Yes, this year it would be 17 years since the Wealthy Affiliate platform is in existence. Wealthy Affiliate is an online business training platform for newbies and experienced marketers.
Is Wealthy Affiliate a scam? If it has been around for such a long time, then surely they are doing something right, right?
But the big question is, is Wealthy Affiliate the right business course for you? And that’s what I am going to help you to decide today.
Company Name: Wealthy Affiliate
Website URL: WealthyAffiliate.com
Price: Starter FREE, Premium $49/mth ($497/year), Premium Plus+ $99/mth ($697/year)
Founders: Kyle & Carson
Community: 2.7+ MILLION members
Overall Rating: 4.9/5
Trust Pilot Consumer Rating: 4.9/5
Research Tools: 5/5
Customer Support: 5/5
Training/Classes: 5/5
WordPress Hosting: 5/5
Websites: 5/5
Free Trial: YES. Get Rolling Here! (no credit card required)
What is The Wealthy Affiliate Program All About?
The Wealthy Affiliate University is a platform that teaches anyone how to build an online business of their own. It teaches its students the affiliate marketing business model and caters to both beginners and experts.
Who Are The Owners of Wealthy Affiliate?
The founders of Wealthy Affiliate are Kyle Langound and Carson Long. They started Wealthy Affiliate 17 years ago.
At the time, the platform was focused on only offering a keyword service. Members would be able to purchase “low competition, high volume” keywords to help their articles get ranked on Google and other search engines.
Today, they have a powerful keyword tool called Jaxxy to help you find keywords in seconds. That is only a small portion of what Wealthy Affiliate has become.
The platform offers comprehensive training, website builders, expert and live classes, top-notch support, and an interactive community to help folks become successful entrepreneurs.
Before we talk about the features that Wealthy Affiliate offers, I want to show you how you can benefit as a Wealthy Affiliate premium member.
How Can Wealthy Affiliate Help You? What Benefits Do You Get As A Wealthy Affiliate Member?
The Affiliate Marketing business that you will be learning with Wealthy Affiliate is SEO Affiliate Marketing.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
It basically means learning techniques to help your website rank among Google and other search engines. When your site is well-ranked, you get an unlimited amount of targeted traffic to your online business. And that means more visitors and ultimately more sales.
In fact, this is the 4-step training process outlined in the Wealthy Affiliate training program.
The steps are as follows :
- Step One: Find a suitable Niche(your target audience or subject for your website)
- Step Two: Build A Website (based on your niche)
- Step Three: Attract Visitors to your website
- Step Four: Earn Revenue
The first benefit of being a Wealthy Affiliate member is that you have access to flagship training courses. These courses will take you from building the foundation of your website all the way up to mastering paid ads.
The second benefit is that even as a free member, you are part of their interactive community. You will be welcomed to the WA family as soon as you sign-up. You will read success stories, you can reach out for help and help others as a WA member. [I will be waiting to welcome you as well]
The third benefit is you get a website and everything else to make it go live! You do not have to go searching for a domain registrar. As a WA member, you get a free personal domain, and included is world-class hosting and daily backup of your sites.
The fourth benefit is you have access to many channels of support. Whether you are a new or an experienced marketer, it always helps to be a part of a community with like-minded folks.
The fifth benefit is that there are no upsells. There are three membership options, two of which are paid ones. Whichever paid option you choose, there are no further upsells. No hidden costs. When it comes to renewing your membership, you get the membership locked in at the original price.
The sixth benefit is that you have multiple ways to make money apart from your affiliate marketing website. You have free access to their affiliate program. You get paid for providing comments on other people’s websites within the WA community. You can provide training to WA members and get paid for it!
The final benefit is that you have flexibility when it comes to working with the training courses. Some online courses affix a deadline for you to complete their course, watch a webinar, or access previous training.
With Wealthy Affiliate, nothing is time-sensitive. You can access tons of training material at any time. (Warning: It might take you a lifetime to go through. LOL)
The Wealthy Affiliate Features- What Do You Get As A WA Member?
To start off, the core feature is their flagship training course.
You have the OEC or Online Entrepreneurship Course which consists of 5 LEVELS, comprising a total of 50 LESSONS.
The OEC course walks you through the process of building a business based on any niche. They have another comprehensive course called the Affiliate Bootcamp.
The Wealthy Affiliate Bootcamp course teaches you how to start a business within the make-money-online niche. It consists of 7 LEVELS comprising 70 LEVELS.
Wealthy Affiliate has its own site builder. In a matter of seconds, you can have the framework of your site built on a free domain or a domain that you already own. You can also buy your own domain within WA.
***The best part is that building your first site is made as simple as possible. If you are a newbie, you do not have to be technically minded at all.
The owners of WA have made it possible that you can reach out for help using more than just one way. You can use the LIVE CHAT feature.
You can “ASK A QUESTION” or “BLOG YOUR QUERY” to the online community.
You also have 24-hour WA technical support on standby. You can also “PRIVATE MESSAGE” any other WA member including Kyle and Carson.
Apart from the flagship courses, you can access the 100’s classes covering any topic relating to affiliate marketing and online entrepreneurship.
If the classes are not enough, then you can also access hundreds of recorded webinars or register for their LIVE WEEKLY ones that take place every Friday!
And if you go for the Premium Plus, which is the one I am on, you get access to classes from the top super affiliates!
With the premium plus membership, you are spoiled for choices big time! They have expert classes taking place every single day!
