Wealthy Affiliate Review 2020: Totally Transparent Opinion

Before you go any further, I need to state my bias for the purpose of earning your trust: I am a member of Wealthy Affiliate and have been for the past five years. For this reason, I cannot guarantee it’s going to be an unbiased review but I promise it’s going to be an objective one.

Here are a few things you can expect from this review and I urge you to hold me accountable in the comments section if you feel I failed to deliver fairly in these areas:

• This is going to be one of the most transparent reviews you’ll read from a Wealthy Affiliate member.
• I will NOT tell you Wealthy Affiliate is perfect because it’s not – nothing is!
• You will learn about the strong points of Wealthy Affiliate and why I’ve enjoyed being a member for the past five years
• You will also learn about the things I do not like about Wealthy Affiliate and why I don’t spend much time actively interacting in the community
• You will learn why Wealthy Affiliate is meant for some and not for others
• This review will address the elephants in the room: price, problems, alternatives and the perception of Wealthy Affiliate and its affiliates.
• I am not trying to sell you anything. My goal is to provide options for you and equip you with enough information for you to decide on your own what’s best for you.

Background info on me

My name is Amedu. I moved from my home country, Nigeria, to Canada (Winnipeg specifically) for university in May 2011 and have been living here since.

In December 2014, I came across an interesting posting on Kijiji (imagine Canada’s version of Craigslist) that presented itself as a business opportunity that could change my life. Being the naive 19-year old I was, I got excited and applied.

It turns out a distributor from an MLM company called WakeUpNow posted the ad and was trying to grow his network. I had no idea about MLMs back then, so I was swayed by all the things I heard about making money, saving money by buying all of my regular household products on their platform, etc.

Before jumping into the opportunity, I thought it was a smart idea to do a simple Google search for what others were saying about the company. I read a few compelling reviews that called the company a pyramid scheme and I became more skeptical of the opportunity. In hindsight, they were right – WakeUpNow was forced to shut down about two months later.

Some reviews I read were written by WA affiliates and I figured I had nothing to lose by testing their platform. It was a free membership that didn’t require me to fill in my credit card info, so why not? I signed up for the free membership, was convinced it was the real deal and within a few days I signed up for the premium (paid) membership. For the sake of readability, I will dig into the details of my journey in different sections of this article.

I hope the biggest takeaway for you in this section is: be skeptical. This applies to pretty much everything in the internet marketing space and Wealthy Affiliate is not excluded. Be careful about any products/platforms that say you will make money. Be careful with reviews. This industry isn’t particularly known for its transparency and is sadly rife with scams and deceit.

Beyond skepticism, it’s important for you to also be curious. The sweet spot in this “make money” industry lies between skepticism and curiosity. What guides you to this sweet spot is something we all have but often ignore – this thing called intuition. Mild skepticism made me look up reviews of WakeUpNow; curiosity made me join Wealthy Affiliate (and curiosity was free in this case). The balance of being skeptical/curious has shaped my life today.

In addition to having multiple sites making me passive income consistently, I am also a full-time digital marketing specialist at a top advertising agency. Also, I occasionally do SEO projects for local businesses in my city. Although there are several other resources I’ve used to further my learning, Wealthy Affiliate takes all the credit for providing a solid base and getting me interested in online marketing in the first place. I mentioned this bit so you’ll know that beyond building something online, there is a high demand for these skills offline.

Who should even consider joining Wealthy Affiliate?

• People who are skeptical of online marketing programs (as they should be). It’s free to join… no credit card info required. 
• People interested in building a long-term honest and sustainable business
• People interested in earning active or passive income but are willing to put in the time and work required
• People who already have a business but are looking to grow their business using the internet
• People who want to promote another company’s products (a.k.a. affiliate marketing)
• People looking for truly beginner-friendly internet marketing training programs
• People who understand what’s required to build an internet business but want all the training and tools in one place
• People who prefer walkthrough learning with an active community to answer questions and provide motivation

Who should NOT join Wealthy Affiliate?

