The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Confused?
Not sure what this is all about?
As you wander around the internet you will often see reviews about Wealthy Affiliate, some positive some negative. Why is this?
The people who like Wealthy Affiliate do so because they see the website for exactly what it is, A training and hosting website full of resources intended to help people start a blog, website, or market an online business.
As you will see from this review, it is packed full of resources to help you.
Is it perfect? Hell no, what is life is.
Does Wealthy Affiliate promote affiliate marketing?
Yes. One of the ways that Wealthy Affiliate teaches you to monetize your website is through affiliate marketing. It is not the only monetization that is covered.
Every Wealthy Affiliate member automatically has their unique affiliate link and anyone, including myself, who sends someone to this website will receive a commission.
If the referral decides to become a premium member, then an ongoing commission is paid as long as both remain members.
Some links on this page and within my website are affiliate links. If you click on one and decide to purchase I will receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
Are you looking for an education on creating a website?
Great. Read this review and I will point out the benefits of this website so you can decide how you can benefit from this website.
Why does Wealthy Affiliate have negative reviews?
Many negative reviews are by people who have dipped their toes inside and missed the whole point of the website or expected Wealthy Affiliate would somehow make them lots of money.
Many may have been written at a time when the website was different from today’s version. Wealthy Affiliate is so up-to-date that it includes access to AI.
Many negative reviews have been based on a misunderstanding of the website’s goals.
Some negative reviews are fair as this website is not perfect.
Some even feel disheartened because they do not understand the rules. Unfortunately, when we make a mistake, we often look to blame others.
Let me explain to help you make up your mind.
Who owns Wealthy Affiliate?
Wealthy Affiliate is a website started by two internet marketers Kyle & Carson in 2005 who wanted to share their knowledge with others.
It has now been operating for around 18 years and during this time many additional features have been added.
Despite this, the monthly basic monthly premium membership fee has remained the same.
This alone, in my view, shows that the owners are dedicated to helping others instead of just making money.
Wealthy Affiliate will never promote that you can get rich quickly, but rather that any business needs time and a lot of hard work.
It does not promote tactics to try and gain an edge from algorithms and instead promotes good quality content that helps the reader and is optimized so that the search engines understand its purpose.
Yes, you can set up a website very quickly with WordPress software from within the website but after that, it takes lots of work and dedication.
If you are not prepared to work hard then I strongly suggest you do not join and try and find employment elsewhere.
Will I be encouraged to pay more?
The (free) starter level is designed to give you an idea of what Wealthy Affiliate membership is about.
You will be able to see some of the features available to premium members, although you will not be able to access all the training or community.
It is a test drive with an AI-generated hub workplace that keeps all your information together in one place.
You start by setting the direction of your website through a selection of choices including a topic and brand.
You then go through the process of finding a niche, understanding keyword research, generating a brand, and setting up a website.
When you are ready to move on and build an online business or blog, and commit your time and some money to creating your website, then a (paid) membership is necessary.
Therefore, as a starter member, you will be encouraged to upgrade to advance your training and join the community.
If you upgrade, you will be encouraged to buy your domain name. This can be purchased within or outside of Wealthy Affiliate.
Having said that, if you purchase the yearly membership option, you will receive one dot com domain name free for the first year.
What about upsells?
There are no internal sales funnels, simply four levels of membership.
What are the Wealthy Affiliate Membership Levels?
Wealthy Affiliate has four levels of membership.
The starter (free) membership, and three paid levels, premium, premium plus (with extra training and features), and premium plus with a dedicated server (for very advanced members).
Please note that the free starter membership is designed to give you some information on the benefits of Wealthy Affiliate membership.
It is not a free means to build an online business.
There are no upsells, no extras that you need to purchase to make everything work, except a domain name (premium only) and even this is optional, although recommended.
As a premium member, you can host 3 websites either on your domain or using a free SiteRubix sub-domain within Wealthy Affiliate.
A premium member can purchase this domain within the website or outside Wealthy Affiliate. It is your choice.
As an Australian, I needed to purchase my dot com.au sites outside and point them to Wealthy Affiliate Hosting. No problem.
As part of premium membership, you can purchase paid WordPress themes and plugins outside of Wealthy Affiliate and load them to your website, but Wealthy Affiliate does not have any of its own to sell you.
Is Wealthy Affiliate MLM?
Wealthy Affiliate is not MLM.
You do not need to purchase any product to sell to family and friends. You do not need to try to get friends and associates to listen to your business plan and sign up.
You can choose to promote Wealthy Affiliate and earn income but this is completely optional.
Wealthy Affiliate is not a get-rich-quick scheme.
What is Wealthy Affiliate?
