What Is The AWOL Academy – Is It Worth Joining?

AWOL Academy Review – Is This Affiliate Marketing Course Worth Joining?

In this article from IBuyIReview, we will talk about AWOL Academy. AWOL Academy is an online program founded by Kaela Kanae. It teaches you how to start an affiliate marketing business from scratch using PPC paid advertising and Facebook ads to drive traffic to your landing pages where the aim is to collect as many email addresses as possible and then use them to promote offers through email marketing.

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AWOL also gives you the opportunity to promote the course itself once you learn everything included in it. Now, this is both good and bad. It is good because this makes AWOL similar to any MLM or Network Marketing, and if you’re familiar with that business model, you can use it to promote this course.

Kaela will, of course, make money out of your sales but think of it as a business opportunity for yourself as well. Since you’ll be learning the ins and outs of the course, you’ll already have a very solid idea of how to promote the course and make a commission out of sales.

On the flip side, I am also against online courses that allow their students to promote the same course they were taught. But anyway, this is an argument that I’ll address later in the post, so make sure you keep reading and find out why this is a bad sign.

The real question is, can you really make money after learning this course? Is Kaela actually making money by using the same techniques he teaches, or is he making money from affiliate sales his students manage to make?

If you’ve got your doubts, read on. I will give you an unbiased review of the AWOL Academy. I have gone through the entire course and I think I am pretty capable of recommending it, or not.

I’ll also try to show you a comparison between affiliate marketing and the MLM Network business model And if that isn’t enough, I’ll also provide you with a better alternative to AWOL Academy which works the same way as this program but provides you with a much more powerful and useful skillset.

Quick Overview of AWOL Academy – Things You’ll Learn

  • AWOL Academy focuses on teaching you affiliate marketing by using the paid advertisement model. And for those of you who are unfamiliar with the general concept of affiliate marketing, allow me to quickly explain it.
  • Affiliate marketing is an online business model that helps you earn money by promoting other people’s products on the internet. Once they make a sale as a result of your promotion efforts, you get a commission.
  • Commissions from sales can range anywhere from 10-40% and sometimes the conversion rates are very low. In simple terms, you’ll have to drive an insane amount of traffic to your site to actually start making a decent amount of money.

AWOL claims to have the perfect solution to low traffic – paid advertisement. It teaches you how to utilize paid advertisements and Facebook ads to drive traffic to your landing pages. But the actual problem that the course doesn’t tell you is that you have to pay the amount of advertisement up front. So in order to go with the paid advertisement model, you should have some money in your pocket. I am talking about having at least enough money to be able to pay $100 – $300 daily on ads.

Then there is another important factor to consider – ROI. If you’re not getting enough Return On Investment, then you’ll be losing money. And ROI through ads is never guaranteed.

For example, when you pay Facebook to run an ad, it will use your daily budget without thinking about your conversion rates, or whether you’re actually making anything out of the ads or not. They will just quickly spend all your daily budget.

Through AWOL, you will also learn how to use landing pages to collect emails of the users so that you can email them later to offer them different offers and do upsells.

I’m sure this sounds familiar to you. I am sure that you have already come across such ads on Facebook and clicking on those ads took you to a similar landing page which tries to collect your email.

The core philosophy behind the course works, I actually use paid traffic to make a lot of money but you have to know how to do it. The AWOL Academy has two very prominent problems, first, it only focuses on Facebook and Google Ads to drive traffic, second, it never actually teaches you how or who to send the ads to.

With paid traffic, you’ll have to make sure you are converting a certain percentage of ads otherwise you’ll be losing money quickly. In the past, I have used affiliate marketing with paid advertisement and I can assure you that it is not an easy thing to pull off. This is because Facebook ads fluctuate so much performance-wise that one second you are making a profit and the next you start losing money.

For example, if you spend $35 per conversion and you only make $20 from a sale, then you are actually losing money even if you are making sales.

My Biggest Concern with AWOL Academy

  • My biggest concert after going through the whole AWOL Academy course is that it never really teaches you the technical stuff behind affiliate marketing. It focuses mostly on paid ads and email marketing but does not tell you anything about niche targeting, and what ads work for certain niches, and how to make sure that your ads do well.
  • I feel like there is a lot of stuff lacking from the course. As an affiliate marketer who spent at least three years making money through this model in the past, I can assure you that there is not enough information to make you a solid affiliate marketer. There’s very little information about keyword researching, getting organic traffic, optimizing your pages. It just wants you to spend money to make money.

