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What is Wealthy Affiliate about? Is Wealthy Affiliate a scam or what? Well, it depends on what you are thinking it is a scam for. I would say it is not a scam, and I will elaborate as to why that is.
What Wealthy Affiliate is is a lot of things. It is a:
- brand and company that’s been around for 14 years
- platform to deliver education and training to members so they can succeed in online business(es)
- huge community of many online business owners and learners
- webhost and website manager which can set up your website in less than a minute
- bundler of a “keyword” research tool
- provider of various other money-making opportunities
Wealthy Affiliate is all these things in one for monthly subscription price of $49 USD a month and even cheaper if you choose a longer time plan like the yearly plan. That’s about $1.63 USD per day.
What wealthy affiliate is about in depth
Here I summarise what wealthy affiliate is about. For a more detailed and prettier description, you can see Wealthy Affiliate’s official page here.
Education and training platform for online businesses
Wealthy Affiliate provides online education and training in the form of videos and textual tutorials on their website. They try to teach members about what online businesses are about and how to make money from an online business. In the training, you will be guided through step-by-step on how to choose your goals, how to best create content online, what kinds of content are best for you to create, how to get visitors to your website and how to use all of that stuff to make money.
The training is like a course in from a school of institute, except you do not get some kind of industry recognised degree at the end. Not that you would need any degree because you are not looking to be recognised for some employed position. You are trying to become you own boss. And to achieve that the training aims to equip you with the knowledge and skills necessary to make you succeed in your online business. You will not need any formal prerequisites or specialised knowledge. It builds you up from whatever level you are even if you are a total beginner. If you ever get stuck at any part of the training you are encouraged to ask for help and are answered through a highly supportive community of other members and support team.
Huge community
Wealthy Affiliate claims to have a huge online community of over 1.4 million members from over 193 countries including many successful online business owners in many kinds of niches, over 1800 expert coaches. There are also many newcomer members who just joined and many other members who are anything in between. Before you even try to reach out to anyone, they start to talk with you to try to encourage and help you.
Many of the community members also contribute to the training and advice provided at Wealthy Affiliate. You get solutions to many common problems faced by online business owners already solved for you. You can contribute as well to the community and help others when you are ready and if you would like to do that.
Web host and websites manager
Wealthy Affiliate also offers a complete and simple web hosting solution. Their website manager provides a simplified way to manage all the websites you have hosted on Wealthy Affiliate. You can:
- purchase new domains
- build new websites
- write and edit new web pages to publish on your websites
- transfer entire websites to different domains
- move you current websites to Wealthy Affiliate hosting servers
- set up email addresses using your domain names
- get technical support for all your websites
- get feedback on your websites to improve them
- choose from thousands of designs for your website
Bundler of “keyword” research tool
Included in Wealthy Affiliate is a lite account for the “keyword” research tool Jaaxy. Technically, it is not a research tool for “keywords” but for key phrases. With this tool, you are able to quickly look for and find how often certain search phrases are searched for by internet users, and how many search results are competing for those search phrases as well as other statistics.
This kind of tool is the same used by many content writers to find what people are searching for on the internet so that they can make the content which will get those people to visit their website to read. Chances are, if you are reading this post, you searched the internet for the same key phrase which I used to base this post on.
Provider of various other money-making opportunities
In addition to the above, Wealthy Affiliate also offers many other ways of making money on the website. You can earn via
- writing blog content
- making your own tutorials
- just writing comments or feedback for other members’ websites
Wealthy Affiliate review
So, now that it is a bit clearer what Wealthy Affiliate is about, what about the quality of the program, itself?
Education and training
Pros:
- fully online so you can access it any time and anywhere at your convenience
- friendly to beginners and experts, enabling you to be built up from zero
- does not require any formal qualification or complicated application process to access
- freedom to learn at your own pace
- hands-on
- many lessons teaching you just about all the knowledge and skills you will need
- frequently updated with new training
- 1000s of training modules covering many topics in premium plan
- 22 lessons in free trial
- plenty of support for when you need it
The education and training is fully online so you do it at any time you want, at your own pace and at any place to your convenience, so there is no need to quit your job or give up any other kind of commitment. The training is contains a hands-on aspect which involves building out your website(s) for your online business in a niche of your choice as you go through the lessons.
