Wealthy Affiliate Review – Will It Work For You?

Hey there! Welcome to my Wealthy Affiliate Review for 2024.

I spent 40+ hours digging deep into the Wealthy Affiliate program, as a Premium Member, to find out if it offers enough high-quality training…

…for someone completely new to affiliate marketing to achieve success!

I ranked it mostly on the quality of training content, but also on usability and value for money.

Ready to find out if Wealthy Affiliate can put you on the fast-track to affiliate marketing success?

Let's get to it!..

Wealthy Affiliate Review – Key Info

So What Is The Story With Wealthy Affiliate?

Wealthy Affiliate offer an all-in-one platform for people looking to get started in the highly exciting but also highly challenging world of affiliate marketing.

In Wealthy Affiliate's own words…

Does the Wealthy Affiliate program deliver on that promise?

As a Free Member, there is a serious limit on the amount of content you can access.

As well as how much of the resources package you can get your hands on.

I found the free membership limits were set so low…

…that I had to sign-up as a Premium Member to really find out what Wealthy Affiliate teaches.

As a Premium Member, you get access to all of the affiliate training modules on the WA training platform…

…plus web hosting, site builder software and a keyword research tool.

And that's all good!

I see the attraction this might have, if you're just getting started building your online business.

I get why someone totally new to internet marketing might want all of these affiliate resources within one membership package…

…because it makes getting out of the blocks all seem pretty easy!

But…getting your hands on a bundle of internet marketing resources is not the key to online business success!

And it never will be!

Becoming a successful online marketer and building profitable websites requires you to learn some high-level skills in a few massively important key areas.

Get these wrong and your website will be living on page ten of Google forever, at best!

Unless of course you choose to buy yourself onto the front page by paying for traffic.

This is a cash burning exercise to be used with extreme caution and a lot of budget control.

You wouldn't believe how quickly you can burn through a couple of thousand bucks with a PPC campaign!

Is Wealthy Affiliate A Scam?

Okay, they do some serious glossing-up of how easy it is to get started in affiliate marketing.

And I think that people new to affiliate marketing get a bit seduced by the importance Wealthy Affiliate like to put on how quickly members can get a website up and running etc.

Whereas in reality, this stuff is of very little value!

You can choose to join as a Free Member, so there's nothing scammy there.

Or you can join as a Premium Member for $49 per month (and you can leave at any time), so I can't see anything scammy there either.

Not a scam!..in my opinion, but not a great training program either.

How To Make Money With Wealthy Affiliate

WA's online training is basically teaching you two ways to make money online:

• Build your own niche site (in a niche you've selected) and earn affiliate commission from relevant third-party affiliate programs;
• Promote Wealthy Affiliate itself and thereby earn affiliate commissions from the WA affiliate program.

What's Inside The Members Area?

There's a lot of training material to get through in the WA program, which is made up of five parts, as follows:

1. Online Entrepreneur Certification (Multi-Module Core Program)
2. Affiliate Bootcamp (Multi-Module Core Program)
3. Live Webinars
4. Site Rubix
5. WA Community

Below, we will go into a little more detail as to what you will find inside each of these five parts.

But keep in mind that it is the first two parts, the ‘Online Entrepreneur Certification' program, and the ‘Affiliate Bootcamp' program that make up the core affiliate training.

#1. Online Entrepreneur Certification (5 courses, 50 lessons):

• Level 1: Introduction – 10-lesson introduction that takes you through the steps of creating an online business.
• Level 2: Building Your Own Traffic Producing Website – 10 lessons on acquiring no-cost traffic via search engines.
• Level 3: Making Money – 10 lessons on the different ways you can earn money from a website.
• Level 4: Mastery Social Engagement – 10 broad lessons on many of the aspects of social media.
• Level 5: Achieving Maximum Success Through Content Creation – 10 lessons on creating engagement through content.

You progress through each course by completing specified tasks, and then move on to the next lesson.

