More than 4 billion people worldwide have access to the internet, and according to certain sources, this number is increasing by more than a million a day at an increasing rate. With a potential audience of this size, almost anything can be turned into a successful business.
There are hundreds of millions of digital and physical products and services available on the market. The majority of them can be promoted using various affiliate programs and networks, meaning the promoter can get a percentage (usually 3 – 50%) of the price the customer pays.
Combine these two facts, and anyone has the opportunity to start and run many different successful affiliate marketing businesses, without producing any products or directly providing services, with only a computer and access to the internet! (Of course, you can create products and provide services yourself, which has some great advantages as well.)
Wealthy Affiliate is the world’s leading platform designed for anyone who wants to use this amazing opportunity, gain a lot of knowledge, and interact with like-minded individuals. They have specific beginner to intermediate level training courses, other educational resources, an enormous community of online entrepreneurs at every level of expertise, every tool necessary to start and maintain many successful website-based online businesses, and more!
***THIS REVIEW HAS BEEN UPDATED TO REFLECT IMPROVEMENTS ON 2020 – 11 – 03!***
EDUCATION
Proper education can help you realize your true potential. The step-by-step training platform will teach you to capitalize on any idea and overcome all difficulties along the way.
COMMUNITY AND SUPPORT
Wealthy Affiliate has members from 195 countries, and 100 000's of people of all levels of expertise are networking there. You can get help and find answers almost instantly.
HOSTING AND TOOLS
It's an all-in-one service. It has everything you need to start and efficiently run several successful website-based businesses (hosting, keyword tool, domain registry, tech support, etc.).
USEFUL EXCLUSIVE FEATURES
For example, Site Feedback and Site Comments platforms to help you get insights and progress faster, weekly live webinars, an in-house affiliate program, and much more!
ONLY 2 MEMBERSHIP LEVELS + 1 OPTIONAL ADD-ON
1. STARTER: FOR EXACTLY $0 (NO CREDIT CARD OR PERSONAL INFORMATION REQUIRED), YOU GET ACCESS TO 2 TRAINING PHASES, 2 CLASSROOMS, 1 FREE WEBSITE, AND LIMITED PREMIUM FEATURES, WHICH ARE STILL ENOUGH TO RUN A BUSINESS! YOU CAN STAY FOR FREE AS LONG AS YOU LIKE, THERE IS NO TRIAL PERIOD!
2. PREMIUM: FOR JUST $49 A MONTH YOU GET ACCESS TO 12 TRAINING PHASES, 13 CLASSROOMS, HOSTING FOR 10 WEBSITES, THE COMMUNITY, AND THE MANY EXCLUSIVE FEATURES WITH NO LIMITATIONS OR UPSELLS!
3.PREMIUM PLUS: FOR JUST $99 A MONTH YOU CAN GET EVEN MORE EXCLUSIVE EXTRAS, SUCH AS HOSTING FOR 50 WEBSITES, 200+ EXPERT WEBINARS PER YEAR, HOSTING SERVERS CAPABLE OF 1 000 000 MONTHLY VISITORS, AND AN INTEGRATED JEXXY ENTERPRISE ACCOUNT!
IF YOU CHOOSE TO GET THE PREMIUM (OR THE PREMIUM PLUS) MEMBERSHIP, YOU CAN SWITCH TO YEARLY BILLING FOR $495 OR $999 A YEAR AND SAVE 16%!
CLAIM YOUR FREE WEBSITE NOW
Creating a website at Wealthy Affiliate takes less than 30 seconds and is extremely easy. If you don’t have the time to read this review, you can create your website right now from this page or go straight to pricing!
Just enter the desired name for your website, click “Build it Now,” and follow the instructions.
(If the chosen name is not available, try another one.)
What You Get With The Free Membership
This is where new inexperienced members start when they join. As a Starter member, you get access to the first phase of the course, which has 10 lessons with video instructions and specific tasks to complete at the end of every lesson.
It covers the basics of using the tools and explains the fundamental principles of niche selection, website creation, and making money with a website in an easy-to-understand manner.
In this phase, you are going to choose your niche and build (a) themed website(s). A niche can be anything you like: fashion, gardening, guns, cars, etc. Wealthy Affiliate will show you how you can turn anything you like into a lucrative business!
This is the second main course of Wealthy Affiliate. It can be helpful if you’re having trouble choosing your own interest and is designed to teach you how to build (a) themed authority website(s) for the use of Wealthy Affiliate’s affiliate program.
With the free membership, you get access to the first phase of this course, which has 10 lessons with video instructions and specific tasks.
In this phase, you are going to create a Wealthy Affiliate campaign – an educational resource that introduces people to the service and encourages them to join. (Just like this website you are now on.) Not to mention, their affiliate program is one of the highest paying programs in the world!
It should be noted that the promotion of Wealthy Affiliate is by no means mandatory. The course expands upon the Online Entrepreneur Certification course and has a lot of additional information that can be applied to any promotional campaign, even when promoting your own products and services. Completing it is worth the time, even if you are not planning on promoting Wealthy Affiliate.
For your convenience, the information within Wealthy Affiliate is categorized into classrooms, where you can ask questions, find relevant information, tutorials, and interact with other members of the community, including ambassadors and CEOs themselves.
With the free membership, you can access 2 classrooms, but that’s still a lot, considering what you can learn there.
Every classroom has four main tabs:
- Questions & Answers.
- Tutorials.
- Video.
- Courses.
For the first seven days of the free membership, you have the opportunity to get a good feeling of the community, which has more than 2 300 000 members and is one of the most defining features of Wealthy Affiliate.
During that period, you can interact with other members the same way that a Premium member would, and even have your own blog inside Wealthy Affiliate!
You can freely use the live chat, ask questions in the classrooms that you have access to, write posts, comment on other people’s posts, and write private messages to any member, including the owners of the company Kyle and Carson.
(Of course, you should not spam or be mean, otherwise, you might get reported and get your writing rights taken away.)
After seven days, you will no longer be able to write anything or contact anyone. Only reading will be possible from then as a Starter member.
