Wealthy Affiliate Review
Have you ever wished there were easier ways to make money from home?
The internet has rapidly changed the way that businesses function. Online shopping makes up a bulk of the economy in the United States, with some retailers selling more online than they do at their in-person stores. Affiliate marketing is just one of the ways this works.
I’m just a person like anybody else wanting to make money from home. Some of the affiliate marketing tools out there promise to make you rich right away. For the most part, if it sounds like it’s too good to be true, it probably is.
Wealthy Affiliate is a name that you’ve probably heard if you’ve looked into affiliate marketing. But is the platform trustworthy and reliable? It’s important to consider a variety of different factors when you consider whether an affiliate marketing program is right for you:
- Does the platform have features that meet your marketing requirements?
- Can you afford the membership fee to join?
- Do you know enough about affiliate marketing to make this a profitable journey?
This review will explain how to answer these questions. It will also explain how Wealthy Affiliate works and whether the program is worth your time.
What Is Wealthy Affiliate?
Wealthy Affiliate is an educational tool that can be found online. It teaches people everything they need to know about affiliate marketing. There are free and premium membership levels. Premium members have access to more resources and opportunities, but free memberships do still let you access a variety of educational materials.
With a free membership, you get the following materials:
- Webinars
- Study materials
- Live chat sessions
- Lessons centered on different aspects of internet marketing
The training doesn’t just talk about how to get involved with affiliate programs. It also talks about how to use them most effectively. This means learning about content creation, marketing strategies, reaching new audiences, creating your brand, and growing your online brand after you’ve made it.
Some affiliate marketing resources claim that you can get rich right away. These should always be viewed with a healthy amount of skepticism. If a program claims to be too good to be true, there’s a good chance that it is.
But Wealthy Affiliate doesn’t offer those same guarantees. It doesn’t say that you’ll get rich right away. The program instead helps to train you in how to market products, and it gives you the tools and resources to grow your business effectively.
Now, if you’re a beginner in the internet marketing world, you might have more questions. Is the program worth the investment? Does it actually give you effective tools? And how complicated is it? Some programs are built for people who already have a marketing background, while others help teach you the basics even if you don’t know anything about internet marketing.
This review will explain the different features of the program so you can decide whether the setup is right for you.
A History of Wealthy Affiliate
Wealthy Affiliate was first created in 2005 by the founders Carson Lim and Kyle Loudon. At the time, each of the founders had a lot of experience with online marketing and money-making, including internet marketing strategies and blogging.
At the start of its launch, the program was meant to be a membership platform with keyword lists. But over the past fifteen years, it’s grown into a network made up of more than 1.4 million people from a whopping 193 countries. Even if you aren’t in the US, you can benefit from the training materials provided.
More than 23,000 members are given assistance with live chats per day. The program employs more than 1,800 expert coaches who can give you real-time advice, which gives it distinct advantages over many other affiliate marketing educational tools. According to the website, more than 10,000 businesses are built from scratch on a monthly basis.
What Sets Wealthy Affiliate Apart
Many affiliate marketing training tools were launched in the 2010s, when entrepreneurs realized exactly how successful internet marketing had become. The founders of Wealthy Affiliate were ahead of the game. They both saw the opportunities available in internet marketing way back before it was a mainstream means of money-making.
Because the program has been around for more than fifteen years, it has a much more thriving network of resources. The 1.4 million members and 1,800 coaches definitely set this apart from other up-and-coming affiliate programs. If you want a program that has a ton of people who can help you problem solve, you don’t have to look any further than this.
No matter what time of day or night it is, or what timezone you’re in, you can always post your questions and get a timely answer.
By using the live chat option, you can connect with members right away. The premium version allows you to private message other members and coaches as well. Even though the company was founded more than fifteen years ago, both of the founders are actively involved in the community. You can even talk to them one-on-one using the private messages.
The community makes up the backbone of the program, whether you have a free or paid account. The extra community features of paid accounts are definitely helpful. It’s nice that there’s a free membership option as well, though, as this lets you try the resources out to see whether payment is worth it.
Some of the other resources you’re given access to include:
- Domain name registration
- Website hosting
- Website building tools
- Market research tools
- Pre-created affiliate programs that make it easier to set up an online business
This means that not only does the company teach you how to market your website, they also help take you fully through the process from conception to launch. You can learn how to find affiliate programs that work for you, or you can use the programs that are already available through the company.
Free Versus Premium Features
The “freemium” memberships may be a little confusing to some people. What does freemium mean?
Basically, you can access base features by getting a free account. There’s no month-to-month payments, and you still get a good deal of the important marketing content. This is also a way to try the program out to see if you like it before making a full purchase.
Premium memberships give you access to the rest of the features. You pay for premium memberships on a month-to-month basis. There’s significantly more content with a premium membership.
Let’s break this down.
Starter Features
The starter account is the free program. It comes with the following features:
- Two hosted websites
- Regular website backups in case the server goes down
- Training course for beginners
- A personal affiliate blog to get you started
- Phase One of the training for the affiliate bootcamp
- Video walk-throughs and tutorials
- 30 searches using the keyword research tool
- Two training classrooms
- Access to the affiliate program
- Earning money during the learning phase of the course
- Access to one-on-one coaching for the first seven days of the membership
The starter account is designed specifically for people who are just getting started. You can learn a lot of the basics of affiliate marketing without needing to pay for the ongoing premium membership.