I really don’t think that is a good approach for someone who is new to affiliate marketing and is unwilling to spend a fortune on ads just to make money.

Regardless of what online business model you follow, niche selection and targeting are very important. You have to pay attention to the smallest details of the niche to make people actually believe in you.

The course even fails to touch on the topic of creating effective Facebook ads. If you’ve never run an ad through Facebook, let me tell you that this isn’t something you can pull off easily. Facebook ad making is a lot tougher than you think.

Let me give you an example of a weight loss ad I ran a couple of weeks ago to get a decent click-through rate (CTR).

While developing the ad, I had to make sure I got the following aspects perfect to make my ad as profitable as possible.

  • I had to make sure the image was attractive
  • I had to make sure the caption of the ad grabbed the attention of the rapidly fast users of Facebook
  • I had to add a bit of sexual undertone to my ad
  • I picked an ambiguous image to make sure that people can’t figure out what was going on and it made them click
  • I picked a science imaged to incite curiosity for the user so that he clicks thinking he’ll learn something.
  • I chose the background color very carefully, making sure it’s not heavy on the eye
  • I tried to tell a short story from my ad image that got people curious and made them click.

Even after all these factors in play, I got an above average response. Imagine how hard it would be for you if you don’t even understand the complete details of your niche. How will you develop an ad that will perform 100% of the times? You can’t! And AWOL doesn’t teach you how to do that either.

What I am trying to say is that there are a lot of other skills you’ll have to learn in order to actually make money through the model AWOL is teaching. Unfortunately, AWOL doesn’t teach you these skills.
The ad clever ad strategy I mentioned above is something I learned from a much better program called Local Marketing Vault. This program focuses on teaching you how to create effective Facebook and Google Ads. Through LMV, I have learned to create such powerful advertisements that 90% of all my paid advertisements return me insane conversion rates! As an icing on the case, LMV also provides you with 26 made for you funnels that cover building funnels and how to set up Google or Facebook ads step by step. They cover massive details on various niches, giving you a great idea about who, where and when to target!

Should You Become an Affiliate of the Course?

  • Remember when I said that AWOL Academy lets its students promote the course itself and make commissions out of the sales? While this may seem like a good deal to some, I think it raises a very important question.
  • Does the founder of the course actually make money through affiliate marketing? Or does he make money through the sales you make for him by promoting his course?
  • On the internet, if a mentor is allowing his students to promote his course after they finish it, he kind of loses a lot of credibility in the eyes of longtime online entrepreneurs and other mentors.

He is basically allowing is students to market his course when they are not even sure if the things they learned in the course are actually going to work for them. Yet they’ll go out and speak wonders of the course just to make some money from sales. This is the reason why you may find very positive reviews of the course when you search for it. Most people are the students trying to promote the course.

Keeping that in mind, the biggest issue with affiliate marketing is that most people get into this business model not because they are passionate about a certain niche, they are actually just in there to make a sale.

This is the reason why you’ll come across many mediocre affiliate marketings putting up really bad stuff on the internet like low quality, bad videos, or writing on something they don’t even know about, just to get that one sale.

This is exactly what is being taught in AWOL Academy. If you don’t believe me, just search for AWOL Academy Reviews on Google and try reading some of them. You’ll be surprised how bad the quality of the sites and the content actually is.

If you really want to make money, don’t fall for getting rich quick schemes. Making a living through the internet requires a lot of time and effort. Sometimes this time and effort are significantly more than you would put in your 9-5 job.

Before Joining the Course, Try and Think This for a Second

  • Ask yourself this question – can you really trust Kanae, the founder of AWOL Academy after all that I have revealed above? If he isn’t even making a fortune from affiliate marketing himself, how can he create a course that produces excellent affiliate marketers?
  • The fact that he lets you market his product after you are done with his course just raises too many flags. He is probably making money from the sales his students are making rather than earning from a good affiliate marketing setup.

If you really want to join a course and hope to become a multimillionaire one day, then you need to join a program created by a solid mentor. A mentor should be inspiring, he should already be making a fortune through his methods. He should reveal everything about himself and his methods. Kanae certainly doesn’t.

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Making Money on the Internet Is Simple, but Not Easy

Learning how to make money these days can easily confuse a lot of people because every other day there is a new online course out there promising to teach you a set of new secret skills that’ll help you make a fortune on the internet. We see these ads on our social media timelines and everywhere else on the internet.

In fact, these ads have become so common and frequent that there is always a good chance one of us eventually will try these new courses out in hopes of making it big. But let me tell you, making money on the internet is simple, but it isn’t easy. If it was that easy to start earning money on the internet by learning a secret formula, everyone would have been doing it.