With the free membership, you can build 1 website completely free of charge and registration fees. It is going to be on a SiteRubix.com subdomain. (YourDomainName.siterubix.com).
The process of building a website with Site Builder is simple and you can do it in under 30 seconds:
- Choose your domain name.
- Enter a name for your website (you can change it at any time later).
- Choose a look (theme) for your website (you can also change it at any time later).
- Click “Build My Website Now!”
And that’s it! Your website is now potentially ready to attract visitors and earn you a consistent income!
The website you can build with the Site Builder for free also gets free hosting.
It has a few limitations but is still valued at $29/month and has the potential to handle enough visitors to bring you a full-time income!
With the help of the Site Manager, you can quickly and efficiently manage your website with a few clicks.
It shows a snapshot of your website, the most important statistics, details, site health (based on your post count, comments, visitor engagement, etc.), and has shortcut buttons for fast and easy access to the most important tools.
You can see a quick overview of your website and log in with one click, making the Site Manager a very convenient platform.
The free Starter membership has an integrated keyword research tool called Jaaxy, that can be accessed by clicking “Research” at the top menu.
It shows related keyword suggestions, average monthly searches the keyword receives, potential monthly traffic if your post reaches the first page rankings in Google, the number of competing websites ranked in Google for this exact keyword, and a couple of other things.
It helps you to efficiently plan your future posts and get the most benefits from every post. You will learn how to use it in the Online Entrepreneur Certification training course.
With the Starter membership, the service is limited, but It gives you a good chance to get familiar with professional keyword research.
If you don’t know what kind of website you want to build and which niche to choose, you can promote Wealthy Affiliate services.
There is an in-house affiliate program that can help you monetize the traffic your website gets. The Affiliate Bootcamp training course teaches you to make use of this program.
Starter members get paid $11.75 monthly and $117.50 yearly from every payment their Premium referrals pay, as well as $23.25 monthly and $232.50 yearly from every payment their Premium Plus referrals pay.
You can always check the program details and your statistics by clicking the “$” icon at the top menu.
Don’t forget that these payments are recurring, which means that you get these commissions for as long as the people stay with Wealthy Affiliate!
When you sign up as a Starter member, you have 7 days to try out and get a good feeling of some of the premium features, including the ability to write private letters to any member, unlimited commenting, and posting inside Wealthy Affiliate.
Also, if you decide to upgrade to the Premium membership during these first 7 days, you will get an exclusive $30 discount for the first month, so it will cost just $19!
But that doesn’t mean your Starter membership is going to expire after 7 days. After that, you can only read other people’s posts and comments, and use free features, which are still amazing! As previously mentioned, you can stay for free as long as you like.
We have good news for those of you who might be worried about spam: users have the ability to choose their email preferences!
Just click on your profile picture in the top right corner, go to “Account Settings,” click “Notifications” and specify what types of notifications you would like to receive, or turn off email notifications altogether.
If they change the controls in the future, you can always block them straight from your email or filter their emails as spam.
If you are still worried, you can give them an email you rarely use.
- The 1st level of the Online Entrepreneur Certification training course (10 lessons with video walkthroughs and tasks).
- The 1st level of the WA Affiliate Bootcamp training course. (10 lessons with video walkthroughs and tasks).
- Access to 2 classrooms.
- The ability to interact with other members, including help from many experts within the community and the CEOs themselves for the first 7 days.
- 1 free and very easy-to-build website.
- Free hosting for said website.
- Very convenient Site Manager platform to manage your website.
- 30 keyword searches with Jaaxy.
- Affiliate program commissions of $11.75 a month or $117.50 a year for every recurring Premium payment. $23.25 a month or $232.50 a year for Premium Plus payments. (Using this affiliate program is by no means mandatory)
- A free 7-day trial period of some Premium features, including asking questions, and personal messaging.
- A $30 discount from the first month of the Premium membership in the first 7 days.
- The ability to stay as a Starter member for as long as you like.
- No hidden fees. Everything is 100% free.
- No credit card or personal information is required.
- No spam guaranteed.
What You Get With The Premium Membership
Each of the 5 phases has 10 lessons. The course is primarily orientated towards beginners, and it’s recommended to go one lesson per day with ten-day breaks in between phases (90 days in total). Finishing time may vary depending on your experience.
In this course, you’re going to learn the principles of:
- Building your own website about anything you want.
- Performing keyword research.
- Attracting a lot of visitors and effectively promoting any product.
- Writing quality product reviews.
- Placing Google ads and affiliate links correctly.
- Social media branding and marketing.
- Leveraging social media platforms to get visitors to your website.
- The creation of engaging, visually appealing, and conversion-worthy content.
- Many more in-depth things.
If you are a total beginner, but you thoroughly apply all the provided information and complete all tasks at the end of every lesson, by the time you finish this course, you will almost certainly be able to create a steady and consistently increasing income online.
According to our extensive research on the matter, in the first 1 – 3 years, it would be reasonable to expect $300 – $3000 a month, depending on your niche, and most importantly, efforts.
Each of the 7 phases has 10 lessons. It’s also designed to go one lesson per day with ten-day breaks in between phases (130 days in total). The course is designed primarily for those who don’t have their own niche and want to use the in-house affiliate program.
Even if you don’t want to promote Wealthy Affiliate services, it would be very beneficial to complete this course. It has a lot of useful information that can be applied to any campaign.
If you have already finished the main course or already have some experience, it is likely going to take considerably less time.
In this course you’re going to learn about:
- The details of the program.
- Earning money by creating content inside Wealthy Affiliate.
- Leveraging Wealthy Affiliate existing content to increase your referrals and sales.
- Avoiding the biggest visual mistakes on your website.
- What social networks you need to use, and how to do it correctly.
- Effective social sharing techniques to encourage engagement.
- Designing high-converting web pages.
- Submitting your website(s) to Bing and place Bing Ads.
- Google and Bing PPC (pay per click) campaigns.
- Tracking free & premium referrals that come from PPC campaigns.
- Creating high CTR (click through ratio) ads.
- And many more in-depth things.
