John Crestani and his course, the Super Affiliate System is very well known in the world of internet marketing and specifically affiliate marketing. This post is going to throw light on who John Crestani really is and why I’m neither one of his fans, nor a promoter of his $997 product.
Before we start, my name is Dominic and I’ve now been doing affiliate marketing for close to seven years. I have multiple blogs and income streams that I’ve created thanks to a program that I’m always happy to recommend to others called Wealthy Affiliate. A program where you don’t get rich quick but you do learn the real pathway to success in online business by high level training, expert support, all necessary resources, tools, and a positive, supportive network of members. Essentially, it has all the things you need to build a successful online business, mastering SEO, the way to organic traffic and passive income with recurring commissions. So far, this program, while it can be difficult to persevere with at times, is in my opinion the real deal and perfectly legit. It has been going since 2005 and undergoes updates to keep relevant to the fast moving world of internet marketing.
Read the Wealthy Affiliate Review >>
But now let’s get our focus back to John Crestani and his course, the Super Affiliate System, the course that used to be called the Internet Jetset.
Video Review of John Crestani and Super Affiliate System:
The John Crestani Story in Brief
From broke, anxious and alone, John Crestani went on to become a thriving internet marketing multi-millionaire who travels the world, owns several properties, got married at 28 and is featured in top business sites such as Forbes, Medium and Insider.
He had dropped out of college and for one reason or another went to Thailand, searching for himself and feeling lost. He was living on a small family loan.
He Gets the Idea of Being an Entrepreneur
At one point he had with him a small companion that ended up transforming his life. It was a book called The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. In this book Tim talks about people who want to break out of the 9-5 and how they can do this by building up a digital asset; an online business that eventually operates in such a way as to cut out the need for doing much work as the business could eventually become automated once it had been set up.
And to an extent an online business can get to a point where it’s bringing in money for you while you’re asleep or watching Netflix or strolling on the beach. Building a system like this is highly challenging but when John Crestani read about it, he was thrilled with excitement at the thought that he could probably do it. He just needed to be determined enough to turn his life around.
And with that persistence that’s so key to success, he did eventually become rich from an online business. But that was only after going through a long period of not getting anywhere and facing one dismal failure after another. He admits that he even got to the point where he was having panic attacks resulting from anxiety and because he so badly wanted his online business efforts to work out for him.
He also talks about how he tried a YouTube channel that failed. He didn’t know how to get visibility. Later, when he was already doing well, he hired a coach to teach him how to do it and says that one of his secrets is to pick a day and make 20 videos. Then upload them on a regular basis. Then make another 20, etc.
One of his first breakthroughs was a business where he was selling products on eBay. But that didn’t exactly make him wealthy and in the end PayPal punished him for selling products that it didn’t approve of by closing his account.
He Goes to College but gets Kicked Out
After facing a bit of a disaster with his eBay business, John decided to go to university again. But being tech-savvy, he was tempted to tamper with the computers and ended up getting the answers for exams from the systems and selling them to the college students! What were you thinking John? That’s when he had his first $1,000 in a day experience.
However, he was suspected as the culprit after some time and was obliged to leave.
Eventually John Crestani got a job that involved him helping the company run paid ads. It was here that he developed great skill. He was bringing in great money from PPC campaigns.
He asked for a raise which was refused by his boss. As you can imagine, John was disgusted at this and resolved to leave eventually. As it turned out, he got fired.
It is indeed impressive that he got so good at running ads. To put this in perspective, the tricky thing with ads is that you don’t know how they’re going to preform before you run them. But either way, you have to pay for them. You may make back the same amount of money or more but you may also end up losing your money and in fact, the typical scenario for those who aren’t skilled in it is that they simply blow their money and achieve nothing. Either they lose some of their ad spend or all of it, but most beginners simply make no sales. Training to do something like this means experimenting and split testing and endless tweaking of your ads. And unless you’re selling digital products with recurring subscriptions, you stop making money when you stop spending money. Ads require ad spend. And even if you manage to sell digital products with recurring subscriptions, people may still cancel/request refunds etc. which means that it’s unwise to stop investing in ads if you want to ensure that your business doesn’t go into decline.
Anyway, John Crestani eventually settled for using his knowledge of paid ads and affiliate marketing to get rich.
But he also became a vendor in 2015. His program, the Super Affiliate System is a huge income source for him.
What is the Super Affiliate System?
The Super Affiliate System is an in-depth course that focuses mostly on teaching students how to run PPC campaigns and make money with affiliate marketing.
After purchasing, members get access to the 16 module course made up mostly of video content.
They also get to be part of a network of people who are members and students of the Super Affiliate System.
The program also comes with live webinars and for private coaching, you can pay extra but that means a significant investment of $4,000+
You’ll be getting extensive training on many things but mostly on choosing products from affiliate programs, creating ads and running them with the hope of turning a decent profit.
Problems with using Super Affiliate System to make money
According to most sources, the majority of people who follow the course do not make the money they were expecting to and certainly not big money within the first month. Yet that is what is promised on the sales page. It says you’ll make ten grand on your first month.
