Is WealthyAffiliate.com A Scam? – My honest review

I originally learned about online affiliate marketing a few years ago by looking for ways to make money online on Google.

 I found the information scattered here and there and being enthusiastic about the idea I decided to create a site, or two actually.

I literally had no idea what I was doing so those sites were destined to be failures.

More recently I decided to give online affiliate marketing a new try, but this time I knew I needed guidance.

I did some research and kept running into a service called Wealthy Affiliate at wealthyaffiliate.com.

Everybody was praising the service and recommending it for beginners (which I was) especially.

Since it was free, I decided to take the plunge. I went premium the first week and have not regretted it for a second.

I have been a part of the phenomenal Wealthy Affiliate community for some time now. I have gotten to know personally many regular people just like you and me that are making a full-time income online.

Some are even earning over $10 000/month and many of these are folks that had no prior knowledge about online marketing before joining WA. Or anything to do with the online world really.

I have also created a successful income producing website with the training. It produces income every single month even if I don't touch it. 

That just goes to show how well the system works when you can turn from a complete beginner to a successful entrepreneur just by following their step-by-step program.

It's time to pay back to the community, so I'm making this comprehensive review. I will tell you anything and everything you ever wanted to know about Wealthy Affiliate.

I will also give you my personal tips on how to make the most out of the service and it's tools when starting out.

What exactly is Wealthy Affiliate?

Wealthy Affiliate is, in essence, an online business education platform. But education is just a small part of their service.

They also offer all the tools you need to run a successful business online under the same roof.

This includes top-of-the-line hosting service for running your website or sites, keyword research tools, content creation tools, domain registration tools, and many others.

I will go into more detail about all the tools and features a bit later on.

Big part of why Wealthy Affiliate is so successful and why the system works so well is the community.

People help each other out with problems and things like getting comments on your content. This is important, as I will show later on.

To a complete beginner the most important thing is the education. The main training is executed in a very easy to understand step-by-step fashion with videos, text and tasks for every lesson.

The lessons and tasks are chopped up in to perfect length so you can get something concrete done every time you "take" a lesson. You will have your first site up and running before you even realize it.

The previous lessons can be accessed at any time if you need to go over things.

They are also constantly updating the lessons as the internet is an ever-evolving entity so you can rest assured that the lessons are always up-to-date and not filled with outdated knowledge.

Besides the two main training anyone with a premium subscription can add their own training after they've been a member for three months.

These are pure gold as people are adding them almost daily and there's probably a tutorial to any problem you might run into.

I can't even count how many times these community-driven training have saved me from a problem that's kept me from moving forward.

Some of the most liked features of Wealthy Affiliate are:

• Completely free to get started
• Personal mentoring from successful online entrepreneurs and millionaires
• Two complete, easy to understand certification trainings
• 24/7 online support
• Incredible helpful community
• State-of-the art hosting platform for running your sites

Wealthy Affiliate was founded by Kyle and Carson 13 years ago in 2005.

Success stories in Wealthy Affiliate

There are literally thousands of people who have had success with Wealthy Affiliate and are using the methods taught there every day to make an income online.

Success is of course relative. To someone creating a site and getting some traffic is enough while someone else might consider making $50k/year a success.

The biggest factor in the success you will have with Wealthy Affiliate is you. No one else can make them work for you and the harder you work the more results you will see.

Let me share some of Wealthy Affiliate success stories so you can see what can be achieved (click the images to see the full story):

--> Get started FREE creating your own money making website <-

Wealthy Affiliate membership options

There are three membership options in WA. Free, monthly premium and yearly premium.

You can sign in for a free membership without registering a payment option. This is something that truly impressed me.

I don't know many companies that don't try to force an automated monthly subscription from your credit card if you forget to cancel your subscription.

Not Wealthy Affiliate. They give you all the time you want to get to know the service and its functions for completely free.

There are no constant bombardment of up-sells and they are very up-front and honest about everything concerning their business.

I originally registered for free membership but decided to go premium after three days' or so because I couldn't wait to get my first site up and running.

There are of course some limitations to the free starter subscription, as shown below:

What is not shown here is that if you join through my link, the premium membership costs only $19 for the first month which gives you a very affordable chance to see if you like the premium service.

 After that it costs $49/month or $359/year. The yearly fee might seem steep but when you do the math it's actually $229 cheaper per year than the monthly subscription.

If that's not a big discount, I don't know what is. So the sooner you go yearly the more you save. Pro Tip: On Black Friday you can usually get the yearly subscription for $299!

How do you make money at Wealthy Affiliate?

So how exactly DO you make money with Wealthy Affiliate? The process is actually very simple.