If it doesn’t work out, you stand to lose nothing besides the time spent going through the training and the subscription cost if you went premium without trying out the free trial first. Even then, you still gain the knowledge and skills which may benefit you in other areas of your life.
Community
Pros:
- lots of experts
- very supportive, friendly and active
- lots of common questions and issues encountered by users already solved
Web host and websites
Pros:
- build websites in less than 1 minute per website
- have fast responsive websites
- many website designs
- websites use WordPress which is used by 35.1% of all websites according to Web Technology Surveys [3], is regularly updated and highly supported.
- can host up to 25 free websites and 25 websites on your own domains with premium membership
- can transfer domains to Wealthy Affiliate or from Wealthy Affiliate to other webhosts
- 24/7 support and automatic problem resolution for websites in premium plan
- get feedback to improve your website in premium plan
- comments on your posts/pages in premium plan which increases your favourability with search engine rankings
Cons:
- can only host 2 websites in free trial
- some functions restricted in free trial
- programming is disabled by default
- cannot sell domains while they are hosted on Wealthy Affiliate
This website that you are viewing now had its domain purchased from Wealthy Affiliate and is being hosted on their servers. It has not lagged for us during editing or viewing and if it has not lagged for you, that’s proof that websites you host on Wealthy Affiliate will work well too. I did find that customising and choosing a theme for the website took unusually long on a particular day, but it may have been due to a plugin or other problem, and choosing a theme is not something you would often do anyway.
By default, you are not able to program your website which may be a negative if you wanted to do that. It is stated that you can contact them if you want coding to be enabled. However, even as a programmer, I prefer to do things non-programmatically if possible as it is easier. Freely available plugins already solve most problems so you wouldn’t even need to think about programming anything.
Finally, the premium plan offers the many great features described above. However, the website features for the free trial are quite limited and you get less support, but it should be enough to give you a feel for what you can do.
Keyword research tool Jaaxy
Pros:
- lets you know which search queries are popular (how many monthly searches) and how much competition each query has (how many websites appear as search result for the query)
- can save the queries so you can reference them later
- offers related queries to the ones you input
- offers a site-ranking tool where you can quickly see if your website ranks high in search engine results for any queries you choose
- offers affiliate program which you can earn from just for referring other users
Cons:
- does not seem to work for non-Latin characters such as Japanese script, greek alphabet, etc.
- free trial only offers 30 searches and 30 site-ranking scans
Overall, the Jaaxy “keyword” research tool is a great tool for finding out how many monthly searches a query gets from internet users and how many results you need to compete with. This is very helpful in helping you plan what keywords or key phrases you should and shouldn’t use to get search results of your website to be ranked high on searched engines such that users can find and visit your website. The only downside of Jaaxy is it’s inability to search phrases containing only non-Latin characters, thus it is not recommended to be used if you are planning to create content in any language other than English.
Overall
Overall, the premium plan for Wealthy Affiliate offers a great value package which includes fast and feature-rich web hosting, convenient beginner-friendly online training and a key phrase research tool all for at most $49 USD a month with the first month discounted for only $19 USD. That’s at most $1.63 USD a day! It is even cheaper if you choose a 6 month or 1 year plan and you can cancel the membership at any time.
Before you even go premium you get a generous free trial which doesn’t expire so you can spend as much time as you want testing it to see if it is really for you. That’s quite risk-free. On the free trial, you get to test all the features such as key phrase research, run 2 whole websites and learn substantial knowledge and skills. Even if you chose to quit after the trial and never purchase a premium plan, you are given plenty of value all for free!
You can even just promote the program itself or contribute to the program to earn money.
Hopefully, you can now see why Wealthy Affiliate is not a scam.
If you are looking to learn how to succeed in an online business or for a good-value package which includes web hosting and keyword research to accomplish a goal related to an online business, come join us at Wealthy Affiliate!
===> Free trial
===> Premium
Feel free to post your comments below if you have any questions or concerns!
References
[1] Special Offer – Wealthy Affiliate, Wealthy Affiliate. Accessed on: December 10, 2019.[Online]. Available: https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/order/signup
[2] Wealthy Affiliate – Create Account, Wealthy Affiliate. Accessed on: December 10, 2019.[Online]. Available: https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/createaccount
[3] Usage Statistics and Market Share of Content Management Systems, w3Techs, December, 2019. Accessed on: December 10, 2019.[Online]. Available: https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management
