Overall Score: 5/10
Founder: Andrea Fulton
Price: $9.95 + upsells ($27, $97, $67)
Website: affiliatecashempire.com
Hey there readers! I was recently notified of a new “get rich quick” product on social media, so I naturally did some digging. As we all know, this stuff is never what it claims to be, but my review will sort you out. Let’s do this!
What is Affiliate Cash Empire?
Ever pay $10 at a fancy restaurant for a bottle of water that you could’ve drank at home for free? Or how about hundreds of dollars on university textbooks that can be found at the public library?
Or for that matter, how about thousands spent on tuition when everything you need to know is online?
That’s what Affiliate Cash Empire (ACE) feels like.
Question: would you really believe a product with a name like Affiliate Cash Empire? It screams “get-rich-quick,” even though it’s only 10 bucks!
Created by Andrea Fulton, ACE is an internet marketing video training course that’s supposed to-you guessed it-teach you the secrets to fast and easy online success.
Although the sales pages harps about affiliate marketing, the videos themselves teach email marketing. Now, I admit that email marketing is a legit strategy. It’s hugely profitable once you get the hang of it.
Still, the truth is that despite having 10 whole videos, ACE doesn’t do a very good job explaining the business it’s teaching. If you know the basic concepts behind email marketing and the process it follows, you basically own ACE.
Heck, if you know what a landing page is, you’re already halfway there.
Even if you don’t know anything, the videos will confuse you, since they’re unclear and poorly produced.
But enough intro. Let’s get to the product!
The ACE Training
As I said before, ACE is comprised of 10 video modules on email marketing.
The modules vary in length, but if you binge-watched them all (and you probably will if you bought this thing in the first place), it’ll take you around 3 hours to finish.
Here are the module topics themselves:
- What You’ll Need (7:36)
- Niche Selection (18:18)
- Autoresponders (38:25)
- Autoresponder Walkthrough (26:20)
- Follow Up Emails (13:47)
- Squeeze Page Creation (26:14)
- Choosing Affiliate Offers (8:10)
- Tracking (11:15)
- Testing (4:41)
- Final Overview (24:27)
There’s also a “resource guide,” with links to the tools Fulton uses in the training, like Aweber and Mail Chimp. But these are all affiliate links, because why not?
The Good News
The videos basically run you through the process of email marketing. And honestly, it’s *decent* training.
The fact that these are videos and not text guides is a plus. Video is easier to teach with. Fulton isn’t very fast, so you can follow along quite easily.
As much as I hate to say it, the training will teach you quite a bit if you’re totally green. Email marketing is really important for any online business, so having a good understanding is key.
Where’s the Bad News, Bub?
Yeah, yeah. Okay, I managed to squeeze all the good news that I could. You really can’t blame me now.
The Bad News
For the little that ACE does right, there sure is a lot that it does wrong.
Low Production Value
A while back I reviewed a very similar product called the Commission Machine, by Michael Cheney. It too has several video modules focusing on email marketing, but the CM videos are gold compared to these.
Despite CM being just as misleading as ACE, the videos were mighty entertaining and pretty high quality. Cheney was very humorous and his modules were tutorials. You could see his computer screen most of the time.
Sadly, Fulton has none of that. Her sound quality is horrible and she doesn’t have much of a presence. She uses PowerPoints, for crying out loud!
And it’s not that PowerPoint itself is a bad thing. It’s just almost none of the ACE tutorials are over-the-shoulder. Most of it is just text.
The price of CM is $25, which isn’t much more than ACE’s $10. Why couldn’t Andrea Fulton invest in a better mike? Are over-the-shoulder tutorials that hard to film? Certainly not, considering even amateur YouTubers do it.
It’s just lazy quality. I’m almost sure ACE is a rushed product.
Vague/Beginner-Unfriendly Training
I did mention that the training was decent, but only to a certain degree. Once you understand the basic email marketing model, everything changes.
The Website
For one, ACE shows you how to make a simple squeeze/landing page to capture emails. Not a website.
Websites are a necessity for affiliate and email marketers. The people buying ACE are probably totally unaware of how easy it is to make a full website (like the one you’re reading now) these days, so they’re probably grateful that they get a landing page.
A landing page on its own, without any experience, is useless. How do you become an authority in your niche without an actual site?
No Mention of Traffic
The training also doesn’t mention traffic at all. You know, traffic? One of the hardest things to get, and the hardest part about running a website?
Organic traffic is hard enough for real websites. Landing pages have no chance. It’s impossible for them to get hits. You would have to pay for ads on Google, Facebook, or even Twitter and Bing. Oh, and Fulton doesn’t mention paid ads either. Good luck, rookie.
Did I mention that those companies often ban content-lite websites from having ads in the first place?
You can’t build a squeeze page and wait for subscribers. It’s just not done.
Way Too General
What I mean by this is, the training is just 3 hours long. You can’t fit everything you need to know in that amount of time.
Take the squeeze page module, for instance. It’s 26 minutes, which isn’t too bad, actually… in a vacuum. But if you search “squeeze page creation” on YouTube, you get thousands of long videos. I’m sure a lot of them cover as much as ACE does.
Also, Fulton’s slides don’t show real examples. She just explains things. It’s like learning web design without looking at websites. Impossible!
Don’t get me started on niche selection. 20 minutes to explain possibly the most stressing part of starting a new website, without many examples?
The Upsells
Oh, those wascawy upsewws!
I hate upsells, and considering even hundred-dollar programs have them, there was no chance the $10 ACE would miss out.