As well as with the first training course, your results ultimately depend on you. It wouldn’t be reasonable to expect that a great training course is going to make you rich overnight. You have to consistently apply the provided knowledge over a period of time.
Wealthy Affiliate has so much information that it became necessary to group that into classrooms (13 as of right now), making the platform a lot easier to navigate.
To access classrooms, just click “Training” in the top menu and click “Classrooms.”
Each classroom covers different topics, business models, and has answers to different questions. With the Premium membership, you can access all of them.
Each classroom has four main tabs:
Questions & Answers: here you can ask any question and help other members if you know the answers to their questions. The process of asking is elementary: just click “Help” in the top menu, click “Ask a Question,” choose a classroom and ask! (Or enter a classroom and ask from there.)
Tutorials: here you will find very useful tutorials made by knowledgeable community members, ambassadors, and the CEOs themselves. If you know something really well, you can create tutorials too!
Video: a video library of many recorded webinars and useful videos related to the topic of the classroom and made by CEOs and ambassadors or knowledgeable contributors.
Courses: a selection of training courses related to the topic of the classroom. (Again made by CEOs or other contributors.) There are more secondary courses next to “Online Entrepreneur Certification” and “WA Affiliate Bootcamp.”
The community is one of the most defining features of Wealthy Affiliate. Recently the total number of members reached 2 300 000!
It has members of all ages and from all walks of life, from teenagers to senior citizens and from people who never heard of affiliate marketing to experts and millionaires.
As a Premium member, you can freely interact with other members without any limitations. You can use the live chat, ask and answer questions in the classrooms, comment on other people’s posts, and write private messages to any member, including the owners of the company Kyle and Carson.
You can also have your personal blog inside Wealthy Affiliate, where you can share everything you want (if it’s ethical and legal). Usually, members share their advice, opinions, insights, methods they find effective, milestones, achievements, and personal life details.
If you are knowledgeable about something, you can create tutorials, video lessons, or entire training courses and help the community evolve.
Wealthy Affiliate was designed to remove all the separate fees for every necessary tool. It has everything you need for one price and no upsells ever.
With the Premium membership, you can build up to 10 top-level websites (for a symbolic registration fee of $15 a year per domain) and up to 10 SiteRubix.com websites (completely free).
Wealthy Affiliate’s Site Builder is elementary and very fast. You can build your own website in 4 steps in under 30 seconds:
- Choose your domain name.
- Enter a name for your website (you can change it at any time later).
- Choose a look (theme) for your website (you can also change it at any time later).
- Click “Build My Website Now!”
And that’s it! Your website is now potentially ready to attract visitors and earn you a consistent income!
As a Premium member, you can host a total of 10 websites. They can be either top-level domains (YourDomainName.com) or SiteRubix.com subdomains (YourDomainName.siterubix.com).
You can build both types with the Site Bilder and host any combination of them as long as the total number does not exceed 10.
Hosting for Premium members is very far from ordinary. You get servers that can process 250 000 monthly visitors for each website, have protection from hackers, daily backups, free SSL certificates, speed improvements, integrated Google PageSpeed insights, and many more integrated tools!
With the help of the Site Manager platform, you can quickly and efficiently manage all of your websites with a few clicks.
It shows snapshots of all your websites, the most important statistics, details, site health (based on your post count, comments, visitor engagement, etc.), and has shortcut buttons for fast and easy access to the most important tools.
You can see a quick overview of all your websites and log in with one click, making the Site Manager a very convenient platform.
Without being able to analyze all major aspects of the market, it would be very difficult to run your online business. You would be working almost in vain, as most of your potential clients and referrals simply wouldn’t be able to find your websites!
With the Premium membership, you get unlimited access to a Jaaxy Lite account, which you can access straight from the top menu by clicking “Research” for maximum convenience.
Jaaxy Lite account includes:
Keyword Research Tool – shows average monthly searches the keyword receives, estimated potential traffic if you reach the first page rankings in Google, the number of competing websites ranked in Google for this exact keyword, available domain names related to a particular keyword, and a couple of other things.
Site Rank – allows you to check how a specific domain ranks under a particular keyword in the three most popular search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo), thus allowing you to monitor your website’s authority and make necessary adjustments. (With Jaaxy Lite, you can perform 2 000 scans.)
Search Analysis – helps you to analyze the most popular listings in Google, Bing, Yahoo by quickly showing the most important information about every listing, thus allowing you to get a very good idea of what it takes to achieve similar positions and keep up with SEO trends.
Alphabet Soup – helps to automate and accelerate the use of the “alphabet soup” technique by showing a lot of results at once and allowing you to quickly go through the letters.
Brainstorm HQ – shows the feeds from Google Trends, Alexa Topic, Amazon best sellers list, and trending keywords from Twitter, helping you to quickly identify worldwide trends and quickly research given keywords.
Affiliate Programs – helps to search and find relevant affiliate programs in any niche and displays a quick information summary. Can simplify the process of monetization.
Keyword Lists – lets you save desired keywords in organized lists for future reference, making sure that you will never forget potentially profitable ideas.
As we covered earlier, if you don’t know what kind of website(s) you want to build and which niche(s) to choose, you can promote Wealthy Affiliate services using their affiliate program.
Premium members get paid $23.50 monthly and $235.00 yearly from every payment their Premium referrals pay, as well as $46.50 monthly and $465.00 yearly from every payment their Premium Plus referrals pay.
Don’t forget that these payments are recurring, which means that you get these commissions for as long as the person stays with Wealthy Affiliate!
A Chance to Win a Trip to Las Vegas conference!
When a person makes 300 sales in a year, they get an invitation to the all-paid affiliate conference in Las Vegas! Every year many new people achieve this in several months.
This is one of the exceptionally useful and exclusive features. Premium members can simply request comments on their websites’ posts and pages!
Comments are considered content by search engine algorithms, and having quality comments greatly improves positioning in search engines, traffic, and ultimately profits.
Comments can spark a discussion among your visitors, and that means better engagement and better user experience. Also, people might return to your websites just to read new comments.
To ask for one comment on your website, you need two credits that are given for commenting or giving feedback upon other people’s requests. You get one credit for writing one comment or giving one feedback. Credits can also be purchased, but that’s optional.
