Wealthy affiliate is a popular platform for people looking to earn money online. The site has been around for more than a decade, and with a membership of more than 1.4 million members, it’s a trusted forum for internet marketers.
This guide will walk you through everything that you need to know about Wealthy Affiliate. Read to the end to get the low down on the course and community.
Let’s start this article by covering the basics.
Who Founded Wealthy Affiliate
Kyle Loudon and Carson Lim founded Wealthy Affiliate. Both were successful digital entrepreneurs before launching the site. They created the site as a community where like-minded people could gather together to share their success online.
The founders of Wealthy Affiliate created a community to help people become financially independent. It’s a pretty cool idea, and, as you can see by the number of members, the site has become a big success.
What is Wealthy Affiliate
Wealthy Affiliate, often referred to as WA, was founded back in 2005. It was one of the first forums for people interested in affiliate marketing. It’s less popular than Warrior Forum, but there’s an active community on the site.
The public forum is free to join. The site has two paid plans, which is what we’ll be reviewing:
- Premium Membership – Costs $49 per month and gives users access to all of the tools available within the community. These include training videos, webinars, live chat sessions, a private messaging system, and other resources.
- Starter Membership – Costs $19 per month and allows users to join the community. You don’t get access to some premium features, such as live chats and video tutorials.
With both plans, you get a domain and hosting.
What Do you Get With the Paid Membership?
On paper, you get a lot of value from a paid membership for Wealthy Affiliate. Here’s an overview of what you get access to:
- Training to help you select your niche
- Website builder for managing your site
- Site hosting
- SEO training to help you get traffic to your site
- Pay Per Click training course
- Subscription to various marketing tools
- An overview of how to monetize a site through affiliate marketing
- Coaching through the community
There are over 200+ hours of training content. Plus, a large community of instructors to support you and provide advice.
TLDR: Should Your Become a Paid Member
Wealthy Affiliate is best suited to people getting started online. Don’t sign up if you have experience in marketing, SEO, or PPC. On balance, I wouldn’t recommend it for a beginner, either, as I think there are better organized courses available.
The Wealthy Affiliate course comprises over 200+ hours of training. It covers a lot of things and lays the groundwork for digital marketing. That’s a good thing.
Unfortunately, much of the information from the course is outdated. Some of the tips are relevant, other advice will be ineffective, and some advice no longer works or could harm your business.
It’s hard to know what advice is valuable and what is just BS as a beginner. That’s a problem.
One of the best things about Wealthy Affiliates is that you will join a community of entrepreneurs. If you focus on networking, you can make some great connections.
Many members do get something back from the course. A quick look at Trust Pilot shows this.
Web hosting and a keyword research tool are provided to paid members. The keyword tool is good enough. It doesn’t compare well to a solution like Ahrefs or SEMrush.
For shared hosting, the Wealthy Affiliate package is ok.
Wealthy Affiliate Refund Policy
The Internet Marketing space is famous for poor customer service. Many companies offer refunds and then don’t pay or have a no refund policy.
Wealthy Affiliate falls into this second group. They do not offer refunds.
If you want to try the program, sign up for the monthly plan. Don’t jump in and sign up for the annual plan.
Word of warning, there are angry reviews on Trust Pilot from people who have issues with the company. The screenshot above is a case in point.
Incentivized Affiliate Recommendations
Like many online courses, Wealthy Affiliate has an affiliate program. Affiliates get just over $100 per referral. That’s quite low for paid courses.
You will find people recommending Wealthy Affiliate because of the affiliate program. You will find people incentivized by the affiliate program providing positive reviews.
To be clear, that’s not a criticism. Marketing a product or service takes time and effort. You should incentivize people to recommend your product (especially if you run a community for affiliates).
Do your research, read a range of reviews, and make your decision.
Wealthy Affiliate Overview
There are four main parts to the Wealthy Affiliate paid plan. In the sections below, we’ll take a deeper look at each of the things on offer. We’ll start with a deep dive into the course.
1. Wealthy Affiliate Course
The Wealthy Affiliate course covers every element of digital marketing. They discuss social media, email marketing, blogging, search engine optimization, and more.
That’s a lot to cover. It’s commendable that the course creators tried to give people such a broad grounding in digital marketing.
All of the information shared in the course you could learn by researching things independently online. A good course makes learning the skills easier. And, to be fair, Wealthy Affiliates does cover a lot in the 200+ hours of training.
The problem is the quality of the information.
I think part of the issue here is the scope of the course. You need someone constantly reviewing and updating content and removing irrelevant material.
That’s not been happening.
As a result, you find a lot of contradictory advice if you start digging into the content. You will find information that is no longer relevant. For example, videos about how to dominate Google Plus won’t have any value. The social network is no longer active.
The course creators need someone to go through things and clear things up.
If Wealthy Affiliate does the above, they would have something great to offer. After all, the course is cheap for what you get. Plus, they are adding new content.
Many premium courses charge $500 or more to access less information. The thing is, those more expensive courses are often better organized.
2. Wealthy Affiliate Community
One of the biggest strengths of a course is the community that you join. Wealthy Affiliate has a large community of free and premium members. There are a lot of experienced affiliate marketers in the forum who you can learn from if you take the time and effort to network.
To my mind, the community is one of Wealthy Affiliate’s biggest strengths.
Having access to a community of experienced marketers you can turn to will help you avoid expensive mistakes. If you’re going to join Wealthy Affiliate, dive into the community. That would be my recommendation regardless of the course.
People who don’t get involved in the community will get less value from the course. People who do engage with the community get more value from the course.
Unfortunately, you do need to pay a recurring fee each month for this access. To be fair, accessing the community is cheap. Many premium courses cost somewhere between $500-$2,000.
On the flip side, there are affiliate communities that are free to join, like Warrior Forum.
3. Wealthy Affiliate Hosting
When you pay to become a premium Wealthy Affiliate member, you also get access to one year of hosting and a site through SiteRubix. The hosting plan is fine for a new website. It’s the equivalent of a shared hosting plan that you might get with a company like Blue Host or similar.
From another hosting provider, the service would cost around $40-$80 per year. You’ll be paying around $300 a year for hosting and additional services through Wealthy Affiliate.
If you care about hosting speed, I’d recommend using a different service. There’s a reason Wealthy Affiliate doesn’t appear on any list of top hosting companies.
4. SiteRubix & Jaaxy
As a Wealthy Affiliate member, you get access to SiteRubix, a website builder, and Jaaxy, a keyword research tool. I’d never heard of Jaaxy before Wealthy Affiliate. It’s not a tool I’ve seen any SEO professionals use.
Most people I know use tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Majestic, Moz, etc. There’s a reason for this; they’re the best tools on the market. It costs around $100 bucks a month to access any of these platforms. That’s a lot of money.
Many people will struggle to justify those expenses.
Getting access to Jaaxy for free is good value for money in that sense. Plus, it would normally cost $49 a month. That just happens to be the same cost as a Wealthy Affiliate membership. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
You also get access to SiteRubix, a website builder.
I wouldn’t use SiteRubix personally. WordPress is a more versatile Content Management System (CMS).
Summing Up
Wealthy Affiliate have put a lot of effort into creating a course and community that they feel would benefit affiliates. It’s great that you can join the community for free. I also really like the fact you can pay a monthly membership fee.
If you’re just getting into online marketing and want to join a community, check out Wealthy Affiliate. You can connect with some really smart people.
I don’t think the course is great, though, because it tries to do too much. I think you’d get more value investing in a premium course that specializes in just one thing and covers that topic amazingly.
