Affiliate marketing has existed as a concept long before the Internet arrived – but it sure didn’t become as popular and widespread until the Web gave us the connectivity we have today. And nowadays, there are numerous niches and specific ways to operate on the market, and therefore people who specialize in different aspects of affiliate marketing.

No matter how good you are though, and how much knowledge you’ve got of the system, having the right tools is an absolute prerequisite for becoming successful in this market. Remember, everyone here is using a compute as their primary tool – and a computer can do much more than just display web pages for you. Today, we’ll be reviewing a unique tool that allows you to automate a great deal of your work if you’re heavily involved in blogging – the WP Mage by Greg Jacobs.

Overview

The tool is a complete package that features several separate programs that do different tasks. There are three main components to the system – Affiliate Mage, Content Mage and Posting Mage. The cool thing is that while they’re set up to work very well with each other, you’re in no way required to run all three – you can just use whichever ones you need for your purposes.

And while Affiliate Mage and Content Mage are the ”blue collar“ units of the operation – the tools that work on the more mundane tasks and can also be controlled manually – it’s the Posting Mage that makes it come all together, working with the other two plugins in an interesting synergy which may take a while to get used to, but in the end proves to be a very flexible platform for your automated blogging.

Posting Mage basically lets you configure the style of posts, defining templates for them and even applying the new styles retroactively – e.g. you can set up a new shiny template for your blog and have Posting Mage automatically apply it to all the posts you’ve already made without you having to go through the dreadful hassle of manually updating them all!
Speaking of blogging automation, you’ll also get CPMage, which is a fully fledged autoblogging package. It’s an intuitive control panel to the posting interface, allowing you to easily install WP on any number of websites, deploying it following some strictly defined rules. It becomes very easy to multiply your operations and spread around as quickly as possible once you get the hang of CPMage.

The one thing that caught our attention were the advertised results – if you browse around the forums of the package, you’ll get the impression that it’s the norm to make around $4,000 - $5,000 a month from a few hundred websites with it. But in reality, this seems to be a rather exceptional case of people who put in a lot more effort than others. In the general scenario, on the other hand, you should expect around $2,000 - $3,000 if you know your stuff and know how to avoid the basic mistakes. Still, it allows you to earn back the tools’ price fairly quickly so you shouldn’t be at a loss buying them no matter what.

Extras

Apart from the main advertised tools, there are also some extras in the package which are nothing spectacular but will surely save you a few bucks considering the cost of regular scripts of this type. For example, you get Sitemap Mage, which as the name implies is an automated sitemap generator, creating a neat-looking layout of all your website’s pages for quick access. Link mage allows you to create an interconnected database of pages, very handy for keeping track of your operations from the inside.
Index Mage is a continuously updated list of free directories where you can submit your sites to, allowing you to get better indexing a lot more quickly; last but not least, there’s Domain Mage which is a nifty little frontend to GoDaddy that gives you information about domains, including the option to spy on domains that have an expiration coming up so that you can snatch them in time.

Downsides

WP Mage is great overall, but it does have some inherent problems that may make it seem like a worse choice compared to some of its competitors, depending on your needs. First, it’s aimed at more experienced marketers – this means that you won’t get the same high level of automation for all tasks by default, and you’ll have to put in some work yourself. However, this is intentional in order to allow you to have full control over the outcome of the campaigns you’re running from WP Mage.

Also, if spreading out dozens of websites quickly isn’t your thing, then WP Mage will definitely not live up to your expectations – it’s designed around the idea of mass marketing and setting up lots of websites to develop quickly, and those of you who like to do things the opposite way, taking their time to carefully flesh out each campaign, will probably not like how WP Mage does things.

Conclusion

Does it work? Yes, definitely. Is it suitable for anyone? Not so much. WP Mage is great if you know what you’re doing, but it’s not one of those tools that holds your hand through the process and does all the heavy lifting for you. You’ll still have to sweat up a bit but in the end, it’s definitely worth it if you know how to use it properly.

In the very least, WP Mage comes packed with so many tools that putting them together and summing up their costs (even on the unprofessional freelance market) will likely yield a higher price than the cost of WP Mage – so even if you’re not that interested in the ”spraying“ method of releasing websites, the toolset is still a very solid investment if you just want to get a good value for your money when buying a bunch of useful scripts. If you’re a fan of precise campaigns though, you’ll probably not put WP Mage to much use. If you’re a fan of making more money online and scaling your business, it’s definitely worth checking out.

Note: The views and opinions of the author of this guest post may not represent the views and opinions of Affilorama.