When it comes to online marketing, there are tons of money-making programs that promise you to get rich, real quick. However, many of them have shady reputations and are marred with false claims.
These days, there’s a whole heap of online marketers that inveigle you to buy their products, making you believe that once you sign up for them, you’ll have a steady cash flow for the rest of your life.
Beware, folks, of this kind of sales gimmick. You wouldn’t want to invest your hard-earned money on some fraud, would you?
And the thing is, if you are a newbie to online marketing, you will be an easy target.
That is why it is important for newbies who want to earn a side income to be properly guided when choosing a training program or course about making money online.
So let this post be your guide to some of the most sought-after products, courses, or programs that you wish to avail of or undertake in your moneymaking journey.
To start off, let me give my honest review of a widely-known system that allows you to earn money online through affiliate marketing: the 12 Minute Affiliate. They said that this program is 100% newbie-friendly and allows you to earn income multiple times daily.
Let’s find out if that would really be possible.
What is 12 Minute Affiliate?
The 12 Minute Affiliate is a plug-and-play system that assists you in promoting products or services with the end goal of earning commissions from each sale you make via your affiliate link.
It’s pretty much an affiliate marketing thing. People will visit your page, find a selection of products in a particular niche, and should they decide to buy one of these products, you’ll have a portion of the sales proceeds.
While affiliate marketing entails a great deal of effort on your part before you can earn profits, this program makes it easier for you to do just that with its done-for-you (DFY) method or solution. This means that the system will do most of the heavy lifting for you, such as knowing what niches are highly marketable and what products from these niches can be promoted, creating affiliate sales funnels, copywriting, and getting traffic.
Also, as the name of the system says, the 12 Minute Affiliate can be set up in as little as 12 minutes. So once it is up and running, the next thing you’ll do is to just sit back and relax and wait for the commissions to come in.
What is Included in the System?
12 Minute Affiliate has the following features:
- Done-for-you (DFY) affiliate funnels in three of the most profitable niche markets: home business, health and fitness, and personal development;
- DFY professionally written follow-up emails (no need for a copywriter);
- Quickstart guide on setting up, which you can do on your own or have the system do it for you;
- E-Z Funnel Wizard where you can customize your affiliate funnels;
- Facebook private community and one-on-one coaching session;
- DFY traffic solution, depending on your budget; and
- Three Bonuses, such as:
- The Success Library – You can have instant access to a library of personal development training that will help you unlock your true potential, balance your life, end procrastination, and a lot more.
- The Free Traffic Guide – Teaches you 16 ways to get free traffic to your website, including how to get free traffic from Twitter & Facebook, from other people’s blogs, and simply by posting pictures online, to name a few.
- Hot Product Promos – This keeps you from taking so much time looking for trendy affiliate products to promote as the system will automatically do this task for you.
The system allows you to start a risk-free trial for 2 weeks for only $9.95. If you like how it works, you can select either the Basic Membership Plan or the Gold Membership Plan. The distinctions between these two plans are enumerated as follows:
Basic Plan
- Price: $47.00 per month or $397 for lifetime access
- Choose 1 of 3 top niches (Weight Loss, Home Business or Personal Development)
- 10 ready-to-use Affiliate Funnels
- 80 Professional DFY Follow-up Emails
- Funnel Wizard (1 niche)
Gold Plan
- Price: $97.00 per month or $797 for lifetime access
- Access to all 3 top niches
- 30 ready-to-use Affiliate Funnels
- 240 Professional DFY Follow-up Emails
- Funnel Wizard (3 niches)
Whether you choose one plan or the other, you can get access to email follow-up messages, funnel wizard, demo videos, free eBooks, and any affiliate funnels that may be added in the future. Both plans are also protected by the 60-day Money Back Guarantee.
How to Get Started with 12 Minute Affiliate?
Create an Account and Personalize the System
Upon payment, you need to sign up to get access to the member’s area. Once inside, you’ll be prompted to set up your system using the “Quickstart Checklist”.
From this guide, the first thing to do is to create your free affiliate account with any of the 3 most popular affiliate networks: Clickbank, Warrior Plus, and JVZOO. If you’re a beginner, I recommend Clickbank because the process of creating an account is pretty simple and it is much easier to get your commissions with it.
The next thing to do is to get your auto-responder and set it up. An autoresponder is a service that allows you to build your email list and automatically send out emails to as many people as there are in your list with ease. You may use any of the autoresponders available in the market like Aweber, Mailchimp, or GetResponse, but Aweber is already integrated into the system, so you might as well use it.
After the setup, you can activate your affiliate funnel pages. The 12 Minute Affiliate system provides you with 3 top niches: Home Business, Health and Fitness, and Personal Development. If you decide to avail of the basic membership, you simply click on the niche of your choosing. As with gold membership, the three niches are all yours to navigate.
When you have chosen your niche, you’ll be given landing pages in that niche. The landing and funnel pages will be linked to your email autoresponder, after which you will receive pre-written email drafts that contain pre-selected promotional products.
The system has pre-designed funnel pages that you can customize according to your taste. This will give your page more character and make it stand out from the crowd.
The system provides you with detailed written instructions on how to set everything up, so you don’t have to worry about not being able to keep up. But in case you want to speed up the process, there’s an option for you to ask the team to set the system up for you for a fee.
Add Done-for-You Traffic
When the system is up and running, you will now have to drive traffic to your funnel page. Generating targeted traffic is quite tough, especially if you’re a newcomer in affiliate marketing. As we all know, without traffic or website visitors who will potentially buy the products you are promoting, you won’t make sales and earn commissions.