Wealthy Affiliate wouldn’t be a good fit for you if you…

• … are in desperate need of money right now. Think about it – do you go and build a business to pay next month’s rent? If you’re looking to make quick money, this isn’t the right platform to join.
• … have no interest in writing or learning how to write. To be clear, you don’t need to be an expert writer to build a successful business but there is some writing involved.
• … are looking for more advanced online marketing training. Although there is a bit of everything on Wealthy Affiliate, it caters primarily to beginners.
• … don’t enjoy being part of a massive community. You don’t have to engage (I don’t) but if you don’t want to be anywhere near it, you might not enjoy the Wealthy Affiliate experience.
• … are not interested in learning a new skill

What exactly is Wealthy Affiliate?

Wealthy Affiliate is an all-inclusive platform that provides extensive training to people who are looking to build a successful online business through affiliate marketing. That’s it – a marketing training platform with a suite of tools and community to help you build an online business.

Maybe Wealthy Affiliate and its affiliates can do a better job of calling the platform for what it is and clear some misconceptions. One thing I often get accused of on this site is trashing other programs that promise to make you money to push my program as the only one that can make you money.

Here’s the thing, Wealthy Affiliate will not make you money. What Wealthy Affiliate does is walk you through the process of how to build an online business, starting from an idea (choosing a niche) to monetizing your site and even scaling your business when you’ve started to make some money.

I may or may not love the product(s) you want to promote but if you feel strongly about it and believe there’s an audience looking for that product as a solution to their problems, Wealthy Affiliate teaches you to create content that positions you in front of your target audience.

Now whether you like the platform or not or think it’s the best way to make money online is a different conversation, but this is what Wealthy Affiliate is.

What’s inside?

Here you’ll get an overview of the things you can expect to find if you decide to sign up to Wealthy Affiliate:

Training

The training is extensive, comprehensive and up to date. The certification courses are available in written and video formats.

Although marketers at any level could get some value out of the training, the structured training modules are primarily designed to cater to beginners.

In addition to the certification courses, there are thousands of training modules created by experienced members who have had success trying certain tactics.

For Premium members, there are weekly live training classes called WAbinars that cover a range of different topics related to online marketing. These classes are hosted by Jay – a successful affiliate marketer and experienced local SEO consultant.

There are 10 lessons in the Level 1 certification course available to every Wealthy Affiliate member and these lessons have the following intended outcomes:

• Learn how to leverage the community within Wealthy Affiliate
• Set and start working towards your financial and non-financial goals
• Choose a niche for your business
• Build your own niche website in a few minutes
• Learn how to optimize your site using WordPress
• Understand how to craft quality content that resonates with your audience
• Learn keyword research
• Discover the process of earning revenue online
• Learn how to make your website search engine friendly and get your content ranked well on Google

Since I created this site in July 2016, I have researched hundreds of online marketing programs and even reviewed some of them. Several other programs match the quality of training in the Level 1 certification course but I’m yet to see one that offers it for free. Like I mentioned before, this is probably why I was comfortable enough to sign up for Wealthy Affiliate in the first place.

Community

One thing for sure is you’re going to have questions and you’ll want people to answer them quickly. This is an area Wealthy Affiliate blows every other platform I have seen out of the water by far. They have an extremely active community with tens of thousands of members.

Support within Wealthy Affiliate comes in various forms:

• 24/7 live chat
• Interactive discussions
• Profile comments. This is how you’ll be able to reach me if you sign up for the free membership.
• Direct messages (only available in the Premium membership)

Everyone is accessible and you can ask questions as they come.

Website Platform

For the longest time, I thought to create a decent website required some sick coding skills. It turns out that was the case several years ago, but you can now have a functional website created in less than 5 minutes.

With a free starter membership, you can create 2 free websites on Wealthy Affiliate’s SiteRubix platform and as a premium member, you get hosting for up to 25 websites!

If you don’t believe me when I say it’s super simple to build a website on Wealthy Affiliate, feel free to use the tool below:

Keyword Tool

One way to oversimplify what Wealthy Affiliate is all about is: you learn how to make your website found by people who are actively searching for things online.

For this process to make sense, you’ll need to know what terms people are searching for, the average number of monthly searches for those terms and what the competition for those terms looks like. Gathering information on these 3 things helps you decide whether some topics are worth spending time on. The last thing you want is to spend time writing an article that nobody is going to see because nobody was searching for the questions answered in your article.

This is why it’s important to have a keyword tool. It helps ensure that you’re investing your time and effort on keywords that will bring value to you over time.

Putting it all together

Ultimately, what’s unique about Wealthy Affiliate is having all the resources and tools in one platform.

