Reviewing Affiliate Institute to me felt like trying to put a puzzle together without any instructions.
And the reason why I say this is because there is so much mixed, conflicting and missing information on this program that I had to dig up from multiple sources, including the main Affiliate Institute site to write this post for you.
And so if you are thinking about joining this program, have heard of it, have doubts or wish to try it, hopefully this review will help clear that up for you, because trust me, getting this info was not easy (and that’s not a good thing). Anyway, let’s begin:
A quick summary and review of Affiliate Institute:
Who created Affiliate Institute?
Julian Sherman and Mathleu Jang.
How much does Affiliate Institute cost?
There are numerous options available:
- A free membership which takes you a webinar ($0, but this didn’t open for me).
- A level 1 membership (known as AI Pro and Level 1) which has 10 courses, each for $497 (or a $997 bundle).
- A $99 a month membership (Known as Affiliate Institute level 2 or AI level 2).
Some reviews I’ve seen also claim this program funnels people into high ticket enagic offers (water filters) that can cost $1,000’s and can possibly have some MLM ties. I have yet to see this, so I’m leaving this as an assumption for the time being.
What does Affiliate Institute teach?
Elements of affiliate marketing basically. If you look at their AI pro and level 1 training, there are courses related to affiliate marketing topics such as copywriting, traffic, and making money.
My rating for Affiliate Institute: 1.5 out of 5 stars
Do I recommend Affiliate Institute? No.
There are many confusing aspects to this program and mixed reviews I’ve seen (I wasn’t kidding when I used the puzzle metaphor).
Some people even say this is a rebrand of the Global Affiliate Zone program, which I happened to be a member of before leaving due to having a poor experience with how they worked.
I’ll explain it all in detail further below, but overall:
- This site is broken in many areas.
- It’s confusing to understand on what they teach.
- It charges high prices for information I could honestly find you programs that teach it for less and much more.
This all combined is why I do not recommend it.
Alternatives? Yes!
A detailed review of Affiliate Institute:
To start, let me say I began my research into this program by visiting the main site. At first glance, I was pretty impressed by the look of it and the offer to join it for free. I generally like any program that offers free trials to test out it’s legitimacy and so I was excited to take advantage of this. However, as you’ll soon learn, it was not meant to be.
Now at this stage of the review, everything past this point in my experience began to depreciate my opinion of the program (yeah that didn’t take long, I know) and allow me to explain why:
1) For starters, I couldn’t join the free membership:
Upon signing up, apparently I was supposed to be taken into a webinar. However, after trying to sign up several times, all I got was the following:
While I wasn’t happy about this, I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps Affiliate Institute was going through some changes and there was other stuff I could see. And so I looked around and found out about the levels of training:
2) Next we have the level 1 (AI pro) training, all of which is quite expensive and adds up quickly:
At $497 for each course, I find that to be quite the investment. But is it worth the price? Well there is a bundle price available for $997, but I can’t justify that type of cost.
As I say again and again with any high ticket affiliate offers: I am not a fan of spending a ton of money on any program to learn affiliate marketing.
In fact, here are other alternatives I would venture would give you info on any of the stuff in the level 1 training (and possibly more) for less (I am affiliate with some of them, but not all):
- Wealthy Affiliate (the best).
- Commission Academy (excellent program).
- Invincible Marketer.
- Savage Affiliate.
These are at least 4 alternative programs I would highly suggest joining (some of them are free to try) and you would get excellent information on everything you need to be a good affiliate marketer. These are also excellent programs to help beginners become successful.
3) Level 2 didn’t really get into much information on what was taught ($99/month):
The basic summary is that you get access to excellent affiliate marketing training made by experts, as well as access to support and classes to learn this stuff.
4) A 12 week accelerator program is provided, but:
This too is a bit vague. I assume it’s a course to help you get leads and make affiliate sales, but that’s the jest of it. There is an application to sign up to get into this.
5) So far, in this experience with Affiliate Institute, I wasn’t really getting many answers, and so I looked at reviews:
And this is where things became a bit more clearer (and familiar). For starters, I looked at 2 reviews online for this program and both of them mentioned the following things:
- This program pitches people to buy Enagic water filters for $1,000’s of dollars (Source).
- Supposedly this program is also a rebrand of the “famous” GAZ program, also known as Global Affiliate Zone (source).
I happened to be a member there once upon a time ago, and it too was $99.
For that price, I got very little except big pitches and opportunities to re promote this program, hence the reason I left (low value, high ticket costs and no justification to stay as a $99/month member).
Now these are assumptions but I remember my experience with GAZ was very poor and incomplete at times. And I say this because I had a bit of a deja vu feeling going through Affiliate Institute where the experience felt similar (little explanation on what’s up, broken parts of the site and no clear messaging/direction, just vague stuff).
And I am also not a fan of high ticket programs as well as the whole Enagic and kangen water filter trend that’s going around. I have been part of some programs that pitch it (other than GAZ) and a few of them are called Digital Prosperity Movement (DPM) and Build Your Empire University (most recent).
Conclusions on Affiliate Institute:
- With many broken parts of the site (no way to access the free stuff).
- With incomplete and vague explanations of how it all works.
- With a lot of expensive courses to buy (one big ticket package or 10 high cost ones).
- With reviews talking about Enagic water filters and this being the former GAZ program.
All of this combined make it a tough call to recommend Affiliate Institute. One thing I can tell you is that this program does have the opportunity to make money with it and while that’s a good thing, I prefer this instead:
- A clear beginner friendly program that’s easy to start with.
- A free option to actually try it and get your feet wet with it.
- Excellent support, tools and help along the way.
- And everything you need to become an experienced and successful affiliate, no matter what your initial level of experience is.
For this, there is no better program in my humble opinion than the Wealthy Affiliate program, and yes, it is much more recommended over Affiliate Institute.
And so to finalize this review, I know that this review of Affiliate Institute is a bit messy, but that’s just how I found this program and had to research it. It was very unclear how it all worked together, and it just so happened that the reviews I found on it were what glued this puzzle together.
Overall, I like simple to understand programs that are transparent and make it simple to get started with and try. Based on my experiences with Affiliate Institute (and considering it’s also the former GAZ), this was not what I experienced there.