Wealthy Affiliate is all about helping you set up an online business. This is done by teaching you to set up, market, and monetize a website (or blog). Full stop.
There are many marketing topics covered in addition to this including affiliate marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and paid advertising.
You can take your time learning or even treat your website as a hobby.
You should join as a premium member when you are ready to learn the step-by-step lessons and get serious about your website.
Starter (Free) Membership
If you wish to take your time and log in regularly to work within your hub, your Wealthy Affiliate starter membership is for life. UNLESS you upgrade.
Once you take advantage of the extra training and benefits there is no returning to free membership. You are no longer a starter.
Ability to ask questions within the training. You will have the ability to ask questions. Your questions will be answered by the website owners or your referrer.
As you work through the training sections in your starter hub, you will learn the basics. This includes finding a niche, considering a domain name, initiating branding, and initial website setup.
Research. You will have access to 30 free searches within the Jaaxy Keyword Tool to help your keyword research. This may help you with blog post topics and keyword ideas for your website.
Premium (Paid) Membership
When you are ready to learn how to create a website for a hobby or attempt to create an online business, Wealthy Affiliate premium membership is the next step.
Premium membership is $49 a month or $497 if paid annually.
Annual membership includes one dot com domain name free for the first year.
1. Chat is available 24/7. As members are located all over the world there is usually someone who can help you if you have a question about a task pretty quickly.
2. Site support. When it comes to hosting and problems in the operational aspect of your hosted website (rather than questions about topics or feedback) site support is available. When I have had an issue they have been quick to respond and they solved it without fuss.
3. Personal Blog within Wealthy Affiliate. This feature is for you to share your ideas, findings, successes, and failures concerning your online business. It is not a feature used to promote your website. Spam is not tolerated within Wealthy Affiliate.
However, if you blog about a topic related to marketing, blogging, and the internet in general, it is possible that the authoritative nature of Wealthy Affiliate can cause a well-structured, search-engine-optimized post to rank on Google well ahead of your new website.
Therefore, as your affiliate link is automatically added to your posts, anyone who discovers your blog post through organic search and joins will automatically become your referral. Wealthy Affiliate will allow them to read the post for a short period and ask for their email to continue.
You can even link to these posts from within your website. All of this is covered in the training.
4. Work Hub. ( up to 3 at any one time) This is a space where all your work and research can be conducted in one place to make your content creation organized.
- the training and quick access to your hosted website.
- AI-generated site structure. This is a website structure recommendation. 10 category recommendations based on your niche selection each with 10 content ideas. This can be added to or deleted as required.
- Writing tasks and to-do list organization. You can create content here, either from scratch or using AI, add images, and post directly to your website.
- Niche content ideas including topics, best, top 10, roundups, and ultimate guide suggestions.
- Keyword and SEO research including seed and long tail keyword suggestions, high opportunity low competition keyword ideas, and comparison keywords.
- Article suggestions by keyword through quick direct access to the Jaaxy keyword tool.
- Industry and Market Analysis including top brands, regulations, and trends.
- Audience and customer research including customer pain points and problems.
- Resources to Learn more including glossaries and terminology and best practices.
- Interactive and Q & A Research including FAQs, pros and cons, and beginners guides.
5. Training. Depending on your niche selection, you will have immediate access to either the step-by-step core training or the Affiliate Marketing Bootcamp. You can access the alternate training simply by creating a second Hub. Within the General Website area, there are also a lot of extra classes on a wide range of topics. There are historical pieces of training with more being created every day.
You can choose to promote Wealthy Affiliate but the training relates to whatever products you wish to promote including platforms such as Amazon, Clickbank, Share A Sale, or even private companies or products.
6. Affiliate Marketplace. This feature identifies some of the better products available to promote from sites such as Clickbank, CJ, ShareASale, and Rakuten. It is organized into about 150 categories with some products covering many categories.
Members can follow any option for later use and leave a comment and reviews for other members. This excellent resource gives details of the commission paid, the payout options, payout currency, the countries to which it is available, and whether affiliates are auto-approved.
7. Weekly training webinars. One member, Jay, has a weekly live webinar and covers many topics within the internet space in general. There are also some Hot Seat and Q & A webinars.
Each webinar is recorded and premium members can view earlier recordings and can search by topic or date to find information on many topics.
These webinars are for training only and do NOT promote any product or service. They are purely informational training. Remember Wealthy Affiliate is a spam-free zone.
8. Hosting for up to 3 websites. This can be any combination of SiteRubix sub-hosted websites or your own domain websites. This includes overseas domains such as .com.au.
Domain names purchased from external sites can easily be pointed to Wealthy Affiliate for hosting. Hosting includes site security, SSL certificate (https), and daily backup. However, this should not replace your regular backups.