It’s funny. You’d swear the sales page was promising that you were paying $10 for the complete “six-figure income” system… simply because it does:
But no, as soon as you buy ACE, you get flooded with upsells:
- $27 for How to Get Traffic: Really? I guess this is why the training doesn’t mention traffic. Pathetic.
- $97 for Webinars: I don’t know what to say for this one. It must be overpriced, though.
- $67 for Coaching Call: A woman who supposedly makes $100K per month online is charging just $67 for an hour of coaching. Hmm…
I totally understand why upsells are a thing. That doesn’t make them any less dishonest and annoying, though.
The Affiliate Cash Empire Verdict
By now, you can probably guess that I hate Affiliate Cash Empire. I hate it a lot.
Still, I can safely say that ACE isn’t a scam. It’s a legit product. I mean, the training sucks, but it’s there.
Plus, the price is $10. I can’t blast it like it costs a few hundred smackers. It’s not like it’s gonna break the bank if you fall for it.
Even though it isn’t a scam, I’d recommend staying away. The training won’t do you any good if you’re established online, and it’ll just mislead you if you’re a total beginner. This is a shortcut that’ll get you lost.
And hey, if you insist, go ahead. It’s just 10 bucks. There’s a 30-day grace period, so be sure to return it if you don’t like it.
A Better Choice
Despite all the deception and exaggeration, ACE’s sales page is right about one thing: affiliate marketing is not dead. It’s still a very lucrative business…if you’re patient.
The thing is, shortcuts like ACE never work. They just drain your wallet, or worse, discourage you from online business.
If you wanna be successful, you need quality support and a community behind you. That’s what Wealthy Affiliate, my #1 Super Program, is all about: providing you with all the help you need.
Check Out My #1 Super Program Here!
Oh yeah, and you also need a website. That’s no problem. You get two full sites for free when you sign up.
Don’t waste your time on these schemes. Sooner or later, you’re gonna have to either start a real business from scratch or quit altogether.
What do you think of ACE? Got any questions? Leave a comment below!
Your enemy in empires,
-Makki
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I was definitely about to look into ACE, until I read this. It seems to be a waste of money now in my opinion. Sure, the training is there but it seems to be of poor quality in comparison to other videos and companies in the market. Honestly, thank you so much for saving me $10.
I see you said this “Super program” comes with 2 free websites? Are these actual hosted websites? or will you need to pay for the hosting yourself? I know GoDaddy is like a domino effect. You pay for the domain, then you have to pay for hosting and all other sorts of things. They advertise cheap domains but then it costs and arm and a leg to actually get it up and running.
Thanks for the awesome review,
~Chris
Hi Chris! You’re right about the way GoDaddy works. Namecheap is like that too. At Wealthy Affiliate, all services are found in one place. That includes hosting, domain name purchasing, and even site-specific email. So yes, hosting is included. Hope that answers your question!
Makki, how do you really feel about ACE? Lol (“I hate it a lot”). I’ll give you credit: as always, you played all sides fair, even though it didn’t seem like you were thrilled about it with this one (offering that the email marketing training was “decent.”)
I’m with you: the constant upsells are the pits. There’s a good way and a slimy, peddler-type-way to offer more value. This sounds more like the latter.
Thanks for another good heads-up. Keep up the great work!
Kevin
That’s a good way to put it Kevin. These gurus are basically modern snake oil salesmen, selling a useless product as a magic bullet. ACE is a legit product, but it’s basically useless. The little good that it does can be found for free elsewhere.
I do hate it, but with a low price, you have to temper your expectations. Thanks for reading, Kevin!
Great review Makki. For $10 the ACE product does sound appealing. It sounds like something my coworker would buy….she always wants to make money but not put a lot of work or effort into in it, or pay much. She mentioned something before about getting a ‘site’ but it was just a landing page like you mentioned here, which will do her no good. Too bad people don’t research some more and look into these things. And the videos don’t sound all that appealing either.
Like you said in the beginning, why pay for something like training that you can probably find on YouTube for free. Even though it is cheap, it does sound like a waste of money, for the quality you get and all the upsells that are thrown at you. Now people will know to stay away from ACE thanks to your review!
The ‘site’ is one of the reasons programs like this are so popular. Rookies assume that a landing page is enough because sales pages like ACE’s hype them up so much. As we both know, landing pages are useless to beginners.
I’m pretty sure the only reason ACE is so cheap is because of the upsells it hides. The trick is to get people to spend money, no matter how little. After that they’re more open to buying big-ticket items. Thanks for commenting, Summerly!
Thanks for the informative review of ACE Makki. I am always looking for new programs to supplement my online businesses but I will definitely be sure to stay away from this one.
If they have to up sell you just to make their money it usually screams scam, especially with such a low entry point.
You are right though, Wealthy Affiliate is a much better program for beginners who are just starting out in the affiliate marketing.
The low entry point is just to get people spending. ACE is mediocre, but it’s purposefully mediocre. The people buying into it will no doubt fall for the upsells. Thanks for commenting Jeremy!
Hello there! =)
I am so grateful for people who go out of their own way to alert others about scams like ACE. I was considering it, but I can happily say I’m gonna stay away.
This is a very informative review and I enjoyed reading every word.
Thank you.
No problem Lawrence! Glad to see I could help you out. Thanks for reading!
Typical marketing strategy right here. First you get in for pennies and then they hit you with all type of up-sells and down-sells. The only one winning here is the owner of the product, so be careful when you join anything that seems too good to be true. Just sayin…
Very well said. The pennies, or in this case the $10, only lull people into a sense of safety. Once they spend the first few dollars, they’re way more likely to buy some more products, in this case the useless upsells. Thanks for commenting!