The business model is essentially Search Engine Optimized content creation, combined with affiliate marketing. 

Don't worry if you don't understand what it means. It's a lot simpler than it sounds. 

It involves creating a niche website with posts aimed for low competition keywords. Those posts will then rank in search engines and you will be getting traffic.

You then monetize that traffic by using something called affiliate links.

If a visitor clicks your affiliate links and decides to make a purchase, you earn a commission.

It's as simple as that. I covered the whole process in a post I made with an example niche and site.

Here are the main parts of the process taught at Wealthy Affiliate:

Choosing a niche for affiliate marketing

The very first thing in the training and in your affiliate marketing career will be choosing a niche. A niche is essentially the topic or category of your site and the market space you are aiming at.

Your niche should be something you are familiar with as you will be writing a lot of content on it.

It can be hard to come up with niche in the beginning but this is where Wealthy Affiliate really shines.

There are tons of tutorials for getting ideas for a niche and what niches are profitable. And if you are still having trouble coming up with a good niche you feel comfortable with, you can always go with the Affiliate Bootcamp training which is aimed for creating a site focused on marketing Wealthy Affiliate.

Choosing a domain and building a site

Once you have niche, you will need to choose a domain for that niche to run your site. Wealthy Affiliate allows you to make two websites in the free membership plan.

These are called SiteRubix websites with a .siterubix domain. In all honesty I think they are probably very hard to rank in google and you should definitely get your own domain.

You can register a domain through Wealthy Affiliate for a very competitive price of $13.99 to $15.99 depending on the domain.

In the premium plan you will have the option to host 25 different .siterubix sites and 25 of your own domains.

Once you have a domain picked it's time to install the WordPress content management system on it.

This is one of the great benefits of WA, you don't need any technical expertise if you host your website there.

WordPress can be installed with a one click and WordPress settings accessed with a click as well.

All you need to do is to install activate couple plugins and delete the test posts. Wealthy Affiliate premium membership offers thousands of WordPress themes to choose from.

Keyword research

Before you start creating your content you need to do keyword research. These days' it's pointless to write content without keyword research on a new site as the chances of that content ranking in Google are nonexistent.

This is one of the great features of Wealthy Affiliate as well. It comes equipped with the Lite version of the best keyword tool on the market, called Jaaxy.

The free membership allows to make 30 searches on it but in the premium there are no search restrictions. 30 searches is really nothing so the free membership is only for trying out.

You might find 5 to 10 great keywords with 30 searches but that's it. You can't really build a sustainable business with the free membership only.

Creating content

Once you have your niche chosen, a great domain purchased and a site up and running it's time to take your keywords and start writing content.

The content needs to be easy to read, specific to your keyword and long enough. The minimum standard these days' is 1000 words per post buy you should aim for more.

Adding affiliate links is the last piece of the puzzle. Once you have some great content up and running it's time to add some affiliate links to products or services related to your niche.

There are affiliate programs for almost anything and if you can't find one you can bet someone in the Wealthy Affiliate community can help you out.

The Wealthy Affiliate training

For beginners in online affiliate marketing, the training is one of the most important parts of Wealthy Affiliate.

Without guidance, it's almost impossible to fit all the pieces together and run a successful affiliate site.

The process outlined before is pretty straight forward but it's all the small little details that everything works together. And you quite simply have to know these details and that requires education.

The training at WA is incredibly well organized step-by-step courses with videos showing exactly what you need to do next and tasks for the days' lesson.

You can usually complete one lesson and the tasks related to it in an evening. Some take longer than other but in general, you should be able to complete even the longer lessons in 3 to 4 hours.

There are two Certification courses in Wealthy Affiliate:

Online Entrepreneur Certification

The online entrepreneur certification is aimed at building a niche site of your own choosing. The niche can be almost anything you wish.

The training is divided in to 5 blocks: Getting started, Building your own traffic producing website, Making money!, Mastering social engagement and Achieving maximum success through content creation.

The free membership allows you to complete the Getting started block which is very good but won't allow you to learn everything about creating a succesfull online business. 

Affiliate Bootcamp

The Affiliate Bootcamp training is aimed at promoting Wealthy Affiliate and other services in the Make Money Online niche.

The training is divided into seven blocks: Getting your business rolling / Content, keywords, and Conversions / Giving your site social value / Get visual. Get aesthetic. Get a brand through media. / Knowing your audiences and catapulting your referrals / Bing, Yahoo & The power of PPC / How to scale successful PPC campaigns.

​Like in the other training you only get to go through the first block in your free membership.

As you can see, the two training are quite different in their details. The main process is the same but there are major differences.

As you can see from my screenshots, I am actually completing them both.

