What is Wealthy Affiliate? Scam or Legit [A Review]

We may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post.

Maybe you’ve been hearing or reading about Wealthy Affiliate: maybe from friends, loved ones, or even from pros in the Internet Marketing Industry.  After hearing this buzzword, you may be curious to know “What is Wealthy Affiliate?”.  If so, you’ve come to the right place.

One year ago, my family experienced an abrupt tragedy.  My 10-year old son’s heart rate went down to 30 Beats-Per-Minute, and we didn’t know what to do.  I had separated the military two years prior and had been running a Marketing agency for just under a year.  When my son got sick, it changed my outlook on my profession completely.

I felt like I could no longer balance family and work the way I had been because my kids would become a larger priority, but what would I do?  I hadn’t built my business to the point where I could outsource much of the work, I didn’t have some “passive income streams” that were large enough to support me, and my current profession required pretty steady hours of operation.  How would I transition from freelance marketing work into work that was sustainable even while navigating this family tragedy?

I began to do research and came across the concept of affiliate marketing.  Basically, you make a commission in exchange for referring a customer to a product or service.  It sounded simple, but when I tried it, it wasn’t quite as simple.

I wrote my content, embedded my affiliate links, and did my best at driving traffic, but wasn’t getting the results I’d like.  So, I began doing research for “affiliate marketing training”.

I found several course creators.  Most were charging nearly $300 for the affiliate marketing course alone.  Some had a Facebook group that was supposed to serve as support.  I bought one and was madly disappointed.

It barely scratched the surface, then required another $299 for the “BIG SECRET”, then I came across Wealthy Affiliate.

What is Wealthy Affiliate? An Overview

Wealthy Affiliate is an internet marketing platform that offers all of the tools, training, and support you need to start an online business and begin making money online.  They specialize in monetization thru affiliate marketing, but don’t let that fool you, there’s training there on e-commerce, dropshipping, running a local business, and so much more.

The Training

Some flagship topics they teach including:

• Search engine optimization
• Pay-Per-Click Advertising
• How to Create a Website
• How to Create Content for a Website
• How to Convert Visitors into Paying Customers
• Traffic Generation Strategies
• and so much more…

In fact, Wealthy Affiliate offers training created by the founders (the Internet Marketing Certification and the Affiliate Bootcamp), and in addition to that, there’s weekly live training (for premium members only) and every member can create training whenever they want.  In total, there’s probably millions of hours of training on every internet marketing topic you can conceive of.  So, if you have an internet marketing question, the Wealthy Affiliate search bar could become your best friend!

The Community

One huge thing that sets Wealthy Affiliate apart from other affiliate marketing course creators is the plaform operates like a social media platform except it’s members are all attracted to online business and affiliate marketing.  As a result, you’re able to network with some of the top minds in the affiliate marketing industry, get amazing feedback, encourage one another, and share your success.  If you can’t find a topic by searching, you can post your question for the community to respond, and most likely, you’re question will be answered in minutes (or even seconds!).

It beats a Facebook group for networking 10000s of time!

The Tools

Added to one-of-a-kind training and a highly engaged and supportive community, Wealthy Affiliate also offers it’s members all of the tools necessary to start an online business and earn revenue from it, including:

• Domain registration (for sites hosted thru WA)
• Website hosting
• Free website Transfer
• Very fast technical support
• Weekly live training with Q&A time
• and, a Keyword Research, Search Analysis, and Competitive Analysis Tool

With the tools offered, you should be able to identify what’s in demand online, create content to serve the online users, drive traffic to your website, and earn revenue!

Look how easy it is to create a website!  Literally, in 30 seconds, you can have a live website for your business. Take a look…

The Support

The support at Wealthy Affiliate is almost unparalleled.  It’s 24/7, around the clock assistance with your online business.  There are many ways to get questions answered, solve problems, and get help including:

• Live chat
• a Community Question Polling Tab on your profile
• The Wealthy Affiliate Support Team
• Private Messaging (only for premium members) to anyone on the Platform
• Support of the Founders
• Support of your referring Affiliate

The Founders

After 13+ years of maintaining a present in the forefront of the affiliate marketing industry, you’d think the founders would turn into the guys that you see flaunting cars, houses, and vacations all over the internet, but they’re not.  Even though Wealthy Affiliate has more than 1 Million members and the founders are certainly set financially, they’re still in the trenches helping people out.

