Is Wealthy Affiliate the Real Deal? 

(My Honest Wealthy Affiliate Review for Newbies)

Is Wealthy Affiliate the Real Deal?

Here is my honest Wealthy Affiliate review for newbies, or for any person who has a strong desire to learn the right skills for making money online in the world of affiliate marketing and beyond.

What is Wealthy Affiliate? 

Wealthy Affiliate (WA) at its core is a complete “online university” where you take “follow-at-your-own-pace” online courses as you go. There are over 120 courses included in 12 levels of the main training.

Although Wealthy Affiliate members come from all different backgrounds, the official main training is designed to be most helpful for beginner marketers.

The core principles of the training is geared toward helping new online marketers (“newbies”) first identify their passion niche, and then teaching them how to create a profitable online business in any niche they have a passion for.

Once their passion niche is chosen, the rest is accomplished by teaching newbies how to:

In a word, Wealthy Affiliate teaches the newbie marketer the blueprint to affiliate marketing success!

Within Wealthy Affiliate, there is a wonderful worldwide community of 1.5 million + members strong and growing in place that are willing to help you along on your journey.  You can ask the community questions in blogs, in Live Chat, in private messages, or by submitting questions on the platform.

Through Wealthy Affiliate teachings, the emphasis is definitely how you can make money online by creating a WordPress website from scratch and teaching you how to build a profitable affiliate marketing business from there.

But Wealthy Affiliate is so much more than this. In essence, it is a powerful All-In-One platform that can teach you how to make money online in hundreds of different ways.

Wealthy Affiliate Background

Wealthy Affiliate is a Canadian company founded in September 2005 by Kyle Loudon and Carson Lim. They are known in the Wealthy Affiliate community simply as “Kyle and Carson.”

The company started out as a simple Keyword List membership site to capitalize on many people looking for good keyword lists to scale up their online businesses. At the time, PPC marketing was very popular.

Over the following 15 years, Wealthy Affiliate would transform into an all-in-one platform replete with all the resources, training, online tools, and support for anyone to build a profitable affiliate marketing business.

What I Like About Wealthy Affiliate

Here is everything that I like about Wealthy Affiliate.

This is a most comprehensive list of the Features and Benefits that Wealthy Affiliate can provide you as a member. This is also where I will explain in greater detail the helpful features and benefits outlined in the previous section.

1. FREE Starter Membership Forever

When you join Wealthy Affiliate as a Free Starter member, you are allowed to join as a FREE member, and if you choose to do so you can remain a free starter member forever. There is no limited trial period.

As a FREE STARTER MEMBER, you will still receive access to 1-on-1 personal mentoring for the first 7 Days, 1 FREE website that you can build and host on WA hosting, and access to the first 10 Lessons of the Online Entrepreneur Certification course (Level 1).

However, if you want to get the true benefits of Wealthy Affiliate, you will sooner or later need to upgrade to the Premium Membership, which is the Paid program.

That’s what I did when I realized the incredible value if the Premium membership. But this is completely up to you. You can stay a Free Member forever.

2. Premium Membership Pricing

If you upgrade to Premium membership within the first 7-Days as a Free Starter member, your 1^st Month premium payment will only be $19. If you decide to pay monthly after that, the price is only $49 per month if you commit to at least one-year, and only $39 per month if you commit to 6-months.

The best rate is to pay yearly which is $495. The monthly average when you pay annually is slightly over $41 per month, which is by far the Best Deal!

3. Never Any Upsells!

These days every program is always trying to upsell you. Give away a free product to lure you to the higher paid product where the platform makes the lion’s share of the profit.

Not Wealthy Affiliate, they are the total opposite.  Wealthy Affiliate has always been about providing the best value rather than any upsells.

Case in point: your $49 per month Premium Membership fee gives you unlimited access and freedom to all the tools you will need to build a website and to start an online business.

There are never any annoying sales pitches. Wealthy Affiliate membership is all about providing the best online education for ONE price. The only additional fee you will pay is when you want to purchase your own domain name, and that makes perfect sense.

This brings me to my next relevant point, which speaks volumes…..

5. 1-on-1 Personal Mentoring

Any knowledgeable member of the WA community can be your personal mentor. A personal mentor is someone with knowledge in a particular subject who can teach and guide any other member on a particular subject of interest.