There are other top programs online where you can get each of the aforementioned components on their own, but I’m yet to find another platform that offers everything you’ll need to build an online business in one place without you having to break the bank.

How does Wealthy Affiliate work?

Now let’s get into the nitty-gritty of what you’re going to be doing to be successful online.

In a nutshell, you’ll provide information (value) to people searching for it and that’s going to turn into a profitable business for you over time. You’ll build a website, create relevant and engaging content, people searching online for information related to your content find your website and click through to it, they read your content and if they click an ad or link on your site and make a purchase, you get paid.

Wealthy Affiliate breaks down the process into 4 steps:

1. Choose an interest
2. Build a website
3. Attract visitors
4. Earn revenue

1. Choose an interest

Wealthy Affiliate encourages beginners to choose their niche in an area they are already interested in. This makes a lot of sense because one of the most important things in this journey of building your own business is consistency. And it takes you being interested in your niche to consistently create content, especially at the beginning when you might not yet be seeing results.

If someone rudely interrupted your sleep, is there a topic you would still be happy to talk about with them? Is there something you talk about every day and never run out of things to say? Have a passion or a hobby? All these things are potential niche ideas for your online business.

From experience, I can tell you that it’s helpful to get someone else’s perspective on your niche choice. If you sign up for the free account through my link, I’ll be your guy! I’m calling this out because my first niche choice (men’s footwear) was too broad and because I didn’t sign up through anyone’s affiliate link, there wasn’t anyone to call out the fact that my niche was too broad. You don’t have to make the same mistake.

2. Build a website

This is the most straightforward of the four steps. It takes only a few minutes, does not require any special skills and your website can be as simple and basic as you want it to be. Use the tool below and you’ll have a website in a couple of minutes.

3. Attract visitors

This is where the hard work sets in. As you consistently add relevant niche content to your website, people asking questions and looking for info online find you and visit your site. There isn’t a cap to how much content you can create, and so there isn’t a cap to how many people can visit your website.

This logic explains how your hard work can directly impact your income. The more quality content you create, the more real estate you have for people to find your website.

If you’re overthinking the idea of creating content, don’t! At the end of the day, the most important in any kind of business is to forge a connection with your audience. If you’re comfortable speaking about a topic in person, you can also write about it. Writing content is simply putting your everyday conversations in written form – and it doesn’t take an expert writer to do that. Think of it as writing a note to a friend about your topic.

4. Earn revenue

One sweet thing about the affiliate marketing model is you don’t own the product, and so you don’t have to worry about things like shipping the product. Your role is to drive traffic to your website and as people click on links on your website and make purchases, you get paid!

More traffic leads to more link clicks, which leads to more purchases, and consequently, more commissions.

Model: Practical Example

1. Choose an interest: Let’s say you’re a big lover of camping and you choose “camping tents” as your specific interest.
2. Build a website: You use the simple website builder above to build a website that is all about “camp tents”.
3. Attract visitors: You write different kinds of content about camping tents. Things like how to choose a tent, info on weather-specific tents, best family tents for winter camping, different tent product reviews, etc. The content gets ranked in search engines and brings in visitors over time.
4. Earn revenue: People that visit your website click on the different tent products you promote and when they make a purchase, you get paid commissions! I did a quick search for tents on Amazon and the Coleman Cabin Tent popped up as one of the most popular ones. If you click on that link and go on to purchase that product or any other products on Amazon within the next 24 hours, I will earn a commission.

The elephants in the room

Addressing the elephants in the room means being very transparent about cost, potential problems, alternative solutions and existing perceptions. In this section, I’m going to try to be super transparent about these 4 topics.

Cost: Is Wealthy Affiliate truly free?

Wealthy Affiliate has two membership options: the Starter membership and Premium membership.

The Starter membership is truly free and doesn’t expire. This option comes with 20 certification lessons, 50 additional training modules, the simple website builder we talked about earlier, 2 free website installs and 30 searches using the keyword tool.

For the first 7 days of the Starter membership, you’ll get access to some Premium support features. Features like having 24/7 live chat and the ability to connect with other members in the community. Although you wouldn’t be able to connect with most of the community after 7 days, you would still be able to connect with me by responding to the comment I will leave on your profile welcoming you to the community or by leaving a comment on my profile.

