Is Wealthy Affiliate a Scam? – Unbiased Review

First of all, I want to start by saying that I’m not here to hard pitch you “My #1 Recommendation to make money online” AKA Wealthy Affiliates.

The course does offer good value for money but depending on your situation, it can not be the best choice for you. By the end of this Wealthy Affiliate review, you’ll learn what’s inside each module and if the course can be a good option for your situation.

Let’s get started.

Key Takeaways

Course Name: Wealthy Affiliate
Instructor: Kyle & Carson
Website: www.wealthyaffiliate.com
Special Offer: Get Free Instant Access Here
Overall rating: 4.3

Pros:

Inexpensive and very good value for money.
Live calls where you can chat with your coach.
Very active community with highly intelligent individuals.
Get started with affiliate marketing easily.

Cons:

Some of the training seems repetitive.
No refunds.
You’ll have to write a good amount of articles to achieve good results.

Contents

Key Takeaways
- - Pros:
  - Cons:
What is Wealthy Affiliate?
Kyle and Carson
How does Wealthy Affiliate work?
Wealthy Affiliate Free Training
What I Like About Wealthy Affiliate
What I don’t Like About Wealthy Affiliate
Is Wealthy Affiliate a pyramid scheme? Is it MLM?
Is Wealthy Affiliate a scam?
How much money can you earn with Wealthy Affiliate?
Can Affiliate Marketing get you rich?
Are students getting results?
Wealthy Affiliate Reputation
FAQs
The verdict: should you invest in this program?
- - Pros
  - Cons
Where to join Wealthy Affiliate?
1 – Super Affiliate System – John Crestani
- Course details:
  - Pros:
  - Cons:
2 – Fat Stack
- Course details:
  - Pros:
  - Cons:

What is Wealthy Affiliate?

Wealthy Affiliate is the world’s most popular and controversial affiliate marketing training course and community. It’s a platform that combines training, software, and website hosting. You pay a membership fee and get everything you need to build your affiliate marketing business.

It’s an active community with 1.4 million people, that was designed to take complete beginners from 0 to profitable affiliate marketers.

At a very cheap price, all of this sounds like a dream, right?

Well, let’s see…

Kyle and Carson

Wealthy affiliate was co-founded by two Canadians in 2005, Kyle Loudon and Carson Lim. It’s very clear that they’ve both had success as affiliate marketers before. You’ll see this as Kyle takes you through some of his affiliate sites in the initial part of the training.

The traffic looked pretty good, so it’s fair to assume that he knows what he is talking about. He built up a lot of authority with his affiliate sites from 2005-2015, probably made a good chunk of money.

Kyle is the guy you’ll see in most training sessions, he is responsible for the vast majority of the core lessons inside the program. You don’t see much of Carson within the program, but he is Kyle’s right-hand man.

How does Wealthy Affiliate work?

Wealthy Affiliate is a mentorship and membership program. You pay a membership fee every month to learn all the nuts and bolts of Affiliate Marketing.

When you sign up for the program, you’ll get a brief tutorial about how to use the system, how to interact with your fellow affiliate marketers in the community, and how to build and start making money with your first affiliate site.

You also have an option to try Wealthy Affiliate for free for seven days.

Wealthy Affiliate Free Training

The Wealthy Affiliate Training is divided into 5 levels “a.k.a 5 modules”. When you opt in to try Wealthy Affiliate for free you’ll get access to level 1.

Level 1 – Getting Started

Here you’ll get a 10-lesson crash course in the basics of affiliate marketing. You’ll go from “what’s affiliate marketing?” to “I know enough about this to start building my business”.

Kyle will teach you how to:

Choose your niche.
Build your website.
Make your site SEO-friendly.
Write engaging content.
Keyword research.

In this first level of the training, you’ll get your website ready and running.

The part that I liked most was the Keyword research, where I learned a very interesting way to research keywords to get more traffic. The way Kyle teaches you to select keywords is a pretty smart way for beginners in the SEO world to get some quick wins.

I found his tips pretty cool, you’ll be targeting keywords with little instances of websites that rank for those specific keywords. Kyle says to target keywords with more than 30 monthly searches and less than 100 sites ranking for this keyword (on the entire internet).