This is also a one-of-a-kind exclusive service, which allows Premium members to get feedback on their websites or specific posts and pages from other Premium members.
Feedback from real people lets you know what others think about your work and greatly improve your websites’ user experience, ultimately leading to greater profits.
Search engines register the time visitors spend on a website every time they visit. The better the user experience you achieve, the more time people spend on your website. More time equals better engagement, equals better placing in search results, equals even more visitors and potential revenue!
Also, visitors often share the content they enjoy, which results in even more traffic, and they are much more likely to return to your website.
To request one feedback, you need the same two credits as for comments. You can get them by giving feedback to other people, writing comments on their websites, or purchase them if you so choose.
No matter how reliable the hosting is, no one is fully protected from technical issues. Luckily, the support team at Wealthy Affiliate is quite outstanding as well.
Just click “Help” or “Websites” in the top menu, go to “Site Support,” specify the nature and details of your question and submit a ticket. A support team member will usually be in contact within five to ten minutes.
Every Friday, Premium members have the ability to partake in live webinars on various topics, hosted by one of the Wealthy Affiliate ambassadors, Jay, by the username “Magistudios.”
He has deep knowledge about a lot of online business and affiliate marketing related topics and definitely is what most people would consider an expert. He joined back in 2007.
While a webinar is in progress, you can use the live chat to talk to other viewers and the host himself. At the end of most webinars, he takes the time to answer viewers’ questions.
And even if you miss the live broadcast, you can watch all of them later in the video library! Just click “Training” in the top menu, go to “Training HQ,” and choose an “Events” tab, or go to “Classes” and choose an “Available to Watch” tab.
Site Content: content writing platform designed to help you efficiently write and publish content on your websites while providing valuable insights. You have readily available templates and can create your own, set writing goals, etc. The platform might look quite complicated, but it has a comprehensive video tutorial.
Affiliate Programs: an integrated affiliate program search tool. Makes it easy to search for affiliate programs by niche, keyword, or category. Quickly displays the most important information.
The Ability to Post, Comment, Communicate, Etc.: Premium members can have their own blog inside Wealthy Affiliate and share anything they want with other members, as well as comment on other people’s entries. They can write private letters to any other member of the community, including the owners of the company.
Plus, a few other features of lesser importance. As a premium member, you get access to every feature and can use any function with no upsells ever!
Premium members have the ability to switch to yearly billing instead of the standard monthly cycle.
Paying monthly subscription fees of $49 a month, you would pay a total of $588 in 12 months. The yearly subscription is just $495 a year, which means that by switching to yearly billing, you save $93 (16%) a year!
- Full Online Entrepreneur Certification training course (5 levels, 10 lessons each).
- Full WA Affiliate Bootcamp training course (7 phases, 10 lessons each).
- Access to all 13 classrooms.
- The ability to interact with other members of the community, including writing posts, asking questions, and help from many experts and the CEOs of the company themselves, without any limitations.
- Site Builder platform that allows you to quickly and efficiently build new websites without any knowledge of coding.
- Hosting for 10 websites (10 top-level domains, 10 siterubix.com subdomains, or any combination of both).
- Your websites will be placed in quality and secure servers that can process 250 000 monthly visitors for each website, and have a lot of other features and advantages.
- The Site Manager platform allows you to effectively monitor and efficiently manage all your websites with a few clicks.
- A complimentary Integrated Jaaxy Lite account makes it possible to perform keyword research and get valuable market insights.
- 48% affiliate program commissions. $23.50 for every monthly payment and $235.00 for every yearly payment your Premium referrals make, as well as $46.50 monthly and $456.00 yearly for Premium Plus referral payments. (Using this affiliate program is not mandatory.)
- Access to the exclusive website comment platform Site Comments, where you can get comments on your websites for free.
- Access to the exclusive website feedback platform Site Feedback, where you can get feedback for your websites for free.
- Access to fast and reliable technical support.
- Live webinars every Friday, and a video library of all previous webinar records.
- Occasionally other expert video classes.
- Site Content platform that helps to efficiently write, shows writing statistics, etc.
- The ability to upgrade to a yearly membership for $495 a year and save 16%! (Optional.)
The Extras You Get With The Premium PLUS Membership
If you feel like even the premium membership is not enough to satisfy your needs and wants, you can upgrade to the Premium Plus membership that was introduced on 2020 – 11 – 03, along with a major appearance update.
Premium Plus members get everything that the Premium members get, plus a few very expensive and exceptionally exclusive additional features for a combined discount price.
This level of membership is mostly directed towards very serious aspiring or current online entrepreneurs, who need all the recourses and education they can get. Quite a few members already enjoy it and find it beneficial.
At the moment, the membership is still new, so some information is still unknown. As time goes on, members will gain a better insight into all the nuances and technical specifications, and this review will be updated accordingly.
In addition to weekly webinars by Jay, Premium Plus members get more than 150 webinars by several other experts at Wealthy Affiliate, as well as CEOs themselves!
In total, that is more than 200 expert live classes per year or 4 live classes per week on average!
You can see the upcoming and recorded classes by clicking “Classes” in the top menu and browsing the library.
Website hosting is outstanding as it is, but Premium Plus members get an enhanced version of it.
Premium Plus hosting includes:
Hosting for 50 websites: instead of being able to host 10, as a Premium Plus member, you can host up to 50 websites! They can be on either top-level (.com) domains that you own, or secondary-level domains (SiteRubix.com subdomains).
While it’s almost impossible to run that many active websites as a single person, it can be a great option for those who outsource.
Advanced hosting security suite: Premium hosting at Wealthy Affiliate is already very secure, but if you feel like getting the ultimate security package, Premium Plus is the right choice for you.
1,000,000 monthly visits: that is four times more than what Premium members get! Very few private websites get that much. Some of the most popular blogs in the world get even less.
By the time you reached 1 million monthly visits, you would be a world-class blogging authority and a multi-millionaire.
Jaaxy is more than just a simple keyword tool. It’s a research platform that allows you to perform a number of different types of analyses and truly get ahead of the competition.
