12 Minute Affiliate Review

12 Minute Affiliate Review Summary;

One thing that I enjoy doing these days, is signing up to different affiliate programs, software, courses and a whole host of other things, why? Because it could potentially save you the time and effort!

When I first started, 'business in a box' products was all the rage, with programs such as CB Passive Income or the early version of 12 Minute Affiliate. Promising riches and income beyond your wildest eyes, without effort or prior knowledge. 

Today we do the 12 Minute Affiliate review, to see if this program lives up to the hype, or if it's just another empty promise program that requires a lot more effort than is promised. 

What Is The 12 Minute Affiliate?

I think this is probably one of the main questions anyone is going to ask, what is the 12 Minute Affiliate, like, at the end of the day, what is it really? 

To be brutally honest, not a whole lot, it is essentially 10 made for you 'funnels', and I say that quite loosely, because really they are just landing pages, with a follow up page. 

Or, if you are feeling fancy and have a little more cash to splash, then it's 30 done for you landing pages and follow up emails. 

It does also include 'training' and the ability to pay for some one to one coaching, but it's not cheap, with the ability to 'apply for' some extra Affiliate Mastery Platinum Coaching, for some unknown price, I am guessing it won't be cheap. 

Inside The 12 Minute Affiliate Platform 

The core part of the 12 Minute Affiliate system, is the platform, or the members area, depending on what you call it. 

It's made up of a number of different tabs, 2 of which repeat themselves, some coaching up-sells, a place to order some traffic and then access to your actual landing pages. 

Sorting Your Affiliate Account & Auto-Responder

This is obviously the place that you start, it gives you the instructions on how to choose the niche you want to promote, if you go for the $47 a month option, you can only choose one niche. 

You get Home Business, Weight Loss or Personal Development, I would say pretty obvious niches, considering they are in the Top 5 or Top 10 niches that people pick or try to promote. 

Depending on the niche you choose, will then determine the 4 or 5 products that the 12 Minute Affiliate Team deem worthy of promoting. 

So your checklist will consist of 5 steps, as I will ignore the up sell in-bedded into this checklist. 

The free affiliate account will be ClickBank, which is no huge surprise. 

The auto-responder is basically Aweber, you can try and set up other auto-responders, such as GetResponse, but it's not worth the hassle. And trust me, it's a lot of hassle. 

Setting up the auto responder is quite quick, they provide you with the follow up emails that you send out, though the follow up emails are only for you trying to get people onto The 12 Minute Affiliate, none of them look to be promoting the back end products, though I may be wrong (there are around 60 emails that get preloaded for you). 

I chose the MMO niche, so these emails are aimed at promoting the 12 Minute Affiliate, if you choose the other two niches, then the emails loaded are aimed at other products. 

Once you have the auto responder set up, you will then get to choose your niche, as I said above, you get 3 different niches to choose from, this will determine the landing pages,  thank you pages and the follow up emails and sequences. 

Setting Up Your Funnels

The 'funnels' themselves are consisting of 10 different squeeze pages, and 10 follow up or thank you pages. 

These differ depending on the niche you chose, so being I decided to go down the Make Money or Home Business niche, the pages had lovely pictures of cars, holidays and private jets, each set up with the promise of you getting something in return for an email. 

It might be training, it might be a workshop or some vague promise of more information. 

Check out this examples of the landing pages or this example

The done for you thank you pages are then packed with buzzwords, images or buttons to push you towards a random affiliate product, again depending on the niche you have chosen. My thank you pages would link off to 12 Minute Affiliate or things like The Jet Set Marketer. 

You can also set up your own one, which essentially means you can take a pre built landing page, plugin your auto-responder and plug in an affiliate URL to a product of your choice. The problem with this, is that the page has phrases and words on it already, so you have to find a product that fits in exactly with the type of product that the thank you page explains. 

Getting Traffic

As with all of these 'done for your funnel' type products, they rely on traffic to be successful, I don't mean this in a bad way, well not always, as it is a legitimate way of promoting offers and it can even be profitable, but it's always highly risky. 

The issue is that you don't know how good the conversions for these pages are, and it means you have to spend a few $$$ before you can build up enough knowledge of which ones convert, which ones actually do well with the initial sell and which ones are best to stay clear of. 

Using their traffic source

The 12 Minute Affiliate does give you access to paid for traffic, within the platform itself, but from experience, it's pretty rubbish and semi expensive. 

The above table is a breakdown of how much it costs to get traffic from the 12 minute affiliate guys, and you guessed it, it seems like they are the ones providing that traffic (Win-Win for them). 

A costs of nearly $1 per visitor is pretty high, considering other platforms such as Udimi the average cost per click or visitor is around $0.50 - $0.65 and that is for some response traffic. 

Paying for the $99 visitors, to their specific list, the actual sign up rate was a brilliant 36 sign ups. Giving these pages a roughly 35% optin rate and you have no way to tweak this or try to increase it. 

To make matters worse, 55% of those optins where dead, or completely pointless signups, i.e they will not be of any use and most likely are fake, bots or people who are being potentially tricked into signups (pop-ups etc). 