This is why 12 Minute Affiliate offers you a traffic package to start with. Depending on your budget, you can buy as many clicks per package as you want. Prices vary and depend on the niche you are promoting, but just to give you an idea, the health and fitness niche has the costliest traffic packages while the home business niche has the cheapest.
Collect Affiliate Commissions
This is the ultimate goal of affiliate marketing. Your earnings depend on the sale you are able to conclude, so it is important to have a large mailing list so that you have more chances of selling the products.
To build your mailing list, 12 Minute Affiliate introduces the right approach to attract your targeted traffic. So rather than sending your website visitors directly to your respective offers, you need to first send them to the capture page. This form serves as a lead magnet where interested visitors enter their email addresses and opt into a follow-up series of emails. This increases your chances of converting your visitors to potential customers who will buy the product through your affiliate link.
Who is Behind this System?
Devon Brown and David Sloan are the co-creators of 12 Minute Affiliate. While I haven’t found any information about David, I know for a fact that Devon Brown is a real person. He is a successful online entrepreneur, a well-known author, and a motivational speaker.
Devon started his career in internet marketing in 2001. Just like any other internet marketers, he had his share of failures as well. But with sheer determination, he has acquired expertise in the field of internet marketing and has created various sales systems that help people earn money online.
Aside from 12 Minute Affiliate, Devon is also the known creator of Web CopyCat, a done-for-you affiliate marketing system that is specially designed for beginners.
While there is no doubt as to his credibility as a respectable online entrepreneur and personal growth expert, does it follow that his product is also reliable? Is it a legitimate system or just another marketing scam?
Let’s find out.
Is it a Scam?
12 Minute Affiliate is surely not a scam. As mentioned earlier, the creator of this system is a real person and has a good name to protect so certainly he wouldn’t allow anything that would smear his reputation.
In fact, the sales page of the product contains a disclaimer stating that the company cannot guarantee the user’s future success with the system because it will all depend on one’s “individual capacity, business experience, expertise, and level of desire”. It also states that the earnings and income statements are estimates only, so there’s no assurance that examples of earnings of previous users will be the same for new users.
This really makes sense because “done-for-you” systems like 12 Minute Affiliate do not really provide a 100% solution to your financial challenges. You still need to figure out how to gain profits from affiliate marketing using this system.
Pros and Cons
Some of the things I like about the system are as follows:
- The system setup is straightforward and simple.
- Landing pages and hosting plan are included in the package, so there’s no need to create your own website.
- You can either customize your funnel pages or have them fully set up for you.
- There is a wide variety of products to promote from the top 3 niche markets.
- An automated 3-month email campaign that is activated within seconds.
- An active Facebook community (a.k.a Inner Circle) with supportive members.
- An opportunity to meet and be coached by an experienced mentor like Devon Brown.
- You can earn daily and start multiple streams of income.
- You can work from anywhere.
- Risk-free initial trial for a small fee.
- Whatever membership plan you choose, you are protected by the 60-day return policy.
Despite the ease of use of this system, it has some obvious limitations, too:
- Because it is mainly a done-for-you system, you are totally dependent on the program. So when a problem arises with the system (i.e. the company closes down), all your investments will be gone with it.
- You have no website of your own, so if something were to happen to 12 Minute Affiliate, you would lose access to it.
- You don’t have much of an option to make your landing page unique because the templates are limited.
- Competition is tough among 12 Minute Affiliate members who are more likely to promote the same products if everyone has the same traffic source and landing pages.
- You acquire no new skills from using the system since everything has been done for you.
- Since products are pre-selected, you are unsure if such products are truly marketable.
- No refunds on paid traffic.
- You are unsure where the system is getting its traffic.
- No guarantee that the traffic will convert to buyers.
- Comes with upsells and additional fees (i.e. private coaching, getting traffic, membership plans, or done-for-you setup all entail additional fees).
- The prices of the monthly package are quite expensive ($47/ month for the basic plan and $97 per month for the gold plan)
Consumer Reviews About the System
From the looks of it, every legit customer has said a good thing or two about the product; how they were able to make sales in just weeks, and how much they have earned so far. The good thing about this program is that it emphasizes that results vary among users. So even if there are positive reviews about the program, the creators have made sure that potential buyers will not be misled by these testimonials.
Is it Really Newbie-Friendly?
Yes, it is, as most done-for-you systems are. But I wouldn’t entirely recommend it to “inexperienced” newbies.
Why? This program does not provide training on how to start an online business.
Assuming this system runs into problems, newbies are put at a disadvantage because they are not fully equipped with the necessary skills and knowledge that will enable them to embark on a new online business.
Also, newbies will find it hard to penetrate the market without an existing audience. Sure, they can buy traffic and grow their audience through this system, but it will be much better if they already have social media following or email list before registering in this program.
On the brighter note, you can be part of the Inner Circle, a Facebook group dedicated to all exclusive members of 12 Minute Affiliate. There, you can reach out to members who already have significant earnings to help you in case you have queries about the program.
Also, you can engage in a private one-on-one coaching session with Devon Brown himself. This is not part of the main package though, so prepare some extra cash if you want to avail of it.
Final Verdict
The 12 Minute Affiliate system is a legitimate program that helps you earn passive income through affiliate marketing. While it does not guarantee that you’ll be earning immediately after the setup, it is still worth considering because of the done-for-you solution that it offers.
However, it pays to have some knowledge about the ins and outs of affiliate marketing so you can keep up with the program. Bear in mind that done-for-you systems like this one will not become effective if you don’t execute what they teach.
I hope this review satisfies your concerns about the product. Feel free to share your comments or experiences with it.