Welcome To My Wealthy Affiliate Review!
Name: Wealthy Affiliate
Website: www.wealthyaffiliate.com
Price: From Free to $49/month ($19 First Month)
Owners: Carson Lim & Kyle Loudon
Training Quality: 7/10
Research Tools: 9/10
Mentorship/Support: 7/10
Websites Included: YES- 1 Free Website with Free Account, up to 10 websites with Premium
Hosting Included: YES
Free Trial: YES- New members can get started with research, training and website all on free account.
Overall Rank: 8/10
How Wealthy Affiliate Works
If you found Wealthy Affiliate on your travels through the internet, chances are you are looking for ways to generate a side income or create/monetise your website. This may mean you understand what affiliate marketing is but just in case, here it is:
Affiliate marketing is where you, the marketer, promotes a product or service and receives a commission for any sales. This could be anywhere from 2% to 100% depending on the affiliate program and specific sale generated.
The first thing to understand is that anything being promoted should be genuine and actually of value to the customer or end user.
So with that out of the way….
Is Wealthy Affiliate A Scam?
No, Wealthy Affiliate is not a scam, but it also isn’t a guaranteed method of making money. It takes effort and time and Wealthy Affiliate doesn’t pretend otherwise.
One of the first things they ask you when you create a Free Account is ask about your goals and how much money you’d like to make, how much money you’d be ecstatic to make and how many hours a week you’re willing to put into it.
This really helps you to think about how much effort you’re willing to put in, and how much you need to make to make ends meet, and how much you’d love to make.
But there are no false promises or guaranteed sales, just lots of enthusiasm from the community and owners.
Training Quality Section
There is a free training course with the free, basic account and lots more with a premium account. One feature that I think is quite useful is other members can create their own training. This is very helpful for those that can specialize in certain aspects of affiliate marketing, such as tracking results with Google Analytics, for example this member, Magistudios has a training on exactly this:
Tracking your Progress with Google Analytics.
With a Wealthy Affiliate free account, you get access to the first 10 Core Certification Course modules, 10 Affiliate Bootcamp lessons and 50 training modules. Not bad for $0!
With a Wealthy Affiliate premium account, you get access to all 50 Core Certification modules, 70 Affiliate Bootcamp lessons, and over 1000 training modules.
All this plus the wealth of information and advice given from within the Wealthy Affiliate community.
Research Tools Section
With a free Wealthy Affiliate account, you get access to Jaaxy. Jaaxy is a keyword research tool that let’s you see how well you could do based on specific searches. For example, let’s say you want to blog or build a site about vegan pet food (first thing that came to my head for some reason).
As you can see from the image above, the term, “vegan dog food” gets 997 searches per month. Almost one thousand people across the world search this up each and every month, and this is just a generic, basic search term! The next search term, “vegan dog foods,” plural, gets 144 hits a month.
This shows a simple tweak to the niche terms you’re looking for can mean you capturing more of that traffic. If we take a deeper look into vegan dog food, we get the data below:
Taking the first term, the QSR (Quoted Search Results), there are 165 websites competing for that exact keyword phrase. Based on Jaaxy’s calculations, this means that if you were to reach the first page of Google for that niche, you should get an average of 165 traffic each month.
Assuming this is just one page and keyword and you build up your site, using this data you should catch a wide net of search terms being asked by people with a specific question.
Let’s say your free website is about dogs in general, or specifically vegan dog food, you could use the other keywords suggested below the one you searched for as inspiration to dive deeper into the niche. So whether it’s a generic dog site or specific vegan dog food, you could use the search terms “raw vegan dog food recipes” and “homemade vegan dog food” for part of your site.
So let’s say you create a page on your site for dog recipes:
Raw Vegan Dog Food Recipes gets 24 searches a month.
Homemade Vegan Dog Food also gets 24 searches a month.
Raw Vegan Dog Food Recipes has only 2 competing websites whereas Homemade Vegan Dog Food has 31.
Jaaxy’s data is suggesting you should get incoming traffic (people) of 5 and 14 respectively, hitting your page based on the traffic and competition.
With Wealthy Affiliate’s free account you’re limited to 30 searches a month through Jaaxy, but unlimited through Premium. This means you could sign up to their $19 for the first month, binge on a load of keywords, and go back to a free account, if you so wish. But hopefully you’ll reach a point where you make enough sales or other income to cover the cost.
Mentorship/Support
Another aspect of Wealthy Affiliate is the support network. There is the usual upselling you get everywhere, such as get your first month for $19 instead of $49, but get Premium Plus for only $30 m
ore. But this isn’t pushed or thrown at you, you can use the free account for as long as you like. You get some private messages from the owners, and other Wealthy Affiliate members can message you privately or on your profile. From my experience this has always been positive and helpful.
In fact, when I took a break and came back, a lot of the members on the discussions were familiar because they were around the first time I tried it. A few seem to be retired and blogging for additional income streams and it’s clearly working for them!
Websites/Hosting
With your free account, you get 1 free Site Rubix Website which allows you to build your own site. You simply choose your website name, for example let’s go back to vegan dog food, and it builds you a free WordPress site. For example if you wanted www.bestvegandogfoodrecipes.com, your website domain/address would be www.bestvegandogfoodrecipes.siterubix.com. The site rubix bit might be a bit off-putting but it’s no different to having www.bestvegandogfoodrecipes.wordpress.com, except for WordPress being more recognisable.
With Site Rubix, it comes with it’s own hosting and SSL certificate (telling people’s computers it is a safe & secure website. Yay!
With a premium Wealthy Affiliate account, you can build up to 10 websites, all with their own hosting. There is also the option to buy domain names direct from Wealthy Affiliate or transfer your domain name from elsewhere into Wealthy Affiliate. I believe you could also redirect traffic from your domain name bought from somewhere else to your Wealthy Affiliate site, but can’t vouch for it until I’m sure how it works.
Pricing
As mentioned before, Wealthy Affiliate membership varies from Free for a basic account to £49 per month (or $19 for first month of upgrade, at time of writing). You get access to Jaaxy regardless of what membership you have, but with the Free account you get only 30 searches per month, with Premium you get unlimited keyword searches.
Jaaxy alone would cost $19 per month without Wealthy Affiliate, so I believe when you put together Jaaxy, hosting up to 10 websites and the resources on Wealthy Affiliate itself, it isn’t a bad deal. Especially when you consider it’s all under one roof, making managing this potential revenue stream manageable.
Conclusion
Like most things, making money online takes time, patience, and lots of effort. If you’re relatively new to affiliate marketing or blogging, I think Wealthy Affiliate is not a bad place to start. It can be overwhelming if you dive into it, but it’s all there on the platform for you to try and see if it’s for you.
If you’ve made it this far, I would recommend trying a free account to get a feel for it. You can create a free account by clicking the image below:
Whatever route you choose, good luck!
Whilst this article is not sponsored by Wealthy Affiliate, I may receive a small commission for any sales, at no extra cost to you, the customer. This helps keep the lights on and is much appreciated. Only tried, tested & trusted products are recommended on this site.