My Wealthy Affiliate Review – Is This The Best Affiliate Marketing Course?

You might be wondering why I’m including my Wealthy Affiliate review on a site that’s about List Building.

This site you’re on is actually being created using the training and tools that Wealthy Affiliate provides.

Many marketers combine list building with affiliate marketing and the two disciplines really go hand-in-hand.

I joined Wealthy Affiliate in 2015.

While I’m a seasoned affiliate marketer, the affiliate marketing landscape changes rapidly and you have to keep on top of new techniques and strategies as they evolve and dump the of methodologies whose time is up.

I’ve been a member of many an affiliate marketing course over the years but Wealthy Affiliate is the one I keep coming back to.

The training is constantly being updated so I know I’ll be able to find the latest marketing techniques that work there.

There’s also a thriving community which has every members’ best interest at heart.

And then there’s the site building platform.

My Wealthy Affiliate Overview

What Is Wealthy Affiliate?

It’s a one-stop-shop for building an affiliate marketing business. Members receive in-depth training on how to become an affiliate marketer for a monthly fee or a discounted annual fee. The training is kept up-to-date as things change in the affiliate marketing world.

Members also get to use the siterubix.com platform for free for building WordPress blogs.

Premium members can build up to 50 websites while Free members can create 2 websites.

As an aside, free members also get access to the Affiliate Bootcamp Phase 1 training module (there are 7 Phases in all). There’s nothing to lose in becoming a free member and it will give you a taste of what’s on offer so you can decide if this program is for you.

The Member Community

One of the best aspects of Wealthy Affiliate is its vibrant community. Members want to help each other. Ask any question and someone in the community is likely to know the answer.

Members are at all levels of expertise, so this is a great way to tap into the combined knowledge of over 1,000,000 affiliate marketers if the training doesn’t provide the information you’re looking for.

How I Built Websites In The Past

I’ve been building WordPress sites since 2008. I created those sites manually and had to host them on a variety of web hosts.

Some web hosts went out of business, some went under new ownership, some had poor technical support and in all those cases I had to move my sites from one web host to another.

And, of course, there were the monthly hosting fees. While paying monthly does mean you pay more, it also means you’re not tied into a year-long (or longer) contract should you end up not being happy with your web host.

Having web hosting means having to learn about cPanels and other site management tasks too.

Building and managing sites in this way had become habit for me so when I joined Wealthy Affiliate, I didn’t pay any attention to their site building and hosting platform – siterubix.com. That was a bit of a mistake.

Wealthy Affiliate Site Builder And Web Hosting

Anyone can become a free member of the Wealthy Affiliate (WA) program. As a free member, you can create two WordPress blogs, hosted for free on their servers, to try the system and training out to see if it’s right for you.

If you upgrade to Premium membership, you’re able to build up to 50 WordPress blogs and have them hosted on the WA servers. That should be more than enough sites to build a virtual real estate empire.

25 of those sites can be on domains you own. The other 25 will be sub domains on the WA siterubix.com domain.

Premium members don’t have to pay monthly hosting fees. I currently pay $27.95 per month for a reseller hosting plan with my web host (A2 Hosting).

If all my sites were hosted at Wealthy Affiliate, I’d be saving $335.40 every year in hosting fees – almost enough to cover the annual fee for Wealthy Affiliate itself!

Not only that, Premium Members can also install SSL certificates on their sites (so their sites can use the https:// prefix) at no additional cost. These certificates usually cost about $50 per site elsewhere. They’re also now a ranking factor where Google is concerned.

To top things off, site security features are implemented at the server level rather than at the blog level which reduces the probability of your sites being hacked. Spam is also filtered out before it even gets to your blog.

I had to learn a lot about WordPress site security when I started building blogs and it’s a necessary skill in a world where something like 30,000 WordPress blogs are hacked each day.

The Wealthy Affiliate platform removes all that hassle from your shoulders and their back-end team take care of all that for you.

That alone is worth the price of becoming a Premium member.

Building My First Site With Wealthy Affiliate

Phase 1 of the Affiliate Bootcamp training is all about keyword research and how you go about building the best affiliate marketing websites on the SiteRubix platform.

For this review I decided to document the building of this very website. I started by disregarding everything I’ve learned about building WordPress sites and to simply follow the training in WA to create this blog.

