But these types of jobs tend to be a one-time deal. Once the job is finished, you get paid for your work and you look for the next gig.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could make money while you sleep?
You can with affiliate marketing — the process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s products.
The best way to get started is to build a niche site and drive traffic to it. Then you earn a commission when someone clicks on your link and makes a purchase.
Sounds great, but there’s just one problem…
What is a Wealthy Affiliate?
Over the years, countless members of the Nichehacks tribe have asked me about a niche marketing training course for beginners called ‘Wealthy Affiliate’.
So I’ve joined and went through the initial free training modules and I’ve also upgraded to premium and checked out what’s on offer there.
And got stuck into their tools and resources and now I can advise you if it’s worth checking out or not.
Here’s my purchase proof…
This is my Wealthy Affiliate review…
It’s an interactive course (like an online training centre or niche marketing university) designed to take you from complete newbie to wealthy affiliate by turning your passions into a successful niche site.
Wealthy Affiliate has been online since 2005 and has over 1.4 million members (both free and paid) which says something about how trusted and valuable this course is.
The initial affiliate marketing training is completely free and consists of 10 training modules.
Then if you want to take it to the next level to access 30 more modules AND get use of their free website builder, tools, resources and community you can upgrade for just $49 a month
It works in 4 simple steps:
- Choose your interest or passion.
- Build an affiliate website (using their website builder and tools)
- Attract visitors (using their SEO and traffic techniques)
- Earn revenue from your passion (through affiliate marketing)
- They have a series of video and text modules to guide you through each step.
On top of that, as a premium member, there’s also a ton of free tools such as a website builder, keyword research tool, and a link tracker to help you along the way and make things easy for you (more on those later).
As well as lots of training, modules, and classrooms to guide you on the right path.
Not to mention the Wealthy Affiliate community — there’s live chat, private messages, help forums, and webinars you can get involved with to get advice or encouragement from other members.
You even get one on one support from the owner’s Kyle and Carson when you’re a premium member – that’s incredible!
All the courses, training, and tools are available online so you don’t have to download anything or spend extra on software or tools like you usually would when carrying out niche research.
What Wealthy Affiliate is Not:
- Not a get-rich-quick scheme — it takes time, commitment, and focus. Don’t expect to make thousands of dollars the next day without putting in any effort.
- Not a push button, instant riches, program — you will have to invest time and energy into it to succeed as a WA affiliate.
- Not MLM — no need to recruit others to make money.
- Not blackhat bullsh*t — a perfectly legal and ethical way to make money online as an affiliate marketer.
- No need to make your own products or stock inventory — you will monetize your niche sites through affiliate marketing.
- Not a scam — it’s a genuine training program, with a community of over 1,400,000 members, that’s been online for years and shows no signs of going anywhere.
Wealthy Affiliate Member Features:
- Tons of free affiliate marketing training and resources for newbie marketers meaning you can learn the basics of making money without spending a cent. But you can upgrade to Premium when you’re ready to take your learning to the next level.
- In-depth training videos and text tutorials showing you every aspect of going from a newbie to an expert niche marketer. All the training materials are accessible right from the dashboard.
- Keyword research tools available for free, so you don’t have to purchase one or pay monthly fees as you do with most tools.
- WordPress-based website builder that you can use to build your affiliate niche website then either host on their servers for free or on your own using a premium domain name.
- Content creator with guides on how to create content that converts and makes you money.
- Lists of money-making keywords analyzed and evaluated for you.
- SEO and traffic guides showing you exactly how to get targeted traffic to your site.
- Pretty much everything a newbie niche affiliate marketer needs to get started and prosper online.
- Lots of support options should you need help or get stuck, so you’ll never suffer alone.
Wealthy Affiliate offers excellent training to those that are still new to online marketing. Even if you don’t have any technical experience, you can build a thriving affiliate marketing business by putting what you learn into practice.
Who is Wealthy Affiliate For?
- Newcomers to the internet marketing world who want to see success with niche and affiliate marketing — if this is YOU then Wealthy Affiliate is what you’ve been looking for.
- If you’re not so new but have struggled so far to make money online (or don’t make enough) then Wealthy Affiliate might be what you’re looking for as it has in-depth training and tutorials to guide you through the process.
- If you’re wondering “how do I get started?” then this is a great place to start. Wealthy Affiliate provides a comprehensive overview of all the basics from choosing a niche to creating a site and earning your first affiliate commission.