In fact, you’ll see them helping in the community nearly every day. They’re constantly taking the insight they get from questions, concerns, and the evolving industry, and making the platform better and better.  Kyle and Carson are two entrepreneurs worth watching and learning from.

How Does Wealthy Affiliate Work?

The basic skeleton that the training revolves around is 4 steps: choose an interest, build a website, get traffic, and earn revenue.  While the training goes into great depths to explain how to choose an interest, how to build a website, and so on, those 4 steps are a very basic summary.

Added onto the basic 4-steps, Wealthy Affiliate teaches so many ways to monetize your website by promoting products and services that are relevant to an audience with your interest.  The main way they teach to monetize your website is thru affiliate marketing.

In summary, affiliate marketing is when you earn a commission in exchange for referring a person to a product or service.  You don’t need a product or service to do affiliate marketing. You don’t have to offer support or make product updates like a product creator would, which is what makes affiliate marketing a very appealing business model for people who prefer to stay behind the scenes, or who need to stay behind the scenes (because of a hardship like mine).

How Do You Make Money with Wealthy Affiliate?

There’s more than one way to make money with Wealthy Affiliate and here’s a few:

1. Promoting Affiliate Offers thru Blogging

Thru blogging, you’re able to build context, authority, and trust, which is why it’s my #1 favorite way to make money online.  You can write about topics that are helpful to internet users, present a solution to them in a helpful way, and as a result, you’d get a commission.  You can also record content in audio and visual, and the lessons taught at Wealthy Affiliate are equally applicable for that. Wealthy Affiliate is my #1 favorite source for information on how to make money blogging.

2. Promoting Affiliate Offers thru Pay-Per-Click Ads

But, blogging isn’t for everyone.  Some people will be completely turned off by the idea of blogging, creating audio, or creating video.  While the internet certainly required some level of content creation, you can minimize the amount if you get good at PPC advertising.

Wealthy Affiliate’s founder built an enterprise largely on the back of paid advertising, and he teaches you how to run successful ads in his training on the platform.  You’ll learn about Bing Ads and Google Ads primarily, but there an expanding resource center of training on topics like Facebook ads also.

3. Using the Skills for Other Internet Marketing Business Models

While blogging and pay-per-click advertising are demonstrated by the owners’ on a blogging business model, the same principles of SEO, PPC, creating engaging content, and more are relevant to other internet marketing business models like:

• Kindle book publishing
• Ebay sales
• Amazon sales
• Audiobook sales
• Dropshipping
• E-Commerce
• and others…

Once you understand how the internet works, there’s so many uses for the skills all over!

4. Selling the Skills as a Service Provider

Some members have went onto start businesses using the skills as a service provider.  Some people:

• Flip website (like offline real estate properties) and sell them
• Create affiliate websites for others and sell them
• Offer internet marketing services to business owners
• Sell gigs on sites like Fiverr or Upwork
• and the list goes on and on of how you can sell the skills as a service provider.

5. Adding the Skills into an Established Marketing Plan

In addition to the other possible ways to make money at Wealthy Affiliate is merging the newfound skills with an existing business. For example, some people have come with Dental practices, Doctor’s offices, Construction companies, Law firms, or other business, but they want to know how to rank on the first page of Google.

These business owners might currently get customers from offline marketing, but may be missing out on the pool of online customers.  When they come to Wealthy Affiliate, the training can teach them how to take their established business, rank their website, and get more traffic and sales as a result.

6. Promoting the Wealthy Affiliate or Jaaxy Affiliate Programs

Wealthy Affiliate also has a very generous affiliate program; offering 40% recurring commission for each referral.  If you write about topics like making money online, affiliate marketing, personal finance, business, or other relevant topics, it’s likely you can make money blogging about Wealthy Affiliate and referring people there.

How Much Can you Make with Wealthy Affiliate?

While some of these examples aren’t Wealthy Affiliate members, they are online entrepreneurs who are applying what Wealthy Affiliate teaches.

Scenario 1: Avacadu [Monetized with Amazon Affiliate Program and a Few Products]

The potential is astounding.  Let’s do some basic math taking the five scenarios listed above.  Let’s say, you create a website about blogging or healthy living and monetize the site with tools for bloggers, Amazon’s Affiliate program and one or two Amazon FBA products.  In that case, you can make an income similar to the entrepreneurs over at Avacadu.com.