Kyle will also show you what you’ll get if you upgrade to a premium account.

Wealthy affiliate Premium

Level 2 – Getting Traffic

Here you’ll learn to get your own domain, more about targeting SEO keywords, using visuals to support your content, and how to increase productivity.

Kyle will build upon the first level and go into more detail. The parts that I liked most are:

You’ll learn to take a single low competition keyword to formulate an article for a blog post and affiliate offer / Google Banner Ad display.

By targeting these low-hanging fruits keywords you’ll be able to target weak points of the internet and get quick results. To target these keywords you’ll have access to the Wealthy Affiliate Keywords tool.

Another pretty cool thing is that you can share your post in an area of the discussion board for a peer review. There are many highly intelligent people in this group, so this part is very important.

The productivity part I didn’t get a lot of value from it, I’m really into personal development and this kind of stuff, so most of the things I already knew. But if you are not as familiar with this kind of advice as I am, you’ll get a lot of value. Some of the tips you’ll get are:

How to break down your goals into daily and weekly goals.
Eat that frog: attack what you don’t enjoy so you get better at them.
NOT multitask, this leads to tasks being carried out more slowly, and with poorer quality. By doing this you are also training your brain to lose your power to focus when you need it.

Lastly, it’s worth mentioning that you’ll have the opportunity to get more involved with the community by sharing your goals and plans for the next 3-6 months, sharing your progress, and sharing your successes.

Level 3 – Making Money

Now that you have the traffic coming to your website, it’s time to monetize that traffic. You’ll learn about the customer purchase lifecycle, how to find affiliate offers, how to promote amazon products, how to add affiliate links to your pages, leverage product reviews, how to get paid to display Google Ads on your site, and how to capture data.

In the “customer purchase lifecycle” Kyle will explain how people typically purchase in a certain phase of researching a product or a service and how you can catch them in the right phase.

Kyle will discuss the Amazon Affiliate program in depth, he does a good job explaining this part and the Amazon Affiliate program has some cool points. But I want to mention that particularly, I don’t like to focus on promoting their products, their commissions are pretty low.

Particularly, I don’t have a strong opinion against them, I just find that it’s a lot easier to promote other offers.

At this level, Kyle will also teach you how to leverage the power of product reviews articles. The goal here is to help your readers make an educated decision regarding a future purchase. You can see that a big part of my site is built around that, I love it.

Lastly, I want to mention that you’ll learn other ways to make money with your site, other than just affiliate marketing. You’ll learn how to make money by placing Google Ads on your site and you can also leverage what you are learning to promote your own line of products.

Level 4 – Social Media

Here you’ll learn how to set up accounts, engage with your audience, how to use each platform, post within Wealthy Affiliates, and branding. In general, this lesson discussed the concepts in a very basic way, but definitely had some vital information on them.

Today people usually get involved in the buzz and hotness of social media, thinking that is the best way to make money online. Social media is a very powerful tool that can definitely help you, but particularly I’m not a big fan of social media, I prefer other ways like SEO.

Kyle recommends that you spend no more than 15 minutes three times per day, for a total of 45 minutes. He also talks about looking for signs that your social media efforts might not be generating the success you want. If that’s the case, you should stop writing your own posts and just share the content others have produced.

Lastly, I going to get a bit nerdy to give you a tip haha

Scientific marketing researchers found that the 3 most effective ways to engage your followers are by posting informational content, content that is fun, and content that offers incentives to engage, such as discounts.

Level 5 – Content Creation

If you are going to build a website, content creation is essential. Kyle says that the quality of the content is an important ranking factor. You’ll learn how to write content efficiently, convert your traffic into more sales and make sure people read and engage with your content.

If you have quality content on your website people will share your content, which will tell Google that your website is valuable. He also talks about the importance of engagement, aka whether or not people are leaving comments on your posts.

You’ll also learn how to get indexed fast in Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Another important thing to mention is that Kyle will teach you how to plan your content creation for a year. This is pretty cool for control freaks like me haha

Kyle also does a breakdown of your traffic potential. According to him, by publishing 3 articles per week in one year you’ll have 23,400 visitors a month.

Lastly, you’ll learn and get some resources for where you can outsource your content creation once you get the ball rolling and start making some money.