The Premium membership unlocks everything on the platform. 1000+ lessons, unlimited support, hosting for up to 50 websites, unlimited use of the keyword tool, everything. The Premium membership is $49 per month if you choose to pay monthly or $359 per year. If you sign up for the Premium membership within 7 days of becoming a Starter member, your first month will be $19.

The free Starter membership is for those who are hesitant (as they should be) to pay for something without having a good idea of what they’re getting. You’ll go through the training, have access to the community, build a website and understand what the whole process entails and then decide whether it all resonates with you as the way you want to build your online business.

If you decide it’s the route you want to take or you’re curious to see how extensive the training library is, the next natural step is to pay for the Premium membership at the discounted price.

Even if you choose to remain with the free Starter membership, you’ll always have access to the lessons and you would have built your website. Still incredible value if you ask me!

Existing Perception: Are reviews written by WA affiliates credible?

I’m not going to speak too much about this here and will just save the in-depth commentary for a future article (I’ll add the link here when it’s published). There are two main reasons why I have chosen not to delve into this in this review:

1. I want to keep the review about the platform itself, and not the things that happen outside the platform.
2. I do not know any other Wealthy Affiliate members personally. Therefore, I’m not in a position to speak on their behalf.

I can speak for myself though. I do not say Wealthy Affiliate is great because I promote them. It’s the other way around – I recommend Wealthy Affiliate because I genuinely think the entire package is great. I promote them because the training, community and tools have helped me build an online business that earns me passive income, helped kickstart a corporate career in digital marketing, has both free and paid membership options, and could potentially bring the same amount of value to you that it has brought to me.

I only mentioned this topic because I wanted to acknowledge it as an elephant in the room.

Problems: Some issues you might face

I’m passing on advice based on some issues I faced when I joined Wealthy Affiliate, and I’m hoping you can learn from them and not have to make some of these mistakes.

My first big mistake was my choice of niche. I chose to build my online business in the men’s footwear niche, which I later discovered was too broad. Better niche choices would have been things like basketball sneakers, soccer cleats, luxury dress shoes, etc. This mistake could have been easily avoided if I signed up through someone’s link and asked them for a second opinion on my niche. I could also have asked Kyle or Carson (owners of Wealthy Affiliate) and, even though it would have taken them longer to respond due to the sheer size of the community and the number of things they have to attend to, they definitely would have called out how broad my niche was.

Closely related, another big mistake I made was choosing a niche I wasn’t passionate to talk about. I’m someone who puts in the effort to look good, so I have lots of dress shoes and fancy sneakers. I also have some soccer cleats because I coach a soccer team and play occasionally. These are things I care about to an extent but not enough to passionately talk or write about them. This lack of passion affected my ability to consistently create content related to my niche. Choose a niche you’re truly passionate about.

Also closely related to the previous problem, another issue I faced was not properly following the training. Having managed to refer a good number of people to Wealthy Affiliate, I would say it’s the most common problem people face. Due to lack of passion for my niche, I ignored one of the core tenets of Wealthy Affiliate’s training – produce honest and in-depth content about the pain points of your target audience. Instead, I produced extremely thin content and littered each piece of content with affiliate links. After a few months of making this mistake, I reverted to what Wealthy Affiliate teaches and started producing educational ‘non-salesly’ content. Sure enough, traffic and revenue came shortly after.

Alternatives options you could consider

Like I mentioned before, the biggest draw for Wealthy Affiliate is having all the necessary training, tools and community all in one place. Saying that, there are several other places you could get each piece.

Do a quick Google search for “affiliate marketing courses” and you’ll see a bunch of training options. There are authoritative sites I’ve digested content from to complement the training I received in Wealthy Affiliate. Sites like NeilPatel.com, HubSpot Marketing blog, Digital Marketer and Smart Passive Income all provide lots of written content that can introduce you into affiliate marketing.

In terms of tools, you are going to need a website and a keyword tool. There are a plethora of resources online on how to build a website. Again, you can just google it or even watch a tutorial on YouTube. For website hosting, I use BlueHost with the local clients I work with and I highly recommend it. For keyword tools, you could use the good old Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush or Jaaxy (the same keyword tool used within Wealthy Affiliate). You can also play with a tool called Answer the Public.