All FREE Starter members are allowed 7 days of online personal mentoring within the community, after which they can continue to receive personal mentoring indefinitely if they sign up as a premium member.

6. A Wonderful Helpful Community of 1.5 million + Members

This is one of the best parts of Wealthy Affiliate. It is a wonderful interactive and helpful community of 1.5 million worldwide members, and one of the most helpful communities I have ever been involved with.

If you post any question, you will usually get an answer from someone in the community within a short period of time. You can also reach out through Live Chat, through writing your own personal blog, through comments in someone else’s blog within Wealthy Affiliate, through private messaging (PMs), or by posting a question on the forum.

7. Live Weekly Classes (and 100's of hours of replays)

Every Friday, Wealthy Affiliate Head Trainer Jay Neil conducts a LIVE Interactive Video Masterclass in Wealthy Affiliate on a wide range of subjects. These video classes are supplemental to the main training Online Certification Course and the Affiliate Bootcamp, and include many specific and advanced topics not covered in the official main training.

The supplemental training covered in Jay’s advanced video classes range from topics such as:

• Local SEO
• Email Marketing
• You Tube marketing
• 21 Ways of ranking any website organically on Google Page One in 7 minutes
• Setting up your affiliate links properly on your blog
• Analyzing Google Analytics and Search Console
• Advanced techniques for driving organic traffic to your website through social media marketing
• 101 ways to monetize your blog

Plus Jay has covered specific facets on affiliate marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, video marketing, and PPC advertising. This is not an exhaustive list by any means. These topics mentioned barely scratch the surface.

The 90 minute video classes run every Friday evening on the Wealthy Affiliate platform (with replays of every class available within a few days). Jay will take questions at the end of these classes, where any member can post a question or comment on the feed about the class in the forum.

Jay will try to answer every question he receives, and those questions and answers will be openly discussed for all participants to gain from at the end of each lesson. He occasionally will even “walk through” a real case study demonstration where he will chose a niche, build a website from scratch, and earn some real commissions from Amazon LIVE during his webinar in REAL-TIME. (Amazing!)

All of the classes are archived going back to 2012. YES, you can review ALL weekly video classes on hundreds of different topics going back as far as 2012 to the present!

These special weekly supplemental video classes by Jay are worth the price of Premium Membership alone.

8. Online Entrepreneur Certification Course

This is the Main Recommended Course for all starters at Wealthy Affiliate. The Online Entrepreneur Certification course (OEC) is comprised of 5 Levels each containing 10 Lessons, for a total of 50 Lessons.

The lessons are highly diverse, ranging from how to build a WordPress website from scratch, how to drive organic traffic to your website through major search engines by using effective SEO strategies , the art of creating engaging content through blogging, getting setup with affiliate marketing programs and networks, multiple ways to earn online passive income, social media marketing, content marketing, video marketing, etc.

Whenever you complete each level of the course, you will click all check boxes “Complete” and you will receive a special Achievement Badge of Completion for that level of training.

9. Affiliate Bootcamp

This is the Advanced Course recommended for members who have completed the Online Certification Course (OEC) of Wealthy Affiliate. The Affiliate Bootcamp (OEC) is comprised of 7 Levels each containing 10 Lessons, for a total of 70 Lessons.

These advanced lessons range from setting up your affiliate links properly on your blog, setting up and analyzing Google Analytics, advanced techniques for driving organic traffic to your website through social media marketing, ways to monetize your blog, more on affiliate marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, video marketing, and PPC advertising.

10. Direct Access to the Founders

Kyle and Carson are always available to answer your questions personally. Simply PM them within Wealthy Affiliate, and you will usually get a direct answer.

11. The Ambassadorship Program

The Ambassador Program is a “pay-it-forward” system that rewards the most highly active and helpful members within the community. It represents the Top 25 Wealthy Affiliate members according to rank who are helping people the most, and who are the most active within the community.

The ambassador rank is a dynamic rank that will vary from day-to-day depending on how much you create, help, and are active within the community. For example, on Tuesday I can be Rank # 10, and on Wednesday I can move up or down in rank.

You do not make any extra money by being an ambassador. It is strictly a “pay-it-forward” system where you are rewarded points in 3 categories: Activity, Creator, and Helper. The average according to a proprietary Wealthy Affiliate algorithm determines each ambassador’s rank from 1 to 25.

The top 3 ambassador positions are reserved only for the co-founders and the Head Trainer. Positions 4 through 25 are all available to any of the 1.5 million members of the community. 