- If you’re an experienced marketer who’s already making money online then there’s not much value for you here. However, you may find the Wealthy Affiliate community valuable as you can connect to other marketers and expand your network.
- Students, retirees, stay at home moms (or dads) who want to bring in some extra income will get a lot of use from this.
- Bloggers who currently aren’t making any money from their blog and need guidance on how to do it. The Wealthy Affiliate platform walks you through how to optimize your content and select a profitable affiliate offer for your niche.
- Sure, you can learn to make money online without a Wealthy Affiliate membership. But searching for “affiliate marketing” in Google yields hundreds of millions of results. If you simply don’t have the time to research and figure everything out for yourself, then the Wealthy Affiliate program cuts out a lot of that mind-numbing research.
Wealthy Affiliate Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Very newbie friendly so if you’re new to digital marketing or even the internet and not sure how to get started this will map out the exact process.
- The in-depth video tutorials, lessons, and guides pretty much cover everything you need to know about getting started with niche marketing so you can start making money.
- The community aspect of the site makes it easy to get help, advice, and encouragement from others in the same situation and from those who are advanced and successful.
- Not sure where to find your affiliate link or stuck on something else? After asking a question in the community, the average time to get an answer is 1.8 minutes — that’s pretty impressive!
- Free tools and software that would otherwise be expensive like the keyword tool, link tracker, and web builder. All of these tools are available with your membership.
- Can turn almost any of your passions into a profitable niche site using the Wealthy Affiliate training course. And if you don’t know where to start, Wealthy Affiliate can also guide your niche selection with over 1,000,000 different niches.
- There’s no other course offering so much in-depth training to newcomers as far as I know. This is a huge plus as you get all the affiliate marketing training you need from one place. And if you ever need a quick refresher, you can log back into the Wealthy Affiliate platform and refer back to those materials.
- Will help you earn revenue through monetizing your passions and live the life you aspire to have — the laptop lifestyle aka freedom.
- Lessons 6 and 7 in ‘level 4’ are some of the best training guides in the whole package IME as they talk about the power of social media networks.
Cons:
- A lot of focus on SEO traffic (though not 100% they do cover other digital marketing channels like social media and PPC too) which is unpredictable and not guaranteed. It would be nice to see more training modules on other aspects.
- Inside the training center, the page feels cluttered to me. Too much going on but that simply means there’s a lot of useful information so it’s not too much of a negative point.
- You can use the SiteRubix website builder to launch an affiliate site and get started on your first blog post in a matter of minutes. But you’re restricted to their themes and it’s not easy to add extra functionality.
- Building and hosting your site with Wealthy Affiliate also creates potential lock-in issues. You’ll need to continue paying for a premium membership to continue using those tools and services.
Support is top-notch.
There’s live chat, classrooms, interactions with other members and staff, a private message system, and more so help is ALWAYS on hand should you need it.
The owner’s Kyle and Carson are available online often solving problems —something you won’t see a lot with training modules like these.
There’s also personal 1 on 1 support with the owners if you decide to upgrade your free membership to premium — not many companies give you personal access to the CEO regardless of the price you’ve paid.
With over 1,400,000 members on board, all happy to help newcomers out the community aspect couldn’t be stronger.
Chances are you won’t need much help as the training is so in-depth and easy to follow that you’ll likely not struggle.
Now let’s get into how much Wealthy Affiliate costs and what you get with your membership.
Wealthy Affiliate Pricing and Guarantee
The initial 10 lessons are completely free without needing to enter any credit card details or payment info so you can check it out without any commitment.
The Wealthy Affiliate premium membership costs $49 per month and there’s no contract, so you can cancel at ANY time.
Or you can also purchase a yearly plan for $495 and save $93 or 16% instead of paying monthly. The plan automatically renews every year, so be sure to mark that date on your calendar.
Here’s a snapshot of how the free Starter membership compares to Premium:
The Starter plan is meant to give you an introduction to affiliate marketing.
You don’t get access to all the features, but you can go through the free training materials available and even get live 24/7 help for the first 7 days if you’re stuck or have questions about anything.
Here’s what you get as a Wealthy Affiliate Premium member:
- 120 in-depth lessons over 12 learning modules, so you can further advance your skills.
- An easy-to-use SiteRubix website builder, so you can build your first site.
- A free keyword research tool you can use to find profitable keywords and save spending money on premium tools.
- Affiliate classroom and Bootcamp to further help you with your affiliate marketing and let you get access to help and advice.
- Done for you keyword lists you can use to create sites around.
