123 Affiliate Marketing Review (Pat Flynn Course)

Today, we’ll go through 123 Affiliate Marketing by Pat Flynn. The course is promoted through Pat’s blog, named SmartPassiveIncome, and it’s been around for a while now (since 2008). However, can one of the most popular affiliate marketers today provide a course to match his fame?

Or is it just one more overhyped product?

The course itself has been available for years now, and it receives updates to this day. You can buy it for $699, and according to the author, it’s a training program aiming to teach you the steps necessary to start an affiliate marketing business through interactive videos.

Let’s see if it’s any good.

Who’s the author?

Pat owns a popular blog, as I already told you. He’s used it for sharing reports on his income for several years, and he’s made it clear he’s making good money on affiliate marketing. One of the largest accounts tied to him is a Bluehost one earning him $110 for every person signing up, and he promotes content related to starting blogs.

He’s made more than $3.5 million in affiliate revenues as confirmed by his site, and he has a weekly podcast that’s around 400 episodes. His topics cover a vast spectrum, including Amazon and Kindle marketing, general entrepreneurship, trends, and tips.

His YouTube channel is also quite impressive. He shares videos on a lot of different content, and his has nearly 200,000 subscribers. His videos cover passive income tips, reviews, and updates on his life.

He’s also de owner of several courses on business ideas, podcasts, brand building, etc. The cheapest one is $249; the most expensive is $999.

123 Affiliate Marketing Course

The course hosts on Teachables, where you can purchase and access the content with great-looking videos regardless of the device you’re using. Since Pat is a fairly big YouTuber, the video and audio quality are great and presented in an entertaining way. The minimum quality is 360p for slow internet connections, but you can go all the way to 1080p.

The sales page might arise some worries. Since the course is a 3-step guide, the program in general seemed to be very short, and some of the more knowledgeable visitors might have the same worries after visiting said page.

There’s also no mention on free traffic approaches like SEO or organic social media. However, organic FB or IG traffic has been losing relevancy, but SEO is still a paramount traffic source.

Now, the sales page does make it clear that this is a paid traffic-focused program. However, Pat uses purely organic traffic to market his Bluehost link, so why not include a strategy making him thousands monthly in a course on how to be a successful affiliate marketer?

Just check out his website where he earns his income. You can see over 10,000 backlinks moving more than 60,000 visitors around his site.

I think the reason is that he wants to market this as a easy process to success, and people wouldn’t buy it if they knew how much work really goes into being a successful affiliate marketer. Sure, paid ads can make the process simple if you have lots of money, but people looking for more ways to increase their traffic and income are missing important content here.

However, I can understand he wants to make things more appealing, so let’s dive into the actual content, but keep that in mind.

Reviewing 123 Affiliate Marketing

The course divides intro 3 core steps and complementary modules. You have a welcome module with a 5-minute video thanking you for buying the course and telling you how to use it properly.

After that, there’s a “getting started” section, with a 101 on affiliate marketing and some vital rules to cultivate success for the long term. The last video is how to use the course.

Now into the main steps.

Step 1

The 1^st step goes into what are the best product types for your business, and Pat actually gives a lot of detail into the types of products you want to offer. You also learn how to choose a product to focus before going into what are affiliate links and how to get yours.

After that, there are some basic lessons on how to act when you have no programs available, what you want to do with those affiliate links, and the process for building good relationships with the companies behind the offers.

It’s mostly basic, and besides the detail on the best product types, it’s just stuff you can find for free on YouTube or online articles.

Step 2

The 2^nd step talks about the different promotional approaches you can use, like adding your links to the content you’re offering, using money pages, some conversion strategies for your home page, and pages with high performance.

Unfortunately, this was the most disappointing section of the course. If you want to teach others how they can begin their affiliate marketing website (and you’re a successful affiliate marketer) you can do more than just some pages. You know, like showing the actual process.

The other section closes with how to set up an autoresponder for your email sequences to send emails to your leads to boost your conversions.

Step 3

The last core module talks about the “active” promotional methods as used by Pat. These aren’t just posting content and adding your affiliate links but using email broadcast, bonuses, campaigns, etc.

However, Pat doesn’t mention anything about SEO in this section either. There’s nothing about link building, blogger outreach, guest posts, swapping links, nothing.

Those are vital approaches, yet they’re missing from a course made by one of the (so it seems) most successful affiliate marketers on the internet right now.

Final Verdict

I hope you found this review useful and if you have any questions, please comment down below. I’ll be more than happy to assist you.

Once again, thanks for reading my 123 Affiliate Marketing Review and I wish you the best of luck.