Company Name: Online Marketing Academy
Company Website: jobarnesonline.com
Company Owner: Jo Barnes
Type Of Site: Online Training Center
Price To Get Started: $497
Overall Ranking: 3 Out Of 5 Stars
Over the past several weeks, I’ve got many requests from my loyal visitors asking me to do a thorough review of Online Marketing Academy.
I have actually had this one on my list for quite some time now, but it seemed to continue to get pushed back so I could work on something else.
However, I thought since I had a good amount of people requesting this, that I might as well go ahead and get this out of way. and show you guys if this is worth your time and money or not.
Within the following review, I’ll be showing you guys if this program is worth investing your time and money into, or if you would be better off putting this on your ever growing lists of programs to avoid.
I’m sure that many of you out there have many questions for me, and I tend to answer each and everyone one of them in this review.
However, If you still have questions after reading this, then will you do me a favor and leave them for me in the comments below?
Do we have a deal?
OK!!
What Is Online Marketing Academy?
This is a membership based site that shows you how to create your own product and also teaches you affiliate marketing as well.
Jo Barnes created this membership site back in April of 2011.
This was formally called The Social Networking Academy and over the years, as the community and training here evolved, it has grown and instead of just teaching social media marketing, Jo now covers a variety of different topics.
Training & Tools
Like I said earlier, the training here comes in the form of a 12-week course.
Over the next 12 weeks, you’ll have assignments that you’ll need to complete and a checklist of things you’ll need to check off before moving on to the next lesson.
Take a look at the screenshot that I’ve captured for you guys below to get a better idea of what I’m talking about!!
As you can see there is quite a bit of training that comes included with your membership if you would decide to join.
Not only are you provided with a great deal of training, this also includes coaching and some pretty nifty tools that you’ll find necessary if you want to design graphics, write an e-book, or create your first sales letter.
The 12-week training course is the meat and potatoes of this system and here is what you’ll be learning over the course of the next 3 months:
- Week 1- Getting everything setup & setting some goals
- Week 2- How To Create Your List Builder
- Week 3- Building Your Opt-In Funnel
- Week4- Create Your Instant Sales Funnel
- Week 5- Building Authority
- Week 6- Content Marketing
- Week 7- Creating Your Product
- Week 8- Driving Traffic
- Week 9- Facebook Ads
- Week 10- Testing, Testing, Testing
- Week 11- How To Create Multiple Income Streams
- Week 12- Affiliate Marketing
Throughout your 12 weeks of training, you’ll also gain access to live webinars every 2 weeks hosted by Jo herself.
Here’s What I Liked About It
- No upsells
- No hype or unrealistic income claims
- Pretty active community
- Training Is decent
Here’s What I Didn’t Like About It
- More of a focus on funnels, then content creation and driving traffic
- Puts the cart before the horse by showing you how to build an email list before you have traffic
- You’re encouraged to steal other people’s content and modify it to use as your own. This is a huge NO NO!!
- Support is provided through a private FB group(Always a red flag)
- Pretty hefty price for mediocre training, a few software tools, and a private FB group
- Support isn’t the greatest
Price To Get Started With Online Marketing Academy?
To gain access to everything I’ve listed above, you’ll need to pay a one time fee of $497.
Surprisingly enough, I wasn’t able to find any upsells associated with this program like I do so many other make money online opportunities.
Since Jo focuses more on paid advertising platforms like FB ads and less on SEO then you can expect to pay a whole lot more than your initial $497 payment.
If you’re new to online marketing and have no idea how online advertising works, then you could likely blow through a couple hundred bucks in only a few short hours.
This is something she fails to mention so I thought I’d give you guys a heads up so you know what you’re getting into before you fork over nearly $500.
Other than that, the only other costs that you would incur here would be the cost of your domain name and hosting.
My Closing Thoughts
Overall this isn’t that bad of a site and I actually like what Jo has got going on here and I really like what she has created over the past 6.5 years.
However, there are many things that I think she needs to approve upon before she get’s my 100% seal of approval.
One of the main things that I have an issue with is her encouraging you to copy other people’s work and claim it as your own.
This is known as plagiarism and this can cause quite a few legal issues for you as well as having your site blacklisted and removed from the search engines if you’re caught.
When first getting started in the online world, you want to try and do your best to stay on the good side of Google.
How do you do that, Scott?
It’s pretty simple really when you think about it!!
Take the time to create your own content that’s 100% genuine & unique and don’t try and take the easy way out!!
Also, another thing that I didn’t particularly care for was that she shows you how to build an email list before you even have any traffic coming to your site.
Without any traffic, who is gonna sign up for your email list?
This is just a personal pet peeve of mine and I guess if you’re using paid advertising this would work if you know what you’re doing.
Other than that, I think the training on product creation to be pretty decent, but when it came to driving traffic and teaching about affiliate marketing, I think she did a pretty piss poor job in my opinion.
Before you learn how to create your own product, I feel that it’s important for you to learn how to sell other peoples products, first.
This way, you’ll be able to get a feel for how this biz works and learn some of the tricks of the trade before venturing out on your own with your own product.
Did you notice how she saved the affiliate marketing training for the last lesson?
I feel like this should have been closer to the top and if it was I would have given it a higher rating than I did.
If the thought of creating your own product doesn’t appeal to you and you would rather learn how affiliate marketing works instead, then I think that you would benefit so much more from a program called Wealthy Affiliate.
This is the place that has shown me how to build a 4 figure business in the online world in about a year that enabled me to quit my time job and work 100% online.
If affiliate marketing has always intrigued you and the thought of building a website that’s based on a hobby or interest excites you to the core, then I would highly recommend that you check them out for yourself to see what they can do for you.
I really hope this review has helped you guys out and hopefully, I’ve answered any questions that you’ve had about this program and cleared up any confusion you may have had as well.
Are you a previous member, or perhaps a current member who would like to share your experience that you’ve had with this program with other people?
I would love to hear all about it and I’m sure everyone else would as well!!
Leave your comments, questions, and any experience you have to share in the comments below!!
I look forward to hearing from you guys and reading through your experiences with this company!!
Cheers
~Scott~