The best alternative I can think of for a strong community is Reddit since it’s massive and they seem to have a pretty active affiliate marketing subreddit. My concerns here are there are a lot of people only there to promote their program and it’s not very easy to gauge the knowledge level of contributors.

I realize it’s not very convenient having to dig through multiple sources but these are alternative solutions if you choose not to go with the free Starter membership option at Wealthy Affiliate.

Things I love about Wealthy Affiliate

• The training is beginner-friendly! For most, this is a positive. If you’re new to the world of internet marketing, building websites, etc, Wealthy Affiliate was designed for you. If you’re already an expert marketer, a more advanced program is probably the better option for you.
• It has a free starter membership that doesn’t ask for your credit card info to sign up. In an industry where there is extremely low trust, and rightly so, this is a massive differentiator for Wealthy Affiliate. I can categorically say that if it wasn’t free to join, I never would have joined.
• This free membership comes with 1 training module of 10 video/written lessons, along with other classrooms. This module provides an overview of affiliate marketing, a walkthrough on how to build a website, a basic introduction to SEO, choosing a niche, keyword research, content creation and several other things. Free Starter members also get a taste of the premium membership experience within the first 7 days.
• The free membership provides 2 free SiteRubix websites; the premium membership provides web hosting for up to 25 of your own domains, plus 25 SiteRubix websites.
• The live video training that takes place every Friday. Jay, who has had a lot of success with affiliate marketing and is also a Local SEO business owner, hosts these sessions and they’re usually interactive and fun.
• SSL Certificates for all domains hosted on Wealthy Affiliate (for premium members). If you don’t know what an SSL Certificate is, it’s the secure green padlock showing on the address bar right now. You can read about the relevance of SSL to SEO here.
• The keyword tool that provides 30 searches for starter members and unlimited searches for premium members. Most programs I have seen do not provide a keyword tool and the few that do include it as an upsell. That’s why I consider having an in-house keyword tool to be one of Wealthy Affiliate’s strengths.
• There is readily available support from the community and technical support team. Again, I think this is Wealthy Affiliate’s biggest strength. I remember having a lot of questions when I first started; questions ranging from “does my site look nice” to “how long does my content have to be”. I even remember reaching out to Kyle, co-founder of Wealthy Affiliate, to help me figure out why my site wasn’t generating revenue even though I had a decent amount of traffic consistently coming in. The support system is where Wealthy Affiliate truly shines.

Things I don’t love so much about Wealthy Affiliate

• I mentioned the support as Wealthy Affiliate’s biggest strength. Interestingly, certain elements that come with the community can be considered their biggest weakness. Due to the sheer size of the community and everyone’s freedom to contribute, you’ll find that there are a lot of people that simply don’t know what they’re talking about. If you sign up through my referral link, at least you’ll have one trusted resource. If I can’t guide you on something, I’ll know someone that can. One thing I had to do when I first joined (I didn’t have a referrer) was read people’s success stories and reach out to them with my questions. Surely they must know something if they’re making money, right?
• There is a ranking system on the platform that assigns each member a rank based on helpfulness, blogging and activity within the platform. The top 25 members are considered “ambassadors”. I can understand the idea behind this approach from Wealthy Affiliate’s perspective; it incentivizes members to be active within the community and acknowledges those who are most helpful. Unfortunately, many members spent a lot of time answering questions they didn’t know enough to answer, some even had scripted comments that they would post on people’s profiles, some would post frequent fluffy blogs all to game the rankings. Noticing the obsession of many members with this vanity metric is one of the major reasons I stopped being active in the community. I only spend time responding to people I referred to Wealthy Affiliate.
• For a beginner, this platform is perfect. Once I had a good grasp of what Wealthy Affiliate teaches and started to get good results and got a digital marketing job, I started to delve into email marketing, pay-per-click advertising, link building, etc. Some other programs cover these topics comprehensively and I think there’s a real opportunity for Wealthy Affiliate to include a training module at the end covering these topics as well.

Just to clarify what I said about the community… I love having a place to have my questions answered clearly and on time. I don’t love how many members have made interacting with the community a higher priority than getting work done on their online business.

Having said all that, it’s one of my goals for 2020 to spend some time giving back to the Wealthy Affiliate community because they were really helpful to me when I started. I’m not exactly sure what giving back looks like yet; it could be a training on how to use SEO data to create a Google Search paid campaign, it could be sharing some of my success (and not so successful) stories, or it could just be spending more time answering questions on the live chat. We’ll see.

