Wealthy Affiliate Review – Is it Overrated?

Name: Wealthy Affiliate

Owners: Kyle & Carson

Website: www.wealthyaffiliate.com

Training: 4.7 out of 5.0

Support: 4.9 out of 5.0

Website Builder: 4.8 out of 5.0

WordPress Hosting: 5.0 out of 5.0

Research Tools: 4.5 out of 5.0

Price: Starter Member (free); Premium member ($359/year)

Price Rank: 4.5 out of 5.0

 

Welcome to my Wealthy Affiliate review. Is it overrated? If you’ve read other posts here on my website, you’ll know that I discovered Wealthy Affiliate quite by accident about two years ago. I quickly fell in love with the whole concept of training, support, the community, and building my own website. I will be brutally honest in my review and after reading, you can judge for yourself if Wealthy Affiliate is overrated.

What is Wealthy Affiliate?

Wealthy Affiliate can be defined as a learning platform and community. It is a community of affiliate marketers learning to market through building a website, writing great content, learning great SEO, building a community of friends who help each other toward success, and step-by-step training. It is a whole conglomeration of all those things. Wealthy Affiliate was designed and built by Co-Owners, Kyle, and Carson in order to help other entrepreneurs who wished to learn affiliate marketing. They took their love for and expertise of the industry and put it into an academy type platform to teach others how to build a website and market.

The Owners

The owners of Wealthy Affiliate are Kyle and Carson. You’ll find they are very approachable, supportive, knowledgeable, and very helpful in the affiliate marketing industry. If they don’t know the answer, they will help you find it. They have built the Wealthy Affiliate program and community on the “pay it forward” model. I have found that most if not all the members of Wealthy Affiliate have the same attitude. Kyle and Carson recognize that in order to be successful, they need to help others be successful and that is just what they have done.

The Training

The training at Wealthy Affiliate is geared toward beginners who have never built a website or have some basic knowledge of doing so but there are many things that the intermediate marketer can learn also. The training is prerecorded where a person can move through the step-by-step process of building their website, learn to write great content, learn about SEO and how to optimize their website, how to insert affiliate links, and how to research keywords at their own pace. There is much, much more to learn but these are the key things for a beginner.

There is live training weekly. As a member of Wealthy Affiliate, you will be notified of the training that is coming up. Most of which are held on Friday afternoon. The live training is recorded as well so that if you miss one you can go back and watch it at your leisure.

There are hundreds of lessons. Not only are there lessons that Kyle and Carson have put together within the Wealthy Affiliate platform but there are members who share things they have learned along the way, there are other trainers who do the weekly training.

I have been involved in a lot of businesses through the years and I honestly found the Wealthy Affiliate platform to be very easy to use. The training is very easy to follow and very helpful. There are benchmarks so that you can pick up where you left off.

There are assignments along the way so that you get to practice what you are learning. After lesson one (ten phases), you have a fully functioning website in which to begin adding more content and eventually adding affiliate links, an eCommerce portal, or whatever you decide to do with your website.

There have been a lot of advantages for me over the past two years or so using the Wealthy Affiliate training. The only disadvantage I have found so far is that some of the training is older or outdated, but I have seen recent updates to some. I’m sure it is a constant work in progress as technology changes and needs change. All-in-all I have been very happy with the training I have received and all that I have learned.

I rank the training a 4.7 out of 5.0 because I do feel like there should be more time spent on updating some of the lessons, checking for misspelled or missing words, and maybe add more training for those who already know the basics. But overall it is a great program. If you’d like to read more about Wealthy Affiliate, check out my other posts about Wealthy Affiliate – The Beginner’s Dream and The Learning Place.

The Support

Wealthy Affiliate has one of the best support teams I’ve encountered.

I had some questions about one of my websites a few months ago and I had a technology problem with another website that I don’t even host through Wealthy Affiliate. I contacted SiteSupport and my questions were answered quickly and were helpful and informative. I had to upgrade one of my sites and where they said it may take up to a week to be done, it was done within the hour. I’m sure that will not always be the case, but I felt they jumped on it as soon as they could.

SiteSupport is always responsive to all questions.  They make every effort to help you as quickly as they can and they do their best to help you understand what the problem could be.

The other means of support comes in the hundreds and hundreds of members in the Wealthy Affiliate community. Anytime you have a question you can type it into the search bar at the top of your dashboard and the question is answered by those who have encountered the same issue or will advise on what they have done.

There are hundreds of tutorials done by members that have been posted for others to glean knowledge from.