Premium Features
When you do decide to get a premium account, you get access to all of the starter features. You also get access to additional features. This type of account is best for people who have consumed the starter content or already know the starter content, and who want to expand their earning potential.
On top of the starter features, important premium features include:
- Private messaging
- Up to 50 hosted websites
- All seven phases of the affiliate bootcamp training program
- A comprehensive website security package for all hosted sites
- Live video classes by expert instructors
- Unlimited searches with the keyword research tool
- Twelve training classrooms
- Twice the payout from the associated affiliate program
- Private one-on-one chat access to the founders
- Constant website support on a 24/7/365 basis
- Access to a platform for receiving website feedback
- Access to a platform for receiving website comments
- Website analytics for your sites
If you can’t afford the premium content, the free content will take you pretty far. But you can see that the premium content does give you access to many more resources, making it well worth the investment.
Drawbacks of the Program
As with any program, there are a few drawbacks. Knowing about these is important because it helps you determine whether the benefits are worth the drawbacks. For me, I’ve found the drawbacks to be negligible, but you’ll have to decide for yourself.
Some programs come with a more comprehensive website builder than the one you get with Wealthy Affiliate. This program’s website builder will allow you to create a site from scratch even if you don’t know any code. But it does have some limitations, and web developers might prefer to use a site that allows for more in-depth customization.
If you’re an experienced marketer, you might also find that you know a lot of the base materials. The seven-phase affiliate bootcamp comes with a lot of dense material that might include things you don’t know, but the program is ultimately designed more with beginners in mind.
A lot of the training is also focused around the Wealthy Affiliate affiliate marketing program. This can make it more difficult to find your own independent affiliate program when you’re marketing, although there is enough training to do so. You just have to focus to get there.
How to Pick an Affiliate Marketing Course to Use
In 2005, many people thought that internet marketing was a trend that would die down. This was a time in which many people in the United States still didn’t have home internet access. But over the past decade or so, affiliate marketing has become one of the most competitive niches in online business.
Because affiliate marketing is so competitive, many people have a basic distrust of affiliate marketing schemes. After all, if you’re getting paid to promote a product, how can you be sure that the product is good?
This means that one of the most important things in today’s affiliate market is to establish yourself as someone credible. You need to give honest reviews that provide the full measure of a product’s benefits and drawbacks. And to do that, you also need to have a concrete business strategy to establish yourself as an authority in your field.
That becomes especially important if you compete with other people in the affiliate marketing game. By taking a training course like Wealthy Affiliate, and by having access to live chats with other members, you have access to instant knowledge that gets you ahead of the game.
It is possible to search the far corners of Google to find the information you need to start affiliate marketing. But if you’re a beginner, it’s hard to even know where to start. And buying separate market research and keyword tools can easily run you hundreds of dollars, even if you don’t invest in an actual course.
The Wealthy Affiliate platform is made mainly for beginner and intermediate sellers. If you know the basics but want to optimize your marketing for better income, you’ll find a lot of valuable information with the premium membership. If you don’t know anything about affiliate marketing at all, you’ll find that the base materials are a very accessible way to get started.
For those who have many years of experience in affiliate marketing, though, you’ll probably benefit more from an advanced course.
Another thing to consider is the tools that come with the course. Some courses have website builders and hosting platforms that will let you build a website from scratch. Since Wealthy Affiliate includes these, it’s ideal for people who don’t have their own website yet.
But if you have a web development background, or you already run a successful website with a different hosting company, the web development features won’t mean as much to you. They’re built for people who have little background in web design or development.
Questions to Ask Before Investing in a Paid Membership
The premium membership for this course requires a month-to-month payment. So the first question you should ask is whether you’ll actually use it. Many people pay for gym memberships that they don’t ever use, “just in case” they want to get in shape. Will you be throwing money away, or will you actually use the resources at your disposal?
Some of the other questions you should answer are:
- Will you use the community-based resources that are available?
- Do you have the capability and patience to learn how to create high-quality content?
- Is the premium membership fee within your budget?
- What are you hoping to learn throughout your experience?
- Are there any features that you won’t make use of? Could another program offer the features you do want at a lower price?
You can also compare different affiliate marketing programs. There are some affiliate marketing programs that you can join for free. A free membership to Wealthy Affiliate does give you affiliate marketing access, but you get double the commission with a premium membership.
An In-Depth Look at the Program Features
The biggest selling point of this program is that it’s the only place you need to go to take your affiliate marketing dreams from idea to reality. The courses will explain how to create content, how to create a highly-trafficked website, and you even get tools for building and hosting your pages.
All of the features work together to give you a more comprehensive experience than many other courses offer. And the community of 1.4 million members gives you access to additional unofficial resources.
I’ve explored the different aspects of the company in-depth so you can see how they compare to other programs.
Education
There are two main courses offered through the Wealthy Affiliate company:
- Affiliate Bootcamp
- Online Entrepreneur Certification
The entrepreneur certification course helps you to journey from beginner to expert in terms of online entrepreneurship. The Affiliate Bootcamp course is focused more around making money by promoting Wealthy Affiliate itself.
Both of the courses have different levels. At each level, you’re taught about a specific important part of how to set up and promote your online business. The courses have a focus on affiliate marketing websites, but they also teach you general information about creating well-trafficked websites.
Online Entrepreneur Certification
This program is designed with five levels. Within each of these levels, there are ten lessons that break down the learning further. Each lesson has a combination of videos and study materials, so the learning process is interactive and fun.
