As a member for several years, it’s pretty clear that I’m a fan of Wealthy Affiliate. After all, they taught me how to earn a healthy passive income, and my relationships I with entrepreneurs in the community taught me how to get way beyond that in subsequent years. I owe my success to the training and support of the Wealthy Affiliate community.
All of that is great, but is the Wealthy Affiliate yearly membership worth the cost? The clear answer for me is yes, it’s worth the money. As a long standing member and a high earner, it’s a no-brainer to just pay the $495 up front. It’s a tax write-off anyway since I use it for my business, so a dollar per day is nothing.
This article aims to answer whether the Wealthy Affiliate yearly membership is worth it for you. If you haven’t actually joined yet, I recommend reading my Wealthy Affiliate review first to see what they offer and if you actually want to join the website to learn the style of affiliate marketing they teach (the best style IMO).
- Cost Breakdown Analysis
- Yearly Membership Benefits Breakdown
- Step By Step Training
- Weekly Live Webinars
- Hosting, Security, Email, Keyword Research Included
- The Value Of 1-on-1 Help
- Quality Question/Answer Forum
- Live Chat
- Personal Mentor
- Feedback
- Wealthy Affiliate Member Results
- Two Reasons I Keep My Yearly Membership
- 1. Weekly Webinars
- 2. Forging Mutually Beneficial Relationships
- Final Thoughts
Cost Breakdown Analysis
The cost of the yearly membership is $495, paid up front. There’s a lot of ways to look at this cost, but no matter how you break it down, it’s pretty freakin’ cheap. Sure, to a lot of folks when you look at that number it looks like big chunk of change, and they would be right.
However, keep in mind that pays for an entire year of membership.
A daily small cup of coffee at Starbucks will cost you $1221 per year. Your monthly cable bill adds up to between $600-$1200 per year depending on what packages you get. Some people spend even more, and when you include you smartphone data plan and internet, you probably spend between $2000 and $3,000 per year. (I don’t have cable, but pay $100/month for internet and $120/month for my smartphone, which costs $2640).
Do you ever go out to eat? Even if you go cheap and get fast food, the average meal will cost you about $7. Eating out once a week will cost you almost $400. If you ever go to sushi or a steakhouse, you know that with tip, you might spend $50-$100 for two people, and if you go out more than once a week you might be spending thousands of dollars on restaurants per year.
Last example, then I’ll quit giving you a guilt trip.
The average gym membership costs $58/month. That’s exactly double what the monthly breakdown of the yearly membership at Wealthy Affiliate costs ($41/month).
Do you get my point?
Wealthy Affiliate is a training center to learn how to better yourself. It’s a positive force in your life to learn how to make money online, whether it be side income to supplement your spouse’s while you take care of the kids at home, or a means to quit your job and work full time from a home office. The training works, and here’s proof of results.
At $495 pear year, that’s less than a dollar per day (there’s 365 days in a year). So many folks winge and whine about how it’s too expensive, but those same people rarely look at what they throw money away on daily. I’m not judging. Do what you want with your money. I’m just saying that comparatively, a dollar a day to learn how to increase your income and live out your life dreams is pretty freakin’ cheap.
Yearly Membership Benefits Breakdown
“Helping you make money online” is a pretty vague concept, so let’s look at exactly why the annual membership is worth your money.
Step By Step Training
The main core of what Wealthy Affiliate offers is the training that teaches you how to build an affiliate website. They’ll show you how to pick a topic, build your website, research profitable products and keywords, then write articles which get ranked in Google.
At the end of all that, you can start making money through the clicks and sales of affiliate products.
There are five “Levels” to the training, all of which are included in your membership. There are no “extra tiers” of membership like a lot of these garbage high-ticket programs engage in. Some of those programs cost upwards of $25,000 to purchase all their products (can you see now why a yearly cost of $495 is a great deal?).
If you work diligently, you’ll be able to get through all five levels of the training within the year. If, at the end of the year, you decide you’ve learned all you can learn from the community, you can move your websites to a new host and continue your training elsewhere or keep doing what’s working for you.
Weekly Live Webinars
One of the main reasons I remain a member of Wealthy Affiliate is the weekly webinars with Jay. He livestreams a new topic every week, so the topics are always fresh. When AMP came out, he did a webinar on it. When Google did the YMYL update, he did a webinar on that too. Every year he updates us on what’s changed in the SEO landscape, including video and image SEO.
He does a great job of reviewing stuff, but is also on top of it when it comes to introducing new concepts that could help your business grow like learning CSS, starting an ecommerce website, or doing paid advertising.
With a yearly membership, you get access to a new webinar every week, plus almost a decade of webinars from the past. Obviously some will be outdated by now, like “How To Use Google+ For Your Business”, but many are timeless like “How To Install A Premium WordPress Theme”, or “How To Discover Keywords in Google Analytics”.
There’s probably about 500+ hours of content in webinars alone, and though you won’t be able to consume all of that in a year, you can certainly try! Many programs charge $20 – $150+ for a single hour of webinar content, but all of these are included in your Yearly Premium membership at WA.
Hosting, Security, Email, Keyword Research Included
Wealthy Affiliate is a training center. That’s the main reason to join. You learn how to build an affiliate website. Honestly, if that’s all they offered, I think it would still be worth the monthly price of $49. The yearly price of $495 makes it even more worth it.
What’s surprising, is that you get a lot more included with your membership. I think this is really where it shows that they are trying to create a valuable product that helps people instead of just drain you of money. There are a lot of folks that would gladly pay $49/month for training and mentorship on how to build an affiliate business.
However, on top of the training they offer, you also get free manaaged hosting included with your membership! Hosting prices range from $5 to $250 per month depending on the type of service you get, but when you get into the “managed” hosting sphere, you can expect to pay $35/month for one website, with very limited data allowances. Multiple websites can cost you $200+ per month.
Included in the price of your membership is hosting for up to 25 websites. That’s a freakin’ lot of websites for a managed host. What’s a managed host? It means if something breaks on your site they’ll help you fix it. With “shared” hosting, most of the time you’re on your own, or they charge you per hour for fixing stuff. When I used shared hosting, they just told me to hire a developer to fix this type of problems, since it’s not included in my hosting package!
Wealthy Affiliate hosting is very fast – in fact, you won’t need a caching plugin, and they include data analysis on a page by page basis to see which pages are running slower (site speed can affect SEO).
Furthermore, you also get free SSL, unlimited email, spam blocking (no plugin required), and rock-solid website security (no plugin required). All of that saves you M-O-N-E-Y, but they charge you $0.00 extra.
The Value Of 1-on-1 Help
Quality Question/Answer Forum
There are a lot of online marketing forums out there. Most of them are pretty much dead, and a lot of the people that hang out in them are assholes. The great thing about WA’s forum is that they are nice people who want to help you succeed.
The WA forum (called Classrooms) is also very focused on holistic online marketing, meaning they don’t recommend things like black hat link building tactics, spinning content, or shady marketing.
The forum isn’t perfect. There are some newbies that give corny advice
Live Chat
How often do you get to speak 1-on-1 to someone that will help you build your website? There are plenty of gurus online, but can you simply ask them a question and get an instant response? Maybe on Twitter, but the responses are limited to 280 characters and you’re unlikely to get them to engage in a full-on conversation about why your blog post isn’t ranking.
Live chat is an incredible resource which is simply unheard of in any other “make money online” community out there.
Of course, not everyone in chat is a multi-millionaire success story, but do you really need that? Live chat is great to ask simple questions which have simple answers. For example, let’s say you have trouble getting your site verified with Google Search Console. You can scour the web and YouTube. You can leave a blog comment. You can sign up for a forum and ask for help. All of those solutions require time and more time.
In live chat, you can get someone to give you some basic, standard answers instantly.
Most of your newbie questions can be answered with the hundreds of training modules available in the Wealthy Affiliate community. Other internet marketers just chill in chat sometimes because they’re bored. They hang out and answer questions for 20 minutes to an hour, then go do their own work.
- where do I put keywords?
- can I use more than one keyword in a blog post?
- how do I review a product if I don’t own it?
- can I promote multiple affiliate programs on one website?
- what do I do if Amazon rejects my affiliate application?
- should I use Adsense on my website?
Obviously, the types of questions you can ask are infinite. The point is that you can save time by having an instant answer, rather than spending time searching the web. For a dollar a day, I think it’s pretty obvious that it’s worth the cost.
Personal Mentor
Lemme tell you a short story. It’s about the time I paid $5,000 for a mentorship. The deal was that I would get 12, 1-hour sessions. He wasn’t that good of a mentor, so I quit after 4. I basically paid $1,000 per hour to talk to this guy.
What a disappointment.
Mentorships can often cost $100 – $1000 per hour if you’re talking to the big gurus. Not to talk myself up, but I make a good income online, and have done so for almost a decade. My time is worth a lot. As my referral, you get to talk to me via Private Message multiple times per week. No, I don’t do hour Skype sessions, but you still get to ask me direct questions about the training or how I run my business.
I think that’s worth a lot of money.
Not every WA affiliate is as successful as me, but many are even more successful. They generate more money, have been doing it longer, and just simply run better businesses. No matter who your referrer is, they’re doing something right, and you get 1-on-1 access to them for…well, you know the price. A dollar a day.
Feedback
On top of having access to a successful personal mentor, in the same membership (remember, you don’t have to pay anything extra to get any one of these features, because they are all included in the Premium membership), you get peer feedback.
You can submit your website to their proprietary SiteFeedback system, and ask for comments about your website. You do not have to use this system, but it’s available if you want to know how you’re doing in the eyes of the “real world”. We can often be too critical of our work, or many times overestimate the value of our work. Either way, it’s hard to judge.
Where else are you going to find someone to take the time to give you feedback on your first affiliate site?
I think that’s worth a buck a day, right? Would you buy someone a cup of coffee just chat about affiliate marketing and see how their business is going? So many of these #entrepreneur circles on Instagram and Twitter talk about networking and how you have to put yourself out there in order to be heard.
Now’s your chance, and it’s pretty darn cheap and easy to get it done. You don’t even have to leave the house and you have honest feedback on tap!
Wealthy Affiliate Member Results
As a long-term member, it’s clear to me that Wealthy affiliate produces awesome results. I’ve seen my own growth as a marketer and income earner, but I also see others get incredible results on a regular basis.
What kind of results?
There are so many ways to look at it. The best way to look at it is with the old saying of “A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.”
“Results” could be a person getting their first website online even though they were afraid they were too much of a tech-dummy to do so. It could also mean a someone getting their first article published, or their first keyword article ranked.
Of course, a first sale is important, and so is your first $100 day. Of course, you are mostly interested in seeing the big results like making $10,000 or more per month. I get it. You want to know if they can guarantee that you will make money online.
I’ll tell you right now, they cannot guarantee that you will make money online. They can’t guarantee that you’ll work hard, or that you’ll strive to overcome your personal hurdles. They can’t guarantee that you continue to build your business after you hit your first $100 day and reach $350/day which would put you over $10k/month. YOU are in the drive seat.
That being said, the people that work hard and stick to the training see results. Here’s a list with recent Wealthy Affiliate results to browse through, but even limiting it to that list is diminishing the amount of success stories they produce. Those are just the “unique” ones that I picked out. They were just the stories I saw in my feed, and took the time to bookmark. They are just the people who publicly shared their results.
There are so many more success stories that happen behind the scenes. How do I know? I get PMs all the time from people talking about money they made, but they don’t want to brag or be public about it. Think about it – would you brag to friends and family about how much money you make? No. It’s a private matter!
Two Reasons I Keep My Yearly Membership
After several years as a successful member, why don’t I just leave the community? I’m already “successful”, so why do I still remain a member? For me, the Wealthy Affiliate Yearly Membership is still a central part of my learning experience.
1. Weekly Webinars
As a premium member, you can attend a weekly live webinar hosted by a professional, long-time affiliate marketer. He runs his own affiliate sites, and will even show you how he builds them step by step. He does many “over the shoulder” style trainings where you can listen in (and chat about!) his thought process live.
He doesn’t just do general how to do affiliate marketing style webinars though. He also covers topics like coding, outsourcing, brand building, SEO, image editing, email marketing and other skills you need to build your business.
The webinars are promotion free, so you will not have to pay extra to attend, or be expected to buy anything at the end of the broadcast.
And again, I feel like I’m repeating myself here, but these are free of charge, included with your yearly Premium membership.
2. Forging Mutually Beneficial Relationships
Secondly, and this one is hard to quantify, but I really like the relationship building aspect of the community. Long time members forge strong relationships, helping out to support each other, exchange ideas, or even work together.
I pretty much know what I’m doing, so I don’t often go to the community for help. I do know that I have a couple rockstars on tap though, and can PM them a quick question about whatever. Maybe the solve my problem. Or maybe they point me in the right direction.
I’ve met some of these people in real life. I’ve done some joint ventures with them, or helped them flesh out ideas for their new niche websites. It’s kind of a like a mastermind, but without the huge fees or douchiness. You know, just one professional talking shop with another professional.
Look at it like this. If I get just one good tip from Wealthy Affiliate per year, it makes it worth the cost. One single piece of good advice could turn my crappy email funnel into a $1000 extra per month. One little bit of advice could cut my costs in half.
Stuff like that happens all the time, and it only happens because I mingle with successful people online.
Final Thoughts
You came to this page wondering if the Wealthy Affiliate Yearly membership was worth the cost. I think in these 3,000 words, I’ve pretty much made a rock solid case that it is. I know there will be some skeptics out there though, so the comment section is open.
What’s holding you back?
What’s up ladies and dudes! Great to finally meet you, and I hope you enjoyed this post. Sign up for my #1 recommended training course and learn how to start your business for FREE!