This feature is wonderful if you have a major issue such as a plugin that causes problems and you need to take a step back and start from an earlier version.
9. Training created by other members. Some members provide training to help others do tasks within their website and show tips and ideas for marketing and promotion.
This covers a much wider training base on many topics including email marketing, YouTube, social media tips, plugin choices, WordPress tips, and more.
The internet is continually changing and members share other opportunities as they arise.
Like every training, YouTube video, and blog available on the internet you must remember that this is a tip or idea.
Different things will work for different people, website styles, niches, and even countries. Always, consider any information you find anywhere online as a resource that you need to research and ensure it will work for you.
Recent member training will show on the dashboard. Older member training can be searched for within two areas.
A training classroom area (in which the member training has been categorized for easy access), and a classes area. You also can bookmark training as you find it for access at a later date.
10. Jaaxy Keyword Tool. You can access this from within Wealthy Affiliate and as a premium member, you can have unlimited keyword searches. There are some extra features you will be able to access such as making lists and scanning your site ranking for a choice of keywords. There are some restrictions, but it is still a wonderful resource.
11. Private messaging. Premium members have access to an internal private message service.
This can be used to privately contact other members instead of leaving messages on their profile or as a blog post.
This feature is NOT used to promote yourself or your products to others. Wealthy Affiliate is spam-free and this also applies to the messaging system.
It is also not to be used to pester people asking for help to do your work or for general ‘help’. There are other avenues to use as I have already covered.
You can use this feature to personally contact your referer and even the website owners.
12. Affiliate program. Access to the affiliate program is automatically included for every member. The referral is for life.
This means that as long as you remain a premium member, you will receive a % of the payment your referrals make to Wealthy Affiliate through their membership. Sounds fair to me.
This is not a pyramid scheme. The product is the education and membership website, Wealthy Affiliate.
The affiliate receives about 40% and Wealthy Affiliate about 60%. There is no further payment. Any member can only have one up-line level.
13. A Reward for super affiliates. If we have a goal to aim for, we can use this for motivation.
Wealthy Affiliate has a reward system in which if you refer 300 members who become premium within one year (Jan – Dec), you will qualify for an all-expenses trip to a conference in Vegas with Kyle and Carson. This includes your airfare, meals, and accommodation. You can bring a friend but their airfare is not covered.
Each year about 15 affiliates achieve this goal and many of these share their tips within the community.
I guess you could say they do have some idea of what they are talking about to achieve this level of internet marketing. These people are often active within the community as they help their referrals and others.
14. Community. Premium membership also gives you access to the community. You can read the blogs, questions, and answers of others. As a premium member, you can comment and ask questions when you need help.
Always remember there are many ways to do each task and you will receive different responses. This is not a bad thing, it is good as it means you can have different options to consider and work with the one that best suits your niche and requirements.
All the things we do online need to be tested. Split testing means trying things in different ways to see which works for you and your audience. This is why the community is an excellent resource for ideas.
15. Within the Websites tab are several features.
a) Site Manager.
This gives you access to your websites. You can log in to your website, check your page speed per post, link to Google page speed to get an overall feel for your website, and get an overview of your site health.
You can also set up domain-specific email addresses and redirect them to your personal email account.
b) Site Builder is where you can quickly build a site using the internal wizard. This feature will be fazed out as you now do so through your work hub.
c) Site Domain. If you wish, you can buy domains within Wealthy Affiliate. Domains do include privacy protection and have auto-renew to help with domain authority. This is a completely optional service. You can purchase domain names outside Wealthy Affiliate and point them to the website for hosting.
d) Site Content.
- This is an environment where you can write your content with an autosave feature. If you make a boo-boo or lose the internet, your data is easily retrieved. You will also have a record of every post you create for backup purposes.
- You can easily access thousands of stock images to use in your posts or upload your own. When publishing to your website, your images are well-optimized
- Your content is checked so you don’t accidentally plagiarize your content.
- You can also keep track of your writing statistics and save templates for layout design.
- Further, this feature lets you know when the post is indexed in Google.
You can access this content through your WorkHub. The writing tasks section of the hub is connected to site content.
e) Site Comments.
This feature allows you to comment on other people’s posts and receive comments in return. It is a give-and-receive process and helps build backlinks to your website as well as increase your word count and therefore SEO.
f) Site Feedback.
This feature allows you to receive feedback on your post or website. Again it is a give-and-receive feature. It is important to consider the overall idea of feedback is not to have a qualified critique but rather to see how the general public (ie your potential audience) may view your post. There is no right or wrong answer or opinion with feedback.
Premium Plus Membership
The third level is for more experienced members and includes all of the benefits of Premium membership and more. This membership costs $99 per month or $697 yearly.