The topics for each of the levels are:
- Getting started with navigating the community and your dashboard
- Building a website that generates traffic
- Generating income
- Learning to use social media for your web presence
- Creating high-quality content with high marketability levels
Level One takes you through everything you need to orient yourself in the community. It teaches you how to complete your profile and access different parts of the community. In addition, you’ll learn how to find your content niche, and you’ll create the basic structure of your website.
This level may seem basic, but it comes with some important tips for your website structure. These help make your site more friendly to search engines.
Level Two focuses on website traffic. This gets much more in-depth about SEO rankings, what search engine optimization means, and how you can organically increase your traffic even before you create in-depth content.
In addition to talking about your website structure, this level explains how keywords work and how to find the right keywords. It helps you learn to use keyword search tools so that you can create richly keyworded content.
Level Three is focused around building your website to make money. You’ve just learned about how to create keyworded content and optimize your website for search engines. So this level teaches you about the kind of content you should create if you want to generate income.
You’ll learn how affiliate marketing works, how different affiliate programs are structured, and how to look for effective ways to make money. You’ll learn about the Wealthy Affiliate program as well. The level is structured around teaching you the most important nuances required to make money online.
All of this will help you create a website that focuses on a specific niche. You’ll develop your strategy for monetization, learn how to rank in search engines, and begin creating content that defines you as an expert in your field.
Level Four teaches you about expanding your web presence by using social media. It focuses on different social media platforms and how they can be used to build your brand. Different websites and apps have very different functions when it comes to attracting traffic.
If you play the social media game right, you can reach a much wider audience than with your simple search engine posts. Knowing how to use social media can help to maximize your web traffic, and it can also build you a loyal user base of people who enjoy your content.
Level Five is all about content creation. You’ve already learned the basics of making content that appeals to your niche and ranks in the appropriate keyword searches. But in Level Five, you learn specific techniques that will help you create visually engaging and mentally compelling content.
Affiliate Bootcamp
With the Affiliate Bootcamp course, there’s training to teach you how to promote Wealthy Affiliate’s program. The goal is for you to make money by promoting Wealthy Affiliate to other people. There are seven levels, each of which also have ten lessons.
Only the first level is available with a basic membership. You unlock the other six levels with a premium membership, which give you more details about optimizing your content for promotion.
There are a lot of topics that overlap with the entrepreneur certification program, so you can take this course even if you haven’t already done the other one. The course also gets more deeply into marketing techniques like pay-per-click advertising.
The main topics covered in each level are:
- Setting up your online business
- Finding the right promotional keywords
- Using social media to increase your conversion rate
- Optimizing your website for the best visual aesthetic
- Creating engaging content to increase your referral rate
- Using Bing and Yahoo to run pay-per-click advertising campaigns
- Scaling your successful PPC campaigns for maximum income
There are also live webinars that are done on a weekly basis by varying Wealthy Affiliate experts. These people have gone through the program and become successful through years of experience. The lessons are a good way to interact with the community and ask questions of experts, although it’s only available through a premium membership.
Website Building and Web Hosting
The goal of Wealthy Affiliate is to be an all-in-one platform by offering website development tools. By using the website builder, you can create your site directly from your profile. That’s a lot easier than trying to narrow down a third party website developer to use, or paying a web development company thousands of dollars.
The tool for website hosting and building is called SiteRubix. This tool integrates with WordPress, which is a platform that’s used for more than one-fourth of all websites worldwide. You can create well-optimized websites without needing to use complicated programming or coding language.
I mentioned earlier in the review that the web builder is a little limited. That’s because you design from a template rather than creating custom pages. But template design is an advantage for people without a web development background. A template website is already optimized for easy reader engagement.
One of the huge selling points of Wealthy Affiliate’s tool is that there are more than 3,000 templates to choose from. No matter your specific niche, you can find a template that works for your needs. And from there, you can customize it for a truly unique website. Doing so only takes a couple of clicks.
That’s a far cry from more limited builders, which might offer just a few dozen templates. It’s also a far cry from extremely flexible builders, which require you to input your own source code and formatting.
I don’t have a strong background in programming. This feature was very impressive to me, because it let me create a structured website without needing to learn code from scratch. Not knowing code is often a big barrier for people who want to create their own businesses, so this is a great way of leveling the playing field.
There are domain registration services as well. You can do any of the following:
- Register an unused domain name for your website
- Use a free, pre-registered domain name
- Move your existing domain name to Wealthy Affiliate for hosting
Both free and premium members are offered a website backup tool in case the servers go down. Premium members also get a comprehensive website security package that offers an additional level of protection against hackers.
When you own a website, you have to spend monthly or annual income to host it. The hosting company stores your data and displays it. Different hosting companies have different packages, which are geared toward people with a variety of different website purposes.
Some of the advantages of the SiteRubix hosting plan is:
- The WordPress integration makes it easier to develop your site
- Websites tend to load quickly, even with high traffic
- There’s an SSL certification included, which is vital for securing your website
SSL certifications are necessary for hosting a website. If you don’t have one, people’s browsers will turn them back when they try to click on your website. They’ll be warned that your site isn’t secure. Not only will that lower your traffic, but it will also work against you in search engine rankings and in building your brand.
One note is that creating and hosting your website through Wealthy Affiliate may make it difficult to migrate in the future. If you intend to use a different hosting service further down the line, you might want to start with one that makes it easy to move.
Research Tools
If you want to run a successful affiliate marketing business, you need to be willing to do research. Good research is what will set you apart from the competition. You need to find out what people want, what products are worth promoting, and what important keywords have a low amount of existing competition.
