Product: Skillpay
Creators: Darin and Kevin Blue
Price: $0 to join, $67/month, $349 for 6 months, or $695 per year
Website: skillpay.com
Rank: 90/100 – A legit program that teaches beginners how to build a niche marketing business. It’s a little expensive when there are cheaper alternatives that offer more resources, training and support. However, I would recommend this as a good program for those who are very interested in Facebook marketing and have extra money to invest up front.

Introduction – What is Skillpay?

---

This is a newly launched (August 2014) educational community that teachers beginners and intermediates in niche marketing. From what I can tell, it’s a completely legitimate program to learn if you’re a newbie and far superior to most products that try to teach you how to make money online. I signed up as a member to provide an in depth, honest Skillpay review for anyone looking for the opportunity to make some extra money.

They encourage you to follow your passions, teach you methods that work, and their support is easily accessible. In addition, they’re upfront about additional costs associated with running a business online and the time it takes to start seeing success.

That being said, however, this is a very new program so it hasn’t been around long enough to prove itself in terms of credibility. This isn’t the first internet marketing product launched by Kevin and Darin Blue; they also created Internet Income University, which I wasn’t too impressed by.

To be fair, this program seems much improved from their last.

Skillpay vs Wealthy Affiliate

---

Skillypay is a pretty incredible program, but when I first saw it I couldn’t help but think it closely resembled another product – Wealthy Affiliate.

However, there are some key differences between the two programs:

Marketing Focus:

Skillypay focuses first on setting up a niche business around a Facebook fan page.  You’re taught to use Facebook paid advertising to build a following, then go on to start up a website and market it within your Facebook page, Youtube and even Google. Search engine marketing and WordPress are not the central focus of the training, although they are covered. While you may see faster results using this method, in my opinion it’s not appropriate for every niche and also requires more up front expenses.

Wealthy Affiliate’s focus is on creating a website as your business foundation, then teaching you how to create content using keywords to gain organic rankings in Google, Bing and Yahoo and first leverage free methods of traffic to your business. Their training focuses heavily on using WordPress, keywords, content creation, affiliate marketing and even PPC. They do teach social media marketing as well, but it isn’t taught as the core of your business. The methods taught here take longer but will give you a solid foundation and you won’t need to pay for traffic.

Training Materials:

Skillpay’s training is entirely video based, while WA is set up as a combination of written and video tutorials. In addition, there’s no member added blogs or training within SP, while much of the material within WA is made up of member added content. This could be positive or negative, depending on your preferences.

Phone Support:

Skillpay actually has phone support which is something WA doesn’t offer. When you have any questions, you can either write a message within their support box or call their voicemail support, leaving your number and email and they claim they’ll get back to you within 24 hours, but that most of the time it’s much sooner.

However, I submitted a support request and it took 3 days for them to respond. It wouldn’t be a huge deal if they didn’t claim it would be 24 hours or less… because clearly that is not the case. They don’t seem to have a number to call to speak with them on demand either; you have to leave a message and wait for them to contact you.

What’s Included in the membership?

---

 Skillpay provides…

• Step by step video training – Facebook, Youtube, SEO, and WordPress set up
• Weekly video training sessions (all recorded and kept within their video library)
• Web hosting
• Email and live chat support
• Access to their private “inner circle” Facebook group for additional support
• Tools – Keyword Evolution and Niche Idea Generator

They also let anyone try out the program for 100% free, without putting down a credit card. Access is limited to a few video materials,but it still is enough to give you an idea of whether or not it is right for you.

My concern with starting a business on Facebook

---

Facebook can be really great exposure to an online business, but it’s not necessarily the best way to actually create a business, especially for certain niches. Some niches just seem to “click” much better with Facebook and others that may be more personal in nature wouldn’t do so well. Either way, the reality of Facebook is that it’s a lot harder to sell to your audience. People go there to snoop on other people’s lives and chat with their friends, not to buy stuff.

When you use FB as your main marketing platform, you’ll be able to get some website traffic if you’re able to build a large following (which would require investing into paid ads); however if you’re using affiliate marketing as your money maker, you’re going to have a much harder time turning those visitors from Facebook into potential buyers.

Although, if you chose to monetize your site with Google Adsense it’d probably be easier to make money this way. Since you make money per click, all you need is people visiting your site, not actually buying anything. If you were promoting affiliate offers your job will become trickier. Not impossible, just harder.

(Another concern I must throw out here is the legitimacy of FB’s paid advertising…. this video brings me to question how well it really works).

This method could be a good option for some people if they had the available resources to invest in additional start-up costs, but it isn’t the cheapest or most reliable method either.

There are way more (and better) options for affiliates than the programs recommended by Skillpay

---

They suggest Amazon Associates, Clickbank and Google Adsense as the three ways to monetize any website. While these are great programs widely used by online marketers, they aren’t the only options.

Clickbank has a lot of low quality products, Amazon isn’t available to everyone and Adsense has a history of banning people from the program. It’s also not the best way to monetize every website, but it definitely works.

Pros vs Cons

---

Pros

• Let’s you try it out for 100% free, no credit card required.
• There’s a 30 day, money back guarentee if you don’t like it after upgrading.
• An honest approach to making money online, teaches methods that can work.
• Encourage you to follow your interests, hobbies or passions when picking a niche
• Has a handy niche generator tool
• Pretty upfront about additional costs involved.
• Very clear it’s not a “get rich quick” scheme and that it takes time to see success.
• Provides phone and live chat support, so it’s easy to get help.

Cons

• Expensive, membership is $67/month or $349 for 6 months.
• Requires a higher upfront expense than just the basic membership, you’ll have to invest monthly in Facebook advertising campaigns. It also recommends outsourcing tasks, which will be another expense if you go that route.
• Doesn’t provide a whole lot of training on SEO or WordPress, focuses way more on Facebook marketing.
• It’s rather limited in suggestions of monetization options and affiliate programs.
• Relying heavily on Facebook and social media marketing isn’t the best option for every niche.
• Affiliate program is only available to paying members.

Who is it for?

---

Beginners who want to start earning money online by building a business around their interests, as well as intermediate marketers who are looking for additional training to build out their existing businesses.

Pricing

---

The pricing for Skillpay varies depending on how long you commit to the program:

Monthly membership is $67, 6 months is $349 and yearly access will cost just shy of $700.

 

These prices are all 50% off if you upgrade within your first 24 hours, so you could get your first month for $29 but it’d still be $67 per month every one after that.

While I think the program is useful, I don’t believe it provides enough training, resources or tools for anyone to stay a member beyond a few months yet, so I don’t know how well a deal you’re actually getting with the extended billing discounts.

My Closing Thoughts

---

Skillpay is a legitimate community to join and learn how to start up an online business. They let anyone join for completely free to test it out, provide training that actually works, and are very up front about the time, effort and costs involved in starting out online. That being said, the training provided is limited to mostly social media marketing with Facebook and Youtube, with less emphasis on building a website and SEO.

A major downfall is that it’s pretty expensive, as the costs involve extend far beyond the basic $67 membership fee with paid advertising campaigns. Wealthy Affiliate provides unlimited hosting, a larger community and much more extensive training for a lot less money than Skillpay. If you want to know how to market online using Facebook and Youtube, however, and have some extra money put aside to start paid advertising campaigns and want to see faster results, Skillpay could be the program for you.