Training HQ and classrooms

Besides the two official certification training in WA, there are tons of tutorials, classrooms, and training for anything concerning internet marketing.

These are mostly produced by experienced premium members and they are very helpful and informative in current topics like GDPR legislation.

The Wealthy Affiliate hosting and tools

The WA premium membership comes equipped with a state of the art hosting service and content creation tools.

Everything you need to run a successful online marketing site. In the past you had to pay for multiple services and take several steps that required technical knowledge on how things work in order to run a site. You needed:

• a hosting service,
• knowledge on how to install WordPress manually (or create content some other way)
• a keyword research tool
• a spell checker tool
• a way to get interaction on your site

WA has combined all that and more under the same roof. Let's see what's included.

Site Manager

Under the Site Manager, you can access your websites and see a quick overview of statistics like a number of posts, comments, and Google Indexing.

Here you can also find the Site Health service which shows crucial info about your site. Site health tells you how well your site is doing.

It's important to keep your site healthy good to rank in the search engines and this is one of my favorite features of WA.

You don't have to guess if you are doing everything correctly as you can check it right out. As you can see on this site's screenshot the health is pretty good.  I'm sure it will increase in due time.

Site Domains

Under the Site Domains menu, you will find the tools for finding, registering and managing your domains. This is pretty straight forward really.

Site Content

Under the site content, you will find the content creation tools of Wealthy Affiliate. WA comes equipped with a very nice writing platform with a complete grammar and spell-checks tool.

Writing quality content without this tool would be gruesome for me as it's impossible to write fast without making mistakes.

This tool has saved me many times from embarrassing mistakes and I love to write all my content in the Site Content manager.

Other great things about writing in WA is you can access it anywhere with an internet connection and it automatically saves all your work and created drafts so you will never lose any content in case of computer trouble.

Site Comments

This is a great tool for getting comments and engagement on your posts. This is something Google and other search engines look for when ranking your content so it's important for SEO.

It works on a give and take principle, you give two comments to earn credits that you can then use to buy comments for your own posts.

Site Feedback

Site Feedback is a service for getting feedback on your from the Wealthy Affiliate community. This is critical for running a successful site. Don't get offended by critical feedback, learn from it!

The cons

Now not to make you think Wealthy Affiliate is all bells and whistles it's time for the dirt. There are some things you should know when thinking about joining Wealthy Affiliate.

Nothing is perfect and you need to have a certain mindset to get most of your Wealthy Affiliate membership if you decide to join.

First of all, it takes work. Quite a lot of it actually, to see some initial success. It's been estimated it takes on average 20-30 quality posts with low competition keywords to start seeing good rankings in google.

If you can produce a post or two in a week it adds up to several months of work before you should expect any real results.

Here's a great example by Kyle (the founder of WA) of what your journey might look like: 

After a couple of months in the community, you will realize most people fail to even get started. There are thousands of forgotten accounts.

Out of the million members, maybe 50 000 are truly active. The training won't work if you don't put in the work.

If you decide to join and go premium, make sure you will not fail to get started. Do something every day! You need the right mindset.

 If you work hard and follow the training I guarantee you will see success!

Since the internet is always evolving and there are a million ways to make money online, not everything is covered in the training.

There are other important things you could learn by spending your time elsewhere.

But as a novice it's important to have a plan and stick to it, that's why they don't try to teach you everything. Instead, they focus on teaching you one tried and true system.

The only thing I would learn more than is covered in the training is SEO. You can find more info on SEO on the member trainings as well though.

Conclusion + A Bonus!

I can promise you WealthyAffiliate.com is not a scam. The service they run is top-notch and to be honest, I could not have believed how much I can achieve in a few months before joining them.

I have created two sites and become very active in the community. I start all my days checking my Wealthy Affiliate contacts and my site comments and traffic. It truly is something special.

BONUS: I trust the program so much that I'm going to give you a free bonus if you create a free membership through that button below and upgrade it to premium within the first 7-days.

You will receive a huge discount for the first month (only $ 19) and my full support and all the secrets for succeeding as fast as humanly possible. I will personally contact you in Wealthy Affiliate on how to receive the bonus when you create your account.

​

In conclusion, here are my basic tips if you decide to join:

- Ask questions and interact in WA

- Use very low competition keywords in the beginning

- Write over 2000 word articles

- Create social media accounts for your site as early as possible

- Get comments and share your content in social media

- Learning everything you can on SEO, everything is not covered in the training IMO

- Focus on one site at a time

- Go for yearly premium, this way you will save $200 dollars/year and you will make a commitment. If you don't get results in a year it's time to evaluate your motivation and goals.

If you have ANY questions about Wealthy Affiliate, please ask them in the comments section below. I promise to answer every single one!