As a Premium Plus member, you get an integrated Jaxxy Enterprise account, which is the ultimate market research tool that enables you to gain invaluable insights.
Many people pay $99 a month for what the service provides. Premium Plus members have it included in the package at no additional cost!
Jaaxy Enterprise account includes:
- Unlimited Keyword Searches
- Instant Competition Analysis
- Keyword Idea Generation (1300 results)
- 5x Multi-Threaded Search
- 10,000 SiteRank Analysis Scans
- Automated Domain Availability Search
- Enhanced Affiliate Program Search
- Communication with Merchants
Affiliate marketing is the process of promoting other people’s or company’s products using unique affiliate links as identifiers, in exchange for a commission from every sale you make.
This form of marketing is based on revenue sharing and can be seen as dispersing marketing and product creation efforts across different parties to leverage their specialty and abilities.
To facilitate that, three main and one optional party must be involved:
- The seller (also known as a retailer, advertiser, or merchant): anyone who’s looking for more clients and exposure. From individuals like yourself to Fortune 500 companies.
- The marketer (also known as a publisher or affiliate): anyone who promotes at least one product that is not their own, with the goal of attracting buyers and getting a percentage from every sale (or other forms of compensation). Also from ordinary people to superstars and massive companies like Google and Facebook.
- The buyer (also known as a customer or consumer): they are the main concern of both the seller and the marketer. The money spent on the seller’s offer is then divided among other parties, but buyers almost never pay more for purchasing through affiliates, as the cost of marketing is already included in the retail price. Without buyers, the entire system would lose its purpose.
- The network (not essential): an intermediary between the seller and the affiliate. Allows marketers to easily find and participate in affiliate programs suitable for their needs, and sellers to offer their affiliate programs to a large number of potential marketers. Optional because a lot of affiliates sign up for programs directly.
Thee are multiple ways you can get paid as an affiliate, but the most common are the following:
- Cost per sale (CPS): by far the most common method of compensation. You get a fixed percentage from every sale (conversion) you make (usually 3 – 50%).
- Cost per action (CPA): less common and a bit more complicated practice. For you to get monetary compensation, a person has to click your affiliate link and perform a certain predefined action that doesn’t involve purchasing (registering, calling, providing their email, etc.)
- Cost per click (CPC): you get compensated every time a person clicks on an affiliate link. You are not concerned with conversions or actions, but instead driving traffic to the seller.
- Cost per mille (CPM): you get paid a certain amount for every thousand impressions or clicks.
It depends on many factors, and only you can answer that. If you are a neurosurgeon, Supreme Court judge, or successful entrepreneur, you’re probably better off focusing on your career. But if that were the case, you would be quite unlikely to have ended up on this page.
Generally, affiliate marketing is worth trying for anyone who finds themselves not fully satisfied with their current occupation for one reason or another. Maybe it’s waking up early, commuting, overbearing bosses, obnoxious colleagues, being tied to a specific location, or insufficient salary?
The best news is that affiliate marketing is suitable for anyone literate enough to be able to write in plain English, and doesn’t require specialized skills or investment capital! Compared to the vast majority of other online and offline business models, affiliate marketing costs are almost non-existent!
In our personal opinion, the best perks of being a full (or part) time affiliate marketer are as follows.
BEING YOUR OWN BOSS
Choosing your own responsibilities, deadlines, and obligations. Having no one to tell you what to do and how. Not being looked down upon and treated as inferior by the higher-ups. Not being dependant on your team members, some of whom are probably dragging you down by being incompetent or lazy, instead choosing partners on your own terms if you so desire.
WORKING WHENEVER AND WHEREVER YOU FEEL
long as you have access to the internet, you are no longer constrained by location and time. Instead of dressing up and catching a bus or driving to work, just take your laptop and start working in your pajamas. Don’t want to start right away? Work in the evening or at night. Don’t feel like working today at all? No problem. Decided to travel around the world? Feel free to do so (just don’t forget your laptop)!
PERFORMANCE-BASED RESULTS
Have you ever found yourself doing much more work, putting much more effort, and doing a much better job than your colleagues but still getting paid the exact same because the hourly rate is the same? The nature of the affiliate marketing business allows you to get back what you put in. Your dedication, efforts, skills, knowledge, efficiency, and overall performance directly determine your income levels!
EXTREMELY CHEAP TO START AND OPERATE
The vast majority of all businesses are quite expensive to even start, let alone maintain. Most offline businesses require a location, which can be a significant financial burden on its own. Creating a physical product is usually quite expensive as well, not to mention likely legal fees, permits, employee salaries, etc. Reaching adequate profits can take months or even years, and that initial period of expenses requires deep pockets, to begin with.
Affiliate marketing needs none of those, as it’s next to free to start, and any fees are only symbolic. Using cutting edge tools and services cost $50 – 100 a month (more if you want to get custom services like dedicated servers, custom software, advertising, etc.). Using lower quality services would be only $50 – 100 a year! One of the lowest-maintenance businesses in existence!
LITTLE TO NO RISK
Because the operating costs are so insignificant, you have nothing to lose even in the absolute worst-case scenario, where you never make a single sale. No lost investments, angry investors who might decide to sue you, ruined credibility and future prospects, etc. Simply cancel memberships, turn off domain renewal, and move on with your life. Nothing happens!
ACCUMULATIVE PASSIVE INCOME
If your job has a fixed hourly rate, you are essentially selling your time, which is the most inefficient way to make money! To make a comfortable living, where you don’t have to worry about finances, you would need to be one of the best specialists in your field, and even then, you would be earning just a fixed hourly rate! Also, as soon as you stop working, your income goes to zero!
With most businesses, including affiliate marketing, you don’t have this issue. Initially, you will have to invest some time and effort, but an article written today can generate traffic (and subsequent income) for years, thus with every article, your income grows, and has the potential to reach substantial levels fairly quickly (usually in 1 – 3 years, depending on efforts).
As income increases, you have two choices: continue putting in the same effort and increase it further or put less and less effort, which slows down the growth. Eventually, after reaching a certain point, you can outsource different tasks and minimize your worktime to the bare minimum, as others do almost everything for you!