I began with some keywords research analysis to find a keyword phrase that I could use as the name of this blog. I used the associated Jaaxy long tail keyword research tool to find a keyword that would get at least some searches every month and wouldn’t be too hard to rank for.

What I needed was a keyword with over 100 searches per month, less than 300 competing pages and one that should be easy to rank for.

That’s how I found Email List Building Techniques.

I was very surprised to find that EmailListBuildingTechniques.com was available. The domain name is a bit longer than I’d like; I prefer my domain names to have 3 words at most and this one has 4.

The actual site building process is the same for Free and Premium members.

This is the page that opens when the Site Manager link is clicked:

Since I bought a domain name, I clicked on the On a domain I own button.

If the On a free domain button is used instead, this next section is what you’ll see on the page. As an example, I’ve pre-filled in the name of my new site – emaillistbuildingtechniques:

I am a Premium member in Wealthy Affiliate so I have access to 2,842 WordPress themes (designs) in my set up options. Free members have 12 themes they can play with. You can always upload your own theme in the WordPress admin area if you need to.

One improvement I’d like to see here is options to filter the themes by number of columns, colors, style (e.g. shop style themes). 2,842 themes is a lot to scroll through!

There is an option to search the themes but you really need to know what you looking for before you search.

To speed things along, I selected the third theme (Hiero). I could always change it later if needed.

Once that was done, a Click Here To Build This Site! button appeared. Clicking on it starts the magic. An entire optimized and secure site is created within a few seconds.

Once the site is built, you’re presented with additional options. These are three of them:

Free SSL is only available for Top Level Domains (and Premium members), not sub domains on the siterubix.com domain.

I enabled the SiteSpeed option – this is available to both Free and Premium members.

These are the included features for all sites (Free or Premium):

Sites are automatically backed up every 24 hours in case you ever need to recover a site for any reason.

These are the site features for Premium account holders:

You can delete a website if you want. This includes Free members who can play about building and deleting 2 websites as they want.

So my site was built with all necessary security and a preferred theme in place. All it needed now was some content.

Site Builder and Hosting Pros:

• A site builder is part of the membership package
• Premium Members can create up to 25 sites on domains they own and an additional 25 sites on siterubix.com sub domains
• Web Hosting fees are included in the membership fee
• Site security is taken seriously and server-level site security measures are used
• A huge number of (almost 3,000) WordPress themes are available to Premium Members
• Sites are automatically backed up every 24 hours in case a site ever needs to be restored
• Page load speeds are improved by proprietary Wealthy Affiliate technologies
• There’s more than enough bandwidth to cater for large amount of traffic visiting your sites
• One of the best affiliate marketing software tools

Site Builder and Hosting Cons:

• The amount of web space per member account is 30Gb. It’s unlikely you can build 50 blogs in that amount of space.

The SiteContent Module

While you can create posts directly in your WordPress admin area, Wealthy Affiliate also provides a module where you can create and edit your content before publishing it directly to your blog.

One very nice feature is the spelling and grammar checker which will identify mistakes in your articles, allowing you to correct them before you publish them.

The Editor also keeps a running count of the number of words in your article as well as a running total of all the words in all your articles.

SiteContent Pros:

• You can create and edit articles before you publish them to your blog
• The spelling and grammar checker helps you clean up your articles before you publish them
• The Editor has all the basic features you need for formatting text and inserting images and links
• There’s a collection of over 1,000,000 royalty-free images you can add to your articles
• Any saved copies of your articles are available for review
• All the articles you’ve created with SiteContent are available for review in the dashboard. Published articles have a green header whereas unpublished articles have a blue header for easy identification

SiteContent Cons:

• As you’re editing, your content is supposed to be auto-saved frequently. While content is auto-saved, it’s much less frequently than I’d like and I’d recommend that anyone using this editor manually saves their content regularly. That is, don’t rely on the auto-save feature.
• Once an article is published, to edit it further you have to do that in the WordPress post editor. A button taking you to the WordPress post appears at the top of the SiteContent article. However, it’s still possible to make changes to the article in SiteContent, but there’s no way to save those changes. This might be confusing for someone not familiar with the system.
• If you accidentally click a menu link while in the Editor and then click you browser Back button to return to editing your article, SiteContent will actually create a duplicate of your article and put that in the editor. You can end up creating multiple copies, at different stages of editing this way. Just something to be aware of.

