In this Home Business Academy review, we’ll dive into the pros and cons of the program.
But before that, let’s ask ourselves: Is affiliate marketing even a worthwhile business model?
On the one hand, the promise is great…
You don’t have to create products, worry about fulfillment, customer service, or bad reviews.
Your only job is to get the right customers in front of the right offer, and take a commission when they buy.
And – theoretically – you can do it all in an hour a day from the beach.
Sounds simple, right?
Well, not really. Driving traffic (that’s internet speak for getting customers) is single-handedly the hardest part of the entire marketing process.
Later in this review, we’ll talk about all the different skills you need to drive traffic successfully.
For now, let’s just say the promise doesn’t really match up with reality.
At best, affiliate marketing is a job. You’re working for someone else, selling their products, and at any time, they can change your commission structure or block you from selling their stuff entirely.
In this business, you don’t really own or control anything. Since – for the most part – you’re driving traffic (again, the hardest job of all) and sending it to someone else, you don’t even get to keep the customers, who are the most valuable piece of the puzzle.
At worst, affiliate marketing is a pyramid scheme. There are certain – ahem – programs that charge you a monthly “membership fee”, under the guise that you will learn how to be a “wealthy affiliate marketer”.
Once you join, however, you find out the only way to really make money is by being an affiliate for that program.
That’s pretty much the textbook definition of a pyramid scheme.
Now, let’s say you really want that hour-a-day-work-from-the-beach lifestyle.
What if there was a way you could build a passive income stream that’s actually passive?
An income stream that doesn’t require:
- Thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours before seeing your first dollar
- Doing all the hard work of driving traffic to only get a tiny commission
- Running your business on someone else’s terms
An income stream that brings in consistent revenues every single month (from a couple thousand dollars to well over $10,000)?
An income stream you could actually build in your spare time, and grow as large or as small as you want to, without having to spend hours a day testing, tweaking, and risking your money in the hope you can finally start making sales?
If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, check out Digital Real Estate.
This is like taking all the good parts from affiliate marketing (however few there are), and putting aside all the bad.
However, if you’d still like to know more about Home Business Academy, keep reading.
What Is The Home Business Academy?
The Home Business Academy is an online community and coaching platform featuring several digital marketing tools.
That is, it is a venue to start affiliate marketing.
The Home Business Academy’s vision is “Freedom Through Principle Centered Leadership”, apparently.
Online marketing is challenging. And you need three marketing efforts to succeed.
You need coaching first (training). Then you need professional instruments. Finally, success requires assistance.
And there are few locations to get what you need to start an online business.
I must admit that when I first visited their website, I was surprised by the absence of hoopla and other BS that usually accompanies scams.
Not much more than a 30-minute film with one of the founders, Paul Hutchings.
The HBA’s primary goal is to assist regular individuals in building a successful digital marketing firm by providing tools, training, and support.
This site claims to teach practical ways to make money online.
But who are the men behind the curtain?
Who Are Mike Hobbs And Paul Hutchings?
Mike Hobbs and Paul Hutchings founded The Home Business Academy.
After years of hustling, they decided to build this platform to help others with their tools, training, and support.
Paul and Mike pitch themselves as genuine people who want to help others make money online.
Many frauds and get-rich-quick schemes conceal the owner’s identity entirely, so this is a step in the right direction.
Mike Hobbs
Mike is a former military vet who has found his stride as a network marketer (Multi Level Marketing) as well as lending his expertise with affiliate marketing.
He calls himself the “Titan of Tech”, or the less-cool-sounding “President of Prosperity”.
Not a bad gimmick, I suppose.
Paul Hutchings
Paul’s campy nickname is “The Freedom Crusader”, according to himself.
He went from struggling in direct sales (yet another name for MLM business model) and living in a trailer, to running The Home Business Academy with Mike Hobbs.
Not bad, but it’s clear that anyone who came here strictly for affiliate marketing should be aware that there is likely to be MLM elements to their program as well.
What’s Inside The Home Business Academy
At first, I mistook The Home Business Academy for an MLM or pyramid scheme – but it turns out not all MLMs are necessarily pyramid schemes.
So, how exactly does the Home Business Academy work?
The Home Business Academy operates on a simple model.
These tutorials teach you how to create sales funnels using their own tool, drive traffic to your website using blogging, SEO, Facebook, and YouTube, and monetize your website with affiliate marketing.
The concept is easy in theory but difficult in practice. The purpose is to link buyers and sellers of a product.
Every time a customer buys a product, an affiliate earns a commission.
Commissions range from 2% to 80%, depending on the affiliate scheme.
As mentioned before, they also have an MLM-style to their program:
If you refer other users to their program, you can make commissions off them.
This is known as recruitment, and can be straining if you bug your family and friends too often about it all.
The Home Business Academy Product Line And Business Model
Now that you know the basics let’s examine what products and services you may acquire if you join the Home Business Academy.
