Wealthy Affiliate

What is Wealthy Affiliate?

In a nutshell, Wealthy Affiliate (WA) is the premiere platform to help you build a successful affiliate marketing business online.  WA gives you all the tools you need to reach and even exceed your goals.

As of this writing, WA has been in business for over 13 years, offers it’s services in 193 countries and boasts over 1.4 million members.  If that weren’t enough, Wealthy Affiliate also has more than 1,800 expert coaches, helps more than 23,000 people reach their goals daily and sees more than 10,000 business built every month.

Another thing to note is that the founders, Kyle and Carson, are active in the community.  You can catch them in live chat or send them a private message.  They’re happy to respond and help out.  They didn’t just set it up, make their money and disappear.  In fact, the site just recently went through an update to make it more accessible and user friendly and work is constantly being done to improve the site and tools available.

Many programs want you to sign up, pay for their training and, once they have your money, you might get a PDF, video or access to some private, members only, web site.  That’s it, you’re on your own from there.  WA doesn’t work that way.  From the start you get access to almost all of the premium content to try out for a full 7 days with the free Starter membership.  Once that 7 day trial expires, your access is reduced to the services the free Starter membership includes.

You can remain free forever if you’d like with no obligation to upgrade to the Premium membership and many members have done just that.  If you see the benefit of upgrading to Premium, great.  If not, that’s OK.  How many other platforms offer free access and resources forever?

Many affiliate marketing programs make grandiose claims of making money with little to no effort or making obscene amounts of money in a very short time frame.  Beware of such claims.  Affiliate marketing is a business just like any other (well maybe not just like, as it does many advantages over a traditional 9 to 5 job).  It requires effort and dedication to be successful.  Wealthy Affiliate knows this and takes the time to build your skills and knowledge properly to make sure you have a solid foundation for success.

Most programs simply offer training and then refer you to other services to build your site which, of course, they make referral commissions on when you purchase their services.  Wealthy Affiliate is more than just a training site.  Their platform offers training, hosting, tools and, what I consider the true power of WA, an amazing community of people from all walks of life with varying levels of expertise in a wide array of professions, niches and tool sets.

A little about the training…

WA offers affiliate marketing training like no other.  Wealthy Affiliate offers many different types of training:

• Online Entrepreneur Certification – 50 lessons, split up into 5 phases of 10 lessons each, that will walk you through the steps to build a business in absolutely any niche.
• Affiliate Bootcamp – 70 lessons across 7 phases to teach you the how to create and establish a business promoting of Wealthy Affiliate itself.
• Live Training – This is a nice bonus.  Every week Jay presents a live training course on various topics.  One of my favorites is the Hot Seat, where members can submit their sites for critiquing live.  You really get some good feedback in the Hot Seat.  Recordings are made available in a day or two, in case you’re unable to attend live.
• Classrooms – Various training courses organized into 13 different categories:
  • Authoring & Writing Content
  • Getting Started
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • WA Affiliate Program
  • Everything WordPress
  • Keyword, Niche and Market Research
  • The Wealthy Affiliate Platform
  • Website Development & Programming
  • Local Marketing
  • Social Engagement & Marketing
  • Pay Per Click Marketing
  • Email Marketing
  • Video Marketing
• Member Generated Training:
  • Blogs
  • Tutorials
  • Videos
  • Complete Courses

That’s a lot of training resources at your disposal.  The main courses are top-notch but I really appreciate the member generated options.  These usually cover specific topics such as how to get plugin X setup and running properly, etc.  I’ve produced several of my own that have helped others as well.

I find following the main courses great for learning the ropes and getting my sites up and running and then taking a look at the specific, member generated courses, to fine tune my sites and the tools I use.

The fact that members can create and offer their own trainings is a great feature that is lacking from many other affiliate marketing programs.

Hosting, another feature of the Wealthy Affiliate platform…

As if the training weren’t enough, WA even offers hosting at both the Starter and Premium levels and it’s not just some low quality offering either.  Wealthy Affiliate manages their own servers through Amazon hosting, offering fast speeds, redundancy and high availability.  They even keep a mirror of your site running at all times, just in case, and can quickly switch to it should the need arise.  Daily backups are also performed to keep your sites safe, should you make a mistake or have some other issue.

