I first found ODi Productions' YouTube channel when I started experimenting with affiliate marketing and I was searching around YouTube for information. After 3 years of building my local lead generation business to multiple 6 figures, I wanted to try something new, so I really gave affiliate marketing full effort, investing in multiple courses including Affiliate Marketing Champ by ODi.
I built various affiliate review sites, failed on quite a few of them, successfully ranked a few as well. Here’s my review of this program & my results. I also get into what I think about affiliate marketing compared to other online business opportunities.
Who is ODi?
ODi is an affiliate marketer mostly known for his YouTube channel on which he posts regularly. His YouTube channel has over 285K subscribers and has been around since 2009. Note that before he started selling courses, he used his YouTube channel and a blog to make headphone reviews, and with a site that teaches newbies how to make WordPress websites. This was all back in 2016 and these 2 endeavors generated lots of traffic and earned him a substantial affiliate commission.
Now this is where the criticism comes in. While he made money through affiliate commissions, his primary source of income that got him to 7 figures is actually through course sales. If you are looking to learn from someone earned his fortune through promoting actual physical products, ODi might not be the best person to learn those skills from.
ODi's Advice For Aspiring Affiliate Marketers in 2024
SUMMARY
Throughout the video, ODi emphasizes the importance of laying a proper foundation, strategically investing in the business, and continuous learning and adapting strategies based on the evolving digital landscape. These steps are framed as a pathway to building a profitable affiliate marketing business that can thrive in 2024 and beyond.
Affiliate Marketing Champ Overview
Affiliate Marketing Champ is ODi's first course. Currently, at the price of $2,000, the course comes in 8 modules. Note that the course is currently closed for enrolment, possibly as it is about to be replaced by his newer course.
The entire video training material only lasts a little under 4 and a half hours. Compared to other similar courses at that high price, others come with way more training material. There is a refund policy, but the requirements are a bit.
The course also comes with 24/7 one-on-one Email Support, a Facebook support group, and bonus step-by-step affiliate marketing website tutorial bringing up the total video training materials to 7 hours.
What You Learn with Affiliate Marketing Champ
This is the basis of affiliate marketing explained.
- Pick a niche (Choose something you like or at least can stand reading/writing about often)
- Setting up domain & hosting
- Installing WordPress & Build it out
- Signing up on affiliate programs or CPA networks (Odi has done a lot of Amazon.com associates)
- Writing or Buying Content to put on the site
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- Promoting on social media
That’s pretty much it.
Affiliate Marketing 101
Affiliate Marketing 101 is a free course offered by ODi Productions. It is a short course that gives you an overview of how to set-up your affiliate marketing company in only ten simple steps. Just because it's free doesn't mean ODi doesn't earn from it.
Most of the things he recommends on the course are linked to his affiliate link. If you purchase any tools or software he recommends, he earns a commission. Pretty smart, huh?
Passive Income Lifestyle Overview
Passive Income Lifestyle is ODi's latest course that was released on November 2018. At the current price of $997, the course comes with a step-by-step tutorial spread over an 8 weeks. Included is 24/7 email support and weekly video livestream call with ODi. You'll also receive access to a private community forum and a product/niche research software which is updated weekly.
The 8-week training is separated into 8 modules.
There is more content in the Passive Income Lifestyle course than in the previous Affiliate Marketing Champ. Although the true learning comes later at module 4, the first 3 may be useful to beginners.
What You Learn with Passive Income Lifestyle
In the nutshell, Odi teaches you the same ideas as with the previous course, but with a little more added to it.
This course is a more updated and improved version of his previous one.
Can You Make Money With ODi Productions?
Judging from the SEO skills that ODi teaches, I believe you’ll be able to build some sites that can generate $500 to $2000 per month, but these kinds of sites will take at least 1 year to rank in the current state of things in 2022. Now, to build a site that does $10K or more, you’ll need much higher level SEO skills and you’re going to have to cough up quite a bit of dough for it.
ODi's success comes from his marketing skills. He is constantly making entertaining and informative videos on YouTube. Odi knows how to be informative, entertaining & charismatic on camera. He knows how to sell the dream, how to properly place psychological triggers in his videos (cars, house, etc) and write content that influences people to buy, and he’s consistently delivering high value on YouTube.
Some of his YouTube videos have over 1 million views and it's been out for less than half a year.