The HBA Funnel Builder
The HBA Funnel Builder allows you to design unlimited sales funnels and marketing pages for any product, service, or business.
It has the following features:
- Lead Capture Pages
- Thank you Pages
- Sales pages
- Order/Checkout Pages
- Digital products
- Memberships sites
For network marketers who want to get their online marketing up and run quickly, this package includes a step-by-step digital education course designed to assist them in doing just that.
The HBA Premium
To assist small business owners, the HBA Premium offers digital education memberships.
- Generating traffic & leads online
- Gathering customers
- And converting sales
Every day and every month, Paul and Mike, together with other top community leaders, host coaching masterminds where you may get the most up-to-date training and personalized coaching you need.
Freedom Launchpad
This isn’t really a Home Business Academy feature or product.
Nick Bramble created this short course on affiliate marketing and funnels to promote Home Business Academy.
In other words, Nick has teamed up with Mike and Paul to help them get more customers in exchange for a cut.
Nick created the 30 Minute Workday. It’s another crash course and eBook to get you to the HBA platform for genuine training.
The Ultimate Email and Traffic Swipe File
This supplementary course teaches you how to spy on your competitors and steal their top-performing keywords and advertising.
You will also get 50+ professionally written email autoresponders.
A little shady.
The Financial Literacy Academy
The Financial Literacy Academy is a digital education membership designed to help people build financial security.
Expert courses include:
- Debt Relief
- US Business Tax Planning
- Planned Retirement Income
- Online Bookkeeping with Quickbooks
- How To Generate Long-Term Cash Flow From Rental Homes
- Management Without Stress
- Asset Defense 101
- Maintenance Of Business Entities
Mark J Kohler, an attorney and best-selling author co-hosts this course with Mike and Paul.
Compensation Plan
The Home Business Academy affiliate program is available to platform members. Here is a breakdown of the program’s compensation plan:
Exclusive affiliate privileges to promote their products and earn $100 for each referral
Commissions are paid weekly on Fridays.
In a 1-tier structure, there are no tiers below or above you, making it less of a pyramid scheme than usual.
You keep 80% ($100) of every sale you make. And it’s reoccurring, so you could earn $300-$600 every referral.
Those are only projections and should not be taken seriously.
What Does The Internet Have To Say?
It wasn’t easy to find customer reviews online, which is concerning to some extent. But here’s one we found:
“Please forgive me! First of all, I’m not computer savvy at all. I don’t know anything. It took me forever to find somewhere to let you know I would like a refund! Please allow my refund I couldn’t understand how to do much of anything. It would be wrong not to do this for me. I should never have tried it to begin with. I’m on social security and had no business trying to do this in the first place. Please believe me I don’t know how to do much at all. Thank You”
It seems this is a recurring theme in their online customer feedback…
“i would like my money back please. there is a 100% money back guarantee it says”
Is The Home Business Academy A Scam?
So, is The Home Business Academy a scam? Not technically. You can make money with this program, but making money with affiliate marketing definitely isn’t as easy as the company makes it sound.
Driving traffic is extremely difficult. In order to do it successfully, you need to at least understand all these things, if not be a ninja at them:
- Copywriting
- Google Ads
- Facebook Ads
- Content Writing
- Website Building
- Conversion Optimization
- Automation
- Email Marketing
- Click Tracking
- Retargeting/Remarketing
- SEO
- Backlinking
And a lot more.
There’s a ton of work to be done upfront, no real guarantee of success, and – most importantly – the actual commissions are pretty small.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with front-loading the work and making the money later.
But if you’re grinding it out for 3 months and then your reward is a $50 commission, it’s not really worth it.
What if, instead, you could do that same 3 months of work (in your spare time), and your reward was a $500 to $2,000 payment that came in every single month?
And what if you only needed 1 or 2 of the above skills to get started, instead of mastering all 12 before seeing your first dollar?
And what if you actually didn’t need to wait 3 months? What if you could get started today and have your first payment in a week?
And what if you could double it next week?
Well, that’s the power of Digital Real Estate.
Your laptop and an internet connection is all you need.
Some of the most successful students in this program run their entire 6-figure businesses from:
- A camper in the middle of the woods
- A beach chair on the water in Mexico
- A small villa in Greece
They’re able to travel around, living their lives first, and focusing on their recurring income second.
Because even if they stop working for an extended period of time, the money keeps coming in.
So adventure, memories, and experience are the top priority.
And they never have to worry about how to pay for the next trip, or consider asking for time off.
If this sounds more like the type of life you want to lead, just click here to find out more about Digital Real Estate.
How Much Does The Home Business Academy Cost?
The good news is that the 1st seven days of The Home Business Academy Premium training are only $1 (after a $25 upfront fee).
After the $1 seven-day trial, the monthly fee is $125, as found in the fine-print. What you get is:
- Learn how to produce simple, free infinite leads with Facebook.
- 15 video YouTube ranking course will teach you how to produce free high-quality leads for your business online.