Keyword Tool – Jaaxy Enterprise is included with the Premium Plus membership. This is a premium product with extra keyword research benefits.
Additional Websites – You can host up to 10 of your own (or free SiteRubix) websites. You have 10 WorkHubs.
Additional training webinars – There are some more advanced training that is included within the Premium Plus Membership. There is new training almost every day for Premium Plus members.
Domain Names – Annual Premium Plus Membership includes two dot com domain names free for the first year.
Additional benefits of membership.
Encouragement from all.
You are encouraged along the way. Within the community and through email sequences from Kyle and Carson and your referee. Some people like it when they receive emails and notifications from within the community. You can decide which ones you wish to receive from within your profile settings.
The options available include new followers to your profile, new comments on your profile, new blogs from people you follow, information on new training and webinars, affiliate notifications, and website comment notifications as well as a few more options.
If you don’t wish to receive any emails at all, you can also choose this option.
Great training
As I have mentioned above, there is wonderful training from many different points of view across a wide range of internet-related topics. The training stresses the importance of building quality content so that you can eventually be found through organic search with Google, Yahoo, and Bing. It teaches you to promote your website through social media and other means as well as to monetize your website with advertising and affiliate marketing.
Resources Everywhere
As you can see throughout this review, there is not only basic training within Wealthy Affiliate, but an abundance of resources to help you learn, get ideas, and create content.
Affiliate Marketing.
Although other marketing and promotion topics are covered within Wealthy Affiliate it is essential training for anyone considering Affiliate Marketing.
What I don’t like about Wealthy Affiliate
Yes, there are some things. Nothing is perfect but who needs perfection?
- Firstly the community can be like social media. It is addictive and you can waste a lot of time that could be spent building your website. It is great for research, but do take care.
- There is a lot of extra training and classes outside the WorkHub and if not careful, you can get caught in analysis paralysis.
- Some training can get out of date from time to time. Sometimes this is because other websites like social media change their rules. There is a date created for all content and this needs to be observed as you may access earlier content.
- Some steps could be covered in the basic training instead of the webinars and classrooms. However, I understand that with an ever-changing search environment, this could mean more frequent updates to the training.
- Internal links between the formal training and the related classrooms or alternatives offered by members could be very helpful. Again, a lot of work but heck if there was absolutely nothing wrong with this website we would still find something to complain about. Isn’t that human nature?
None of these detract from the overall quality of the Wealthy Affiliate Website.
Who is Wealthy Affiliate Not For?
- Wealthy Affiliate is not for people who want to learn how to dropship or operate a Shopify Store. You can learn to market your store but not find products to fill it.
- Wealthy Affiliate is not for people looking to become third-party sellers on Amazon. You can learn to create a website and drive traffic to your product or Amazon itself. However, it is not an Amazon training course.
- Wealthy Affiliate is not for web developers who want to do things their own way. It is for beginners to learn and others to use as a resource for improvement.
- Wealthy Affiliate is not for people chasing shiny objects and trying to make money quickly. Wealthy Affiliate teaches hard work and patience.
- Wealthy Affiliate is not for people wanting coaching to teach them every step along the way by hand-holding and giving advice on content creation. This service may be available elsewhere but expect to pay $ thousands per month for this service.
- Wealthy Affiliate is not for people who are not prepared to or cannot afford to, invest any money into building their business. If you need money urgently this is not the answer for you.
Is Wealthy Affiliate the only option available in the educational and internet marketing space?
Heck No, but it does contain a lot of features and information all in one place. Education, Hosting, Research Tools, and an AI interface. Unlike a lot of other information you can find such as e-books, blogs, and videos, it does not promote any products to upsell.
What does Wealthy Affiliate Cost?
The Starter Membership is free.
The Premium membership can be paid monthly or yearly. You can choose to pay monthly at $49 USD or annually at $497 USD.
The annual fee works out at $41.25 USD per calendar month and as a bonus does include one dot com domain name free for the first year.
Premium Plus Membership is $99 USD per month or $997 USD annually.
This annual fee works out at $82.93 USD per month and includes two dot com domain names free for the first year.
Premium Plus with Dedicated Server. For large websites. $399 a month or $3990 annually.
Final thoughts
I have spent a lot of wasted time, (60 to 70 hours a week for a couple of years) on YouTube and downloading books looking all over the place for answers and trying to discover ways to do things but this is the best resource I have found. Yes, you can find information elsewhere, but it is all here in one place.
I have joined so many email lists it is not funny. I have read blog post after blog post. Most people are trying to sell their own products, which is fine, but they have not always been as educational and as helpful as I needed them to be.
I hope that you will see from this review the extraordinary benefits of Wealthy Affiliate and will join through one of my affiliate links. See you on the inside.
KerryAnn