- A bustling community, so you can chat, interact, ask questions and get help from the leaders and others in the community.
- Affiliate program search, so you can easily find the affiliate offers to promote on your site.
- You can save 16% by upgrading to yearly billing instead of month by month.
One thing you might be asking…
“Is the Wealthy Affiliate a scam?”
Not at all.
In fact, there are plenty of affiliate marketers who have used the training materials provided by Wealthy Affiliate to build successful online businesses and generate a passive income.
Let’s take a look at what others are saying about Wealthy Affiliate.
What Do Others Say About Wealthy Affiliate?
I’ve searched the net for genuine reviews…
“When I first joined this awesome community back in 2012 I didn’t have the first clue about what I would be doing. I just started going through the training and asked lots of questions and pretty soon everything started to make sense.
In a year and a half, I have been a member, I have learned how to build websites, and how to write content that will get ranked in Google, and bring me loads of traffic every day.
This same website has made me enough money that I have been able to free myself from corporate America and pursue my dream of working from home.” – aworkathomebusiness.com
“I recommend this program highly for any new entrepreneur and even for those who still struggle to earn a decent income from the internet.
I truly believe that the owners of Wealthy Affiliate have the right mindset into helping people to achieve their online goals.
The design is professional without flashy buttons, fake promises, or constant promotions.” – christene-marketing.com
“I have to say, I really doubted that was possible until I stumbled on Wealthy Affiliate.
But through clear and extensive step-by-step training (and their fun and informative weekly live webinar training…) this program taught me I really could make money online doing the things I loved.” – http://www.ivetriedthat.com
“For me, Wealthy Affiliate has been the bedrock for my affiliate marketing journey. It was one of the first training programs I took over 2 years ago and it really showed me how to run numerous successful affiliate websites.
Sure the prospect of “passive income” is an intriguing selling feature for affiliate marketing, but the reality is that it takes time!” – Jeremy Harrison on quora.com
Here’s a review that one user posted on Trustpilot:
Here’s another honest Wealthy Affiliate review from a user on Reddit:
You’ll also find plenty of stories inside Wealthy Affiliate from users who have had success with their affiliate marketing training program.
One user built a niche site on female hair loss and sold her site for $28,000:
Not bad for about 6 months of work!
Here’s another Wealthy Affiliate success story from one user who turned her Amazon affiliate review site into a 4 figure monthly income after one year:
These reviews of the Wealthy Affiliate program took me about a minute to find.
And you’ll find tons of success stories from others who have applied what they’ve learned to make money online with affiliate marketing.
Wealthy Affiliate offers a legitimate affiliate training program that takes you through the exact steps to building an affiliate site and earning your first commission.
Let’s take a closer look at the training that Wealthy Affiliate offers and what you can expect if you decide to sign up.
Wealthy Affiliate Training
The learning materials are at the heart of the Wealthy Affiliate marketing course. Let’s look at what kind of training is available from the dashboard.
Online Entrepreneur Certification
The Online Entrepreneur Certification (OEC) training consists of 50 lessons that are broken into 5 levels that teach you how to make money online with your chosen niche.
Be sure to get your pen and notebook ready because each section covers many aspects of affiliate marketing.
Here’s a breakdown of what’s covered:
- Getting Started: Here you’ll learn more about the Wealthy Affiliate community. This level also helps you find a profitable niche and create your first website. You’ll also learn how to write your initial content and the basics of keyword research.
- Building Your Own Traffic Producing Website: These lessons will teach you how to choose a domain and create keyword-rich content for your audience. You’ll also learn how to increase your site’s visibility online with search engine optimization or SEO.
- Making Money!: Here’s where you’ll learn more about affiliate programs, how to sign up for them, and how to add affiliate links to your pages. You’ll also learn how to track your website traffic.
- Mastering Social Engagement: There are an estimated 3.5 billion social media users worldwide. These lessons will show you how to use networks like Facebook and Pinterest to promote your affiliate site.
- Achieving Maximum Success Through Content Creation: Publishing quality content to your site is key to becoming successful as an affiliate marketer. These lessons show you how to write your content in a way that gets people to buy.
If you’ve ever taken an online course through a platform like Skillshare or Udemy, then you’ll find the interface familiar.
What I like here is there’s a clear progression system in place. You can see how many “tasks” or lessons are in each level and how far along you are.
In each lesson, there’s a checklist on the right-hand side of what actions to take. Simply check the box after completing a specific action and the system will keep track of them.
Let’s look at how each lesson is formatted.