These expert classes are conducted by folks who joined WA and took the training and made it an amazing success and they share their winning strategies with you! (TRULY AMAZING VALUE)
Wealthy Affiliate has its own keyword tool that allows you to do more than just find the best keywords for your articles.
You can track keywords that you have already used to see how they are performing on Google. You can save a keyword list. You can even spy on your competitor’s website, and see what is working for them so that you can use it in your business.
These are just some of the main features of the Wealthy Affiliate platform. Go ahead and sign-up to discover more about what Wealthy Affiliate offers here.
How Much Does Wealthy Affiliate Cost? The Wealthy Affiliate Membership Options
There are 3 membership options that you can choose from.
These are:
- FREE Plan
- WA Premium Membership $49 (+ 1 Free Domain) (discounted further if go yearly)
- WA Premium Plus Membership $99 ( +2 Free Domains) (discounted further if you go yearly)
As a free member, you get access to the first level of their flagship training courses and the starter version of Jaaxy, the keyword tool. You also get 7-days of unlimited support, and one website to start building the foundation of your business.
I am on the Wealthy Affiliate premium plus membership. It has served me fine thus far. I only use 3 of the 10 websites that are allocated in my membership. In fact, Kyle even mentions in the training, that you only need 1 website to have a profitable online business on your hands.
I have not even gone through half of the expert classes, and the Jaxxy Enterprise membership is working wonders for me. If you are just starting out, I would recommend going for the Wealthy Affiliate premium PLUS membership.
You can always upgrade or downgrade between memberships. Note that both paid memberships are discounted drastically if you go for the yearly option. For instance, when I upgraded to Premium Plus, I took the yearly price and now it only works out to $58 bucks a month, instead of $99 bucks!
I strongly recommend going for the yearly price.
Does The Wealthy Affiliate University Training Work? Wealthy Affiliate Success Stories
I like to check out 3rd party review sites, to get a fair view of whether or not people are happy with using a particular program. One such site is called Trustpilot.com
At the time of writing this review, Wealthy Affiliate had around 523 reviews. 92% of the reviews were 5-star ratings.
Here are some of the positive reviews.
What about success stories? Are people making money with the Wealthy Affiliate training?
That’s a great question.
Remember earlier on I mentioned that folks can use the blog feature within WA to reach out for help, share training, or even talk about how their business is doing?
Well, there is a special section within WA where they showcase members making it a success after implementing the WA training.
That’s what makes the Wealthy Affiliate community different from other online training platforms. They do not have your usual Private Facebook community. And Kyle and Carson did that on purpose.
Having a support channel in the form of a blog is so much more versatile. If someone has a problem with their website or needs help, blogging allows them to explain the problem in much more detail and it gives a clearer picture as compared to using a Facebook post.
As you can see it is also easier to see the success stories.
Speaking of which, here are my recent commissions that I made with Wealthy Affiliate.
Pros of Wealthy Affiliate
- Owner Transparency/Long Standing In The Market
Not only do they have owner transparency, but this is one of the few online business platforms where you can directly contact the owners even if they have 2 million members on their database. WA has been around for 15 years.
2. They Offer a Free Membership Option
3. They Have Many Channels of Support
You can reach out for help via their live chat, blogging, or private messaging. They have 24/7/365 technical support service on standby.
4. All of your premium websites are backed-up daily
5. They Have a Free Affiliate Program
6. They Are Teaching A Proven Online Business Model(i.e. SEO affiliate marketing), that Will Stand The Test of Time.
7. They Have Tons of Success Stories and Member Testimonials
8. They Cater For Both Newbies and Experienced Marketers
9. They Have An Interactive and Helpful Online Community
10. Live Weekly Training Webinar Session With Q&A
Cons of The Wealthy Affiliate University
- Too Much Going On- Can Be Distracting
You can jump into the live chat, or blog or spend time reading tons of other people’s blogs. You can also immerse yourself in watching the hours of training sessions. Sometimes it can become distracting and take you away from focusing on building your business.
2. They Teach a Concept That Requires Patience
Having a successful affiliate marketing website with SEO does take time and hard work.
Is it Difficult To Make Money With Wealthy Affiliate?
How do you make money with Wealthy Affiliate?
The main way is to have a blog and write articles that are optimized for SEO. This is what the core training of Wealthy Affiliate teaches.
It teaches you how to first set up your blog, and then how to go about creating content that will be favored well on Google and other search engines.
To make money this way, would mean that you need to be consistent in creating quality content for your reader.
Google is not going to just rank your site after you created 5 or 10 posts. Google needs to know that they can trust your website, and for them to do this they need to see you put out original and helpful articles on a regular basis.
Do you have to be a writer to be a successful online affiliate marketer?
No, you do not. If you are just starting out, then you might not be good at writing, but as time goes on, you will become better. As they say, practice makes perfect, right?
The main idea is to focus on helping people.
Think of it as talking to a friend and helping them out. That is really what blogging is all about. Reaching out to people.
Is Wealthy Affiliate a Scam? My Personal Opinion
Why do people call Wealthy Affiliate a Scam?
Some people say that the training at Wealthy Affiliate does not work. I have shown you some amazing success stories.
The main reason I believe people say this is because members have not given it a fair chance. If you treat your online business as a hobby, and not as a business, then you are not going to get the results you are looking for.
You have to be committed.
It takes TIME to have a blog that gains traction and is making money. Depending on the niche you select, it can take anywhere between 3-9 months to get your first commission.
It’s not hard to make money with Wealthy Affiliate. It just does not happen overnight. If you implement the training and take massive action every day, you will have a profitable online business on your hands.
Just Do Not Give Up! You might be closer than You Think!