If your goal is to create the next Buzzfeed or HuffPost, you might be out of luck, but if you would like $100 – 10 000 of extra income, then you came to the right place!
If you google “how much does an average blogger make,” you get many interesting articles. Some of which claim that it’s realistic to expect $500 000 in your third year, which is simply outrageous!
For example, the guy from financialsamurai.com was an Executive Director at a major Wall Street firm, made $750 000 a year, and quit to become a full-time blogger because it was more profitable!
But don’t get too excited, these individuals are extreme outliers and their perspective is skewed due to their own success because it’s all they have ever experienced.
Obviously, he had a tremendous advantage from day one, because you need to know a thing or two about business and finances to become a Wall Street executive in the first place.
Others typically have advantages too. An average person can not expect to become a millionaire in less than 5 years from starting a simple blog!
Besides, some of them are praying on gullible people to sell things that are supposed to help achieve the same incredible results.
For the sake of not giving you false hopes and being truly helpful, we made a realistic expectations table (click to enlarge):
The prospect of making $300 – $3000 a month in 1 to 3 years may not make you euphoric, but the median of that still $18 000 a year, which is a base salary in most fast food places, with about 3 – 6 hours of honest work a day! That would be enough to cover most people’s rents or buy a cheaper used car.
Depending on your expectations, and current financial situation, affiliate marketing is definitely worth a try!
CHOOSE THE BEST PLAN
STARTER: for the cautious ones, who want to see what the service is all about and make sure it’s suitable for them.
PREMIUM: for the ones who are serious about their online business and feel ready.
$495
per year
- 120 Lessons Across 2 Courses
- 13 Classrooms (1000
- Hosting For 10 Websites
- Unlimited Community Access
- 24/7 Live Help
- 24/7 Tech Support
- Unlimited Keyword Tool Useage
- Many More Exclusive Features!
$0
starter
- No Time Limit On Staying
- 20 Lessons Across 2 Courses
- 2 Classrooms
- Hosting For 1 Website
- Time-Limited Community Access
- SiteBuilder, SiteManager
- Limited Keyword Tool Usage
- More Features!
$49
per month
- 120 Lessons Across 2 Courses
- 13 Classrooms (1000
- Hosting For 10 Websites
- Unlimited Community Access
- 24/7 Live Help
- 24/7 Tech Support
- Unlimited Keyword Tool Useage
- Many More Exclusive Features!
USER TESTIMONIALS
JUST A FIEW WEALTHY AFFILIATE SUCCESS STORIES
Wealthy Affiliate Members Share Similar Stories Every Day!
How would you defy financial success online? Is it making a few extra dollars, hundreds, or thousands of dollars? Doing it full time? Wealthy Affiliate community has all kinds of success stories to share. From people who just made their first dollar to full-time entrepreneurs. Most are somewhere in between, making reasonable profits and treating it as a secondary source of income.
Even though the results of any kind are by no means guaranteed, they are way more common than most people realize. Since Wealthy Affiliate doesn’t track anyone’s earnings, it’s impossible to tell exactly what percentage of members is making a noteworthy amount, but based on our personal observations after analyzing members’ posts nearly every day, it’s definitely pretty high!
Furthermore, if the company was not living up to the promises and not delivering, it would go bankrupt instead of operating since 2005 and continuing to grow in popularity at an increasing rate!
All things considered, you have realistic chances to end up like these folks, with the help of all the resources available at Wealthy Affiliate. Let’s take a quick glance at a wide variety of achievements shared by Wealthy Affiliate members:
- Stratos joined 2.5 years ago and now makes more than $1.5k a month.
- After 2.5 years of working on her online businesses, Zarina is making nearly 4k a month from various sources.
- Thabo joined three years ago, now makes $5k a month from a single niche website, and is self-employed.
- Dale is making more than $100 a day from a website he started about a year ago.
- During the last ten years with Wealthy affiliate, Eddy earned more than $1 million from Google Adsense alone.
- Jerry reached $6k a month in two years after joining. Now has his own marketing course.
- As a three-year member, in total Darren made $38k from two businesses he started a year ago.
- After 2 years at Wealthy Affiliate, Tiffany is making $2k a month.
- After a year with Wealthy Affiliate, Liz quit her job.
WEALTHY AFFILIATE HAS MORE THAN 2,300,000 USERS WORLDWIDE
And This Number Is Increasing as You Read This…
Since September of 2005, Wealthy Affiliate accumulated more than 2.3 million members. Companies that don’t deliver to the promises have a tendency to quickly go out of business, while Wealthy Affiliate has been thriving for 15 years and is now doing better than ever before! That alone says a lot about the usefulness of their services.
Wealthy Affiliate is getting increasingly more popular among audiences of all ages and all walks of life. During the last five years, since the end of 2015 (which is when we joined), they accumulated more than 1.8 million members, which three times more than during the first 10 years!
If you go to the Wealthy Affiliate homepage, you can see members performing different actions in real-time, which includes joining. Lately, people have been joining every minute. Some of them will change their lives forever. Will you be one of them?
POSSIBLE DISADVANTAGES AND CONCERNS
Nothing is perfect and Wealthy Affiliate is no exception. Sometimes improvements in certain areas lead to compromising other areas, some people have unrealistic expectations, are ignorant, want everything to be handed to them, expect instant results, etc. Others just figure out that the service is simply not suitable for them.
Wealthy Affiliate competitors, their affiliates, and ex-members, who failed to achieve desired results due to their own shortcomings, often lie and start smear campaigns for personal benefits or out of spite.
There will always be some disputes about the validity of the training and some claims made by the Wealthy Affiliate CEOs. Certain things are just unavoidable. No popular service or product ever had a 100% satisfaction rate, but 96% is more than enough, and the success of both the company and its clients speaks for itself.
With that being said, there are legitimate concerns and possible inconveniences members might experience.
- The training courses are primarily beginner-oriented. They will likely seem too elementary If you have experience in the affiliate marketing business.
- The layout and many functions can be confusing until you get used to it.