To make money on the internet without employing anyone or getting employed by someone, it all comes down to how much value you can provide to people around the world. And this value is actually determined by your skillsets. The more valuable skills you have, the more you can help people out and the more you will earn in return.

It really is that simple but people will still go on and read books upon books on self-development, and they’ll join courses that promise secret money earning formulas, but they will never think about acquiring new skills.

We all know that learning new skills and getting good at them takes hard work. And no one got time for hard work!

In 2019, I don’t really recommend you learn affiliate marketing because the market itself is saturated with pretty powerful people who started out with this skill quite a few years ago. And what you learn in AWOL Academy certainly doesn’t equip you with the right tools and skills to compete against these giants. You’ll be stuck trying to acquire traffic and you’ll simply lose money on ads.

If you really are serious about making a sustainable and good income through the internet, then it is time you start investing your time in learning high-level skills because this will bring you high-level customers and businesses that are willing to pay you a fortune for your services.

Learn High-Level Income Skills Before Starting a Business

  • Let me be very straight with you, it is really funny to see how every other average joe out there dreams of making big on the internet but does not spend enough time in learning stuff. No matter what the business model, if you don’t have the right skills, you’ll never make it big.
  • What I am trying to tell you is that take a lot of your time out to learn high-income earning skills before you even think of starting a business on the internet. Some online courses actually do teach you very valuable skills, but they are also really hard to follow.

Let me tell you how I started things out. When I was still doing my 9-5 job, I had no idea how to make money on the internet until I met a colleague at work who introduced me to search engine optimization.

He inspired me with his work and the fact that he was earning a lot of money through this skill started this weird fire in me and I knew I had to do the same. Now back in the day, SEO was one of the most desired skillsets on the internet. Everyone wanted to rank their sites on Google and SEO optimization was the only way to get their sites on the top.

As we all know, SEO is a hard skill to master. But I spent months and months learning this skill until I was finally able to help businesses get their websites on the top pages of Google. From there on I expanded my skill set and learned a few other skills such as content marketing, website development, affiliate marketing, and finally optimizing Facebook and Google ads for maximum ROI.

Today I am successfully earning thousands and thousands of dollars every week. This is thanks to all the skills I have learned in the past. I recently learned how to make money through MLM network marketing and I must say that in 2019, it is one of the best and easiest ways to make a good fortune on the internet.

The reason why I love MLM is that I can always be sure about how much I’ll be making every month instead of relying on income that I can’t count or predict. Affiliate marketing is no doubt one of the best ways to earn money online, but the income you may from this skill is actually very unstable.

One month you may make $15k with $2k profit, and the next month it could go down to $500 profit. The income fluctuates so badly in this field that sometimes you may not even make a single dime. This is the reason why I quit affiliate marketing in the first place. There is just too much competition out there now and the commissions have dropped to a level that it has become hard to make good fortune.

AWOL Academy – My Final Thoughts

Affiliate marketing was my favorite mode of making money on the internet a couple of years ago. I was making a fortune out of it. But unfortunately, in 2019, it just doesn’t cut it out for me anymore. There are now several other money making methods available today that easily help you create a better sustainable income than affiliate marketing. And after going through the AWOL Academy, I just don’t see you making good money out of it. The course teaches very basic stuff and fails to teach you any valuable skill that you can actually use.

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Since the program doesn’t teach you anything about creating powerful and focused Facebook and Google ads, you’ll probably run ads that will quickly burn your pocket. And you can never be sure about the advertisement, especially when it's on Facebook. The ads fluctuate on an hourly basis. You may start losing your money without even realizing that your ads have stopped performing.

Fine tuning ads to perform good and actually make you a good profit in return depends a lot on luck, and I don’t think depending on luck to make a regular income is a good idea.

What AWOL Academy is trying to teach you is basically a half baked MLM idea. If you really want to make good money, then I recommend The Local Marketing Vault course instead. It is a solid local lead generation program that helps you create a 2-page website and then send paid traffic to it to get leads. Through the course, you’ll learn how to make effective ads so that every time you run an ad, it’ll covert good.

And if you are still hell-bent on learning affiliate marketing, by all means, learn it. There are many courses out there that are much better than AWOL. I recommend joining an affiliate marketing course that focuses on helping you get organic traffic. Sure you’ll need to send paid traffic to your site when the opportunity arises, but to be able to make it big in this industry, you must know how to play with both options and have a good understanding of making convertible Facebook and Google ads!