The Affiliate Marketing Training

If you want to learn affiliate marketing, the training aspect of WA is hugely comprehensive. There are 7 Phases in all, each broken down into 10 modules. You must complete a module before you can progress to the next one.

This is the breakdown of the training:

• Phase 1: Getting Your Business Rolling
• Phase 2: Content, Keywords and Conversions
• Phase 3: Giving Your Site Social Value
• Phase 4: Get Visual. Get Aesthetic. Get a Brand Through Media
• Phase 5: Knowing Your Audience And Catapulting Your Referrals
• Phase 6: Bing, Yahoo And The Power of PPC
• Phase 7: How To Scale Successful PPC Campaigns

In addition to that training there are 5 Certification courses that further round out your affiliate marketing training:

• Certification Course 1: Getting Started
• Certification Course 2: Building Your Own Traffic Producing Website
• Certification Course 3: Making Money!
• Certification Course 4: Mastering Social Engagement
• Certification Course 5: Achieving Maximum Success through Content Creation

Along with all that training there are 13 extra Classrooms that supply even more information about topics such as Keyword, Niche & Market Research; Everything WordPress; Local, Video and Email Marketing, etc. There’s about 1,000 videos and tutorials in this section alone providing a huge number of affiliate marketing tips!

There are also regular weekly Live Video Training classes on important topics or topics requested by members. Recent topics have been: Local SEO 2018: Earning Income from Clients, Using the New Google Search Console and Ask the Expert (Las Vegas Edition). The recordings are made available soon after live broadcasts.

And for affiliates, there’s complete training on how to market Wealthy Affiliate itself.

The Site Comments Module

One of the best ways to tell the search engines that you have an active site is to get lots of quality comments. Spam can be an issue for any blog, so it may still be a good idea to use spam filtering plugins like Akismet or AntiSpam Bee on your blogs.

There are 3 ways that Wealthy Affiliate members can request comments from other members:

1. There’s a specific page where you can request comments from other members
2. There’s a specific page where you can share your latest posts and ask members to comment on them
3. And then there’s the Site Comments module

The Site Comments module works on a credit system. For every comment you add to another member’s post, you earn 1 credit. Every comment you request for your own post costs 2 credits. This incentivizes people to leave comments on other members’ blogs.

You can also buy credits if you feel the need to.

And you can review and approve or reject comments.

Generally, when you manually leave a comment on a blog post, there’s a box where you can leave your web address so you get a backlink. The comments left via the Site Comments module do not include a website address like this.

Instead, what’s passed to the blog you want to comment on is your email address, your Gravatar image and your comment text. So you don’t get any backlinks from the comments you leave. Any comments you receive also won’t have backlinks but will add new content to your post if you approve them.

It all adds to the mix of comments that will appear on your site – some with associated web addresses, some not.

I generally struggle to get comments from visitors on new sites. The Wealthy Affiliate way of getting comments works.

Originally, this blog you’re on only had comments from other Wealthy Affiliate members. But as the number of comments grew and the site started to reach a larger audience, other visitors started commenting too.

When visitors see other people have commented on posts, they’re more likely to leave their own comments.

And the search engines love all that new, fresh content. It helps get your blog ranked higher too.

The Affiliate Program

Wealthy Affiliate does have its own affiliate program. To be honest, the product is so good that it practically sells itself.

You’re provided with a number of standard referral links to use but can create your own tracking links if you need to. You can create affiliate links for any of the front-facing pages (like the home page and other pages accessed from the site’s main menu).

Members are encouraged to blog frequently inside the members’ area. Anybody can read these posts, not just members. But every blog post also has a unique affiliate link with your id embedded so you can promote these posts as well to attract new members.

Free members will earn 24% commissions on any sales while Premium members earn 48% commissions.

Support

Needless to say, support is outstanding. Too many times I’ve needed support with other programs and services only to find those companies were very lacking in their customer support.

The things that annoy me about companies that provide bad customer support are long response times (any longer than 24 hours is unacceptable in my book) and lack of technical expertise.

You get none of that nonsense with Wealthy Affiliate. A company that truly prioritizes its customers is one to pay attention to and one worthy of your business.

There are several routes to getting help:

• Live Chat – help within seconds
• Comments Section – help within minutes
• Ask A Question / Blog Post – help within minutes
• Private Messaging And Mentoring – help within hours
• Website and Web Hosting Support – help within minutes
• Direct Access to Kyle – help within minutes to a day or so, depending on when he’s online (remember, he has 1 million customers to support)

How Much Does It Cost?

