An AWOL Academy Review – Finally! A Thorough Report

Have you been looking for ways to make money online? That’s great because there’s never been a better time to start with online marketing. With the millions of people online every day, your source of viewers is vast.

If you’re here today, you’re looking for a review of AWOL Academy. I applaud you for checking out any platform before purchasing or becoming a member. The internet is a wonderful tool, but it’s also abused by many unscrupulous people.

I review many products for my readers, and I always try to be honest and fair about each product I review. I never use the term “scam” unless it’s truly dishonest and doesn’t offer any value to you.

I have personally been involved with online marketing for a few years now and can say that’s it’s a wonderful way to create additional income streams or replace your full-time job entirely. I personally learned everything I needed to know with a different platform than AWOL Academy, but that doesn’t mean this product isn’t good as well.

This has been a difficult review to write because there have been so many changes to their courses and prices. The courses and costs I will show you, are as of August 2018.

Let’s take a look…

What is AWOL Academy?

Kameron George

AWOL stands for “Another Way Of Life”. Its creators are Kameron George and Keala Kanae, who launched their program in 2015.

If you’ve been involved with internet marketing for quite some time, you have probably heard the name Project AWOL. This was the name of Kameron’s team within “Empower Network”, an MLM (multi-level marketing) network.

Kameron, a member of Empower Network, would provide training and referrals to anyone who joined Enpower Network under him. This was the start of Project AWOL.

Empower Network has since gone bankrupt. AWOL Academy founders Kameron and his friend Keala decided to restructure, rename, and relaunch their new product.

AWOL Academy is, at its core, is a very costly training program. They themselves refer to it as “freelance digital marketing”.

Keala Kanae

This is a high ticket program, meaning training is very expensive. You even have to pay a monthly fee to be their affiliate! I’ll get more into that further down.

This is what you get with AWOL Academy: Please note that these are the new prices of their products, as of August 2018, and are clearly noted on their website.

You would have started the process with an invitation to view the “Freelance Digital Secrets Masterclass”. This is where you’re introduced to Keala and Kameron. In this 2.5 hour webinar, you will hear their journey to success, and how you can replicate it. From there, you need to purchase each consecutive course.

They also offer a free AWOL Academy PDF copy of “Freelance Digital Marketing Secrets”, which may interest you. We all like free, right?

Upon checking out their affiliate program, they listed a couple more high-end courses that their homepage didn’t mention. Why aren’t they listed in their product’s category? I’ll list those below for you so you get the full picture.

And no, I’m not an affiliate. 🙂

Pro Academy – $99 (which includes AWOL 101)

Prerequisite 3 step introduction (AWOL 101)

1. Deep Dive Questionnaire
2. Business Planning Session
3. One on One Coaching Call

Upon completion of these 3 steps, 4 modules become accessible (Pro Academy). This teaches you about email marketing and how to set up your business framework. Additional costs for recommended services will be your own responsibility.

• Module 1: Sales Funnel
• Module 2: Lead Capture Pages
• Module 3: Email Marketing
• Module 4: Conversion Tracking

Internet Income Explained – $49 This is a recent addition…

This is an explanation of how online sales and digital marketing works.

• Module 1: Business & Marketing Mindmap
• Module 2: Creating Digital Assets
• Module 3: Fast Track Formula
• Module 4: How To Scale Your Business

AWOL Community (as per Affiliate’s Page) – $49.95/month or $59.95/year

This fee provides you with access to their Facebook groups, to ask for help and stay in touch.

Inbox Academy – $447

This course teaches you about the importance of building and maintaining an email list. You’ll learn how to communicate in a way that generates sales, and increases your open rate and click-through rate.

• Module 1: The Basics
• Module 2: Email Deliverability
• Module 3: Open Rates
• Module 4: Cluck-Thru Rates

Conversion Academy – $1797

This course teaches you how to increase your conversions using persuasive copywriting, live presentations, and storytelling.

• Module 1: Epic Story Telling
• Module 2: Mind Control Hacks
• Module 3: Live Sales Formula
• Module 4: Evergreen Sales Formula
• Module 5: High Ticket Sales
• Module 6: Affiliate Tracking

Traffic Academy – $2997

This course shows you how to target high converting traffic through various mediums like Facebook Ads, YouTube, etc.