He can monetize this traffic in multiple ways. The most obvious is to sell his affiliate course, but as he collects emails, he can market to his audience other affiliate products that are pertinent to his content, such as promoting a website builder, for example. You get paid proportionately to how much value you’re delivering to the marketplace.
The point is, he is able to generate massive traffic because he knows how to create quality content.
Not slapping together a simple product review site where you bought some cheap content for a few bucks on fiverr.com, which is what he teaches in the course.
I know this because I’ve tried ranking plenty of these types of review sites. Most of them have failed and only a few have succeeded. It made some money, but it was significantly less than what I was expecting or hoping to make for the amount of effort I put into it.
Low-quality sites that target very specific keywords are called sniper sites. It used to work pretty well up until around 2016 when Google came up with their Panda algorithm change. Now Google mostly rewards big authority sites over sniper sites. So I believe some of these affiliate tactics may not work as well as people in the course are hoping, unfortunately.
Unless you can build a big authority site that gets tons of traffic because you consistently deliver high-value content on it either blog posts or YouTube videos, & you sell affiliate products on the backend or you have very high-level SEO skills and you can rank these review sites to page 1.
How the training of his courses are laid out, it may give students the completely wrong expectations on just how challenging affiliate marketing really is.
How Hard Is Affiliate Marketing In 2022?
For more a more detailed take on affiliate marketing, check out my Affiliate Marketing Pros & Cons post.
Your success in Affiliate Marketing is all about your SEO skills. Trying to rank on page 1 of Google is extremely competitive now in 2022 for affiliate marketers. It's not like how it was in 2012, where you could write well-written review posts for obscure keywords like “Product name” + “review” and expect to rank on page 1 naturally. Now you need a serious amount of backlinks to get to page 1 and even then it can take up to a year to rank for affiliate keywords.
Is affiliate marketing dead? It is pretty much dead if you’re still employing SEO tactics that don’t work anymore because you will not get any sales unless you get to page 1. Google has gone through some major algorithm changes that makes it much more difficult to rank for long tail keywords and a lot of the easy backlinks that people were using to rank their sites became less and less useful.
I honestly prefer to rank local lead generation sites these days because in local, all I have to do is beat like 10-20 local companies, most of which don’t know what they’re doing. With affiliate marketing, competition is pretty steep because you’re competing with people nationally or from other countries even.
Why I make more money with local lead generation over affiliate marketing
For newbies, I feel local marketing is much more doable. Ranking an affiliate site not only takes longer, but it's more expensive to rank as well if you want to do it right.
I have an affiliate site where I review indoor grill cookers that took me 1 year to rank. That site is generating around $400 per month for me. On the other hand, I have a tree service site in Grand Rapids, MI that I ranked in half that time that’s generating for me $2000 per month.
These SEO tools will show that indoor grill review keywords have much more search volumes which might be the big reason most people don’t think there’s any money to be made with local marketing because when you pull up keywords like “tree service Grand Rapids”, it doesn’t show any monthly volume.
That’s because these tools are only estimations and they’re terrible at picking up local search volumes. We know for a fact that people in Grand Rapids are searching for tree services every month. Yet these tools will show “0” search volume.
Most people simply don’t know how to monetize their leads properly so you have 100% control, and how to track their leads, it's easy to do when you follow our process & guidance but it's not as obvious as signing up for an affiliate network and getting a referral link.
This is the breakdown of my online income:
As you can see Lead Gen is my bread & butter. Part of it is because that's the business I started with, but even after trying other ways to make money online, I like lead gen the most.
Conclusion
As I’ve stated many times on this blog, this is how I rank the online business opportunities out there today.
- Local Lead Generation
- Amazon FBA Business
- E-Commerce Shopify Business (using Facebook ads)
- Affiliate Marketing (using organic traffic)
- Affiliate Marketing (using paid ads)
IMO affiliate marketing has been saturated by too much competition at this point. Newcomers are forced to fight for scraps. It's just not worth all the effort it takes to rank for an affiliate keyword in 2024 for most newbies.
Doing affiliate marketing by ranking your own site is more for those that’s already making at least $10K per month with either local lead gen/local marketing or some eCom business, and if you’re looking to add different forms of passive income.
When you’re making at least $10K per month, then you can afford to put aside a decent amount of budget for your affiliate project every month and just patiently build that site in a course of a year or two on the side.
But when you’re looking to make money online right away so that you can leave your job, then affiliate marketing takes way too long to build. You’re much better off doing local marketing doing SEO or lead generation. Come and learn more about Local Lead Generation.