According to their income report, they’re making well over $100,000 per month blogging!  They started their blogging journey in 2015 and have achieved quite a feat in 3 years.  While they are an anomaly, the potential is what you asked for, right?

In summary, the sky is the limit.

Scenario 2: MrRonnie [Made $5000+/Month Within 3 Months!]

To finish reading this article on Wealthy Affiliate <<CLICK HERE>>

Mr. Ronnie is a Wealthy Affiliate member who chose to use pay-per-click advertising to promote affiliate offers rather than blogging, and he definitely had quicker results than most people who go the organic route.  His first month, he describes losing more than $1000, his second month he broke even, and his third month, he was profiting to the tune of $5000/month!  If he could create a $5000 per month income in 3 months, what could be done over time?

Again, the sky is the limit.

Scenario 3: Amazon or the Forbes List [Using the Skills for Other Internet Marketing Business Models]

When you consider all of the different business models you can apply the skills of search engine optimization or PPC marketing to, it’s no way to calculate the earning potential.  When you think about the growth of the internet, companies like Amazon are using the same skills to grow billion dollar companies in less than two decades!  Just take a look at the Forbes list for richest people in the world.  The majority of those on the list are people who have followed the growth trend and served the internet market a useful product or service.

Another example that the potential is endless.

Scenario 4: Selling the Skills as a Service Provider

When you consider that you learn many of the skills to offer web design, search engine optimization, Google submission, pay-per-click advertising, and overall lead generation online, you’ll find many people who will pay you for that.  On low-end sites like fiverr, you can make a full time income selling services like SEO management, web design, content writing, or others.  Then, if you leave from there and go to places like Upwork, in your local market, or sell services on your website, you can be well on your way to 6-figure months if you’re serious.

Scenario 5: Adding the Skills to An Existing Marketing Plan

Let’s say for example, you own a lawn care service and you charge $50 for most lawns.  Typically, you get your customers from word of mouth or by going door-to-door, so you’re making some money, but you’d be doing much better if you had a more consistent customer flow.

You join Wealthy Affiliate, learn to make a website, and get ranked in the search engines in your area for “lawn care service near me”.  If the term “lawn care service near me” gets 1000 searches per month and you get 10% of those people as buyers thru your website, then that could earn you an additional (50×100) $5000 per month!

Similarly, if you had another business model, you could expect the same math as a baseline hyptothesis.  There’s lots of potential for local businesses who learn the skills Wealthy Affiliate teaches to increase their incomes by quite a bit.

Scenario 6: Promoting Wealthy Affiliate [Two Recent Case Studies]

Added to the other possible ways to make money thru Wealthy Affiliate, their 40% recurring commission has created many win-win scenarios within the platform.  An affiliate joins and has a great experience, they refer someone else who signs up, and the referring affiliate makes money for as long as the recipient stays.

Since the retention rate at Wealthy Affiliate is an average of 8 months, affiliates have alot of potential to earn a stable income.  For example, here’s two recent success stories…

Grace (username Little Mama) was a professional Accountant that turned into a stay-at-home mom of two.  She made money on Etsy selling dolls at one point, but she didn’t enjoy the work.  She decided to try Wealthy Affiliate after doing some research and caught onto what was taught.  She built a website, Work Anywhere Now, and began blogging aggressively.  Within two years, she was earning more than $5k per month!

Jerry (username JerryHuang) was a soldier in the military of Singapore.  He dropped out of college and made his parents quite upset. Deep down inside, he always wanted to start a business, but he didn’t have much of a budget.  He did research and found Wealthy Affiliate. He started promoting Wealthy Affiliate training on his website and he’s had months as high as $8k after two years of work!

Can Anyone Make Money with Wealthy Affiliate?

No! I don’t have an exact count of how many people haven’t made money, but I can assure you that hundreds (or maybe even thousands) of people haven’t made money with affiliate marketing.  The people who don’t make money get those results because:

They Don’t Develop their Skills as Content Creators

Most people don’t start out being good at content creation.  It takes practice! Some people want to skip the evolution process and jump from being horrible at english into being a pro overnight, and it doesn’t work like that.  Whether you choose to write blog posts, create audio content, create video, or post ads, you have to practice and improve.  When you first start, you may not be good at it, but continue hustling along. Don’t be like the quitters who don’t make money!

They Don’t Have a Good Work Ethic

Unfortunately, there are loads of scams about making money online. The scammers say:

• “You can get rich overnight”
• “Making money online is quick and easy”
• “There’s no skill required to make money online”
• and a bunch of other jibberish!