As you can see in the above screenshot, I was ranked #4 Ambassador (the highest available position after the co-founders and head trainer) for a total of almost one year. 

And I held the top available #4 ranking position for a record 163 consecutive days.

*******UPDATE********

Recently I have changed my mind about the WA Ambassador program.  Despite its many attributes, actually I now believe it has become a huge distraction.

From what I see consistently, there are too many members (new and old) who have become "obsessed" in becoming WA Ambassadors at the cost of working less on building their online businesses.  To a large extent, this is due to "status"; it is simply sexy to become a Top 25 member of WA in their "elite" Ambassador program. 

But all of this at what cost?

Being a WA ambassador is tempting, and it attracts many new members (and many older ones too) to play the "ranking game." However, it is more about someone's level of activity than actual success. 

You can read all the details in my recent review about the Wealthy Affiliate Ambassador program here.

Don't get me wrong: there are many GREAT ambassadors who are very successful marketers at Wealthy Affiliate and have a great deal of knowledge.

These great ambassadors are the ones always willing to share their experience, expertise, and knowledge within the community.

Now I do not say this in any boastful way,  only to demonstrate the current reality.

I am one of those ambassadors, and have proven myself time and time again in many different ways. The large amount of social proof I have received through my testimonials from others speaks for itself.

However, in my humble opinion a replacement is now needed for the WA Ambassador program. Perhaps this should be an incentive-based program.

 Until then there will be members new and old "chasing rank" for the state of raising status by being "busy" on the platform at the expense of losing productivity toward their businesses. 

12. The Affiliate Program

Wealthy Affiliate rewards members who recruit new members through its own affiliate program that is one of the highest paying per referral affiliate programs anywhere.

For every FREE member that has previously signed up under a “referring member” who later signs up as a Premium Member (a referral), Wealthy Affiliate will reward that referring member with a commission of 50%. This is one of the highest paying commission rates per signup in the affiliate marketing space.

Many members who are signing up other new premium members are making a great sustainable passive income and have become financially independent through the Wealthy Affiliate Program alone.

In addition, those Special Top Performing Members (called “Super Affiliates”) who sign up at least 300 Premium referrals within one given calendar year are each sent to an all-expenses trip to the Wealthy Affiliate Super Affiliate Conference held in Las Vegas every January.

Here at Las Vegas they will meet and interact with the co-founders Kyle and Carson where they will discuss constant new improvements in Wealthy Affiliate, and where they all will be deservedly treated to deluxe luxury accommodations, dining, special entertainment, like true affiliate marketing “Kings and Queens.”

13. Networking

Wealthy Affiliate is an amazing place to network with a worldwide community of 1.5 million+ members. In my 3+ years as a WA member, I have made a boatload of international friends here, and have found this wonderful WA community to be the most helpful and engaging I have ever been a part of.

Like Facebook and other social media, within the Wealthy Affiliate platform you can build up an unlimited following within the community. A counter on your profile will show you how many are following you, and how many you are following.

Within the community you can follow other members’ journey, members can follow your journey, and you can unfollow people.

14. A Safe Place to Learn the Art of Blogging

Premium members are allowed to set up their own personal blog within Wealthy Affiliate. For those who never wrote a blog post before, this is a safe place to test out your writing skills in front of an engaged and helpful community and to learn the fine art of blogging.

Anytime a member writes and publishes a blog post, that post can be seen in the feed of that members followers, and those followers will receive an email notification (if their notifications are turned ON) that a new post was published by that blogging member.

As we progress through 2019, comparable hosting alone is $275 per month.

One would be hard pressed to find a WordPress Managed hosting company in the industry that can compete with the hosting and cost-effective price that is offered at WA.

16. Website Performance Tools (SiteRubix)

SiteRubix is the proprietary hosting platform and Website Creation and Performance tool that runs on the Managed WordPress platform at Wealthy Affiliate.  

With SiteRubix, you can build a website literally within 30 seconds without any coding knowledge. No experience is necessary. There is also strong FREE SSL (Security Sockets Layers), Google Page Speed Insights. Site Speed, Site Protection, anti-spam protection, and caching built in. 

Try SiteRubix here, and see what I mean.  Enter a name for a Free Website, and watch how FAST it BUILD!