Sites are based on the WordPress platform.  This gives you unparalleled power, offering countless theme options, numerous plugins to enhance your site and add features as well as a proven solution that powers some of the most successful websites on the net today.  Because WordPress is so widely used, finding information, getting hints and tips and locating help when you need it is so simple because it’s literally everywhere.

The WA Starter membership includes up to two subdomains on the siterubix.com platform with a handful of theme and plugin options.  These are yours for as long as you want.  Build your sites, test them out, monetize them and more.  You can pretty much do what you want and it won’t cost you a dime.

Now, let’s take that up a notch to the Premium membership.  Expand those two sites to 25 and then add an additional 25 sites using your own domains too.  That’s right, now you get up to 50 sites to use as you see fit.  Tack on countless more themes and plugins and you can really see where this service can take you.

If nothing else, two sites to play around with, learn on and even monetize, all for free, has got to be a little tempting.

OK, so there’s training and hosting…  What about tools and services?

WA has got you covered here too.  A website and hosting alone aren’t enough to be successful.  You need to be able to create content and engagement if you’re going to be taken seriously online.

Enter Jaaxy, Site Content, Site Comments and Site Feedback.  These tools not only help you build your content but offer features you just don’t see elsewhere.  Let’s take a closer look:

• Jaaxy – This tool is quite an impressive little gem.  This tool is used for keyword research, niche insights, competition evaluations, site ranking information and more.  I’m just touching on the highlights but I really do suggest, even if you don’t go the Wealthy Affiliate route, that you check out Jaaxy and use it in your online endeavors.
• Site Content – Yes, you can absolutely create content right in WordPress and, if you choose to do so, that’s fine.  Now, consider a content creation platform that includes access to over 1 million free to use images, templates that you can use or create to standardize your look and formatting and one that even optimizes images when you publish.  Site Content does this and more.  I use it exclusively for my site posts.
• Site Comments – If you’ve been online for a while, I’m sure you’ve come across blogs and posts that have captured your interest.  Of those, how many have you caught yourself either reading comments on or commenting on yourself?  That’s the true magic of blogging, interacting with the author to ask questions, give your opinion and so on.  The Site Comments tool reaches out to the WA community and asks them to take a look at your post and then comment on a variety of categories.  Not only does this help to build interest in your post but it can help with ranking in the search engines.  Posts showing interaction between the author and readers tend to get the attention of the search engines.
• Site Feedback – When creating a site, you may have the “perfect vision” of what you want.  That’s great but, getting opinions from others can help you make it that much better.  The Site Feedback tool is very similar to the Site Comment tool but, instead of asking for comments on an post or page, it’s asking for opinions on things such as layout, images used, color schemes, content and so on.  This is great for tweaking your content to make it more appealing to the general public.

Site Comments also offers a secondary benefit.  If you become a certified commentor, you can earn cash credits for every other comment you leave.  There are checks and balances to make sure the quality of the comments are up to par.  I’ve seen some people use this feature as a way to pay for or supplement their Premium membership dues and even earn a little cash on the side.

I saved the best for last.  The WA community!

By far, the Wealthy Affiliate community is the best part of WA.  People from all walks of life, with different backgrounds and expertise, all in one place, working together to help make each other successful.  It doesn’t get better than this.

Members can leave comments, ask questions, create trainings and more.  You can build your network by following other members and other members can follow you.  Live chat is always hopping and I’ve come to consider it a social media platform that I find myself in more than any other.  In fact, I’m probably on live chat 3 to 4 hours a day helping others or learning something new.  Do yourself a favor and just check it out sometime.  Some of the best tidbits you’ll get will be from live chat.

You’ll be surprised by how many new friends you’ll actually make in the WA community.  I actually have more meaningful friendships here than I do on Facebook.

This page was a little long, and I haven’t covered everything but, I wanted to make sure you knew what Wealthy Affiliate is all about.  I also wrote a review of Wealthy Affiliate. You can check it out here: The Wealthy Affiliate Review – Is Wealthy Affiliate Legitimate?

Be sure to check out the different membership options and, at the very least, sign up for the Starter membership to check it out for free.

What is Affiliate Marketing? –  A Little Bit About Scott Hinkle… – How Does This Program Work? – Let’s Get Started