How to choose an online marketing program

Let’s tell it like it is: the online marketing space is rife with dishonesty, crappy products and borderline fraud. It’s alarming the number of people I have spoken to that has fallen prey to low-quality products that they paid a premium for and just flat-out scams that promised them quick riches.

If you choose not to go with Wealthy Affiliate and want to vet other alternatives, here are a few things to look out for in online marketing programs:

Contact info: Browse through their website for a ‘contact us’ page. This is typically found on the top menu, sidebar or footer. If their contact info or form isn’t easily accessible, that’s an automatic red flag. If you manage to find the contact info or form, go ahead and ask them any pressing questions you might have; questions like “are there any upsells”, “is the training beginner-friendly”, “am I required to invest in any other 3rd party tools”, etc. This is even more important if there isn’t a free trial and you’re required to pay money to get a true sense of the service. By doing this, you’ll be achieving two things: (1) you’ll have your questions answered and (2) you’ll be establishing a clear line of communication that you can reference if you’re not satisfied with the service.

Social proof: Does the program’s website have links to their social media pages? This is a flexible requirement but it just makes sense for an online marketing program or its owner(s) to have some form of social presence and for that presence to be authenticated by their website.

Refund policy: This is a big one. For programs that require you to put in your credit card info and make a payment before you’re able to access their platform, it’s imperative that you understand their refund policy before you sign up. If they don’t offer a free trial and their policy is no refunds, steer clear; that’s a red flag. Most programs will offer a refund within the first 7 days. Ensure you’re clear on what the policy is and the process for requesting a refund. This can be one of the questions you ask when you fill out the contact form.

Reviews: I’m sure you know this already (since you’re here), but read reviews. I made this last because this one has the largest grey area. Most reviews will be biased in some way; whether they’re written by members or people who are members of competitor programs. This review isn’t unbiased, but I’ve tried my best to make it as objective as possible. Look out for objectivity in the reviews you read. If the review says the program is perfect and the claims seem too good to be true, the review is probably not an honest one.

The mindset required to be successful

Treat an online business as a business. This means you should erase the thinking that you’re going to become successful overnight. Embrace learning, enjoy executing and BE PATIENT.

To be successful in business (both online and offline), you’ll need to think in terms of solutions to your audience’s problems rather than products. Earlier, I mentioned how writing extremely thin content featuring my product links didn’t get me traffic or any revenue. Switching over to helpful content containing very few links increased the traffic to my site and revenue.

We’re in the business of trust at the end of the day. You aren’t going to join Wealthy Affiliate because I said you should. You are going to join if and only if you trust that I have been honest with you in this review and you think Wealthy Affiliate might be the solution to some of your problems.

The same logic applies to every niche: understand the problems of your audience and provide solutions. Do this and you’ll be successful.

Questions I often get

Is Wealthy Affiliate a scam?

No, it isn’t. It’s a platform that has the training, tools and support required to build an online business. The friction is very low with Wealthy Affiliate, so you don’t have to take my word for it when I say it’s not a scam. You can head over to their website, create a free account and see for yourself. It doesn’t ask for your payment information, so there’s no risk at all to vet them yourself.

Is Wealthy Affiliate a pyramid scheme?

No, it is not. Affiliate marketing, in general, is not a pyramid scheme.

According to Investopedia, a pyramid scheme is a model “where a few top-level members recruit newer members, who pay upfront costs up the chain, to those who enrolled them”. It goes on to say “as newer members in turn recruit underlings of their own, a portion of the subsequent fees they receive is also kicked up the chain”.

Firstly, you’re not paying me anything. Secondly, if you do decide to join Wealthy Affiliate, I will not know your earnings; so nothing is getting kicked up the chain. Wealthy Affiliate will not know your earnings either unless you choose to participate in their affiliate program.

How soon will I make money?

I understand the basis of this question, but let’s put it into perspective.

If you were going to start up an ice cream shop in your town and you asked your neighbour who has been running a profitable salon business for years how soon you would make money, what do you think their response would be?

It depends. What part of town can you afford to set up the shop? Is that the best location for your target market to reach you? What flavours will you be selling? How will the price and quality compare against your competition? Do you have an advertising budget? How many employees will you have?