There is also a website domain registration tool where you can check the availability and purchase a .com domain for $13.99 or a .net domain for $15.99 through Wealthy Affiliate. With each new website domain you own, you will get a Custom Business Email Address.

17. Keyword Research Tool

Keyword research is perhaps the single most important component to getting your websites and posts ranked high in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). The higher the ranking, the more eyeballs will view your website. The more visitors to your site (“traffic”), the higher the conversions.

If we want to rank high in Google to get more traffic driven to our sites, we have to understand the art of choosing keywords for our blogs. This requires having a good Keyword Search Tool.

For the price of Premium membership in Wealthy Affiliate, the keyword search tool called “Jaaxy” is included in the price.

Jaaxy is by far is the BEST and Most User Friendly keyword tool I have ever used. With premium membership you get “Jaaxy Lite” which includes unlimited keyword searches. Free Starter members are allowed 30 free keyword searches. Even though this is not the top version of the keyword tool (which is Jaaxy Enterprise), this is more than enough for all your keyword search needs to get you ranked high!

18. Member Created Personal Training

Premium members of Wealthy Affiliate are allowed to create and publish their own personal training after three months as a member on WA. Training can be on any topic related to online marketing. This can be presented in the form written tutorials or video training.

Wealthy Affiliate will offer you credits for personal training in return based on the popularity and engagement of your training. These credits can be later exchanged for a small amount of income. It is another great way to help the community.

Personally, I have created evergreen training on Wealthy Affiliate that over one year later is still being praised by the community. In April 2018, I wrote a training called “Turbo Charge your Site Speed.” on how to make your website run faster.

You want social proof? 

To check out what one awesome WA member recently said about my training, click here.  

Where Wealthy Affiliate Can Improve

One of the best things about Wealthy Affiliate is that they are always adding improvements to the platform. The co-founders Kyle and Carson are always listening to member’s feedback to get a feel of where further improvements can be made.

That said, there are still several ways where Wealthy Affiliate can improve their user experience.

1. 24/7 Site Support

Wealthy Affiliate has a 24/7 Site Support that will help you with any technical problems you may be experiencing on the platform. All you need to do is fill out a Site Support Ticket via a PM.

In my experience, the best thing about WA Site Support, is that when you fill out a Site Support Ticket online, you will usually get an answer to any issue via private message within one hour. Great.

However, Site Support will provide complete answers quickly for only the most basic issues. When there are more complex technical issues, the quality of answer you will receive from Site Support diminishes. In some cases, it will be incomplete. They will often write, “Try it now.” Or “Check again.” Without explaining what the problem is. This in my experience can be very annoying.

The good thing is that even for more complex issues, in the end the problem usually gets fixed. Most of the time even within 24 hours.

2. The Hosting Platform

The Hosting Platform at Wealthy Affiliate is slightly antiquated, and is not optimized to the latest version. For instance, currently it is running on WordPress PHP 5.6, which is an older version of the coding language. WordPress current version of PHP is 7.3.

How will this adversely affect our websites? Well, some of the WordPress free plugins (i.e., Child Theme Configurator, Contact Form 7) will not work using the older PHP 5.6 version.

However, there is a way around this. Wealthy Affiliate is now currently inviting members to take part in there Beta which runs on PHP 7.2. This Beta is still in an advanced experimental stage, although it appears to be working fine it has yet to be perfected.

3. Website Engagement Platform (Site Comments)

Wealthy Affiliate has a website engagement platform in place called Site Comments that allows other members of the community to give their own personal feedback about the quality, design, and function of any member’s website.

However, to give a Site Comment you must use up cash credits you build up if you want someone to critique your website. Overall, I have found this platform to be close to useless for me. Many of the comments have been low quality.

The good news is that Wealthy Affiliate most recently made the announcement that they will be improving Site Comments by penalizing and even disallowing those commenters from engaging in the future who in the past have given low quality comments to members.

4. Site Content Writing Platform

The Site Content writing platform is a fairly new addition to Wealthy Affiliate that is supposed to make writing easier for members who have trouble writing. It gives you information to track your own writing progress such as total articles, total words written, spell checker, and includes over 1 Million Free Images you can use to add to your article.

Frankly, I find Site Content to be superfluous and an unnecessary extra step to writing that is a waste of time. I believe Wealthy Affiliate has added this tool to incentive bloggers who write on Wealthy Affiliate regularly to produce more content and drive better SEO to Wealthy Affiliate.