Here's a quick snapshot of how the ‘Introduction' module looks when you first land inside it:

This is not a course you can fail, it’s put together to provide some basic knowledge and to get you building some momentum.

While the above material is all about internet marketing generally;

The following part of the training is all about how to build a business by referring others to Wealthy Affiliate…

#2. Affiliate Bootcamp (7 courses, 70 lessons):

• Bootcamp Course 1: Getting your business rolling;
• Bootcamp Course 2: Content, keywords and conversion;
• Bootcamp Course 3: Giving your site social value;
• Bootcamp Course 4: Get Visual. Get Aesthetic. Get a Brand Through Media;
• Bootcamp Course 5: Knowing your audience and catapulting your referrals;
• Bootcamp Course 6: Bing, Yahoo, & The Power of PPC;
• Bootcamp Course 7: How to Scale Successful PPC Campaigns.

And here's a quick snapshot of the layout you'll see when you enter the first module of the core ‘Bootcamp' program:

In addition to the core training, there's a load more lessons available inside the member's area.

A lot of this extra content seems to be put together by other Wealthy Affiliate members.

#3. Live Webinars:

Each week, one of Wealthy Affiliate’s successful members hosts a live webinar on a variety of subjects all related to building an online business through affiliate marketing.

All of the webinars are both shown live and recorded.

So you don't have to miss out on seeing them, just because you might have been unable to watch live.

#4. Site Rubix – Hosting & Website Building Solution:

The Site Rubix platform is Wealthy Affiliate's hosting and site building solution.

In here you can buy and host a domain, as well as host a domain that you may already own.

This is also where you come to build your new website.

Apparently you can build a website an under an hour!

Maybe so, but I can promise you it will be awful and won't get any traffic.

If you're not too confident when it comes to the technical side of things, this ‘all-in-one' package is probably a pretty attractive option.

It also keeps it very uncomplicated for anyone who is totally new to online marketing.

A sound option if you want to test drive whether the whole affiliate marketing thing really is a road you want to go down.

But it's definitely not an option I would take up.

I like to have full control over my websites.

I definitely wouldn't want them connected to anything other than just my site hosting provider subscription.

Jaaxy – Keyword Research Tool:

I've been doing this internet marketing and SEO thing for a few years now, and up until signing-up with WA, I'd never heard of Jaaxy.

Not that it's the be-all-and-end-all, just because I haven't heard of something, but it is kind of odd.

Odd seeing as how WA founder Kyle claims it to be an “internet marketers dream research platform”.

Anyway, let's park that little whinge of mine…

…is Jaaxy any use as a keyword research tool?

Well, let's first rule out it being any use if you are in Wealthy Affiliate on a free Starter Membership.

If you're signed up for free, you only get Jaaxy Starter, which is pointless, because you only get 30 keyword searches a month.

I use 30 keyword searches in an average morning, so if you are real serious about affiliate marketing, this isn't going to get you very far.

So what about Jaaxy at WA's Premium Membership level?

Any good?

I compared Jaaxy with the two keyword research tools that I use on a daily basis:

Ahrefs and KWFinder.

I looked at how many high-quality keywords were generated, given each seed keyword.

And I looked at whether the ‘ranking difficulty' was in-line with what I actually know to be the case.

Yeah, I used keywords where I absolutely know from experience what the ranking difficulty is.

In all 50 cases that I looked at, Jaaxy massively overestimated how easy keywords would be to rank for.

In all 50 cases Jaaxy generated some interesting longtail keywords, but failed to generate more than 10% with buying intent.

So I will not be swapping out mu keyword tools for Jaaxy any time soon.

Oh, I should also mention that even on Jaaxy's highest plan, it only returns 30 keyword suggestions, which is crazy tight!

#5. Wealthy Affiliate Community:

The Wealthy Affiliate community is very active and lively, no doubt about that.

But…this can be both a blessing and a curse!