Using a different traffic source

As I have already said, the other potential way of doing this, is using other solo ad providers, such as Udimi. 

These look to get better results, with optin rates around 40 - 50%, but more importantly the open rates and engagements rate where a lot higher, with open rates hitting 70% for one run. 

I tested out the different landing pages, to see which ones had the best optin rate (a little unscientific), as I said above, the best being about 50%. 

One thing I did notice and this was the case for both traffic sources, the number of people taking up the offers on the thankyou page, was 0.01%. 

Which is pretty rubbish, because ideally these pages should be paying for the traffic and mean that you are building your engaging list for free. 

Follow Up Emails

The follow up emails come in two separate formats. 

One set is the email sequence you set up as part of the auto-responder, the second one is from 12 Minute Affiliate themselves, which is there to help promote some of the products.

I wouldn't rely too much on that second email stream, it ends up in the spam folder, every single time. 

It gets flagged so many times because every single affiliate will be using that follow up sequence, it's pointless. 

Yes it contains your ClickBank ID, yes they are quite well written, but it's instantly marked as spam, so it's just not seen. 

Secondly, the 'I did not sign up for this' button gets clicked a lot more, because your subscriber will see two separate emails, both talking about the same system, or a number of products. This is not a good way of keeping your lists fresh and happy. 

Actually Getting Sales

This is the bit that really matters, because at the end of the day it's pointless having lead pages and follow up emails if no one actually signs up.

So after spending about $250 - $300 on traffic and the platform itself, (you need to spend a few $'s on different traffic sources and the different landing pages) the overall return is around $150 (at least at the moment). 

Now I do also have a list potential customers, who have signed up for a niche I know about and can engage with, so more sales may come down the line, but at the moment this product has not made me profit. 

And the main reason, or at least the reason I believe, is that the thank you pages are not designed to make that first initial sale. 

There is no 'grab this for $9' or any kind of pre sale, they usually just pass you off to a webinar, which may work down the line or they send you straight off too a product that is $400. Someone who has signed up for some free stuff, or wanted to grab a cool secret is unlikely to drop $$$'s straight off the bat. 

Now many of the people on this email list are currently going through the sequences, they are clicking links, being taken to landing pages etc, but only a few took the offers presented too them. 

How Much Does 12 Minute Affiliate Cost?

The main part of the system is separate into two different costs. 

The $47 a month version, which gives you access to 1 niche out of the 3, with 1 auto follow up sequence. 

The more expensive version coming in at $97 per month offers you the ability to take all 3 niches and all 3 follow up sequences. So around the same cost of the basic version of ClickFunnels, or a little more expensive than the higher tier BuilderAll.

If you can't be bothered to follow the pretty easy step by step guides, then you can also pay for them to do it for you, for an additional $67 (for 1 niche), I wouldn't really say it's worth it. I will do it for $49. 

Upsells

Apart from the monthly costs, you can also treat yourself to some 1-1 coaching, for the low-low price of $297. 

You will be given 3 coaching calls, lasting 3 hours. I'm not sure how useful these sessions would be, considering the goal is essentially to get you set up and running. 

The other up-sell that you will face, is the Affiliate Mastery Platinum (AMP) Coaching, which if I am 100% honest, I have no clue how much it costs. They do a fair amount to push you away from purchasing this, and you have to be phoned to even get a chance of buying it. 

Is it worth it? 

Well they do offer you the guarantee they will stay with you until you make 10 sales, but that could potentially cost you $$$'s in traffic to get those 10 sales, so there is no guarantee it will cover the cost of the training and traffic. 

12 Minute Affiliate Review - Final Thoughts

The main question I will get asked is, 'Is the 12 Minute Affiliate program worth it?'. And honestly, I am on the fence. 

As with a lot of programs that are popping up at the moment, funnels are the new buzz word. But really, these are not full funnels, in my eyes at least. 

They are landing pages, and they are thankyou pages, but ideally it needs one or two more steps, which helps warm up the 'funnel' emails you then send out. 

The pages could also do with some tweaking, including fixing the thank you pages to actually push towards making small few $ sales to help cover the traffic cost. 

The follow up emails are good, and well crafted, so there is a good chance someone will finally click through and make a purchase, potentially buying one of the higher ticket offers, netting you that sweet $400 commission, but there is also the chance they wont. 

To see success you are going to need a large budget for traffic, or a proven traffic source that you can utilise to see constant sales from this. 

Who The 12 Minute Affiliate Is For?

One that requires very little set up and can be incorporated with paid for traffic that they may already have. If you are good at paid traffic, and you want some semi decent landing pages, but with some done for you email follow ups, then this will work well for you.

If you have access to ClickFunnels or even Thrive Architect then you can probably build your own squeeze pages and you can tweak them until you are 100% happy with the optin rate and then the purchase rate on the back end. 

I would say that you need to have a good traffic source, or a proven sales list that you can leverage. 

Accessing the 12 Minute Affiliate

If you want to go ahead and give the other niches a try and see if the 12 minute affiliate platform can work for you, then go ahead and give it a try.

You can get a 14 day trial here.

Good luck, and let me know below what your results are!