The Wealthy Affiliate Review – New And Improved In 2023!

I joined Wealthy Affiliate at the end of January 2020. Three years on and I can actually say I am a different person!

By the end of this review, you will know what the 2 opportunities are within Wealthy Affiliate, how to get started, and why you never need to read another Wealthy Affiliate Review.  

This site includes affiliate links – if you buy through my link I may get paid a commission but the price remains the same for you. Thank you for your support.

Wealthy Affiliate Overview and Rankings

Name: Wealthy Affiliate

Website:    www.wealthyaffiliate.com

Training: 4.8 / 5.0

Website builder: 4.9 / 5.0

Research tools: 4.8 / 5.0

Suitability for newbies and experts: 5.0 / 5.0

Pricing: Starter membership: Free

Premium Membership – $49 per month or $495 annually

Premium Plus Membership – $99 per month

Overall ranking:  19.5 / 20.0

What is Wealthy Affiliate?

Wealthy Affiliate is a very well-established training platform that’s been around since 2005 and teaches people how to make money from Affiliate Marketing using a Blog.

It was started by 2 Canadian guys, Kyle and Carson, who today still take the time to welcome new people into the business.

Unusually for a training platform, however, it also includes web hosting, a website builder, a keyword research tool, online support, and a community of knowledgeable people who are only too happy to help you when you get stuck.

Tutorials are created so that you can either watch on video or read the lessons to suit your learning style. The entire site and training were updated in 2021.

New to blogging and affiliate marketing?

Blogging has been a method of making money online for many years now and here’s how it works.

You create a website around something that you’re interested in – that is called a niche –  then you create valuable articles and reviews that people want to read.

(For more info, check out How To Find An Affiliate Marketing Niche here.) Having done that, you then look for really good products related to your niche that you can sell for a commission.

These are called affiliate programs and there are affiliate programs for just about every product and service you can imagine.

When you sign up with a company as an affiliate, you get a specific link for each product to put into your blog and when someone clicks on it and buys something, you get a percentage of the sale.

The great thing about working this way is that you don’t have anything to do with the sale other than to send people to that vendor.

When writing your posts, you will optimize certain keywords so that search engines such as Google and Bing can rank it and it can be found by your audience. To find out more about Keyword research, visit my post about keyword research tools.

This is exactly what Wealthy Affiliate teaches.

What is included in the membership?

There are 5 training modules with 10 lessons each.

You work your way through the training, taking action as you go so, for example, when it’s telling you in the first module how to build your website, you actually build your website at the same time so you don’t end up getting lost or overwhelmed.

When it’s teaching you how to find keywords, you follow along to actually find keywords for your niche.

At the end of each lesson, there’s an area where you can ask questions about what you’ve just learned. There is a huge community at Wealthy Affiliate and it’s designed for everyone to help each other.

You can add people to your network and you can write Blog posts for Wealthy Affiliate.

Some of the very experienced members give really valuable insights into what they did to get where they are on these posts and you can follow them (much as you do with Social media) and ask them questions.

Wealthy Affiliate also has its own website hosting, keyword research tools, lots of themes you can use for your website, content creation tools to check for your spelling and grammar, and thousands of free images you can put straight into your posts.

You can host up to 10 websites with your membership but it is strongly recommended that you focus on one when you are starting out.

This saves so much time and also saves you paying elsewhere for some of those services or worrying if there might be copyright on a photo you’ve used.

In addition to all of the actual course lessons, there are live weekly training on all sorts of topics plus lots of past training that you can access.

What are the negatives?

So, that all sounds fantastic, right? But what are the negatives? Anything worthwhile in life takes time and this takes time.

A brand new website takes months to gain authority with the search engines and you need to do a considerable amount of work while not seeing results at the start.

This is a business for the long term so it’s not for everyone. The way I look at it is that that time is going to pass anyway so why not spend it building your future?

All of the training modules have just been updated for 2020 so although the platform is rather long in the tooth, the training is bang up-to-date and, there is a live training webinar once a week.

Last but not least, if you are not careful, you can easily get caught up in other members questions and discussion.

Just like Facebook, it’s hard not to have a read and perhaps add your opinion! I would recommend turning off notifications if this is a distraction for you.

By all means plug in again another time as it’s great when you have learned something you can pass on and you learn from other people’s questions.

Why I got started with Wealthy Affiliate

At this point, I’d like to just tell you briefly about why I got started.

About a year and a half ago I tried to build a website on my own and it looked quite nice but I got stuck and I couldn’t move forward.

I just needed help but the only help I could get was going to cost $70 per hour which frankly I couldn’t afford.

In any case, I needed to find a way to do it myself, not have someone fix it when I made a mistake or got stuck which I could see would be quite a lot.

So I ditched that website. To read more about my experience, please check out my post How To Get A Website Up and Running here.

Fast forward over a year and I was looking for a new opportunity, I liked the idea of affiliate marketing and I stumbled across the Wealthy Affiliate website and I could see that, if I had had that platform, I would have been able to build that website because there’s training and people to help you.

There is very much a ‘pay it forward’ culture and I’ve found that even I can help new people too which was a big surprise – I can’t believe how far I’ve come.

So, that was why I signed up. It had been my intention just to stay with the free membership (the free membership would have solved that website problem that I had).