Sure, everyone on there is trying to be super helpful, but I've seen members clambering to answer questions, even when their own knowledge is clearly pretty thin.

Sounds a bit harsh I know, but it's true.

Some people don't seem to mind this, but it bugs the hell out of me.

Maybe some people enjoy asking questions and generating a whole load of chat around it, without worrying too much about getting an accurate answer.

There is a chance that I'm the oddball here and that I'm totally missing the point!

But hey!..

This is my review, and I think the guys at Wealthy Affiliate could do more to moderate the community and make sure people are getting quality answers to their questions.

My best advice to potential new members here, is this:

Be very careful who you listen to in the community area, make sure you figure out quickly who is knowledgable and worth listening to.

And there are plenty of WA community members that are very knowledgable and well worth listening to, I'm not questioning that for a second!

WA Member Success Stories

You won't have any problem finding Wealthy Affiliate members queueing up to tell you how successful they are online.

But if you spend a little time drilling down into their stories…

…you will find that many of them are telling you about the success they have had marketing Wealthy Affiliate itself, as affiliates of Wealthy Affiliate.

Now you may not see any problem in that.

You may of course think, who cares how they're making their dough, as long as they're making it.

For me though, I find it all a little bit MLMish.

I'm not denying that there are some massively successful Wealthy Affiliate members, of course there are.

And plenty of them have success in entirely separate niches that have nothing to do with marketing WA.

Just be careful who's stories you trust is what I'm trying to say here.

Wealthy Affiliate Pricing

Is WA cheap?

If I had a dollar for ever Wealthy Affiliate review that I read claiming the Wealthy Affiliate training is way cheaper than pretty much all other affiliate training course/programs…I'd be as rich as Kyle and Carson!

I'm not sure how they figure that to be the case.

I'm ruling out anyone staying as a Starter Member on the free plan because that's not getting anyone anywhere.

The whole WA deal revolves around you remaining a member for as long as you keep your affiliate business going.

And that sees you're paying $49 per month as a Premium Member, or $99 per month as a Premium Plus Member.

$588 per year, or $1188 per year, for affiliate training, is not cheap in anyones book.

And it's way more expensive than almost all other affiliate programs out there, with a few notable excepetions!

Is Wealthy Affiliate A Pyramid or MLM Scheme?

Although it certainly has elements of both a pyramid scheme, and a multi-level marketing scheme…

…Wealthy Affiliate isn't actually either.

Close, but not close enough.

Everyone involved with WA, owners, employees, members, hate having this one thrown at them.

But, as long as so many of their members continue to spend their affiliate marketing efforts trying to get other people to join Wealthy Affiliate…

…and as long as WA themselves continue to encourage that, the pyramid/MLM accusation is not going away.

Wealthy Affiliate Alternatives

These are my two most highly rated affiliate courses right now.

Both of these programs will teach you their tried and tested steps of how to build and grow successful affiliate sites.

Authority Hacker: Authority Hacker’s The Authority Site System is bang up to date affiliate training with a focus on niche selection, building out new authority sites, content creation and building layers of traffic sources.

The goal of The Authority Site System is to get you to a point where your authority site is earning you in the region of $2k to $10k per month…what they refer to as a “Stage 1 Authority Site”.

Once you're making that kind of monthly income, you can level up to their flagship program: Authority Hacker Pro.

Affiliate Lab: SEO legend Matt Diggity's outstanding training program is of rare quality and focused on getting you the results you want as quickly as possible.

This comprehensive training program has been built on the back of many years of affiliate marketing experience.

It's regularly updated so that all of the strategies inside are bang up to date, and actually work today!

FAQ's

Wealthy Affiliate Reviews – Not Worth The Web Space They're Written In

It can at first appear difficult to figure out which of the many WA reviews are trustworthy.

But actually it's easy to quickly weed out the ones that just want your commission dollar…

…and are most likely written by WA members after they've been affiliates for about a week, maybe two.

What to look for?..

