If you’re like most people seeking opportunities to make money online, then it is possible that you’ve come across at least one of the numerous reviews of the Wealthy Affiliate program and you are probably curious to find out if the program can truly help you make a killing. If this sounds like you, then you want to read my Wealthy Affiliate review to the end.
Most Wealthy Affiliate reviews portray the program as the best training to help anyone become a successful affiliate marketer. While most of these reviews were not only marketing pieces written by affiliates seeking to earn commission, they failed to talk about the amount of hard work, grit and perseverance required to succeed with it.
Wealthy Affiliate is one of those typical training courses that claims to have the best tools and resources to help you get started on the journey of creating an auspicious affiliate marketing business.
In this review, I will explain what the course entails, as well as provide enough information that you need to make an informed decision whether to sign up for the program or not.
What is Wealthy Affiliate About?
- WA is a training platform that is designed to help people looking to get into affiliate marketing business. Affiliate marketing is a business model where you earn income (commission) by promoting other people’s products or services. As an affiliate marketer, you don’t have to be a producer, or manufacturer of the items you promote.
- In addition to training resources that you find in any typical affiliate marketing training platform, WA boasts of software and website hosting which are designed to ease your journey of becoming an affiliate marketer.
To get started as an affiliate marketer, you need to have a platform (website, email, blog, YouTube channel, or social media) through which you reach your target audience and promote these products or services. You get paid once anyone makes a purchase using your affiliate link.
Is Affiliate Marketing a Profitable Business?
- Depending on who you ask, affiliate marketing can be a profitable business especially if you get the right training and exposure. One of the important factors that determines your success or otherwise in the business is the kind of product or service you promote. While this may be challenging to figure out on your own, a comprehensive affiliate marketing training platform can help you determine the right niche where you can make money.
- In addition, you will need to spend a lot of money and time in promoting the items you’re marketing. Most of the best niches are saturated with many marketers making it the race of the swiftest and the smartest. You have to develop a unique promotional/marketing strategy that will make you stand out from the crowd of competitors aiming for the same market like you.
Having said that, the biggest question is, can WA help you make consistent income online?
I will resist the temptation of imposing my opinion on you. Instead, I will leave you to answer the question yourself by providing you adequate information about the program.
Learn more about my #1 recommendation to grow an online lead gen business
here.
Who are the Brains behind the Program?
- WA was founded by Canadian entrepreneurs Kyle Loudoun and Carson Lim and the program launched on September 10th, 2015. Prior to this time, Kyle and Carson met while they were both pursuing undergraduate degrees in computer science in the university.
- Back then in 2002, the duo decided to invest some time into learning how to make money online. After a series of trial and error approaches, they finally figured out a way to make money. They discovered an internet marketing business that got them their thousands of dollars in affiliate commission.
Following their decent breakthrough, they decided to create a platform where they could teach others how to make money by promoting other people’s products or services. Thus, Kyle and Carson officially started Wealthy Affiliate in 2015. Today, the platform has millions of members some of whom claimed to have made money with the program.
How Does Wealthy Affiliate Work?
Wealthy Affiliate is a features-laden website, and it may take time to learn how to seamlessly navigate the platform to get the most out of it (in case you eventually decide to sign up). Apart from the features, there are a number of certification courses that are designed to guide you through the basics of building a website, and driving traffic to your website. Each of this will be explained to help you understand how the platform works.
Let’s start with the features…
Features of Wealthy Affiliate’s website?
Activity Dashboard
- This section of the site is where you can ask questions and get answers from other members of the community. No one is an island of knowledge. You can leverage this option to seek clarification to anything that is not clear to you.
Meanwhile, you should be careful of who you listen to. The community is made up of both newbies and experts. The site is designed in a way that allows veteran members to run classrooms which are forum threads focused on a particular topic.
The Certification Courses
- The certification courses are designed to guide new members through the process of setting up their account and mastering the tools to get results. By clicking the green “Get Started Here” button, you will see an overlay with available courses. Members are required to complete a task before moving to another one.
- The tasks are designed mainly to teach you how to stay focused on the training. For example, the first task requires you to watch a tutorial video on how to use the Wealthy Affiliate while the second is to add a profile picture.