Some of the things you’ll use research for include:
- Finding your niche when creating your business
- Finding the relevant keywords for your content creation
- Keeping up with market trends
- Keeping up with changes to SEO algorithms for different search engines
- Paying attention to what your competition is doing
Rather than using a third-party keyword tool, the Wealthy Affiliate program uses a research tool that was developed by the founders themselves. The tool is integrated with the larger platform. Searches are limited for free members, but they’re unlimited for premium members.
Keyword research tools are essential when you’re running an affiliate marketing business. Rather than needing to find one for yourself, the tool is available through your profile. This is another way that the company fulfills its promise to be a one-stop shop for starting your business.
The keyword tool functions very similarly to most other keyword tools on the market. You enter your “niche” into the search, and then the search tells you what keywords are most popular and relevant. It also tells you how much competition each keyword has, plus the exact search volume of each phrase.
This isn’t the only tool included. Jaaxy is actually a more comprehensive suite of tools. One of the most important ones is the Site Ranking tool, which helps you track where your site is ranking in search engines. You can look at the rankings in specific search engines, rather than just checking Google.
This tool is especially helpful for beginners who have only just begun using SEO tools for their websites. You get information about where you’re ranking and why, which allows you to take action to improve your rankings. By learning about your rankings, you can greatly improve your traffic and revenue.
The final tool is the Affiliate Programs helper. This tells you about affiliate offers within your specific niche. It includes affiliate programs that aren’t associated with Wealthy Affiliate, and are instead part of their network of co-sponsors.
Community
The community of today didn’t exist when the program was first launched in 2005. But as word of mouth has spread over the past fifteen years, the community has grown to become one of the most distinguishing features. There are almost no affiliate marketing courses with this many members available to network with.
If you want a company that gives you access to community and networking, Wealthy Affiliate has distinct advantages over most of its top competitors. The active community is extremely helpful and constantly available to answer questions. You can find hundreds of testimonials from WA members explaining how quickly they were assisted.
The community is so active because the marketing materials work. People keep coming back after their successes to talk to others. Premium memberships also entitle you to 24/7 support and private messaging, including one-on-one messages with the founders.
Whether you’re a free or premium member, you can use the live chat feature. This brings you into a chatroom where you can ask questions in real time and get answers fast. There are always people online, no matter your timezone or when you log in. That means you don’t have to submit help tickets or wait ages for your questions to be answered.
The chatroom doesn’t exist solely for people to get answers to their questions. There are also intensely social aspects of the site, such as:
- Being able to chat with other people about their personal journeys
- Becoming friends and potential business partners with people whose niches are adjacent to yours
- Sharing your success stories and getting congratulations as your business starts to take off
- Getting motivation from seeing other people’s success stories
- Having a reprieve from the isolation of running your own business online
- Having people to bounce your ideas off and to give you advice on whether you’re going in the right direction
Most people also choose to give back to this community once they’ve gotten past the beginner stages. That’s how the community sustains itself. When you gain more experience and knowledge about what works for your marketing, you can answer the questions of newbies and provide helpful tips.
You are encouraged to give back in the same way that the community helps you. This can be a very encouraging and positive thing. It certainly helps you appreciate how far you’ve come from when you started. But some people who are less social might be bothered by the feeling of being obligated to talk with others.
You’ll get the most out of the platform if you use the community aspects. Wealthy Affiliate is an extremely social platform that’s set up to give you instant community access.
This is great for people who want a constant source of emotional and intellectual support. But if you only want educational course materials for a more introverted approach, you might not like the structure.
Hard Work and Investment
Wealthy Affiliate doesn’t tell you that you’ll get rich instantly. It also doesn’t tell you that you won’t have to work to get what you want. That’s part of how you know it’s the real deal. But it also means that you have to commit to doing the required work.
This isn’t a case in which you can invest in a product, sit back, and watch the dollars roll in. You have to be willing to use the included resources. That means you need to be committed to spending many hours on a weekly basis consuming the course materials and connecting with the community.
It’s a good idea to access the free membership at first. Then, when you know that you’re ready to commit fully to the rest of the training materials, you can upgrade. Whether the features are worth the price depends wholly on how you use them. If you do make use of them, then yes, they’re worth it!
Think about it the same way you’d think about a gym membership. If you buy a membership but never go to the gym, you won’t see any benefits. If you go to the gym but only use the same machine, you’ll see limited improvement. If you go to the gym and make use of all the equipment and training materials offered, you’ll see full-body fitness results.
That’s the same way that the Wealthy Affiliate membership works. You’re given access to all the course materials and community engagement, but you have to be willing to use those things.
Wealthy Affiliate’s premium membership will work best for the people who are willing to do the following:
- Spend several hours engaging in the coursework and studying hard to learn new information
- Attend the weekly webinars and ask questions to get answers from the experts
- Frequently review your materials and refresh your memory
- Use the keyword, search engine ranking, and affiliate program tools to optimize your website
- Practice creating strong content and pay-per-click campaigns using the included information
- Consistently engage with the community, both as a newbie and as a more experienced member
- Learn to be a more effective writer who creates unique content
Most of the content creation techniques are focused on creating keyworded written content. That means that non-writers might struggle to make the most of the lessons. You’ll need to be committed to practicing. If you’re planning to outsource that part to a content writer, then a lot of the educational materials won’t be relevant to you.