I ranked support a 4.9 out of 5.0 because I think they are great but there is always room for improvement in everything we do. It’s hard for me to give anyone a perfect score.

The Website Builder

The website builder is fast!

You can have a website set up and ready to go in about 30 seconds. You’ll be directed to choose a name for your website, whether it is to build on a free platform or a paid domain.

You will be instructed on how to choose a theme from thousands of choices (as a free member there are about 12 choices).

You will learn the difference between a page and a post and the benefits to both, how to complete your first post and get it posted to your website, and the importance of good keyword choices.

In just the first few lessons you will have a website up and running. Click here for an example.

 

 

There is such a feeling of accomplishment within the first few lessons after you have learned a few basics and set up your first website.

I found the website builder to be very user-friendly. I have read other reviews where ease of use was not high on their list. I don’t know what other programs people have used but I have used Blue Host, Go Daddy, and Host Gator and the tutorials were not as helpful and the admin area or back-office part of the website builder was not as easy to use.

I ranked the website builder a 4.8 out of 5.0 because I think there is always room for improvement and there are a few things on the training that could use some updating or clarification.

I have used the community support in many instances where I needed clarification, or I didn’t understand a step or two. The people I have connected with have been very helpful to me.

The WordPress Hosting

WordPress is one of the biggest, if not the biggest content management system. With Wealthy Affiliate, you get to choose from over 4,000 WordPress themes as a Premium member and approximately 12 as a starter member.

A starter member receives a seven-day trial and within the first few days, you will know whether you want to continue building your website and learn how to maximize your content.

The only disadvantage to this is that if you work a full-time job like many people do you don’t get as much time to spend on the program before you choose whether you want to make a commitment to stick with the program.

It would be nice if you had a 30-day trial to be able to really get into the nitty-gritty. Maybe one day they will change this to give people more time to make an educated decision.

I ranked the WordPress hosting a 5.0 out of 5.0 because I love WordPress. I’ve used WordPress with other hosting companies and loved to build my website with the pages and plugins.

Wealthy Affiliate has so many themes to choose from it is almost overwhelming. I love it because there will probably never be two websites that look alike with the thousands of themes.

The Research Tools

Wealthy Affiliate teaches you how to use one of the most comprehensive research tools on the market. You can use Google to choose good keywords but there is another tool called Jaxxy that does so much more. With Jaxxy you can determine how much competition is out there for the keywords you may want to use, how much traffic the keyword is getting, and how many average monthly searches the keyword is getting.

Google may help in a lot of ways but Jaxxy is the icing on top. If you’d like to see how it works, click here.

 

 

I ranked research tools as 4.5 out of 5.0 because it is a great tool to use but still has some disadvantages. It is a stand-alone platform and comes with a separate cost associated with it. If you are a premium member of Wealthy Affiliate you can use it for many things, but you are limited to a certain point without paying to upgrade. I’m still using the lite version with my Premium membership and happy with what I have for now.

The Price

The price of Wealthy Affiliate is probably my biggest hang-up. It is still very affordable for a lot of people, but I think about the people who don’t have a lot of money to spare until they can start making an income with their website to offset the costs. You can start with a free membership and there are a lot of things you can do but you eventually reach a point where you are limited.

The Premium membership is $49 per month or $495 per year unless you catch the Black Friday deal (which I did). I could afford it and there are a lot of people who can pay the annual fee, but there are a lot who can’t.

Even with the price at what it is, I feel that it is worth it. If someone really wants to become a Premium member and to learn all the amazing things on Wealthy Affiliate, they will find a way to do so. I did.

I made sacrifices elsewhere in order to pay for my annual membership. I started out by paying monthly, then I moved to the new six-month payment plan and then to the annual payment plan. I was committed to starting this chapter of my life, but it may be a deterrent for some.

If you are interested in checking out the starter membership and building a free website, click here.

I ranked the price of Wealthy Affiliate a 4.5 out of 5.0 because it is a deterrent for many people, but if you shop around Wealthy Affiliate is still one of the more affordable affiliate marketing programs out there. I plan to share another post soon comparing Wealthy Affiliate to some of the other programs out there.

If you decided to become a Premium member within those first 7 days you will get a discount.  Check it out.

Is Wealthy Affiliate Overrated?

There are a lot of things you can do within Wealthy Affiliate, so many that it is hard to touch on everything in one post. I hope that I have been able to shed some light on one of the best learning platforms out there. You can decide for yourself whether Wealthy Affiliate is worth every penny like I have or if it’s overrated.

If you find yourself checking it out, connect with me when you get there.

Happy Building,

Pamela