• Module 1: FB Traffic Academy
• Module 2: YouTube Traffic Formula
• Module 3: Instagram Traffic Formula
• Module 4: Bing / Yahoo Traffic
• Module 5: CPA Traffic Formula

Masters Academy – $5497

This course is about managing your mindset, money and future plans. You’ll hear from Dr. John Demartini about the mindset of money and Mark J. Kohler (accountant and lawyer) about tax and business strategies.

• Module 1: Mindset Hacks
• Module 2: Wealth Strategies
• Module 3: Solopreneur to CEO

AWOL Elite Lite (as per Affiliate’s Page) – $11,997

This package entitles you to 1 year on ongoing mentoring and training, as well as weekly training webinars.

AWOL Elite (as per Affiliate’s Page) – $17,997

This includes everything in Elite Lite plus tickets to their Elite Summit and Awaken events. I spent some time on the phone with their event organizer, and this is what I found out:

• Both events are in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.
• Awaken online tickets are $597 unless you’ve purchased the “AWOL Elite package”. Then it’s included. It’s a 3-day event.
• Elite Summit is a 4-day event and is only available if you’ve purchased the minimum “Traffic Academy”, which gets you a 2-day pass only. With “AWOL Elite”, you get a 4-day pass.

Who Is AWOL Designed For?

I believe these courses are great for someone wanting to earn money through email marketing, but someone who also has adequate funds in advance. This is a high ticket program, with many additional costs for tools and services.

AWOL Academy is an educational platform only. The price of each course is to give you access to their training. Any recommended services, required to make the program work, is an additional cost to you. For example, the cost of your domain name, website hosting service, autoresponder service, solo ads, etc. I’ll break this down for you further on…

You are highly encouraged to promote the Academy itself. When they talk about the “made for you” funnels, it’s for the affiliate’s themselves.

This is one of AWOL’s videos on their AWOL TV channel on YouTube.  It’s great because it can apply to everyone and any online training platform.

AWOL Academy Affiliate Program

To sign up as an affiliate with any business or affiliate program is always free. AWOL, on the other hand, is designed as an MLM. So if you’re wanting to promote the Academy itself, (be an affiliate) it will cost you:

• $39.95/month
• Minimum purchase of the Traffic Academy course for $2997

Technically, you’re not an affiliate, but part of the MLM structure. You can recognize any MLM business by their multiple tier commission structures. With AWOL Academy, there’s a two-tier earnings potential:

• 60% commission on Pro Academy
• 30% commission on remaining courses
• 5% commission on all sales made by an affiliate you generated (downline)

As an affiliate, you have access to a “Complete Funnel” already designed for you, and extra training specifically for selling AWOL products. Though very convenient, this shows me how serious they are about having people sell their product.

Being an AWOL affiliate can be quite a profitable business, but only if you can find enough people to purchase such a high ticket item. My concern is their “done for you” sales funnel. If they require all their affiliates to use the same promotional material, the market will get saturated fairly quickly. This will only hurt your chances of success.

How Does AWOL Work?

Initially, you would have received an email, or seen a promotional ad on social media, inviting you to watch his free webinar.

Anyone who knows how to make an engaging, exciting video, will have you hanging on their every word in no time. Ironically, this is what they’ll eventually try to teach you, haha. You will hear all about the value of the Academy, without ever hearing the costs of each individual course.

To start with the Academy, it will cost you $99 for AWOL 101 and Pro Academy combined. I think this course is worth the price if you are a total newbie to affiliate marketing. And maybe this is why the price of this course hasn’t changed like the rest. But you will still need to continue your education, either here or somewhere else. Pro Academy is just providing you with the foundation.

AWOL 101

You’re required to complete the first three steps in the 101 section before moving onto the Pro Academy modules. Depending on your sensitivities, be prepared for the one-on-one coaching call.

Understand that they are going to try to convince you of your need to purchase all the courses. You may hear questions like “How bad do you want this?” Or “Is there any way you could move some money around to free it up?”.

Pro Academy

When going through the next four modules, you’ll learn about affiliate marketing and how to set up your online business. To begin with, you will need:

• Domain name – $15/year (approximately)
• WordPress Hosting – up to $30month (pay more for SSL, email, security…)
• Custom email address – may or may not be included with hosting plan. It may be an added cost

Kaela then covers landing pages, autoresponders, tracking and split testing. These are all the basic concepts of email marketing. It’s how you entice people to give you their email address, how you capture those addresses to send them subsequent emails, and finally tracking and testing which promotional email works the best.