Is It a “Pyramid Scheme”?
You can find hundreds of trusted reviews of the WA program. These explain the ways that specific aspects of the training and community helped to promote success. Again, the people who find the most success are those who are willing to put in the work necessary.
One of the biggest concerns that people have is asking whether the company is a pyramid scheme. There are a lot of reasons why it isn’t. Some of the most important include:
- The educational tools teach you how to create an independent marketing business, rather than requiring you to use the WA program
- Free memberships give you access to many basic educational materials and get you started without ever requiring you to make a purchase
- Premium membership payments are mostly to give you access to further educational materials, not to sell you products that you then must sell yourself
- There is no predatory pricing structure
- You can cancel a premium membership at any time or leave the WA program if you feel it’s not worth the investment
Again, you’ll get the most out of it if you’re willing to put in the work. But even though I’ve emphasized that you should be willing to commit several hours a week to your work, you shouldn’t have to slave to get the maximum benefit.
It is important to note that migrating your website might be difficult if you create, launch, and host it entirely through Wealthy Affiliate. The setup isn’t designed for easy migration to new hosting platforms. At worst, you might have to build your site again entirely from scratch.
Because of this, if you don’t want to be “locked into” WA’s hosting company, you’re best off using the WA educational tools while paying for another hosting company’s servers.
Many affiliate marketing courses only teach you how to promote the company’s specific affiliate program. If you want to make money, you’re forced to promote that company alone. But WA’s model isn’t like this. Though the Affiliate Bootcamp course does focus chiefly on WA’s program, the entrepreneur certification does not.
If you want to find your own affiliate program instead of using WA’s, the entrepreneur certification program is great. It teaches you about how to do independent research so you can launch an independent business. You aren’t made dependent on the WA affiliate program.
That’s why I recommend this as a legitimate means of learning about affiliate marketing. Your independence will depend a lot on your choices – like whether you use your own program, invest in a third-party hosting service, or invest in third-party research tools. But ultimately, you have everything you need to launch an independent business.
The bottom line is: Can you earn money with the Wealthy Affiliate program even if you don’t promote WA products?
The answer: a resounding YES.
Success Stories
That brings us to success stories. Any cursory search of the internet will find hundreds of reviews explaining the success people found with WA’s courses.
Now, if Wealthy Affiliate was a pyramid scheme, then you wouldn’t find any successful people except for those who’d used the WA program in their affiliate marketing.
But that isn’t the case! There are tons of success stories from people who opted not to promote WA.
This section of the review will explore the success stories of people who promoted their own researched programs, and also of people who decided to use Wealthy Affiliate’s promotional program.
People Who Don’t Promote “Making Money Online” Programs
Some people make pocket change with their affiliate programs, while others make hundreds of thousands of dollars. It all depends on your niche, how much time you spend creating your content, how comprehensive your marketing campaigns are, and how much traffic you bring in.
Baseball Blog
Baseball might seem like an odd niche for affiliate marketing. You’re unlikely to draw in any professional players, as these people already have gear selected for them. It’s hard to market merch for specific baseball teams, and there’s not a huge market of people looking for baseball gear. Mitts, bats, and balls have long lifespans and don’t often need replacing.
But for Brandon, baseball was his chief area of expertise. He knew how to create unique content because of his pre-existing knowledge. Brandon built a baseball blogging website and then sold it for a significant profit.
In fact, the website made more than $20,000 dollars. That might not sound like a lot when compared to the multi-million-dollar affiliate companies dominating the market – but here’s the thing. The blog only had 50 articles up.
Just 50 total blog posts. When you break down the math, that means that Brandon was making more than $400 for every article. That’s above and beyond the industry standard for content marketing.
Brandon probably could have sold the website for more. But the payout meant that he had thousands of dollars in his bank account. From there, he’s begun creating more websites to gain affiliate revenue and eventually sell. He’s also traveling the world and living the life he wants to live.
One important note Brandon made was that he used affiliate programs who offered a one-year “cookie” life. If someone clicked on a product recommendation but didn’t buy it immediately, that wasn’t a lost sale. As long as they returned and bought that product within a year, Brandon still got the commission.
It’s important to note that these programs use cookie tracking to accomplish this. If someone deletes their cookies and returns to the promotional website, there won’t be any trace that they first visited from a commission link. Therefore, you won’t get the commission from the sale.
Monetized Baby Blog
Tons of stay-at-home moms have turned to online marketing as a way to make money. There’s a huge market for “mommy bloggers,” who share stories about their experiences and offer life tips.
Sarah is a blogger who talks about her experience with motherhood. She describes how WA helped her find a niche, choose promotional products with high commission rates, and use Pinterest to promote her site. Pinterest is a huge selling point for stay-at-home bloggers because it has the largest social media demographic of middle-aged women.
Sarah’s baby blog does well enough to bring in $1,000 monthly. This is a significant chunk of pocket change, especially since Sarah doesn’t have to spend 40 hours per week creating content.
Sarah talked about how she also had a health and wellness blog. This blog lost some of its traffic when Google changed its SEO algorithm. That’s a fairly common experience – Google’s algorithm can update up to 700 times in a single year! By having multiple websites, Sarah was able to weather the lost income with a safety net.
Over 4K Per Month After Just 7 Months of Growth
Amazon has the most popular affiliate marketing program in the world. Signing up is simple – you can promote any product on Amazon for a commission. Because Amazon sells basically everything, you can enter the program no matter what your niche is.
