Should You Join Wealthy Affiliate?

If you’ve been trying to decide whether to join Wealthy Affiliate, you’ve probably been reading Wealthy Affiliate reviews. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to find a real one. When you search for Wealthy Affiliate information, you’ll find lots of affiliate sites with fake reviews that can’t really answer your questions.

This is a real review of Wealthy Affiliate. I’m a real member, and I recommend the site for many reasons. If you think you want to join Wealthy Affiliate University but still aren’t sure, I welcome your questions and will be happy to address your concerns.

My Wealthy Affiliate Testimonial

When I joined WA, I was already making money online in affiliate marketing, in a niche I had found mostly by accident. I used affiliate marketing to supplement my income as an eBay PowerSeller, by promoting products that complemented what I was selling in my store.

When I decided I preferred the freedom of being an affiliate, with no inventory, no customer emails, and no trips to the post office, I looked for ways to expand my affiliate marketing efforts. I quickly realized that, even though I’d been making money already, I really didn’t know what I was doing.

What You Get When You Join Wealthy Affiliate

When you join Wealthy Affiliate, you don’t get an online money making scheme. You don’t get affiliate marketing secrets, or the ultimate million dollar strategy, or tricks to deceive people out of their money.

What you do get is an understanding of how affiliate marketing works and how to get your piece of it, in the form of tutorials, tasks, in-depth explanations, and lots of hard work. You get the knowledge to understand how to make money with affiliate marketing, and the skills and tools to use that knowledge to find your own way.

8-Week Action Plan

One of the first things you’ll get into when you join Wealthy Affiliate is the 8-week action plan. The action plan guides you through the resources available on the site in a logical way, so you don’t get lost in all the information. The plan explains basic concepts and techniques, and points you to the more detailed tutorials on each topic, making it easier to stay focused and organized as you learn.

Each week, the plan lists tasks for you to complete that reinforce the topics covered and get you taking action to start building your first campaign. When you have questions along the way, you can ask other members in the Wealthy Affiliate forum and explore member-created guides in the Share Zone.

Wealthy Affiliate Forum

The more you learn about affiliate marketing, the more you’ll see how valuable the Wealthy Affiliate forum is. In the beginning, the forum is the place to go to clear up any questions you have as you go through the 8-week action plan. Later, when you start to feel like you know what you’re doing, you’ll pick up on the tremendous value in the posts by more experienced members.

There is simply no other forum online where experienced, successful affiliate marketers share so much useful information. Every day, simple questions in the forum lead to highly profitable affiliate marketers discussing techniques and theories that will give you an understanding that would otherwise take years of experience to develop. If you join Wealthy Affiliate as a beginner for the learning resources, you’ll stay as a successful marketer for the forum alone.

Site Rubix, Free Hosting, & My-Linker, Oh My!

When I joined Wealthy Affiliate University, I underestimated the value of the free tools that are included with membership. Site Rubix is a website builder designed specifically for affiliate marketers who don’t know how to build websites. You’ll use it to build your first websites, and they’ll go live on your included free hosting. My-Linker is a super-simple tool for cloaking your links and tracking your clicks. My favorite tool, Rapid Writer, is a simple way to write and organize your articles while automatically keeping track of keyword density. (You’ll quickly learn what that is and why it’s important.)

Spaces is a place to create your own personal profile page that you can use for networking and keeping track of other members you get to know. The Share Zone is full of tutorials, guides, tips, and even pep talks, all created by other members who want to share what they’ve learned. WAJobs is a platform for outsourcing projects like graphics and article writing, or for making extra cash picking up jobs requested by other members.

PPC & Article Marketing Accreditation Courses

The accreditation courses at Wealthy Affiliate are one of my favorite features, although they are a bit controversial for some members. They’re the only resources offered on the site that cost extra, which offends some new users who aren’t expecting to have to pay for anything beyond the subscription fee.

While I can understand this reaction, the truth is that the accreditation courses are a great resource that you can easily pass on if you can’t or don’t want to pay for them. All of the information in the courses is available on the site separately for free, so you can learn all the same topics without buying the courses.

For me and many others, the courses are well worth the cost. They’re similar to the 8-week action plan, but with much more detail and very specific tasks. Each lesson includes resources to study and tasks to complete. The tasks are very specific and include things like “write 5 articles targeting the keywords you researched in the last lesson.” By the time you finish the course, you have a full-blown campaign up and running, and a template for future campaigns.

If you like the structure of a course with a series of lessons and tasks to complete, consider taking one or both of the accreditation courses. For me, the format of the courses made me more focused, more organized, and more productive. By following the lessons, I produced more work each week than I would have in a month or more on my own.

The Pay-Per-Click and Article Marketing Accreditation Courses are $67 each, or you can get $30 off the second course if you buy them both at once. The courses also come with several bonuses, including Beating Adwords, Inside The List, and Who Loves Money, three best-selling affiliate marketing guides by Wealthy Affiliate creators Kyle and Carson.

NicheQ Industry Research Reports & Resources

Each month that you’re a member of Wealthy Affiliate, you get to unlock a new NicheQ of your choosing. These are extensive research reports and resources on broad subjects full of profitable niches. The report includes hours of research into an industry, with statistics, trends, and observations. The resources that go with it include keyword lists, website templates, PLR articles, autoresponder emails, and a lot more.

Each NicheQ topic has so many possible sub-niches that you could probably build your entire affiliate marketing business within it, with the resources provided as your starting point. And you get a new one every month!

Some People Aren’t Happy With Wealthy Affiliate

Every day in the WA forum, there are two particular types of new posts about the site. There are those people who’ve been working hard, using all the resources available on the site, who post about their success. It may be that they’ve made their first sale, or they’ve reached a goal they’d set for a daily average profit, or they’ve become successful enough at affiliate marketing to quit their day jobs.

At the same time, there are always new posts from newbies who are not happy and are thinking of ending their memberships. In nearly every one of these types of posts, it’s easy to see why Wealthy Affiliate isn’t working for these people. Some of them have come to realize that they’ll actually have to work, that WA isn’t offering them three clicks and 24 hours to $100,000. Some are taking shortcuts and getting ahead of themselves in taking action, and they’ve missed some key points that are causing their efforts to fail. Many of them have been so busy learning and researching that they never got around to taking action.

I’m not saying that these people are wrong. Some of them get responses to their posts that get them back on track, and they go on to be successful. But it’s true that some of them just won’t get what they need or want from a Wealthy Affiliate membership. It’s not for everyone.

If you need affiliate marketing to make your mortgage payment by the end of next week, this is not for you. If you think, “I’ll get a one-month membership and if I haven’t made $xx.xx by the end of the month, I’ll cancel,” don’t waste your time.

If, on the other hand, you really want to learn affiliate marketing, and you’re prepared to work hard, join Wealthy Affiliate University. There is simply no better resource for learning affiliate marketing than a Wealthy Affiliate membership. It might take you a month or six months or even a year to see big profits, but every member has the potential to earn a very comfortable full-time income from affiliate marketing with the help of the resources available on the site.

Join Wealthy Affiliate and

• Get the direction you’ve been looking for
• Make sense of all the affiliate marketing information you’ve been reading
• Get answers to all your questions
• Understand how to take action
• Start making money at affiliate marketing

If you’re not sure if the Wealthy Affiliate University is right for you, let me know your questions or concerns, and I’ll do my best to help you figure it out. When you join, send me an email with your WA user name so I can add you to my buddy list and answer any questions you might have as you find your way around the site.