To be honest, some parts of this level seemed a bit repetitive, but either way, some aspects were very important.

Bonus 1 – Selling WA as an Affiliate

This bonus is pretty similar to what you had learned in the course levels, but with some tweaks to teach you how to push WA’s community with your own affiliate offer. This bonus is built upon 7 phases.

Build your own website
Organize your content and Keywords
Use Social Media
Get Visual
Getting more referrals
Bing, Yahoo, and PPC
Scaling Up Your PPC Campaigns

Bonus 2 – Customer Purchase Lifecycle

In this bonus, Kyle will teach you how to understand your buyer. He breaks down the lifecycle into three main phases: research, decision, and purchase.

He will talk about the kind of information they are looking for in each phase and how you can interact with them at each point of the cycle.

You’ll learn how to use metrics to prove to yourself that you understand your customer and what drives them, how branding works, how to make long-term customers and not allow your relationship to end after your customer makes a purchase.

What I Like About Wealthy Affiliate

You can get started with Affiliate Marketing Easily and Cheaply

Unlike other online courses, Wealthy Affiliate doesn’t require you to pay thousands of dollars to get started. You can get the first module for free, buy the first month for $19 with a discount and pay the $49 monthly fee thereafter.

This price includes the keyword research tool and the website hosting. Usually, you’ll pay something around $99 monthly for the keyword research tool alone and $2.95 monthly for the website hosting and domain.

With Wealthy Affiliate, you can put your website up and running within a week. You’ll not start making money in just one week, of course, but it’s important to take action and implement things as fast as you can. Money loves speed.

Very good training on the Fundamentals

Besides being highly affordable, it offers very good training on the fundamentals of making money online. You’ll learn about the affiliate marketing business model, how to do keyword research, how to build websites, how to get traffic, and how to monetize your site.

Website Hosting, Keyword Research Tool, and Community

Wealthy Affiliate isn’t just an online course, you get a lot of other things. Besides the step-by-step training, you get:

Tools for keyword research.
Hosting for your website, where you can host up to 10 websites.
One-on-one support from the community members.
WA Community for asking questions.
Tech support is available 24/7.

Live webinars every week

Jay Neil is your host here. The webinar is Saturday and lasts around 60-90 minutes. The webinar is always recorded and you can watch the replay if you prefer. The webinar covers not only Affiliate Marketing but a lot of other topics related to online marketing, such as:

Email Marketing.
Selling Your own Products.
Local SEO
eCommerce and Dropshipping
Google Analytics
Pinterest Marketing
Branding
Funnels
Converting visitors to buyers
On-page and Off-page SEO.

In the beginning, you don’t need to worry much about these topics, but as you start to make some money and become more experienced, you’ll need to learn more things to become a more experienced entrepreneur.

Super Helpful and Active Community

The community has more than a million members. If you post a question, you’ll get an answer within minutes. There is no guarantee that you’ll get an expert opinion, but knowing that you need just to ask and you’ll get help, is great for beginners.

Being an entrepreneur, especially in the beginning, can be a very solitary journey. Sometimes you’ll feel down, overwhelmed, and maybe you’ll want to give up. And having that community to support you in these times, helps a lot.

People from the community also link to each other and share each other’s content on social media which is a great hack for accelerating your business growth. There are some better courses on affiliate marketing out there, but it’s difficult to find one with a better community. You can post your questions any time of the day, the week, and will always have someone to talk to you.

What I don’t Like About Wealthy Affiliate

Wealthy Affiliate Makes a Lot of Outlandish or Unsubstantiated claims

They make some promises that are simply not true. Here are some:

You won’t fail. Here’s what they have on their website:

This is not possible. The only thing guaranteed in life is death.

Another is that It takes 30 seconds to build a website. Seriously dude? It’s not even possible. This is clearly a misleading marketing tactic.

We can all agree that “building a website” means a fully functioning website with everything, and that’s just not possible within 30 seconds. You’ll have the empty shell of a website that still needs filling with stuff.

You need a good theme, good logo, good font for your letters, quality content, SEO work, and lots of other stuff. In 30 seconds you’ll just have “a website”, an empty shell.