One Amazon review site used WA’s platform and techniques. By the seventh month after launching the site, revenue was up to $4,550 per month. Dylan managed this by making the website his main job. By investing a full work week into affiliate marketing websites, he scaled his business to bring in significant income.
Today, Dylan has sold many different websites after building them from scratch. He also runs several affiliate websites on an active basis, and has created his own keyword strategy. His Amazon reviews discuss the best products for each year.
Time-sensitive articles like this end up getting high click rates and search rankings. They have more user engagement than non-dated articles because people know that they’re relevant.
Dylan also talks about how he focused on using his site to make money. This meant that he reviewed products without creating content that wouldn’t turn into clicks.
Using SEO for Local Marketing Income
Jay is a Wealthy Affiliate member who’s created several webinars discussing his use of their SEO practices. The main WA training courses are focused on affiliate marketing, but the SEO tips and tools make a huge difference. Jay focuses more on SEO than on affiliate programs.
In fact, Jay doesn’t use affiliate marketing at all. Instead, he runs a local SEO business. He creates SEO content for businesses in his area and brings in hundreds of dollars a month. With his free time, Jay has even created some training modules explaining how to use WA’s resources the same way he did.
Jay’s first client offered these payments:
- A down payment of $1,000 for the starting website content
- $400 in ongoing fees for continuing to write content and grow the business
That was a good gig, especially considering that Jay didn’t need to create a lot of dense content to get the business running. With this type of business setup, you only have to get one new monthly client, and within a year you’ll be making $4,000 monthly to maintain your client websites.
One important thing to note through Jay’s success story is that even if affiliate marketing doesn’t work out for you, WA teaches you other ways to make money online. Throughout the training courses, you learn vital skills for running an online business. These skills place you head and shoulders above the average competition.
Money Made from Norway
Wealthy Affiliate’s user base spans more than 150 countries. But it’s one thing to hear that and another to actually see the success. People often ask about whether the tactics can be used if you’re marketing to people outside the US.
Yes!
One great example is Andreas, a man who lives in Norway and uses the Amazon affiliate program. The first check he got from Amazon was for $1,000. Keep in mind that if you live in a country where the currency is worth significantly less than the American dollar, this can convert into a seriously hefty paycheck.
One helpful aspect of WA’s website builder and hosting setup is that you can choose what language you make your website in. You might create the pages in English, or you might write in your native language to bring in more local clientele.
People who market in English tend to be looking for international clients, and they appeal to a wider base. But they’re also competing with tons of other companies. Meanwhile, websites in less-spoken languages tend to have more localized user bases with significantly less competition.
Most experienced marketers recommend getting started in English. This helps get you familiar with the basics, and it lets you learn about keyword competition. Once you’re more experienced, you can start building websites in your native language to appeal to localized clientele.
A Year to a 28K Competitor Buyout
Stephanie used Wealthy Affiliate to create a blog and maintained it for 13 months. At the end of those 13 months, she sold it to her competition for $28,000. That might not seem like a get-rich-quick scheme, but it’s very impressive!
Even though it took 13 months, Stephanie wasn’t working 40 hours per week. She ended up earning more than $600 per article. Imagine if every blog post you made translated to $600 in your bank account! With enough patience and the right SEO strategies, that’s exactly what can happen.
When Stephanie talked about her success, many people asked her what she did to create and sell a site for so much money. She said that all she needed was the Wealthy Affiliate training, since it taught her everything she needed to optimize her blog and rank in search engines.
$100 Per Day from Amazon Commissions
When you make your first sales, it’s an exciting endeavor. But the $100 day is a pretty big milestone. $100 per day is often enough money to pay your rent or mortgage, plus pay for groceries and utilities. Sure, that’s just making ends meet. But it means you have tons of time left over to grow your income further or pursue your passions.
Think about it. $100 per day is $3,000 per month. And that’s without taking into account income from days when you do even better!
An active WA member named Zarina has made many blog posts discussing her online marketing journey. These posts help create a timeline showing you exactly how much work and time it takes to turn a profit. That’s better than overnight success stories.
Zarina discussed how it took a while to reach the $100 per day milestone, but it was well worth the wait. Doing so gave her passive income so she could pursue her passions. She also talked about how her family didn’t really believe in her dream until she started making tons of money.
More Than $2,000 from Ad Revenue
Passive income is a way of generating income from people’s clicks on your ads. A large portion of the Affiliate Bootcamp program on Wealthy Affiliate’s site is dedicated to launching effective pay-per-click ads.
Jay is an active WA member who uses the MediaVine ad network. The display ads bring in more than $2,000 every single month. That’s because Jay gets paid every time a site user clicks on an ad. The more traffic you have, and the better-targeted your ads are, the more you’ll make through running ad campaigns.
Once your articles are written, posted, and ranked in search engines, you no longer have to do any maintenance to earn money. You do have to continue posting to keep your blog relevant and ranked, of course, but you don’t have to do any heavy product marketing to bring in revenue.
One important thing that Jay has mentioned is that you don’t have to run a gaming website the way he does. Many different niches do well with ad revenue. Tech blogs and food blogs bring in some of the highest ad revenue on the market.
Zero Experience to Successful Entrepreneur
In 2017, Craig hadn’t had any experience with affiliate marketing except for browsing blog posts. Less than two years later, he was bringing in over $1,000 monthly through his website. Craig says that his success is a combination of hard work, the WA training program, and SEO tips published by the blog Backlinko.