Scroll down to the comments section at the end of the post.

You will find that some have an absolute ton of comments, mostly added very soon after the post was originally published.

They will also be totally over the top in their raving about the review and of WA itself…I mean, so OTT it's a little embarrassing.

Bingo!

You've just found a review of WA, written by a relatively new member, with very little affiliate experience, who's gone and got the Wealthy Affiliate community to hit his review and leave a bunch of positive comments.

Wealthy Affiliate Review – Wrapping It Up

Without doubt there is a lot of training content inside the Premium Member's area of Wealthy Affiliate.

And a lot of it is fairly decent quality.

But I didn't find it easy to follow, the lay out isn't great and for someone starting out I think it could get pretty confusing pretty quickly.

My 5 biggest problems with the WA training?

#1. Totally new members marketing Wealthy Affiliate

I think the training tends to lead people towards marketing Wealthy Affiliate itself, because it is kind of made to look like this is an easy option…a quick route into affiliate marketing.

I don't think this is great on a few fronts:

• Wealthy Affiliate falls inside the ‘make money online' niche – an extremely tough niche for a new affiliate marketer to get into;
• It encourages new affiliate marketers to start telling other people about how to learn affiliate marketing, like they're seasoned pro's;
• It discourages new affiliate marketers from selecting and researching their own niches, and this is a massively important part of affiliate marketing. Seriously, if you can't find and analyse a new niche idea of your own, you're done before you've even started.

Sure, nobody is forcing anyone down this route! I just feel it's a route that's made a little too easy to go down.

Personally I would advise anyone new to affiliate marketing to find and decide on their own niche.

#2. Building an Email List: Very Little Content

I was really surprised how little training there is inside the WA core material on growing and maintaining a quality email list.

I think this is one of the most important areas of affiliate marketing and it's one that is used by the WA guys themselves.

I cancelled my Wealthy Affiliate membership a few months ago…

But I still receive regular emails from  the guys at WA, so it's a strategy they fully understand and know the value of.

#3. Developing a Content Strategy: Very Little Content

Developing core content for your site is critical, so that the search engines get to understand what your website is all about.

A content strategy needs to be developed for this to happen. If your site is confused, so will the GoogleBot be.

I'm staggered that Kyle and Carson, the WA program owners, haven't got more modules about this on their training platform.

#4. Backlinking Strategy: Very Little Content

Same as what I said above about email lists really.

There is very little inside the training about building high quality backlinks to your website.

This is another area that I see as completely critical for a new affiliate marketer to learn about, so I don't really understand why it's covered so briefly.

#5. Fake Reviews

Encouraging new affiliates to go out and write reviews about online products and services.

Which those new affiliates duly do, with little or no knowledge of the what they are reviewing.

The reviews are fake and it's a shitty thing to do.

Will You Get The Results You Want With Wealthy Affiliate?

If you're really keen on joining Wealthy Affiliate…

Make sure you sign-up with a real understanding as to the amount of time and work involved in becoming a successful affiliate marketer.

Don't sign-up because you have fallen for this…

And please do not get drawn into promoting Wealthy Affiliate itself…

…unless you actually know about affiliate marketing already…just find another niche.

When it comes to providers of affiliate marketing training, Wealthy Affiliate is okay…

…but it’s getting a bit dated now, and they don’t go anywhere near deep enough into a few critical areas.

My Experience: 2.2 / 5

Sure, others may not offer the all-in-one style package that Wealthy Affiliate does! But this is not what will be the deciding factor in whether or not you turn into a successful affiliate marketer.

Niche selection, site structure/content, traffic generation through quality SEO, backlink building and growing a quality email list.

All of the above are in my opinion, the most important skills that need to be learnt by any new affiliate marketer.

It definitely would not be the affiliate training program for me.

Got Something To Add?

Love or hate my Wealthy Affiliate review…

…I'd love to hear from you!

Just jump on to the comments below and have your say.