Most students are simply promoting the same course to others. This is what MLM is about and although strictly speaking the Super Affiliate System isn’t a pyramid scheme, yet in effect that’s more or less what it is, with John Crestani at the top of course.
There is another marketer, David Deckle who created Profits Passport and his pyramid scheme was more blatant. One day I visited it again out of curiosity and found that it was all taken down. Now if that had been my entire business which thankfully it wasn’t, I would have been pretty screwed. However, later, he produced a very similar product.
That’s another thing to note about affiliate marketing. You should have more than one income stream and whatever you are promoting should be reliable and not something that people are likely to be disappointed with and want to refund.
No focus on SEO: John Crestani does not teach you to create your own content using a website and generate organic traffic. His only focus is on paid traffic. But a website is pretty central for anyone who wants to be in the internet marketing game for the long haul. A website is a stable base for any online entrepreneur and can save you a lot of money. It is your own asset, so you’re not always relying on someone else’s system to make your money.
In my view, people should start out with building their own digital assent in the form of a website and keep that going throughout their online business journy. Highly expensive courses and super tricky paid ads does NOT have to be the route for newbies and I don’t think it’s fair on them.
Successful marketers usually have things of their own. Either a YouTube channel, a program that they’ve made and sell or a website where they sell affiliate offers and generate ad revenue.
You really don’t have to pay anything for a YouTube channel to start making you money and you don’t have to pay much at all to do blogging. Just hosting and a domain. If you learn to do things like blogging and YouTube properly, you will end up far better off and save massively on money. The master of all arts in this business is to generate your own traffic without having to pay for it all the time. That means gradually building a following on multiple platforms such as your blog, YouTube and social media. It means being able to build an email list and become trusted and established as an authority in your niche.
I don’t think it’s fair to sell newbies a pricey course on paid ads and then persuade them that they’ll make money by recruiting other people to that same course. But that’s basically what John Crestani is doing with Super Affiliate System. Plus the upsells are also expensive. As soon as you make any money, he makes money because most people are really his affiliates who have to pay big money to know how to promote him and make him more money. He has nothing to lose if you make no money. There’s always going to be affiliates promoting his course because he’s well known and it’s a high ticket offer meaning that you make big commissions from it.
It’s the same with other expensive courses that are well known like Robby Blanchard’s one, Commission Hero. It’s just not that great because again, it about running ads but this time Facebook ads and anyone who has tried doing Facebook ads for any length of time will know that they Facebook are notorious for suddenly punishing and banning accounts. Then your business immediately grinds to a halt and you have to decide to try to fight for your account and get it back or start another one. But you can’t just keep making Facebook accounts because they punish you for that too. Anyway, affiliates will always be there to promote Commission Hero because it’s a high ticket offer.
Both John Crestani and Robby Blanchard tell their students to promote high ticket offers (a.k.a. their courses) to family and friends on social media and write posts saying ‘Hey, I found a course that taught me how to make money online. Check it out.’ John Crestani advises students to do this even though they have never made a dime online or never made any money as a result of taking his course. Firstly, I absolutely hate the idea of promoting affiliate offers to my family and friends. Spamming people who are close to me is a horrible idea. And they won’t simply click on the link and buy. Affiliate marketing doesn’t work like that. The Super Affiliate System isn’t cheap. No one is likely to suddenly buy it.
But look, affiliate marketing cannot be mastered by trying to buy your way there. And you don’t need to.
All this nonsense about it being a quick way to wealth with no experience required is what cripples most people in their early attempts. That’s not what internet marketing is about. What it really is, is a highly difficult and complicated business that takes a LONG time to master and requires a lot of SKILL.
It the complete opposite of what people think it is.
So, look if your blog and YouTube channel take a long time, then so WHAT? It’s one of the most rewarding and incredible businesses to become successful in. Forget about how long it takes and start learning the trade properly and putting in the work. That is the only way you will make money on the internet. And I mean make money consistently and be a real self-sustaining online entrepreneur.
What I believe is a better opportunity than the Super Affiliate System
I think it is better to go for a far more affordable, and in my opinion, better structured program called Wealthy Affiliate. It will train you to become your own success instead of just the on-going success of someone else.
Wealthy Affiliate Primium is only $49 a month. So for under 50 dollars you get everything you need to start building an online business the proper way. Learning how to generate organic traffic, helping real people out there in a niche that YOU choose and hopefully, love. From there, you can go on to all kinds of other things including running paid ads. But paid ads are not for beginners in my opinion and they should not be your ENTIRE income source.
Incredible money can come from a single blog if you do it correctly, plus it’s completely passive income. It’s probably the best and most satisfying way to go about an online business. You can also branch out into YouTube and build a social media following as you build out your website.
All tools and all support you’ll ever need are included with a Wealthy Affiliate membership.
At the end of the day it is your decision to go whichever way you think will work for you.
I’ll leave my link to Wealthy Affiliate in case you want to try it out today with a free starter membership. Zero risk and no credit card required.