Craig’s blog is about the pet industry, which is very competitive. His success shows that even newcomers can make money if they’re willing to put in the work. Even if you think your niche is too competitive, it’s worth trying anyway.
To reach the $1,000 per month point, Craig needed to create 200 blog posts. Everyone has different experiences with regards to this. Some people generate a ton of income after around 50 posts. Most experts say that they usually see the most traction at anywhere from 50 to 100 posts.
Nearly 16K MONTHLY for a Finance Website
Ralph is a Wealthy Affiliate member who’s posted about his finance website. He blogs about investing and ways to grow your wealth. His website first ranked in 2016, which was when he made his first celebratory post. But by 2018, his blog was bringing in more than $15,000 every month!
A lot of this success can be attributed to Ralph’s prior knowledge about investing. It’s also important to note that by running a finance blog, he attracts a user base that’s wealthier than the average consumer. But he credits WA with giving him the tools to structure and promote his website.
3K Monthly to Travel
Travel blogs are very lucrative, but they’re also very competitive. It’s expensive to travel, so you need to make a lot of money if you want to turn a profit. Once you reach that point, though, you’re literally getting paid to go on adventures and explore new places.
Even though the travel industry is full of competition, you can easily find a specific niche within it. For example, you might talk about backpacking, traveling in an RV, traveling in specific regions, traveling while disabled, or finding great local spots that are often overlooked.
Nathaniel is a Wealthy Affiliate member who’s talked about how the company “paid for his Lamborghini.” Now, that is a little misleading: He rented the Lamborghini instead of buying it. And he used income he made using WA’s techniques; WA didn’t literally give him the car.
But without WA’s techniques, he wouldn’t have made the money necessary to travel to Nevada. Or to rent the car.
If you do intend to start a travel blog, you might not want it to be your first website. Some of the travel expenses you’ll encounter include:
- Car rentals
- Plane tickets
- Hotels
- Luggage
- Restaurants
- Cruises
- Tourist activities
Daily Income from Cat Blogging
Huge success stories are all well and good, but there are small successes to celebrate as well!
Jessica made a post celebrating 11 straight days of sales from her cat blog. She used WA’s techniques to create her website, and she’s extremely excited about it!
When you first start out, you probably won’t be able to devote 40 hours a week to your endeavor. The exception is if you already have a cushion of money to live on. If you keep at it by using your free time to focus, you’ll eventually find your conversions increasing until you have real and reliable income.
Jessica’s success is just the beginning of her journey. As she keeps going, the sales will increase until she’s bringing in a ton of monthly income. From there, she can focus on growing her business.
Anywhere from 3K to 7K Monthly
Darren has been a Wealthy Affiliate member for three years, but he had an unconventional way of using the site. For three years, he’s had reliable income by creating cash-generating websites. Rather than creating affiliate marketing posts or earning commissions, he has a strong web development business!
His first project was to create a stock forecasting service with another person. By using WA’s keyword research techniques, he found clients interested in the product.
Then he created an employment recruitment service. He found openings for jobs, matched job seekers to the positions, and used keywords and social media research. His articles are effective enough to draw in high traffic.
Affiliate marketing, for Darren, was just the beginning. He used WA’s techniques to launch businesses that existed outside affiliate spaces. Nowadays, Darren’s ventures earn a minimum of $3,000 monthly, and they often bring in up to $7,600 each month.
Selling an $8 Site for $3,000
Asen is a Wealthy Affiliate member who turned his passion for movies into a source of income. This might seem unusual, since it doesn’t involve reviewing or promoting products. But after making $8 on his site, he eventually grew it into a large enough presence to sell for $3,000.
Let me emphasize that: The website had only made eight dollars. Until Asen sold it, it might have seemed like a dismal failure. But this is proof that websites that don’t generate active income can be sold for significant money if you find the right buyer. Many buyers just want sites that generate traffic.
Wealthy Affiliate has traffic training that teaches you how to generate traffic without needing to use an affiliate program. If you use the traffic-promoting techniques, you can make money by building, flipping, and selling websites without ever earning a single commission.
Success Stories from People Promoting WA
We’ve talked a lot about these non-traditional ways of using WA’s resources to build a successful website. Now let’s look at some people who successfully promoted WA’s products and earned a significant commission.
Skill Sharpening with Christene
Christene is a WA member who already knew how to create marketing websites when she joined the community. She was successfully running her own business. The reason she joined WA was because she wanted to find a platform that she could recommend to readers looking for internet marketing solutions.
She decided that Wealthy Affiliate had what she was looking for. In addition, she’s discussed how the program taught her more about marketing even though she was already a seasoned professional.
Christene promotes Wealthy Affiliate for those who want to get started in internet marketing. She also says that it’s helped her promote her non-marketing websites as well.
Through Wealthy Affiliate’s training programs, Christene has done the following:
- Increased traffic to all of her websites
- Improved her rankings on Google
- Increased her sales and conversion rates
- Created sites in niches unrelated to marketing
Full Time Living Working from Home
One traditional success story is from Frank, who lives in New Zealand. He has a wife and several children, and by promoting Wealthy Affiliate, he's able to support his family just by working from home.
Frank's success can be attributed to his writing skills. He has a relaxed, personal writing style that has earned him a loyal readership. Many people feel like he's talking directly to them as a friend, rather than acting like a salesman.
Another aspect of Frank's style is that he shows people specifics about his affiliate programs. He posts graphs and screenshots explaining how much he earns through different programs. This helps give people honest, realistic expectations about what they might earn through the affiliate programs Frank promotes.