Each lesson consists of text and a few videos that show you how to do something. For example, here’s a look at one lesson that covers custom domains:
The article goes more in-depth on the benefits of buying a custom domain for your niche site as opposed to using a free blogging platform like WordPress.com or Weebly.
They also include a video that shows you how to buy a domain name with SiteDomains — a domain name registrar.
And at the bottom of each lesson is an open discussion. Here you can ask a question to the WA community if anything is unclear or view previous discussions to see what others have asked.
Affiliate Bootcamp
The Affiliate Bootcamp training materials consist of 70 lessons total that walk you through how to make money in the lucrative “make money online” niche. One of the main focuses is promoting Wealthy Affiliates’ own affiliate program.
Here’s a breakdown of what you’ll learn in this training module:
- Getting Your Business Rolling: These lessons provide an in-depth look at how to choose your direction and build your website. It also takes a look at how to activate plugins and optimize your website for Google.
- Content, Keywords, and Conversions: Here you’ll learn how to create engaging content for your audience and how to add your affiliate links to your product reviews.
- Giving Your Site Social Value: You’ll learn how to make your site more social with plugins and how to optimize your social media profiles. This level also covers how to create the kind of content that gets shared.
- Get visual, Get aesthetic. Get a Brand Through Media: It takes just 50 milliseconds for online users to form an opinion about a website. These lessons provide an overview of website design and how to create a brand.
- Knowing Your Audiences & Catapulting Your Referrals: These lessons dive into how to create content that resonates with your audience and how to drive traffic to your site through video platforms like YouTube.
- Bing, Yahoo, & The Power of PPC: PPC, or pay-per-click is an advertising model that lets you place ads on search engines like Google and Bing. These lessons take a look at how to set up your first PPC campaign.
- How to Scale Successful PPC Campaigns: The last lesson is all about scale. You’ll learn how to refine and optimize your PPC campaigns to generate even more conversions.
There are several issues that I have with the Affiliate Bootcamp training though.
There’s quite a bit of overlap with the materials here and in the Online Entrepreneur Certification training. That means you’ll spend time learning about topics you already know about.
The promotion methods also place a strong emphasis on PPC to drive traffic. PPC is effective, but it has a steep learning curve and it can be costly if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Finally, the training materials in Affiliate Bootcamp are centered around promoting products like Wealthy Affiliate. You can certainly make money in this niche, but you’re facing a steep uphill battle.
If you’re just getting started with affiliate marketing, I recommend starting first with the Online Entrepreneur Certification training.
Training HQ
Training HQ is another section in Wealthy Affiliate that allows you to learn more about specific topics, such as WordPress, SEO, and more.
Also included in this section are webinar replays, which you can view at your own pace. Overall, Training HQ is a great resource to drill down into more specific areas of affiliate marketing (e.g., how to track conversions).
Classrooms
Classrooms is another learning resource (part of Training HQ), which breaks down topics like SEO, WordPress, keyword research, and more into their own “class.”
That’s not all. If anything is unclear about a particular topic, you can leave a question and get answers from other users shortly. This is a great way to get help with something you’ve been racking your brains over and connect with other members.
Live Events
Finally, Wealthy Affiliate regularly offers weekly webinars to its members. These are typically about an hour long and cover a range of topics from setting up Google Analytics to running campaigns on Pinterest and more.
Even if you miss a webinar, you can still view past events in Training HQ. These ongoing webinars really add to the overall value that you get as a Wealthy Affiliate member.
Let’s take a look at some of the other features that you get with a premium membership.
Wealthy Affiliate Websites
Don’t have any experience building websites?
You’re in luck.
You can use the SiteRubix platform within Wealthy Affiliate to build your first site. It’s easy to use and it includes integrated tools for website analysis and security.
The website builder is a handy feature if you’ve never created a site before. When you first set up your site, you can choose an existing domain, register a new one, or use a free one.
SiteRubix is built on the WordPress platform. Once you choose a domain and enter a title, you can choose from over 3,000 templates for your new site.
Be sure to jot down your username and password. Then once everything is complete, here’s an example of how your site will look after installation:
Hosting your site with Wealthy Affiliate offers a number of advantages.
Backups are done every 24 hours, so you can recover to a previous version if needed. You also get a free SSL certificate, which provides a safer browsing experience for your visitors.
Note that you’ll need to upgrade to premium to enable comments on your content, get feedback on your website, and receive technical support.
Alternatively, you can also purchase a domain name from a different registrar and get it set up on a hosting platform. Then if you ever decide to cancel your membership, you won’t have to worry about migrating your site.