- Wealthy Affiliate is huge, and at first, too much information can be overwhelming.
- Wealthy Affiliate is so large that it is very easy for new members to get lost.
- No getting rich quickly. For a total newbie creating a full-time business can take 1 - 3 years.
- Creating a profitable business requires work. Usually 3 - 6 hours a day.
- Ultimately the success of your business depends on your efforts and determination.
- You need to buy premium to get the best experience and the best results.
- When writing on the live chat or asking questions, they can sometimes be left unanswered to your satisfaction due to high activity on the Wealthy Affiliate platform.
- Sometimes you can spend too much time on the live chat, reading other people's posts, and socializing.
- Not allowed to sell or promote anything inside Wealthy Affiliate.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
A scam is a dishonest scheme or a fraud that does not provide anything useful and is intended to result in a personal or financial gain of the perpetrator. Wealthy Affiliate is neither of those because it actually provides legitimate services that a lot of people find very useful, which means it’s not a scam.
If you want proof that they provide useful services, there is nothing that can be done on our part, since every type of proof can be very easily faked.
The best way to make sure it’s not a scam is to register as a starter member for free, which only requires a username and an email. Then you will be able to get a very good understanding of the services Wealthy Affiliate provides, and even use some of them for free!
It should not seem that good, because even though Wealthy Affiliate is a great source of knowledge, support, and provides cutting edge tools for running an online business, it’s up to you to apply those resources and put enough effort to become successful.
And there is no catch either. The premium membership is many times more useful, and if you want to experience the full potential, you have to buy it. That’s how Wealthy Affiliate makes money.
Begin from asking yourself several questions:
- Are you interested in making money online?
- Are you interested in running a website based business?
- Are you not expecting to get rich quick or make money immediately after starting?
- Are you ready to put some effort into starting and running an online business?
- Do you have little to no experience with starting and running an online business? (Optional)
- Can you invest ~50$ a month into your business? (Optional)
If you answered “yes” to at least the first 4, then you can join as a starter member free of charge and make sure the services really suit your needs.
The two main training courses at Wealthy Affiliate are oriented towards people exactly like you! They have 120 total lessons that will walk you through the creation and subsequent running of a website based online business.
They also have 12 classrooms that are full of different types of information, and you can ask questions there as well.
More advanced people are usually interested in Wealthy Affiliate for the tools that they offer and the affiliate program. Quite a few of them also enjoy helping other members of the community, who might be a bit clueless, such as yourself.
It varies greatly from person to person. Some start earning within the first month, and others never earn anything.
According to our extensive research online and inside Wealthy Affiliate, a realistic expectation would be about 3 – 6 months. It usually takes 3 – 6 hours of work a day. Statistically, you have a 50% chance of making approximately $1500 a month after 1 – 3 years of running an affiliate marketing business (a blog).
That would be considered a full-time business since that is more than a base salary in some workplaces!
You can find many ways to invest money into your business (paid advertising, custom themes, hiring people to do various tasks for you, other paid services and upgrades, etc.), but everything is optional, and none of it is a part of the Wealthy Affiliate platform, which only has one subscription price and one optional add-on.
The only things you will need to buy are top-level domains, which only have a symbolic registration fee of less than $15 per year.
Usually, people do well with only a website, free Google Analytics service, and nothing else. Wealthy Affiliate already provides you many more additional tools and resources.
Additional investments should be treated as icing on the cake. If you cannot make an online business profitable without additional expenses, investing more would not be advisable because it is unlikely to be profitable even with investments.
As much or as little as you want! That is one of the best things about being the owner of such a business. You work on your terms, choose your own hours, and do whatever you please! Work at night or during the day, at home, or on a beach, every day or once a week, 15 minutes or 15 hours a day; your options are limited only by your imagination!
With that being said, and as much freedom as you get, you still need to put in an adequate amount of work and produce sufficient results. Generally, 3 – 6 hours of work a day are enough depending on the quality of your work and the desired outcome.
No, you do not, and no, they cannot. The hosting there is very similar to other premium hosting providers, except much cheaper. You are free to use all of your domains and websites in any way you want, as long as it’s legal.
The only times they can control your websites are out of necessity, when you contact technical support to help you with a problem, or if your website violates the law. Any other time would be legally considered hacking. They cannot put advertisements on your websites or obligate you to do anything with them. Wealthy Affiliate doesn’t even have the means to control what their clients are doing with their websites because that would require too many human resources.
Yes, you can, and very easily so! You can either transfer their registration to Wealthy Affiliate, for which you will need a transfer verification code provided by your current registration provider; or you can point domains registered elsewhere to Wealthy Affiliate’s hosting servers by updating their DNS at your current hosting provider’s settings (each one is slightly different).
Go to Site Domains at Wealthy Affiliate, where they will walk you through the process, which takes only a couple of minutes. After that, it can take up to 24 hours for your domains to appear in the Site Manager at Wealthy Affiliate.
Yes, you are. If you are using the free starter membership, just stop using it and forget about it; and if you are using one of two subscriptions of the premium membership, click on your profile picture in the top right corner, go to “Account Settings,” choose the “Subscription” tab, scroll down, and click “Cancel Billing.”
That is it, your membership is now canceled. To our knowledge, prior to doing that, you need to transfer your top-level domains to another hosting provider, otherwise, the websites and all of their data will be lost. It’s advisable to contact the technical support team before canceling to avoid any mistakes or misunderstandings.
No, you can not. It would be very complicated from a technical perspective because you would have to transfer your top-level domains to another host or delete them along with all except one secondary-level domain, change themes, etc.
Also, being able to switch from premium to starter at will would be rather unfair for the people who pay the full price non-stop. You pay for the entire package of services, even if you choose not to use some of them, and if you wish to stop paying, you lose access to the entire package.
You can resubscribe to premium later, or create a different free account. To our knowledge, your websites can be restored for up to two years after canceling the membership, but you need to contact the technical support team to avoid any mistakes or misunderstandings.