In fact, being an online entrepreneur is a profession similar to being a doctor, lawyer, auto mechanic, salesman, or anything else.  It does require skills, and you have to practice to acquire skills. The people who come to Wealthy Affiliate that want easy and quick money don’t tend to make a good match because the process that’s taught is increasing your skill level and requires self-discipline.

They Get Distracted By Other Metrics Aside from Money

In the online world, there’s lots of vanity metrics: social media share, pageviews, sessions, awards earned, etc. Then added to the metrics all online entrepreneurs can acquire, Wealthy Affiliate has perks that are supposed to reward behaviors where you’re progressing in your business.  For example, there’s a ranking system that ranks people who are helpful in the community: those who create helpful training, those who blog on the platform, those who answer others’ questions, and so on.

Some people lose focus of making money, and focus on vanity metrics instead. Some vanity metrics are transferrable to money, but often times, they aren’t.

How Do I Get Started with Wealthy Affiliate?

Those case studies probably have you eager to get started, but I haven’t shown you how.  To get started with Wealthy Affiliate, you CLICK THE LINK HERE, then you’ll be taken to this screen…

 

If you join thru MY LINK, I’ll be your coach inside the platform to help you along the way.  You’ll enter you’re full name, email address, password, and username, and your FREE account will be created.  During the first 7 days, you’ll have access to premium features, and for $19, you’ll be able to have a full month of premium membership.  After the 7 days is up, you’ll downgrade to a basic free account.

 

Here’s a basic breakdown of what you get Free vs. Premium:

 

When and How Does Wealthy Affiliate Pay?

While Wealthy Affiliate teaches many methods of making money online, there’s one path to making money directly from them: as an affiliate.  If you promote Wealthy Affiliate, you make your money like clockwork on the 1st of every month.  Wealthy Affiliate has a 13 year record of on-time payment for their affiliates, so there’s no need to worry about whether or not you’ll be paid.

The Good & the Bad

The Good:

PRO #1: Great training

PRO #2: Lots of Support

PRO #3: Great tools

PRO #4: They teach a sustainable way to make money online and have loads of success case studies as proof it works

The Bad:

CON #1: It’s not a set-it-and-forget-it System

CON #2: It requires hard work

CON#3: There’s people of various skill levels giving advice, so you have to be careful who you listen to

Who is Wealthy Affiliate For?

Wealthy Affiliate is for the person that is willing to put in the hard work for the next one to two years in order to get pay off for nearly the rest of their lives.

Who is Wealthy Affiliate Not For?

Wealthy Affiliate is not for:

• Businesses owners who are too busy to go thru the training and implement it.  In this case, they should hire a marketing agency
• Those who prefer to hire out the marketing without understanding it
• The person who doesn’t want to work hard
• People who want everything given to them

What Are Common Complaints About Wealthy Affiliate?

While I’m a big fan of the platform, I have to be honest that they do get complaints. Some of the complaints include:

Why Don’t We Get More For Free

While the platform offers a lifetime free account where you get 10 free training lessons and two free websites, there are people out there that want more freebies.

My Site Went Down

While technical issues will be a problem regardless of where you go, Wealthy Affiliate does an amazing job keeping downtimes extremely low.  Most often, when a site is down it’s because the owner has downloaded incompatible plugins that have crashed the site.  In this case, the site support will help you deactivate the plugins and restore your site to function.

Scammers are Messaging Me!

From time to time, I’ve seen people who try to exploit the engagement and safety members feel at Wealthy Affiliate.  We’ve had Nigerian scammers who request people to send money or pay services they’ve never heard of.  We’ve also had weird people send harrassing messages.  The great thing about how highly engaged Wealthy Affiliate is, is that once a scammer is identified by one member, most likely, they’ll post or notify the support staff, and the person (or people) will be banned within less than one day.

After You Go Premium, You Can’t Downgrade Down to a Free Membership

The free membership is a lifetime offer.  You get 10 free training lessons and two free websites, but if you want the remainder of the training and tools, you have to upgrade to premium.  Some people make the choice to upgrade, but due to their personal finances, they decide after they’ve learned the processes, they’d still like to be involved on the platform, but they want to do so for free. Wealthy Affiliate doesn’t work that way. It’s more in the likes of an association membership for your new industry (“online entrepreneurship” or affiliate marketing).  Once you make the decision to go premium, there’s no going back.

