Wealthy Affiliate Review

Remember back to when you were first exposed to the world of Affiliate marketing. How did you feel? Confused.. Excited.. Hopeful?

You were most likely bombarded from all directions with offers to teach you the secrets of the business and have you making millions in no time. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but it can be very confusing out there for a greenhorn.

There are a number of sites out there that promise to teach you what to do. Affilorama is one of them. But how can you know who to trust, or whether it’s worth shelling out precious cash for training?

Today I’m going to have a look at Wealthy Affiliate University (WA for short),one of the big players in the world of Affiliate marketing training. I intend to check out what they have to offer the aspiring affiliate marketer and how their offer stacks up.

Taking the Leap..

I began my journey by signing up to their newsletter, which gave me access to their free course on internet marketing.

This is a quality course, with some great basic info. There are 14 lessons in all which take you through the usual stuff; mindset, keywords, internet marketing lies, PPC...

As good as the free course is, I was left wanting more. So I signed up to see just what you can get with...

Wealthy Affiliate Membership

At Wealthy Affiliate you have the option of paying $97 per month or $797 per year. For that, you get access to training, the forum, the exclusive WA tools, web hosting, and a couple of other extra features.

(note: since the time of writing there is now another price option at WA. The Gold membership, which is only $47 per month and comes with almost all of the benefits of the regular platinum membership, but limited web hosting, websites, keyword tool searches, and a few other things)

Now there’s nothing wrong with paying for good advice and training. We offer paid products and services ourselves here at Affilorama.

The problem is that most people new to this are often short of money. This is usually the main reason they are looking at doing it in the first place! So committing so much cash up front can be a big risk.

Having said that, I found three really great features on their site which provide some great benefits to any new affiliate marketer...

A World Of Advice

There are over 500 guides and tutorials in the training center, so it’s a pretty extensive resource. There are sections for Article marketing, Email marketing, PPC, Research, SEO, the WA affiliate program, and others.

An interesting approach to this area is that any member can post up training guides, tutorials, or videos. (Over 400 of these guides are written by members rather than the sites creators.)

Each course or tutorial can be rated by users and receives a ranking based on the collective ratings. Members who post helpful articles can get a higher rating and become experts in the training center.

Within the training center you can find the ‘Getting Started Action Plan’. This is a really detailed course that takes you through 12 weeks of lessons. Each week featuring tasks to complete and check off before you can move on to the next week.

The lessons here are well written and very informative. One little problem I had was that there are a lot of links within lessons leading to other lessons. This had me going off on about 3 tangents all at once and then feel like I was missing out on the core lessons

(note: If you’re an information junkie like me then let this be a warning to you -- If you want to make some progress, make sure you stay focused and actually DO the recommended tasks.)

Affiliate Tools

Let's get down to the nitty gritty, any Affiliate training site worth its salt will offer a good set of tools to make your job easier. There are a number available within the WA site, here’s a quick rundown..

Research

• Keyword research tool. The WA equivalent to Traffic Travis, not as sexy but pretty powerful.
• ClickBank research tool. Adds some new features to searching ClickBank, such as momentum and refund score, to make it easier to rate offerings.
• NicheQResearchSystem. These provide in-depth research and analysis for a range of niches. You get access to one per month.

Site Building

• Site Rubix Website Builder. Drag and drop editor for creating affiliate web pages.
• Website Templates. 12 pre-set affiliate style templates you can modify and use.
• Wordpress Express. Wordpress site building. As well as pre-built newsletter course, customized for you which promotes WA and other relevant products and services.
• Turn-Key Feeder Sites. Automatically generate links to landing sites for your PPC campaigns.
• WA Web Hosting. Making it easy for you to host your affiliate sites.

Others

• RapidWriter. Helps you create, rewrite and mange articles for your campaigns.
• My-Linker Cloaking tool. Cloaks affiliate links and tracks clicks for you.
• STF marketing blueprint. WA created their own fat loss product specifically for members to promote. Provided with turn-key sites, and ready made keyword lists.

So that’s the training and tools. Another strong feature of the site is the forum ..

A great place to hang out

Wealthy Affiliate has one of the most informative and friendly forums I’ve seen for internet marketing.

It’s very clean, easy to navigate, and quite conveniently opens in a new window so you won’t lose your place on other pages.

With over 400,000 posts and 81,037 topics, there is a lot to read. You could spend hours and hours in here.

The problem with forums can be knowing that the information is coming from an authoritative source, the member rank helps and it's nice to see the Kyle and Carson (the sites creators) have 3655 and 2819 posts respectively.

There are also a couple of other features that help with the whole community feel..

WA Spaces is like Facebook for all your affiliate marketing friends. It lets you create a profile and buddy up with other affiliates.

Your profile includes a blog where people generally share their WA experiences, which is pretty cool, and a good way to keep people enrolled in the program.

There is also a pretty active Jobs board.

Jobs?! “But I got into affiliate marketing so that I could quit my job!”

Well it’s not that type of jobs board. The Job space on WA is where you can go to post jobs you’re wanting to outsource, mostly article writing and site design.

You can also bid on jobs to earn some spare cash and help fund your online business ventures.

Is It Worth The Investment?

Is it worth paying $97us (or $47) per month for Wealthy Affiliate membership? (note: Subscription is non-refundable and there is no money back guarantee). If you’ve got the cash, I’d say yes.

But consider this..

If you’re just starting out you don’t need all the tools, you don’t need advanced strategies, and you don’t need to read thousands of forum posts and training articles.

What you do need is enough information to get you started in the right direction, a place to ask questions and get informed responses.

To be pointed in the direction of the tools you need, and to have the opportunity to learn without spending a lot of cash upfront.

All You Need for FREE

For those people just starting out. Remember, the key to success lies in your ability to learn and take action.

With a FREE membership at Affilorama you get over 85 video lessons (with text) covering all the basics and some more advanced stuff.

Access to a forum that although not as extensive as Wealthy Affiliate’s, will have an answer to all your problems.

As far as tools go, the ones needed most by beginners such as the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, Traffic Travis, and Wordpress can also be had for free.

All the information you need to get started in Affiliate marketing is at your fingertips.

What you do with it is up to you.

P.S. If you’ve worked through the free information on the Affilorama site and are wanting to take it to the next level.

You could spend $97 (or $47) per month for all the extras that Wealthy Affiliate offers.

Or you invest just $67 per month in a Premium membership to Affilorama. Premium gives you access to a lot of the same things as Wealthy Affiliate, such as more advanced tools and free web hosting.

In addition, each month you get:

• 30 Private label Rights articles on a specific niche topic.
• An in-depth interview on that month’s topic with a recognized expert or internet millionaire.
• In depth coverage on a certain topic every month. The first is all about making money through blogging.

What’s more, Affilorama Premium comes with a 60 day money back guarantee and a $1 trial period for the first week. So there is no risk of losing your initial payment if you find it's not for you.

Date published: 18/11/2010