There is one piece of advice that is really bad

Aim for 1,000 words as a beginner for your article. This is pretty bad advice. I think I understand why Kyle says this.

There are a lot of beginners going through the course and they’d be intimidated if Kyle said they had to publish 4,000 or 5,000-word count articles. Doing something is better than doing 0, so there is some logic behind it. But the truth is that there is no exact number of words you must have.

You need to take a look at the first page and see what’s going on, you need to see how many words the top articles have. A good rule of thumb is to pick the first three to five pages, and then see what the average number of words between these pages is.

They appear to not be doing affiliate marketing anymore

Wealthy Affiliate made approximately $10,000,000 in 2019. This is the number they earned through the monthly fees. I believe that Kyle and Carlson are just enjoying the money they make with WA and aren’t actively working with affiliate marketing anymore.

Here’s why…

The affiliate sites they use to teach the material are way out of date, and not even earning much money anymore. One is from 2018 and the other is from 2015. I believe that if they had up-to-date sites they’d have put better examples in the training.

Is Wealthy Affiliate a pyramid scheme? Is it MLM?

Wealthy Affiliate is not a pyramid scheme or an MLM program. You have the option to earn money promoting Wealthy Affiliates and sometimes Kyle incentivizes you to do that. The confusion comes from the fact that a lot of people who join the program start promoting wealthy affiliates.

Pyramid Schemes occur usually in a multi-level marketing company (MLM), where people are mostly getting paid to recruit more people than offering them a product or service. With Wealthy Affiliate you get the training course and other products such as website hosting, keyword research tool, etc.

Is Wealthy Affiliate a scam?

No, Wealthy Affiliate is not a scam. They have a very helpful community and the training will help you develop a very good foundation that will allow you to start making money online. You’ll also have their website hosting service and their Keyword research tool.

The platform has existed since 2005, so if it were a scam, I don’t believe that would still be alive to this date, getting new members every day.

How much money can you earn with Wealthy Affiliate?

The reasonable answer is: it depends. Your results will be in proportion to your efforts and the niche you are in.

Can Affiliate Marketing get you rich?

Affiliate marketing isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. It takes time, effort, and patience. But yes, depending on your dedication, affiliate marketing can make you rich.

Are students getting results?

Yes, a significant number of students are getting results by following the WA training. Here you can take a look at some success stories:

Jerry is a 21-year-old college dropout who consistently makes 4 figures+ a month from Wealthy Affiliate and Affiliate marketing.

This woman started in November 2017, and in 2018 she cashed in 40k in commission.

This guy’s new website generated $4,000 in month 7:

Wealthy Affiliate Reputation

I can’t tell. Wealthy Affiliate is the most controversial course out there. Most of the positive reviews come from students who are promoting WA itself. The negative reviews come from people who want to pitch you another course.

I spent a lot of time reading all the reviews I could find and I think that most of them are biased. I don’t think they are reliable so I’m basing my opinion on my experience with the training material. You’ll read my verdict in a minute.

FAQs

Is wealthy affiliate free?

No, Wealthy Affiliate is not free. But you do have the option to opt-in to the starter membership which gives you access to the first part of the training material, WA community, and website building tools.

What are the differences between the starter and premium membership?

Starter Membership at Wealthy Affiliates has limited access to the features, but with the premium membership, you unlock all the features. Most people join Wealthy Affiliate as a starter member and upgrade to premium membership.

Here’s what you have access to as a starter member:

Online Entrepreneur Certification – Getting Started Course (Level 1): I reviewed this lesson above.
Two free websites: you’ll get access to the SiteRubix website building platform and you get free hosting and domains.
Wealthy Affiliate Community: the community is great. You can chat, share experiences, celebrate your successes, ask questions and get answers. The members are helpful and friendly.

Here’s what you have access to as a premium member:

Full access to the Online Entrepreneur Certification courses which include all the levels I reviewed above.
Hosting to 50 websites: you’ll get their website hosting for free, and technical support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Jaaxy – the keyword research tool: this keyword research tool gives you traffic data from Google, Bing, and Yahoo. You’ll have an unlimited amount of searches.
Live weekly video classes: here you can learn a lot of different topics about digital marketing, how to create viral YouTube videos, build an email list, plan your social sharing, create landing pages. You’ll also have access to all the replays.