However, I was loving it so much I went for the Premium so I could take more modules in the training.

What are the membership options?

Free Membership

With the free membership you get the first module with 10 lessons, a free website, and hosting, and you learn all of the basics of how to set it up for affiliate marketing.

In the first 7 days, you get the chance to upgrade to the Premium membership for $19 for the first month, thereafter it’s $49 per month.

With Premium membership, you unlock all the rest of the training, can host up to 10 websites and get continued access to instant help etc.

See the chart below for more detailed info:

New – Premium Plus membership

Premium Plus offers all of the benefits of Premium membership but adds:

• A premium version of the keyword research tool
• Hosting for up to 50 websites
• 200+ additional extra classes each year

The cost is $99 per month, however, from time to time there are special offers running and you can get it for only $49.

Wealthy Affiliate’s own affiliate opportunity

Now, there is a second opportunity within Wealthy Affiliate and I can’t believe I had not paid any attention to it.

I heard someone say recently that to be a Super Affiliate (you know the ones that make the big money), you need a program that has recurring commissions.

And the penny just dropped – Wealthy Affiliate’s own affiliate program offers recurring commissions and I set about investigating.

So, in a regular niche – maybe you love dogs and you sell all sorts of dog accessories and someone buys a dog bed from your site.

It costs maybe $60 and you get $15 commission. Well, that’s great but that is all you are getting from that sale. To make more money you need to find another customer.

With Wealthy Affiliate’s own program, where your niche would be ‘work from home’ or something along those lines, if someone joins through you, then upgrades to Premium membership, you get paid every month that they are a member.

Normally people join Wealthy Affiliate as a free member but 1 in 8 of those free members go on to upgrade to the Premium membership. If they upgrade in their first week, they get the first month of Premium membership for $19 then it’s $49 monthly thereafter.

The commission that gets paid on these is $8 for the first month then $23.50 for the months that follow for as long as they stay a member. Some people have been members for more than 10 years.

So can you see how this makes sense? They have a calculator on the website that shows you how many referrals you will need to reach a particular target.

If you are a free member you get paid $4 for the first month and $11 per month thereafter so you could potentially use your early commissions to upgrade to Premium and double your commissions.

Why I decided to Promote Wealthy Affiliate

My niche for my first blog is Personal Development which I love writing about, but I can’t ignore the opportunity to promote the Wealthy Affiliate program itself because:

• It’s easy to get referrals – people want to get the free membership because it’s great value
• People love the platform – I love it myself – I know there are lots of people looking for help with websites like I was and they love the training and help
• People can start for free. Do you think there might be people out there right now looking for something they can start for free? Maybe even people you know who you could also introduce?
• As well as learning the blogging aspect, you can promote Wealthy Affiliate on social media or however you like.
• I was inspired to promote Wealthy Affiliate by a member who doesn’t actually have a blog – he doesn’t like to write but he loves video and has a super YouTube channel. There is no reason why you cannot do that too!
• Last but not least, when you sign up as an affiliate for a product, whether physical or digital, you are normally on your own. With Wealthy Affiliate, you have got training right there to help you from the developers of the program who know what works! With any other program you will be searching YouTube for advice paying for a course.

Las Vegas Incentive

Wealthy Affiliate runs an incentive where their affiliates can qualify to go to a 4-day private Super Affiliate conference in Las Vegas, all expenses paid. When I was in network marketing they would always have incentives on but only the top 6 or so in any particular level got to go – you could have met the minimum criteria and still not get to go.

With this conference, anyone who is responsible for 300 Premium memberships between January to December is invited on that trip.

Success Stories

Everyone who has achieved the level of success they were hoping for (or more) will tell you that it took time, effort, and a ‘never give up’ attitude. Imagine if Ralph had given up!

Grant shows how people from all walks of life can succeed in this business with the right help. Read his story for yourself.

Success does not care how old you are, how young you are, or where you are from as you will see from 21-year old Jerry Huang’s post. Jerry is from Taiwan, dropped out of college, and doesn’t regret it for one minute! Read his story here.

What if you are an experienced Affiliate Marketer?

Interestingly, some new members are already very experienced affiliate marketers who join either with the intention of scaling up, connecting with other ‘Super Affiliates’ or accessing WA’s own affiliate program with the recurring commissions (not to mention that Las Vegas trip!). If you are curious, sign up for free and have a look around.

The last review you need?

At the start of this post, I said that you never need to read another Wealthy Affiliate review and that is because there is only one review that matters – and that’s yours. A hundred different people could have a hundred different opinions but the only way you will know for sure if WA is for you is to try it.

It’s free to join so instead of spending the next few days looking at more reviews and different opportunities, why not spend them getting your free website up and running?

If you don’t like it you have lost nothing but if you do, you have taken action instead of wasting time and you will be so pleased you did.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I recommend that you sign up for the free membership, get started on the training and see how you like it which you can do by clicking here. There’s also lots more information on that link for you to check out at your leisure.

Also if you click here,  you will find a video walk-through of the platform – this was made by Kyle, one of the founders of the program, who actually makes himself available to members! Considering there are something like a million and a half members, that’s pretty impressive!

Want to check out the thoughts of someone with only 2 weeks membership under her belt? Then read her short post here.

Are you fed up with reviews and want to get started? Then go ahead and I’ll see you on the other side!