To do all this, you will need these recommended services that Keala himself uses:

• LeadPages (landing page builder) – $37 to $321/month
• GetResponse (email autoresponder) – $15 to $165/month
• ClickMagick (tracking system) – $17 to $97/month

The above prices start small for smaller email lists. As your list expands, you’ll need to upgrade to more expensive plans.

The remaining modules touch on where to find affiliate products and how to sign up for them. He then moves onto paid traffic sources using solo ads. These ads require you to pay someone to have your promotions sent to another marketer’s email list for a negotiated price per click. They usually average about $.70 cents per click. He explains the model, but there are no actionable steps here.

Their central focus is on you using solo ads.

I believe this course has a decent amount of valuable information, but as you can see, the $99 just teaches you the foundations of your business. You can expect an average cost of $100 per month to set up your business model. That’s a pretty hefty price for someone with no experience or new to the industry. And that can increase by hundreds per month depending on the size of your list.

As I said before, if you’re financially prepared to start using AWOL Academy, then you’ll be fine. Pro Academy is a great foundation, but you’ll still need to learn so much more about generating traffic, email marketing, choosing the right products, etc.

This is how the Academy is set up. Your initial, basic training is the first course for $99, but to expand your knowledge to truly become successful, you will need to purchase each consecutive level.

So that you know in advance, there are other places online that you can get all this information for free.  

AWOL Community (As Per Affiliate’s Page)

I’m surprised I couldn’t find anything online about their community. No user reviews or anything. And of course, you can’t access the Facebook groups unless you’ve purchased the courses.

For such a monthly cost, you’d think they’d be boasting about their community on their website. Any other platform I’ve looked at always talks about their community help and support.

I can’t begin to understand why they’d charge so much for a Facebook community. But then again, I can’t understand any of their prices…LOL.

Inbox Academy

This course, at the new increased rate of $447, teaches you the importance of the phrase “the money is in the list”. It provides more in-depth information about email marketing. They talk about building and maintaining your list and treating it as a lifetime asset.

As great marketers themselves, Kaela and Kameron like to use terms like “secret”, and “exclusive tactics and strategies”. Really, there are no secret, exclusive strategies. It’s just all about persuasive copywriting, and efficient split testing to achieve the highest conversion rates.

These strategies are important, and you will learn how they themselves do it. You just have to decide if it’s worth it for you to spend top dollar to access it. And of course, building a list doesn’t get you anywhere if you don’t know how to convert your subscribers. This is how they promote their next course…

Conversion Academy

Anyone who is online as an affiliate marketer knows how important conversions are. They are your bread and butter. No conversions = no money!

This course recently increased from $997 to $1797, will show you how to engage with your subscribers and build a list of loyal customers. This again comes down to persuasive language and storytelling. Though they boast “elite level knowledge and insights”, it’s really them showing you what’s worked for them through research, trial, and error.

Their module titles and course descriptions are an example of persuasive language. Even though there is no such thing as “mind control hacks” or “hypnotic language”, there is an art to writing your promotional copy to entice someone to buy your product.

So now you have more specific knowledge of email marketing, how to build your list, and how to persuade your subscribers to buy your product. Now what? Traffic. You need to learn how to drive continuous traffic to your website. That’s how you increase your conversions. And yes, that’s how they convince you to buy their next course…

Traffic Academy

This course, with its recent price increase of $997 to $2,997, will show you how to access the right type of traffic for your conversions. Their main focus is Facebook Marketing with paid advertising. So yes, be prepared to increase your ad budget.

They will touch on the other forms of generating traffic with YouTube, Instagram, etc., but obviously, they themselves have the most success with Facebook, and that is their primary focus.

I’m sure the initial invitation to watch their video was on Facebook, right? That’s where I first heard of AWOL Academy. See…it works, lol.

So now what? You’ve expanded your knowledge and are building a successful online business. What else is there to know? How about becoming wealthy? Yup, you guessed it. Their next course…

If you don’t have $5340 plus about $120/month to invest, 

Master’s Academy

They promote this course for the “serious entrepreneur” only. I’d say, if you’ve invested $5,340 so far, you’re pretty serious!