As you can see from the above screenshot, considering that I have published several hundred articles with 100,000's of words, I hardly ever have used it. 

Personally, I track all of my articles and word counts in a Google doc or a spreadsheet. Also, it is easier for me to write directly in my Thrive Architect plugin Content Editor. Even for those who do not have such a plugin, it is still easier to write directly in WordPress and publish there without taking this extra intermediate step of first writing in Site Content.

I get all my Free Images through sites such as Pexels, Pixabay, and Unsplash and then download the ones I need to my computer.

5. Website Structure to Maximize Conversion Rates

WEALTHY Affiliate does not teach members how to maximize their conversion rates through detailing their website structure. I have learned this high level skill through other advanced training, such as Thrive Themes which this site is built from.

Sure, Wealthy Affiliate offers great training on how to build a WordPress website from scratch, how to optimize your content for high rankings through SEO, how to write content for your blog, and how to choose the best affiliate marketing products and programs.

However, where Wealthy Affiliate falls short is on advanced training. Still there are many advanced marketers who are members within the WA community (and who were marketers before they joined) who use the platform to get hosting for 50 websites and to make a few thousand dollars extra per month.

For this reason, Wealthy Affiliate is great for beginner and intermediate online marketers. Nonetheless, it is a great “bang for the buck” and offers phenomenal training.  

6. Measurable Results Take a Long Time

There's no such thing as overnight success.

Those who think its possible (other than winning the Lottery!)  are only dreaming.

It doesn’t matter what program you join. It will take a boatload of hard work in order to first learn then to make a sustainable income online.  

Wealthy Affiliate’s main focus is to teach members how to drive free organic traffic from Google.

This approach definitely takes a lot longer for members to see results compared to using paid traffic methods.

However, driving FREE traffic is always good once you know how to do it consistently.

Social Proof:  How My Personal Training Increased WA Member’s Traffic by 358 visitors in One Day!

Yesterday a wonderful and highly experienced premium member of the WA community published a blog post on Wealthy Affiliate praising my training.

Over one year ago in April 2018, I created a free training on WA called “Turbo Charge Your Site Speed” where I demonstrated to WA members my own personal technique of how to make their websites run faster.

In my training, I openly shared my own personal trial and error experiments which I conducted over a one-month period, and how my end results were astonishing: I was able to raise my site speed from 39 to 99!

She goes on to explain in great detail that by learning how to increase her site speed based on my training she was able to increase her traffic to her website by 358 visitors in one day!

She said that up until she found and applied my training, her site speed always SUCKED.

Today her article she shared with the WA community about how my training worked skyrocketed to the Number One Post on Wealthy Affiliate!

Believe me I don’t say this in any bragging way, but want to demonstrate how there are many wonderful success stories like mine where Member-generated training has helped other struggling members of the community solve difficult problems.

This adds one more reason to a growing list why Wealthy Affiliate is my #1 recommendation.

Conclusion: Is Wealthy Affiliate the Real Deal? 

Is Wealthy Affiliate a SCAM?

Definitely, NOT!!

Most definitely Wealthy Affiliate IS the real deal!

Nowhere else will you ever find a platform with such comprehensive training for such a low price. If you find one anywhere else online, please send the proof here to me.

By far, Wealthy Affiliate is the most cost-effective program for newbies who want to make money online via Affiliate Marketing.

For 15 years and counting, Wealthy Affiliate continues to provide such a comprehensive training system for building affiliate marketing success for such a low price with ZERO upsells.

This is while other touted programs are charging hundreds or even thousands of dollars by offering much less. Many of these programs have even been shut down by the FCC.

Despite any of its shortcomings. Wealthy Affiliate Super Affiliates continue to march on.

Wealthy Affiliate will always be an evergreen platform.

What was once a “keyword list” site that people loved back in 2005 for a cost of $359 per year, is now something that is miles and miles more sophisticated in 2019, and something that is still $359 per year.

This is why Wealthy Affiliate is the Real Deal, and my #1 recommendation.

And the reason why this is the most honest review for newbies.

I am very proud to be a Wealthy Affiliate member and long-time ambassador.

Thank You for reading this long article (lol!), feel free to post any comments about this article you have below.

All comments will be appreciated!

Here is something even better.

Create a FREE account with Wealthy Affiliate by clicking on the button below, and catch me on the inside!

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