The Owners are Too Optimistic

Mentality is behind success in anything.  If the Wealthy Affiliate owners hadn’t been as optimistic about their success, it’s likely they wouldn’t be where they are. As a result of their massive success and their training, they impose the same optimism onto others.  You’ll hear them say “I believe you can do this”, or “At the rate you’re going, you can make a great living online”.  There offer alot of encouraging feedback and have a great deal of belief in people who have a work ethic.

Some people get upset about their optimism saying it’s inflated or that they should directly say “we don’t believe you’ll make it” to some people. While it’s true that some people some to Wealthy Affiliate with very low skill levels, who’s to say they can’t improve, or they won’t put in the work to improve?

The Process is Too Hard

Making money online is very much like making money offline, but many people are still remembering the times where the internet was less competitive.  Some course creators make false claims based on their experiences decades back when there were very few people who knew how to create content online.

Wealthy Affiliate and the members demonstrate that it takes about two years of consistent work to build a full-time income online. For some people, creating content for two years is too hard. For people who have the mind of an investor, they imagine 2 years of work in exchange for location independence, schedule flexibility, and financial independence as a worthwhile endeavor. It’s really up to you.

What Are Common Positive Feedback About Wealthy Affiliate?

My Site is Indexed

Success posts are posted nearly every day with members who post titles like “Google found me” or “My site was found”.  The members are having lots of success getting indexed into Google.

My Site is Ranking

After being indexed, it takes keyword research, content, and consistency to earn rankings. Despite that, Wealthy Affiliate members are experiencing lots of success: many 1st page rankings, many 1st position rankings, and lots of traffic as a result.

Made My First Online Sale

From mere change to thousand dollar sales, they’re all exciting because it serves as proof you can make money online. Making money virtually is a different concept than making money offline.  There are many success reports of people sharing their first online sales.

Made my First $1000 from my Site

After the first sale, most people believe they can make 10 more, 100 more, and 1000 more.  The first sale (regardless of size) is so motivating! Once members get past the first sale and hit $1000, they’re quickly on their paths to a full-time income, and there’s lots of people who have experienced their first $1000 online as a result of WA.

Making a Full-Time income!

The epitome of making money online is to make a full-time income for most people.  Some will go further to grow a fullblown enterprise, but once members achieve their full-time income, they’re likely to have:

• location independence
• a feeling of genuine accomplishment
• and a big weight lifted off their self-confidence and finances.

They believe “I can make a full-time income from anywhere in the world.  What a great feeling!

What’s The BBB Saying About Wealthy Affiliate?

As a company whose been in business for 13 years, it’s a very noteworthy thing that Wealthy Affiliate was earning very high BBB ratings.  Unfortunately, there are many knockoffs like Wealthy Affiliate Programs LLC and Wealthy Affiliates who are not earning such high ratings.  A year or so back, the owners decided that the BBB was a scam operation because they force owners to pay for ratings.  As a result, Wealthy Affiliate (based in Vancouver, BC) no longer has a BBB listing. They didn’t like the “pay to play” model rather than sincerely protecting consumers.  Read more about how the BBB works  here.

Wealthy Affiliate Review Video

Here’s a playlist where you can see a walkthru and breakdown.  This video will help you out. Enjoy!

Wealthy Affiliate Price

Wealthy Affiliate has flat rate pricing with no upsells.  You’re either a free member, a monthly premium member ($49/mo), a bi-annual member ($234/6-months), an annual member ($359/yr), or you take advantage of the annual black friday offer ($299).  Here’s how it all breaks down…

My Final Opinion of Wealthy Affiliate

Overall, Wealthy Affiliate is an amazing platform.  They’re by far my #1 Recommendation for:

• Affiliate marketing training
• SEO training
• PPC training
• Internet Marketing Training
• or, Overall training on How To Make Money Online

If you’d like to Begin Making Money Online, TRY WEALTHY AFFILIATE. It’s FREE to try, so there’s no risk.

<<CLICK HERE>>

No credit card is required.

Wealthy Affiliate at a Glance…

Website URL: www.wealthyaffiliate.com

Website Name: Kyle and Carson

Owners: Kyle and Carson

Price: FREE, $49/month (for premium), $234/bi-annual (for premium), or $359/year (for premium)

Overall Rank: 98 out of 100

VERDICT: Recommended

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Still unsure? check out the Money Growing Mom’s Official FREE Make Money Online Guide!