Does wealthy affiliate work?

Yes, it works. By following each step you’ll build a website that generates passive income for you. How much and how fast depends on your niche and the amount of work you’re putting in.

With the step-by-step training and a very active community, the course really gives you a good chance at success. If you put the information into the work, you have a pretty good chance to build a profitable site that generates passive income for you.

How do you make money with Wealthy Affiliate?

Wealthy Affiliate is a course and a community designed to teach you how to make money as an affiliate marketer via a website. You’ll learn how to set up your website, produce content for that website, promote products and earn a commission for every sale you refer.

How long does it take to make money with Wealthy Affiliate?

You’ll need a bit of patience. As with any website, Google takes some time to rank your website, it will also take some time to build your website content.

How long it takes to replace your full-time income depends on a few factors. It will depend on how much money is your goal, your niche, your content quality, the quantity of content you can post. Basically, the more time you work on your site, the fastest the results you will be.

Do I have to promote the Wealthy Affiliate program to make money?

You can if you want, but you don’t need to. Wealthy Affiliate isn’t a pyramid scheme, so you can use the knowledge you’ll get from the training course to promote the product you want. Wealthy Affiliate do heavily encourage you to promote WA itself, but it’s up to you.

The verdict: should you invest in this program?

You’ll see a lot of reviews on the internet that say that wealthy affiliates’ content is outdated or that wealthy affiliates are the best thing in the world and all you need to make money online. I don’t think the answer is on either side.

I do recommend wealthy affiliates, but not for everybody. Let me explain in more detail.

When I’m reviewing a course, there are a lot of different things I consider, two very important are the quality of the training and the price.

Wealthy affiliate is not the course with the best content out there, you can check the other products that I recommend in a bit. But, at the same time, I know that most of my readers aren’t in a position where they can spend a thousand dollars on a course.

The reason I recommend WA is because of the value you get from the money you invest. If you have little money to invest and/or are not completely sure if you want to start an online business, Wealthy Affiliate is a very good choice for you.

The course gives you a very good foundation that will allow you to start making money online. So you can take the course and after you start to make money you can invest more in your education to build upon your foundation.

Pros

Inexpensive and very good value for money.
Live calls where you can chat with your coach.
Very active community with highly intelligent individuals.
Get started with affiliate marketing easily.
You can make an income by helping people.

Cons

Some of the training seems repetitive.
No refunds.
You’ll have to write a good amount of articles to achieve good results.

Where to join Wealthy Affiliate?

Wealthy Affiliate is quite cheap and most people can afford it. Here are the plans they offer:

Starter membership: it’s free to join, no credit card is required, but you get access to only level one of the training.
Premium membership: you’ll get access to everything on the platform. The first month is just $19, after that, the membership fee is $49/month.

You can start your free membership, get a feel of the training and the community and then decide if you want to upgrade to the premium membership.

Join Wealthy Affiliate

Wealthy Affiliate is definitely the best course for those who are short on money or don’t are completely sure if they want to follow this make money online path.

With so many options out there it’s difficult to separate the tares from the wheat. There are a lot of scammers and courses that don’t deliver but Wealthy Affiliate does offer really good value for money. The course provides you with a solid foundation to start making money with Affiliate Marketing through blogging.

If you’re not sure, take a look at the free training they offer and decide from there.

On the other hand, if you have more money to invest and want to invest in a better quality course, here are my top picks:

1 – Super Affiliate System – John Crestani

About: an affiliate marketing course from the 7-figure affiliate marketer John Crestani.
Price: one payment of $997 or three payments of $397
Verdict: Recommended.

Course details:

Super Affiliate System PRO is created by veteran online marketer John Crestani who has been featured on Forbes, Affiliate Summit, Yahoo Finance, and Home Business. He is an expert when it comes to internet marketing, conversion optimization, and business development. His companies have made him over 2.9 million dollars.

This is a 6-week course on paid advertising. If you have some money to invest and want to see results quickly, this is definitely the best course for you. Super Affiliate System PRO contains over 50 hours of video content including live weekly coaching sessions, pre-built landing pages, ad templates, and so on.