This course, increased from $3497 to $5497, claims to teach you how to master the methods of growing and keeping your money to secure your future and the future of your family.

They will discuss money management, tax planning, investing, and more. They also claim that this type of high-level information is reserved for only the truly dedicated entrepreneurs. These ones are in it for the long haul.

Yet, I’m sure they wouldn’t turn your money down no matter how dedicated you are, or not, lol.

AWOL Elite Lite

With this level of membership, you get one year of weekly webinars where you can bring your “entire funnel” with all the accompanying data, and they’ll help you interpret it. They’ll offer you some actionable steps to help you become profitable, or otherwise increase your profits.

At this point, you’ve spent at least $22,834. If you’re not profitable yet… yikes!

AWOL Elite

This level is exactly the same as the “Lite” version, only this includes passes to the Elite Summit and Awaken events. Both events are in Las Vegas. They bring in experts in both the business industry, as well as the personal development industry.

I’m having a hard time justifying the additional $6000 for this level. Yes, it included the two events, but the ticket price for the Awaken event is $597 for 3 days, and though I don’t know what they value the Elite Summit one at, surely it’s not $5403 for 4 days?

Pros

• This is a very structured course, designed to go step by step for easier learning.
• Because it focuses on just email marketing, you should have a thorough idea of what it entails, provided you carry through to the end.
• They provide a 14 day, no questions asked, AWOL Academy refund policy.
• Their affiliate program is generous.
• The Pro Academy course gives you a solid foundation for setting up your business.

Cons

• Extremely high-ticket prices. The total package comes to $22,834 with Elite Lite or $28,834 with Elite.
• No free trial – you must buy the minimum $99 Pro Academy course to get inside.
• To get thorough training on email marketing, you must spend a minimum of $5340.
• The only “made-for-you” funnels that they talk about, are for affiliates only.
• Must complete the “coaching call” before moving on.
• All tool and services needed to build your business come to an additional monthly cost of at least $100.

My Thoughts And Recommendations

Is AWOL Academy legit? Yes, it is. Is it ridiculously priced for what you get? I believe so. It will cost you over $5,000 to complete your basic training, then much more for continued training and support.

As I said earlier, you need to be financially prepared to take this route. It’s very expensive for the information you could find elsewhere for much less, or even free.

What I found curious, was the lack of personal reviews for the higher course levels. There are many people who have purchased the $99 Pro Academy course. Several of my marketing friends have done this also. None were interested in purchasing the higher level courses. They just found it way too expensive for what you get.

And as usual, the reviews online are both very positive or negative. I’m sure there are legit AWOL Academy success stories to read online.  It’s just hard to tell which are true and which are just affiliates promoting the system. I’m assuming the glowing reviews are affiliates. That would only make sense. The negative reviews may only be angry people who’ve spent the thousands of dollars and never got anywhere. Who knows for sure?

My other concern is the number of times the courses have changed their fees in a year’s time. I understand the tweaking of courses to make them more valuable, but all I’m seeing here is the same course for double or triple the fee. Why?

And remember, your initial investment is quite high, so your ROI (return on investment) won’t happen for some time. Unless you are a gifted salesman like Keala, himself…

I do believe if you follow their steps and work hard every day performing the tasks, you will get results. Any successful business takes time, commitment and persistence. Keala and Kameron never promise you overnight success.

So….if you don’t have the money you need in advance for these courses, I would like to share with you an alternative choice. It’s where I learned all this, and more.

They offer a free starter membership that includes 2 free websites. You get the same business foundations as in the Pro Academy course for $99. In fact, you get more! Some of what you’ll learn is about keywords, how to drive traffic to your site, and how to write content. You see, there’s so much more to online marketing than just email funnels.

This platform not only offers you the training, but also the website builder, hosting, keyword research tool among many more tools to make your job easier. And the LIVE community is priceless. No, it’s not Facebook, lol. It’s their own community on the platform itself.

The Premium membership, if you choose, only cost $359 per year. You would have to be with AWOL Academy for 30 years to spend that much…  Yes, really! And with that, you can build and host up to 50 websites. Your only additional cost is your domain names.

If you would like to test drive this amazing platform, click on the picture below.

Have you heard of AWOL Academy? If you’ve purchased any of their courses, please let me know what you thought, in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you.

Your friend,

Suzanne