However, most of the learning materials are text-based which can make learning boring. The first lesson, for instance, has around 1,500 words with only two short videos.
Learn more about my #1 recommendation to grow an online lead gen business
here.
Wealthy Affiliate Community
- If anything, Wealthy Affiliate has a vibrant and engaging community where members post questions and receive answers. This helps you to get explanation or clarification on anything you are not clear about. However, getting wrong answers is inevitable as there are many self-styled experts whose knowledge of the business is limited. Thus, you should only listen to real veteran users who know their onions.
Site Rubix
- SiteRubix is the website hosting solution of Wealthy Affiliate. It shows you a few options about how you can create your own website. You can choose an option either to host your website on “a free domain”, “a domain I own” or “Register a domain.” This option can be useful especially if you are a beginner. It gives you the confidence, and guides you step by step to launch a website. However, you are going to have very limited control over the website created on the site. I will recommend that you have your website created outside of the platform if you have the technical know-how.
What Can You Learn From Wealthy Affiliate?
- Wealthy Affiliate is broken down to 5 certification courses. Each of these courses are designed to guide you through the process of setting up your website and driving traffic to the website. The courses are divided into levels including the following:
Level 1: Online Entrepreneur Certification
- This is a 10-lesson training course designed to walk you through the steps of creating a successful online business that delivers results.
Level 2: Building Your Own Traffic Producing Website
- Here’s another 10-lesson course that teaches you how to generate no-cost traffic into your website. Kyle and Carson claim that their traffic generation technique works for any niche. You will soon find out whether this claim is just one the many marketing statements or an expression of truth.
Level 3: Marketing Money
- This training course contains 10 lessons that are designed to walk you through several ways you can earn money through your site.
Level 4: Mastery Social Engagement
- Mastery social engagement emphasizes the importance of leveraging social relationships to generate sales. Therefore, it offers general training on all aspects of social relationships including social media, social marketing and social networking.
Level 5: Achieving Maximum Success through Content Creation
- Here’s another 10-lesson course dedicated to teaching you how to achieve high engagement by creating high quality content that boosts your conversion rate. It recommends outsourcing the task if you don’t have a strong writing skill.
Learn more about my #1 recommendation to grow an online lead gen business
here.
Affiliate Bootcamp
WA has a provision for people who want to earn by selling the program as an affiliate. There are seven phases mapped out to guide them. Anyways, most new students end up signing up for these options and that explains why you have probably noticed thousands of positive reviews on WA.
These phases are quite similar to the general certifications courses we discussed earlier – they only did some tweaking to teach you how to spread the gospel of the Wealthy Affiliate Community.
Here is the breakdown of the seven phases:
- Build your website
- Get your content and keywords in order
- Use Social media
- Get Visual
- Getting more referrals
- Using Bing, Yahoo and PPC for promotion
- Scaling up your PPC campaign
So How Much Does It Cost To Join Wealthy Affiliate?
WA is free for starters and you can get live help for 7 days after which you will be required to upgrade to premium if you want to remain active on the platform. The premium access costs $49 per month or $359 per year if you paid up front.
While the free access restricts you to only two websites, the premium access allows you to have up to 50 websites with other benefits such as one-on-one coaching, live video classes, an earn while you earn option, unlimited keyword searches, and 24/7/365 support.
Wealthy Affiliate: Is it legit or just another scam?
- I wouldn’t say WA is a scam. WA has been around for 15 years with millions and there are a few people who claimed to have made money with the help of the program. Therefore, it will be unfair to call it a scam.
Can you Make Money with the Program?
- There is actually no straight answer to this question. For a program like WA, you may end up being disappointed if you rely solely on the training to teach you everything you need to succeed. This is because WA doesn’t seem to have a specific template or blueprint to guide students into success.
- If I have any objection about the program, it is not because I feel it is a scam, but for my doubt over the relevance of the course content. Maybe I wouldn’t have had much things to say in order to counter some of the claims made by Kyle and Carson if I’d written this review in 2012 when the program was at its peak.
Learn more about my #1 recommendation to grow an online lead gen business
here.