Wealthy Affiliate is free to join as a Starter Member. Premium membership costs $49 per month or $359 per year (a saving of 38%).

If you’d like to become a Premium member, you can get your first month for just $19 here.

The prices haven’t changed in 12 years. There’s a team of 25 people working behind the scenes to provide the technology and training far beyond anything else offered within this arena.

Testimonials

Don’t just take my word for it about just how good Wealthy Affiliate is as both a training platform and site building & hosting service. Here’s what some other members have to say about it:

• I Never Really Expected To Build A Million Dollar Company
• Just Made My First Local Marketing Sale $2000 + $400/mo
• $12,500 – Website Sold on Flippa
• Wealthy Affiliate Review 2018: $4k Per Month Results!
• How Much A Single Review Post Can Make? – Five Figures!
• Hello from CES 2018 Las Vegas – Thank You WA

My Exclusive Bonus

Sign up for the starter membership – it’s $0. And if you don’t like what you see and get, you can always come back here and yell at me (seriously!).

And did I mention that joining is FREE, $0, zip, nada?

No hidden costs, no charging your credit card (whose details you don’t even need to provide) after 7 or 14 days because you forgot to cancel your membership.

You can remain a FREE member as long as you want without any commitment.

When you join, I’ll be sure to get in touch with you within the first hour.

I do want you to make a promise to me though that if you do join, you’ll go and set up your account. It’s a simple process and you’ll be taken by the hand through it when you join Wealthy Affiliate.

It’s FREE!

How to Claim Your Bonus…

When you sign up for your FREE Starter Account, I’m going to offer you some exclusive bonuses if you do decide to become a PREMIUM member in the first 7 days:

1. A 59% discount on your first month of Premium membership (only $19)
2. You are going to get personal and private access to me! If you ever have a question or need help with your campaigns, I will be there. You’ll also get a personal invite to my private Facebook Mastermind Group.
3. Access to the exclusive Diamond Traffic Training course
4. I am also giving away 20 Exclusive Bonuses worth almost $4,500 (you can see what they are when you sign up for a FREE Starter Account)

When you create your Wealthy Affiliate account, I’ll be in touch personally on your profile page with my “welcome” message, some more information about Wealthy Affiliate, how you can get more help from me, an invitation to my private Facebook Group, what’s in my Bonus Package and how to claim it.

This is going to be awesome 🙂 and you’ll also benefit from my 14 years as an affiliate marketer! 🙂

Once you step inside Wealthy Affiliate you’ll realize just what you’ve been missing all these years!

My Wealthy Affiliate Review – Final Words

Whew! This has been a long post. I guess I had a lot to write about Wealthy Affiliate.

It is from what I know, the most comprehensive affiliate marketing training program available. What’s more, the content is constantly kept up-to-date. Other courses I’ve joined have let their content go stale, so have become much less useful as time passes. This makes WA one of the best affiliate marketing courses out there, if not the absolute best.

If you’re looking for an Affiliate Marketing For Dummies, this is it!

Wealthy Affiliate is also freakishly cost-effective. You pay a monthly or annual fee for a combined training program, website creator and web hosting. Paying for all these services separately, outside of Wealthy Affiliate would cost a lot more.

And you can check out the training and build 2 websites as a free member. There’s no commitment on your part. You don’t even have to hand over your credit card details.

In fact, what I recommend is that you sign up as a free member, test drive the program, build a couple of websites and see if this program is right for you before you even think about committing any money to it.

If you decide to upgrade to Premium membership at some point, it’ll cost about $1.56 per day (paying monthly) or $0.98 per day if paying yearly.

And remember, web hosting is included as part of your membership. In fact you can build up to 50 sites, all at no additional cost.

So that fee is not much to become a part of the most comprehensive, progressive, up-to-date and fun affiliate marketing course and platform currently available.

If you’ve been wondering “can you make money with affiliate marketing?“, hopefully with this review, I’ve answered that question for you.

Wealthy Affiliate’s not perfect but it comes pretty damn close. And it is darn good value! 🙂

Still Not Convinced? Here’s a No-Strings-Attached Free Training Course

Here’s a free training course provided by Wealthy Affiliate on how to start selling affiliate products online within 60 minutes:

All the best,

Gary Nugent

P.S.: Don't forget, if you want to create an internet income of your own, here's one of my recommended ways to do that: