Open Source Affiliate

Review: An honest review of the Wealthy Affiliate program

An honest review of the Wealthy Affiliate program

One of my first expenses along the affiliate marketing road was a subscription to the Wealthy Affiliate. When I first joined the program, I felt that my subscription was justified. But as I learned more and became experienced, I had mixed feelings about the Wealthy Affiliate and their brand of affiliate marketing in general. Here are my thoughs on the Wealthy Affiliate.

Before I criticize the Wealthy Affiliate, I will say that I did make my first affiliate sales for a few hundred dollars while I was a subscriber. But I am NOT vouching for the Wealthy Affiliate. I am going to be very critical of them here. I just want to get the facts out in the open.

When I was trying to decide if I should join the Wealthy Affiliate, part of the problem was that every “review” of the Wealthy Affiliate was by a Wealthy Affiliate member. If you don’t know, Wealthy Affiliate members generate money when they refer a new member. This is a HUGE conflict of interest, but for some reason no one bothers to point this out! If you go over to a site like the DigitalPoint Forums, you will see a post where someone asks, “should I join Wealthy Affiliate?” followed by a many members saying “Yes, it’s the best!” along with their affiliate links. I don’t have an affiliate link here, so I will give an honest review.

First of all, you can get almost all the information at the Wealthy Affiliate for free elsewhere (like here!). In fact, before I quit my subscription, I had been planning on downloading and saving all of the content to my hard drive. I never did, because none of the content was valuable enough or exclusive enough for me to bother with saving it. There were, however, a couple of very insightful posts in their forum. But these posts were more valuable to experienced marketers and unnecessary for beginners. In addition, the argument that the Wealthy Affiliate’s program saves time or money by organizing information is untrue. You are more likely to waste time browsing the forum trying to digest every last bit, rather than spending your time going out and practicing the implementation. The quagmire of theory is the beginner’s Achilles heel - it feels like you are making progress, but your bank account doesn’t change.

This brings me to my second point. There are only two kinds of people who will benefit from the resources at the Wealthy Affiliate - utter newbies, and rich, sophisticated pros. Newbies will benefit from any information. There is an 8-week plan that guides you through the basics. Honestly, though, anyone with an iota of self-motivation could accomplish just as much without the 8-week plan. In fact, there are some free internet marketing courses out there designed to rope in newbies with affiliate offers. The main Wealthy Affiliate training program does not do much more than those free email teaser courses. Sign up for a couple of these free courses, but first promise yourself not to spend a single cent on their promotions! Successful pros, on the other hand, are by definition soaking in money. They can easily afford a subscription while they scour for that one obscure tip from the forums that boosts profits by 5%. A newbie, though, is better off focusing on the basics.

My third point is that the structure of the Wealthy Affiliate is not designed to help you, the learner. It is designed to help the owners and other rich affiliate marketers. For example, the forum is filled with questions by newbies. The two owners, Kyle and Carson, cannot possible answer every question. Neither can they provide useful responses to their private messages (although private coaching is vaunted in their ads) simply because of time restraints with too many members. A few experienced members do try to answer the questions. However, again, they cannot answer every newbie question. And their motivation for answer questions is simply to gain trust from less experienced members. EVERY single one of these active “pro” members tries to sell or advertise a product to the hordes of inexperienced marketers. In fact, one of the best markets for internet marketers is other internet marketers! If you realize what they are doing, you should be a little cynical!

Kyle and Carson do try to teach you some affiliate marketing skills. They stand to profit from you if you become a successful marketer - you can help sell more Wealthy Affiliate subscriptions. In fact, almost all of the examples and program activities are designed to help you sell Wealthy Affiliate subscriptions. I noticed that Kyle and Carson were much more likely to respond to threads that directly involved selling Wealthy Affiliate memberships rather than other affiliate marketing techniques. Most of the “sticky” forum posts are about contests to sell the most Wealthy Affiliate memberships.

I hope you can understand the Kyle and Carson’s business plan. It’s not bad. But it doesn’t do you much good. They want to teach you how to sell memberships. It doesn’t matter if you’re good or bad. Every little bit of promotions helps - and remember, you’re PAYING them to advertise for them. You pay for adwords. You pay with your time writing articles. Think about this again. Normally a client pays the advertiser, but in this case you are PAYING the Wealthy Affiliate to advertise for them! They don’t need to worry about the quality - it’s free, and there’s a lot of quantity too! Not only that, as they lead you through their course, they suggest affiliate offers that make them even more money. For example, they will suggest you buy a domain name, and then offer their affiliate link for a domain registrar. They will suggest you use an autoresponder to handle email, and then offer their affiliate link for an autoresponder service. Each step of the way is designed to make Kyle and Carson money, not you.

One member, crazywaters (Damien Speck), got fed up with how the Wealthy Affiliate was recommending expensive, sub-par products when there were free alternatives, and put up a page over here. The comparison is very englightening. However, be careful about crazywaters’ claims, as well. He is also trying to sell you a product and has a history of making promises that he can’t keep… but that’s a different issue. When dealing with internet marketers, it is best to tread carefully. I know his stuff sounds better - but that just means he’s a better marketer.

Finally, how effective is the Wealthy Affiliate? Will it help you make money? That is the wrong question. The question is, how will you help yourself make money. If you devote enough time and energy, you WILL eventually make money, regardless of the program. In fact, I recall that there was a post about how long it took to make a first sale. The average person seemed to take MONTHS before making a first sale after joining the Wealthy Affiliate. You could be spending that month trying out different methods, instead of wasting it browsing forums in hopes of finding that secret gem of information that brings you the riches.

Final thoughts on the Wealthy Affiliate

My final recommendation, as always, is to not spend money on any marketing product until you’ve explored the free options. You can learn all of the basics about affiliate marketing at this site or other sites. You won’t get much more mileage out of the Wealthy Affiliate beyond this kind of free knowledge. For this reason, I would not recommend that beginners start out with the Wealthy Affiliate. If you are a successful affiliate marketer and just want to chat with other people or get fresh ideas, you might want to join the Wealthy Affiliate. Even then, the material is quite stale compared to other forums, like WickedFire, or blogs like Bluehatseo. Most people at the Wealthy Affiliate are stuck on bum marketing and PPC, which are only a tiny aspect of affiliate marketing. I would not recommend that beginners start out with the Wealthy Affiliate.