Frank talks about how promoting Wealthy Affiliate and other affiliate programs helps him to pursue his passions and live a life that lets him spend more time around his loved ones.
6K in One Month... At Just 18 Years Old
Doug is a Wealthy Affiliate member whose success has caught many people's attention. He promotes various affiliate programs and writes highly-trafficked blogs. In addition, he creates and sells eBooks in his niche.
During a single month, he made more than $6,000. Nearly $3,500 came from commissions through his blog posts. An additional $3,000 came from sales of his eBooks. He also used the eBook sales to create a mailing list of more than 2,500 people, who now receive email updates and often do repeat purchases.
Part of what makes Doug's success so riveting is that he's just 18 years old. This isn't a seasoned professional with a lifetime of content marketing under his belt. He's barely finished with high school and hasn't gone to college. But he's still making thousands of dollars by writing.
Success with Wealthy Affiliate After Years of Being Scammed
Many people try to get into online marketing. After all, online marketing is one of the fastest-growing industries in the world. You don't need any special education, and there are tons of success stories out there. So many of the world's richest people got to where they are through internet marketing.
But the internet is also full of scams and false get-rich-quick schemes. Lev is a WA member who has talked about how he kept falling for scams in his quest to make money online. He'd been trying to find a legitimate program since the 90s.
Once he started using Wealthy Affiliate, he learned the skills he actually needed to create an independent business. This was important because it meant he wasn't falling prey to multi-level marketing schemes or scams. He decided to promote WA on his blog because of how much it had helped him.
Nowadays, he does more than promote WA. Lev works entirely from home operating a full-time business. He talks about affiliate marketing and how to use it to your advantage. He also talks about niche topics that interest him, building a user base around his passions.
Making Money by Sharing Valuable Knowledge
Leo first started working on making online money in 2000. He knew that online marketing was going to be a huge industry, and he wanted to break into it. But even though he had the foresight to know how important the internet would be, he still struggled to break into any online industries.
When Leo started using Wealthy Affiliate, he found the tools he needed to be successful. He then taught others about what he'd learned by sharing knowledge.
These days, Leo continues to contribute hugely to Wealthy Affiliate's community. When he isn't helping newbies with their questions, he's making a full-time living from home by promoting WA and other affiliate programs.
Leo is one of many people who have continued to be active in the WA community after their success. He does his best to give back to the community so that others don't have to struggle the same way he did twenty years ago.
Turning SEO Experience into Income
Before Garen started using Wealthy Affiliate, he had more than eight years of experience using WordPress websites and SEO navigation. By using the tools and the education in the WA program, he's multiplied his income and become even more successful.
Right now, he runs one of the most trafficked and best-ranked websites for web hosting reviews. He combines his prior web development and SEO experience with the affiliate marketing techniques from WA. In addition, he promotes WA itself.
Garen made over $50,000 using an affiliate program. He's talked in his blog posts about how he had to work hard to get there, often working between 12 and 16 hours a day. But doing so helped him to create websites that generate both active and passive income, so now he can relax and maintain what he's built.
Community Participation for More Than 10 Years
Marcus is a WA member who has been an active part of the community for more than a decade! He has one of the oldest active community accounts, and he's heavily involved in the WA program. His first success happened more than a decade ago, and from there, his success has just grown.
Marcus has talked about how by using Wealthy Affiliate's techniques, he achieved these things:
- He quit his unfulfilling day job and was able to work from home doing what he loved.
- He was able to have a more active parenting role and watch his children grow up.
- His health improved due to the decreased stress, decreased work hours, and ability to sleep when he needed to.
- He faced and overcame his biggest fear, which led to hugely increased confidence.
- He built a sustainable business online that generates ongoing income.
Marcus says that just two things were responsible for his success. First, he decided to have faith in WA's training and believe it would help him. Then, he took action regarding the things he learned.
Full Time Online Work from Zimbabwe
Kuda is from Zimbabwe and has talked about his success with the WA program. His success story is significant because it shows that affiliate marketing can be accomplished by people all over the world.
Oftentimes, "international" programs are really just geared toward people in the US, Canada, the UK, and occasionally Australia. But Wealthy Affiliate is truly a global program with participants on every populated continent.
By promoting Wealthy Affiliate and using the company's techniques to create his own niche, Kuda made enough money to quit his job. He now works online full-time by running his own business and talking about his passions.
According to Kuda, WA made it possible for him to:
- Create a website
- Use Youtube and Facebook to create a huge following
- Publish reviews of programs on his blog
Tech blogs like Kuda's are some of the most lucrative options when you're looking for an affiliate marketing niche. But because of this, they're also extremely competitive! Kuda's story is yet another one that shows that WA's techniques can help anyone break into extremely competitive online markets.
Final Thoughts
Wealthy Affiliate is one of the most popular affiliate marketing tools on the market for a reason. The community is made up of more than 1.4 million members, which means that you can always connect to people and have an audience to view your successes.
The premium accounts come with worthwhile features like private messaging and PPC advertising education. But if you're not sure whether you want a premium account, you can also sign up for a free account to access many of the same features. Free accounts give you a chance to decide whether the setup works for you.
For beginners, I haven't found many programs that are more comprehensive or easy to follow. And even for seasoned internet marketers, the educational materials have information that can help you sharpen your approach. This is a great place to turn to learn about affiliate marketing. There's nothing to lose by making a free account and checking it out.