Wealthy Affiliate, 2018 review – Run a Successful Home Based Business

What is Wealthy Affiliate?

Wealthy Affiliate is a training ground for setting up an online business, specifically how to run a successful online home based business.

It is a very comprehensive online program which I am certain contains all you need to do to succeed in affiliate marketing. You could say it is the absolute encyclopedia to everything about affiliate marketing.

Yes, it is a place of learning. But not only that it is a most comprehensive source of information as well as a 24/7 online help desk.

You start off by learning how to build a website, the foundation to a home based business. Then you learn how to enhance it and what you have to do to make it searchable(and findable!!) on Google.

It will teach you all you want to know about how to go about setting up an online business from scratch and how to subsequently manage it. It also has its own website management facility(WordPress) with the ability to keep score of your progress.

Lectures or “hands on”?

It is a very structured program with the training set into groups of lessons.

For example the basic start is a group of five modules each containing ten lessons. Each lesson contains videos and script and a task list at the end. Realistically each lesson takes about a day to complete. That is about an hour for the lesson followed by several hours practical stuff. However, the practical stuff isn’t just”practice”, it is actually setting up your own website.

Also, after each lesson you are encouraged to enter a discussion on it. You can use the discussion platform to ask questions.

The founders/owners of Wealthy Affiliate are Kyle and Carson and they actively encourage this discussion part of the program. This means that when you ask a question it is answered by another Wealthy affiliate member.

So in effect it is all one big team working together and helping each other.

Commitment

It is worth mentioning here that success doesn’t just happen. You have to remember that a home based business is like any other business, it requires commitment both in terms of time and endevor.

Let’s look briefly at what’s involved in what you do at your current place of employment or the “day job”, sometimes called a “proper job”. Most people have a commute and this can be anything from five minutes up to two hours. Even more if you commute from the suburbs into the center of Chicago for example. You will then do something for the working day which probably averages out at about eight hours. So let’s say that’s nine hours a day for five days a week.

It’s going to take at least that in time commitment even now your commute has been reduced to 29 seconds.

However it’s not just a time commitment, you have to make progress and achieve goals along the way. It’s no good sitting staring at a blank computer screen in the hope that ideas will come dropping from the ethos.

What Wealthy Affiliate will do in this regard is not only help you set goals but will also help you in finding out where you can get ideas from.

If you are thinking of changing from a regular day job to a home based business, I would be inclined to stick with the day job until your income from your home based business generate the equivalent amount of income.

What does it cost?

It is free to join and this gets you the fundamentals like explaining how it works and how to build a website. There is a video explaining how to build a website in 30 seconds!

However, in order to progress you have to pay to become a Premium member and this gives you access to everything. One might think at $47 per month($359 per year) this is a bit on the expensive side, however when you consider what you get for it is good value.

Premium Membership

You can only go so far with fee membership. You will soon realize that in order to progress you will have to become a Premium member. For example as a free member you can only take the first two phases of training out of a total of 12, and you can only have 2 websites as opposed to 50 as a Premium member. See the table below for a full list of benefits.

A Community

There are a huge number of members of Wealthy Affiliate. Judging by the ranking system which they operate there must be over half a a million. We all have access to each other and not only exchange ideas but also be on hand to help each other out. No matter what your issue is there is always someone that can answer it.

One of the real advantages of having a community concept is that no matter what question or issue you may have there is someone in the community who will be able to help you with authority.

There is a ranking system within Wealthy Affiliate. Each member has an individual ranking number which depends on a variety of parameters, for example how often you write a blog on training or how often you are able to help other members etc. The top 25 in the ranking order are called ambassadors and you better believe that they are very good at running an internet business and therefore more than capable of answering any questions you may have.

 

 

A University?

It’s a very interesting question. Wealthy Affiliate could easily be classified as a university with the amount of learning that is available. However, there are no exams and therefore no certificate saying that you reached a certain level of learning and thus no degree ceremony.

In all other aspects it qualifies as a university.

 

What does Wealthy Affiliate not do?

What Wealthy Affiliate does not do is your work for you. For example a lot of training time is spent on the value of content and how to write it, but it doesn’t write it for you. You are on you’re own for that one!!

It goes on at length about keywords and gives you mountains of information on how to find them – yes you’ve guessed it Wealthy Affiliate doesn’t actually find them for you.

Make no mistake, however the key to success is you – it doesn’t just happen. As previously indicated it takes a lot of hard work and commitment.

Content

OK, having said that Wealthy Affiliate does not write content for you, it certainly explains the value of it and how you should write it.

Content is probably the most difficult part of the whole exercise because not only do you have to have the ideas to write about but you have to be able to make it make sense and readable.

Develop website content or keywords. There are guidelines but you definitely have to write your own content and choose your own keywords.

Genuine or Scam?

As previously indicated it is free to join Wealthy Affiliate. With this free membership you can progress quite a long way into the basics of website building, setting goals and the fundamentals of how affiliate marketing works. Not only that but you can also connect with all the other members. Being able to learn that much for free would suggest that Wealthy Affiliate is certainly not a scam.

Progressing to Premium membership does in fact cost money, but not much in terms of what you get for it. Also, there are no further payments to be made.

One aspect of Wealthy Affiliate which I think is really positive is its openness. Everything you want to know about the company is on its website as well as bios of Kyle and Carson, the owners and founders.
You can Google both Kyle and Carson and you will get positive results with full details of both of them. There are no secrets and to my mind this instills a lot of confidence.

Conclusion – it is definitely NOT a scam.

Summary

Having been a premium member of Wealthy Affiliate for 5 years now, I can highly recommend it as an outstanding source of learning to establish a home based business. Absolutely everything you need to know about how to do it is within Wealthy Affiliate somewhere.

In other words Wealthy Affiliate provides everything you need to create a very successful home based business.

Don’t forget starter membership is free, so the opportunity is there to have a go – get your feet wet as they say. You will find the community to be most friendly, helpful and encouraging. So if you want to progress take out Premium membership and then at a later date you decide that it’s not for you, you can always cancel it with no obligation.

From a personal point of view although I have looked at other affiliate marketing websites I have never found any area of the whole subject that is not covered by Wealthy Affiliate and therefor no need to go elsewhere.