- A blog that generates leads and effectively follows up is a blog that generates more sales.
- Weekly interactive marketing coaching webinar with top earners to answer all your questions.
- 7 Lead Magnet Videos How to create a free offer that stands out from the crowd and attracts the top leads for your business.
Extra Costs and Upsells
Home Business Academy‘s extra features will cost you more money, which is not my favorite thing.
You will have to pay the following amount to gain access to the whole product line:
- $25 per month for Funnel Builder
- Freedom Launchpad costs $37 per month.
- One-time payment of $1000 to Financial Literacy Academy
They keep this sort of thing hidden, which is also a little shady in my opinion.
The Home Business Academy Refund Policy
If you bought any of the products above but then changed your mind, you may be eligible for a refund…
…but you only have three days to act, which is a seriously low amount of time. What happens if it takes them 2-3 days to even respond to your email?
It even looks like if you double-click a purchase and buy the same thing twice (clearly an accident), they will only provide an in-store credit.
Frankly, “no refunds at all” would at least be cleaner than this.
Are There Alternatives To The Home Business Academy?
Yes, there are plenty of Affiliate Marketing programs and resources to choose from if you want to pursue this business model. Here are just a few:
- Affiliate Marketing Mastery
- Amazon Affiliate Marketing
- Commission Junction
- Wealthy Affiliate
- Clickbank
What Is My Top Recommendation For Making Money Online In 2023?
Our review team has spent months researching, reviewing, and vetting dozens of business models and thousands of programs.
While there may be no “perfect business”, the research IS conclusive:
Digital Real Estate is the #1 online business model for those just starting out.
Whether you’ve never made a dollar online, or you’ve been in this space for a while but never really “made it,” Digital Real Estate is for you.
Why?
1) It’s Flexible: got an hour a day? You can do this. Ready to drop everything else and dive in full time? You can do this. Yes, the more time you put in, the faster you see results. But even with a little time each day, you can move the needle in a Digital Real Estate business.
And because this system is so flexible, you don’t have to constantly be working to make more money. It’s called PASSIVE INCOME because if you stop working, the money doesn’t.
Imagine taking 3 months off to just tour around Europe, rent a cabin in the woods to write a book, hike the Appalachian Trail, or live on the beach and surf all day.
This is only possible if you have an income stream that’s not tied to your time.
2) You Own & Control EVERYTHING: With Affiliate Marketing, you don’t really own anything. You have no control over the quality of products. You don’t even own customers.
Look at the fine print for most affiliate agreements. At any point, the company can change your commission structure, reduce your profit margins, or kick you out entirely.
With Digital Real Estate, you own the assets, which means you have all the power and all the control.
3) Little To No Startup Costs: It’s possible to get into Digital Real Estate with zero dollars upfront.
Because, using the strategies outlined in this program, you can get a client to pay you BEFORE spending a penny out of your own pocket…even before you do any work.
Even without getting paid in advance, you can have your first Digital Rental Property up, running, and generating profits for less than $100.
4) Easy To Duplicate: Ok, here’s the best part: once you have your first Digital Rental Property up and running, you can literally DOUBLE your income with a few clicks, a couple keystrokes, and a single phone call (and you don’t actually need the phone call).
Remember: each Digital Rental Property is worth $500 to $2,000 a month in semi-passive income (over 95% profit). Every time you decide to create another one and increase your income, it gets easier.
Because you have more knowledge, more experience, more results, and more momentum.
If you wanted to double your income with affiliate marketing, you’d have to double your traffic, double the average order size of each customer, OR double your commission rate. And, guaranteed that’s a lot harder than a few clicks and a few minutes of your life.
5) Make Money Helping Real People: This part is what makes it all worth it. With affiliate marketing, you’re selling the product with the best commission rate, NOT the one that’s going to improve the most people’s lives.
And that makes it pretty hard to sleep at night.
But with Digital Real Estate, you’re actually helping people by solving your clients biggest problem:
Small, local businesses need more customers, and with Digital Real Estate, you are unleashing a flood of happy, paying customers for these businesses.
You make money by helping them make money.
Not a big, faceless corporation either…a small business owner who’s using that money to put food on the table for their family, start a college fund for their kids, or take care of a sick parent.
Once you see how Digital Real Estate makes a real impact in the lives of real people, you’ll sleep like a baby with a big smile on your face.
Now, the choice is yours. You could continue browsing, looking at opportunities like The Home Business Academy which could one day make you money.
You could continue researching, never making a decision.
OR, you could take a look inside, consider what you really want, and join a program that makes your dreams a reality. At the same time, joining a community of over 2,000 successful students that are living life on their own terms thanks to Digital Real Estate.
A consistent, reliable, semi-passive stream of income that doesn’t depend on you or your time to keep producing profits.
All while genuinely helping real people who are grateful and happy to pay for it.
If this sounds more like what you want out of life (or if you just want some nice side income), click here to learn more about Digital Real Estate.