Your neighbour wants to ease your fears by answering your question, but they can’t because there are too many unknown variables. They cannot use their own experience to give you a proper answer because they’re in a different industry and the answer to each question will be different from yours.

It’s a similar story for an online business. It depends on your niche, how fast you’re able to learn and apply what you’ve learned and how consistent you are at producing content. My first website about men’s footwear took me about 8 months to earn revenue (remember I ignored the principles in the training for around the first 6 months). This website took around 3 months to earn revenue. My newest site about home entertainment devices earned revenue within 1.5 months.

I give these timelines loosely because they might not apply to your situation. What I’ll say is: follow the training and take action, then the money will follow.

How much money do you make?

Again, I understand the basis of this question. However, I don’t feel comfortable answering it for three reasons:

1. This site is part of my portfolio that is included in my resume and I wouldn’t want my current employers, potential employers and clients to see how much I make from affiliate marketing
2. My friends and some family members are also aware of this site. I don’t want them to know how much I’m making.
3. Similar to the previous question, how much I’m making has no bearing on how much you could make. The same logic applies: different niche, different products, different affiliate programs, etc.

Having said all that, I found Wealthy Affiliate members who are comfortable with disclosing their earnings:

• How I added $1500+ to my monthly income
• Earnings Report: Here’s How I Made $8,871.03 from Blogging in May 2019
• Surpassed the $1000 a month mark. Epic!
• Over $35,000 so far this year in a tough niche
• Officially a 6-Figure Business – 2018 Year End Report
• Amazon bought me a Volvo

There is an entire section within Wealthy Affiliate where you can read success stories like these.

Do I need to upgrade to the premium membership?

The simple answer is no, you don’t need to. Think of it this way: the free membership option gives you a feel of what the platform is about, two websites, and premium features for the first 7 days.

If you feel this platform and business model aligns with how you want to build an online business, then you can upgrade to the premium membership for more training and features. If you’re unsure and want to seek out alternative solutions first, you still have your free membership.

Why do you dishonestly promote Wealthy Affiliate?

Kyle, co-founder of Wealthy Affiliate, says this in one of the training videos: “Never leave money on the table”. He said if we were writing a review of a product/service that we felt wasn’t a great one, we should give an honest assessment of why we think it isn’t great and why we wouldn’t recommend it. He also said we should include our affiliate link so we would still earn a commission if the reader decides to go against our recommendation and still purchase the product.

I mentioned this because this website is ranked highly on Google’s search results for several reviews of internet marketing programs and MLM companies; chances are you landed on this site through an online search. Lying that I think these programs and MLM companies are great is what I would consider dishonest and doing that would make me significantly higher commissions than the $0 I make when someone signs up for a free Wealthy Affiliate account.

Do you get paid if I sign up for a free account through your link?

No, I don’t. I only earn commissions when my referrals upgrade to the premium membership.

With that said, I’m not promoting the premium membership. I’m not a salesperson in any way, so I’ll leave it up to the platform to sell itself.

All I ask is that you create the free account, go through the training and get a sense of the community. If you like what you see and you can imagine building your online business this way, then you can consider upgrading to the premium membership.

Wrap-up + 2 requests if you do join

This is by far the longest article I’ve ever written. Trust me, most of your articles will not be nearly as long.

I will not go as far as saying Wealthy Affiliate is the best way to make money online. It probably isn’t and the statement would be logically wrong. Wealthy Affiliate isn’t a way to make money online; it’s a platform where you can learn how to make money online and get the support that you need to aid your learning. There’s going to be a lot of learning and a lot of work to be done.

Hopefully, I was able to provide enough value to help you make an informed decision – whatever that might be.

If you decide to proceed and create the free starter account, here are two things I’d like you to do after you’ve signed up:

1. Upload a picture and write a short description about yourself. People tend to feel more comfortable assisting and engaging with those they can feel some kind of connection to. People need to understand that you’re a real human being, and not just a profile. It can be a picture of yourself, your pet or garden or anything. The description can be something as simple as “Hi, my name is Sharon and I’m super excited to begin my journey of learning to make money online”. 
   
2. Come back here and leave your thoughts on the platform in the comments below. You are free to be as honest as possible. Your comment might just be what someone needs to make an informed decision.

Folks, this brings me to the end of this lengthy Wealthy Affiliate review. If you have any questions, please feel free to hit me up in the comments.