Check out this step-by-step guide to setting up WordPress with Bluehost.
Wealthy Affiliate Research Tools
Wealthy Affiliate offers the following suite of marketing tools to help you take your efforts to the next level:
- Site Rank: Use this tool to see where your site ranks across major search engines like Google for your target keywords.
- My Keyword Lists: This feature lets you create and manage your keyword list — useful once you start creating content for your affiliate site.
- Alphabet Soup: Need some ideas on niches? With Alphabet Soup, you can uncover tons of niches that you can target.
- Brainstorm HQ: One lucrative way to make money with affiliate marketing is to target topics that are trending. Brainstorm HQ can help you identify opportunities.
- Affiliate Programs: Here you can see relevant details about affiliate programs you can promote, such as the commission they pay and where you can apply.
- Niche Keyword Lists: If you don’t want to bother with keyword research, you can choose a keyword list around a niche you’re interested in and save yourself tons of time.
You also get access to a keyword research tool called Jaaxy. Simply input a keyword and the tool will generate a list of ideas.
You’ll also see other metrics like QSR (Quoted Search Results) and KQI (Keyword Quality Indicator), which tell you how competitive ranking for a keyword is.
Normally, purchasing all these tools on your own would easily cost you well over a hundred dollars a month if not more. But they’re all neatly packaged in Wealthy Affiliate for premium members.
Wealthy Affiliate Alternatives
Wealthy Affiliates is an excellent program if you’re still new to affiliate marketing. It offers tons of training materials and resources to help you build your first site.
But they do focus a little too much on SEO, so it would’ve been nice to see more training on a wider range of traffic sources.
There are some modules on social and paid traffic, but I didn’t see any mention on networking, content marketing, email, forum marketing, blogs and so.
Here are some Wealthy Affiliate alternatives to consider:
- Project 24: Project 24 offers a step-by-step program that teaches beginners how to get started with affiliate marketing. It costs $449 for the first year and $199 each year after that.
- Authority Site System: Authority Site System is a program that teaches you how to build an authority site. You get access to over 120 video lessons and there is also an active member community. The program costs $997.
There’s no shortage of affiliate training programs, but these are two of the more popular alternatives.
Final Verdict of Wealthy Affiliate
If you’re a newcomer and wondering “how do I get started” with niche and/or affiliate marketing WA is certainly a good place to start.
The training modules, video courses, and tools you get access to make it much simpler to get your own online business up and running based on your passion than if you go it alone and try and figure it all out for yourself.
With the community aspect and help available from mentors and other members, it’ll make you more likely to stick with the training and succeed as you’re working towards a goal together instead of solo as you would usually be.
It’s not perfect and I doubt you’ll become a millionaire after following the training.
But it will definitely get you started, on the right track, teach you the skills you need to be successful, and give you a better chance of success than if you do everything yourself.
It’s easy to dream about being the laptop millionaire with a fancy car, nice house, no debts, and regular luxury travel but until you learn the basic skills you’ll never get there so start mastering them now.
WA teaches you the basic but very essential skills that put you on the right path to being a successful niche marketer and affiliate.
Get these under your belt first (and you can get them very quickly and cheaply thanks to WA) and those dreams might just come true further down the line as you build on the foundations WA gives you.
It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme but it will give you the basic skills every niche marketer needs to be successful.
Get started on the road to your dream life for $0 below…
Do I Recommend It?
Yes, if you’re a new marketer who’s not sure how to get started or what exactly they should be doing then Wealthy Affiliate is a great place to start.
You’ll learn a lot of the basic but essential skills and knowledge from going through the training modules that you can use to create your own profitable niche sites around your passions.
Even the first 10 free modules will teach you a lot but it’s when you upgrade to premium you’ll really see the benefit.
There’s no other course out there that I know of which offers everything Wealthy Affiliate does and trying to compile out the information and skills contained within this course from different sources would slow down your learning and progress by months.
Plus it would cost you more money to go solo as you’d need to purchase keyword research tools and other software which come free with WA.
In WA everything is included and you can quickly fast track your way to success with niche marketing instead of taking the slow, lonely, and painful route.
If you’re ready to fast track your way to niche marketing success then you need to take action now so simply click below instantly…
I hope you’ve enjoyed my Wealthy Affiliate review and concluded that it is indeed a legit way to make money through niche marketing and promoting affiliate products.
Have any thoughts about this Wealthy review? Be sure to leave a comment below.