Lately, nothing much has been done to review the course and make sure the lessons align with the current reality. The key component of successful affiliate marketing business is promotion and traffic generation. While WA stressed the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) in generating organic (free) traffic, the concept was approached from an outdated perception. SEO is an evolving field with Google keeping everyone on their feet by rolling out updates every few months.
Email marketing (another key component of affiliate marketing) was only taught at amateur level.
Do I Recommend this Course?
Nope, I wouldn’t recommend WA for anyone seeking to make consistent income online.
For one, WA is a crowded space with millions of users running the same rat race.
Hence the reason I am writing this wealthy affiliate review!
It is obvious that most people are not making money by promoting other products or services and that is why a lot of them resort to promoting WA on their websites.
Also, there is an extremely low barrier to entry (anyone can open a free account) which makes the space become saturated. As a result, there is more competition for you which makes it difficult to make a lot of money.
Also, there is a lot of repetitive content which makes the entire training sounds monotonous and boring. By and large, the program doesn’t offer much unique content that makes it stand out from competitive affiliate marketing courses like Income School Project 24, and Authority Hacker.
What are the Pros and Cons of Wealthy Affiliate?
To guide you further in your decision, I will briefly run through the positives and negatives of the program.
Pros:
Free membership: WA offers free start memberships to anyone who wants to try the program out. Star members have access to live help for the first 7 days, two websites and a personal blog. They also have limited training, support and coaching.
Abundance of tools: WA has a software known as Jaaxy designed to carry out keyword research. Although, this software has limited data and functionalities compared with similar tools like Ahrefs. Meanwhile, it helps users to get started.
A vibrant community: One impressive feature of WA is the robust and engaging community which can help new members to learn faster by seeking advice from veteran marketers.
Reputation: The program is put together by expert affiliate marketers with proven results.
Learn more about my #1 recommendation to grow an online lead gen business
here.
Cons:
Disorganized and outdated training: Some content is repeated many times while some important aspects like SEO, and email marketing are given less attention. But then, neglecting such important components of traffic generation is like building a house on a weak foundation.
For you to make money online through affiliate marketing, it means that you have to push your site to the first page of Google. However, there is no way you can achieve this without a thorough understanding of SEO. Outsourcing this role means that you are to pay an SEO thousands of dollars.
Steep learning curve: There are a lot of bulky materials to read before you can get started with the program. Worse, most of this content is text-based which makes it boring and laborious at the same time.
A little success rate: Apart from Kyle and Carson, only few people can prove they have succeeded with the program. This is partly due to the lack of restriction to entry. Any Tom, Dick and Harry can decide to join with free membership which only succeeds in making competition stiffer. Success rate with Wealthy Affiliate is extremely low.
Is there a Better and Easier Way to Make Money Online?
- Yes, I know of a better and easier way you can make money online.
- I found out about this life-transforming opportunity after a series of attempts to launch my online business without lasting or substantial results. With this business, I make 4-5 figures monthly by helping local businesses or companies to generate leads to grow their business and improve their profits.
While many people complain about how hard it is to get results with Facebook ads, I run high-converting ads almost every day that generate sales for my clients. Because they get results on their ad spend, I earn a steady flow of income. I learned the tricks and strategy via a program called the Local Marketing Vault.
What is the Local Marketing Vault?
The Local Marketing Vault is a program that shows you how to conveniently generate qualified leads for local businesses using an easy to replicate funnels and Facebook Ads. With Local Marketing Vault, you can easily make 4-5 figures monthly by helping businesses to get leads.
Wondering how profitable lead generation is?
Local businesses are always looking to get new customers to expand their customer base and make more profit. That makes your service as a lead generation expert a vital one in the process.
Lead generation business allows you to earn consistent income monthly for as long as your clients are willing and ready to pay.
The Local Marketing Vault provides you the needed training, and shows you the right tools to easily generate qualified leads using Facebook ads. The program gives you access to pre-built tested funnels to make your task of getting leads much easier.
You should check out The Local Marketing Vault if you’re really serious about making money online. You can read what people who’ve succeeded with the program are saying HERE.
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