No, they will not. In that respect, Wealthy Affiliate is just like any other premium hosting provider, just considerably cheaper. It would be illegal for them to keep the top-level domains that you bought because they are your property. Upon leaving, they only delete siterubix.com subdomains, which are property of Wealthy Affiliate.
Prior to leaving, you need to transfer your websites to another hosting provider, which is a simple process, otherwise, they will be lost. Contacting the technical support team would provide you with more details and assistance to avoid any potential mistakes.
Pretty much all the information in both training courses can be found somewhere else because the courses are primarily oriented towards total beginners, and they are not trying to come up with the newest get-rich-quick scheme or turn you into a millionaire.
Instead, they teach you to build a sustainable and reasonably profitable long-term online business, using proven, time-tested methods that have been working for at least several years by now, and are expected to work in the foreseeable future.
However, would you rather wander all around the internet looking for bits and pieces of information, and just hope that you don’t miss anything too important, essentially leaving everything to chance; or have everything presented to you in bite-size pieces using plain English that a middle schooler would be able to understand?
The same question could be applied to any course, school, college, or university. What do they teach in Harward or MIT that cannot be found elsewhere? Exactly nothing, but it’s much more convenient to study there, instead of researching everything yourself.
The hosting of 10 websites is included in the premium price.
The 10 websites can consist of any combination of secondary-level SiteRubix.com domains (that are owned by Wealthy Affiliate, and you can use all of them free of charge for as long as you are a premium member) and top-level domains (that are your property because you have to pay a symbolic registration fee of $15 a year.)
Both secondary and top-level domains can be deleted and added at any time, but the total number cannot exceed 10.
When joining as a starter member, just an email, name, username, and password.
When joining as a premium member, they also need a payment source, which can be either PayPal or a bank card. You need to provide the details of one of them according to your preference.
They need it to recover your password in case you forget it and send you notifications and necessary warnings about activity in your Wealthy Affiliate account.
And no, they don’t spam and especially don’t disclose or make an email visible on your profile. You can tailor your email notification preferences to your exact liking in your account settings, or opt-out from receiving emails altogether.
Of course, you can! And in some cases, it might be even better depending on your approach to affiliate marketing and online business in general.
For example, websites in your native (or any other less popular language that you know of) can be used for local marketing and targeting specific niche audiences that might be very interested in what you have to say, show or offer.
You can stay for as long as you like; the starter membership has no trial period. When you sign up for free, you get a week to try out some premium features, but after that, you can stay and use your free secondary-level website as well as other free features.
The starter membership is 100% free, and they couldn’t charge you even if they wanted because for that you need to enter your bank card or PayPal information.
That’s a very visual and informative article! Even though it’s an advertisement I actually enjoyed looking at it!
Exceptionally helpful article. Love the FAQs at the end.
We are very pleased to read it! Thank you for your comment.
If I already have a few websites that are being hosted at a different hosting provider, can I transfer them to wealthy affiliate? And if so then how?
Yes, you can transfer up to 25 domains in a single premium account. Refer to the Frequently Asked Questions section at the end of the article above for a more detailed explanation.
How much is hosting at Wealthy Affiliate? You said the hosting of 50 websites is included in premium, but that doesn’t seem realistic. Other providers would charge more than 100 dollars for that alone.
The hosting of 50 websites is indeed included in the premium price. Those 50 websites consist of 25 secondary-level domains (siterubix.com subdomains) that are completely free and 25 top-level domains that you have to buy for $15 a year each. Wealthy Affiliate is one of the most competitive (maybe even the most competitive) services in the world, that’s why it may not seem realistic to a lot of people.
The best WA review I have ever seen!
Thank you for your support!
you don’t care about your audience. You only have a few posts, the last of which was written in 2016, only updating this page because it makes you money, and not even replying to comments since 2017! The fact that this seems to work for you, frankly, blows my mind!
Hello,
we genuinely care about our audience, but sometimes other priorities get in the way of giving enough attention to online business or even cause it to be greatly neglected. Even though we took a three-year break, stopped posting and eventually replying, but we never fully stopped working behind the scenes, and have been developing some pretty significant improvements, that you may not have noticed if you’re new here.
As for working, of course it does, because we employ other strategies that work regardless of posting frequency and search engine rankings.
But despite how neglectful we may have been in the past, we are getting back to working on all of our websites once again. And this time more seriously than ever before!
Thank you for leaving this comment 🙂
Grey
The service seems to be trustworthy and deserving of that many clients. Also love the design of this whole website and this page, simply incredible work!
Exactly, they are definitely worth what they have. And thanks for visiting our website and leaving this comment 🙂
At first I was hesitant to join but after I finally did it became aparent that I made the right decision. Thank you, cheers!
Thank you for stopping by and letting us know that you enjoy it! Best wishes!
Those success stories are inspiring but are not very realistic. What would be a realistic expectation for a person who has no experience in a similar business or coding?
Some of them aren’t, and some are. Becoming a millionaire is not realistic for an average person, but making $400 in two months after seven months of working on a website is a not only realistic but relatively poor achievement. You can reasonably expect $1000 – $2000 a month in 1 – 3 years of seriously working on an online business without any prior experience (according to our pretty extensive research).
I came across some reviews of this a few years back. It looks like they changed their design and now have more than two times more members. Even though it’s not for me, it looks like a quality service.
Recently they changed their design to a much more modern and convenient one, and they’re gaining mambers at an ever increasing rate. During the last 4 years, they gathered more than a million members, which is more than they got in the first 11 years of operation! That only proves how usefull the services are.
So if you are saying that it’s possible to run a business and make money as a free member than why would anyone buy premium? It doesn’t make sense for a business to give away too much for free, because the paid plan loses it’s purpose.
Yes, it is possible, but the premium membership offers many times more value and opportunities. For example, with the free membership, you get hosting for two secondary-level websites, both of which can be turned into successful businesses. With the premium, you get hosting for 25 top-level domains and 25 secondary-level domains, all of which can be turned into successful businesses! Premium also gives you full access to both courses, the community, questions and answers platform, and so much more! Check the exact differences at the comparison table in the article above.
My favorite review ever!
Thank you very much!
Simply Amazing Work!
Thank you very much! We appreciate your comment!