my 12 Minute Affiliate review. If you have ANY questions, let me know below!