I started my first website at Wealthy Affiliate in 2010. It was about horse hair care, and it bombed pretty hard. The next one about zombie video games tanked too. After multiple attempts, I finally built my first successful affiliate website.
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10 years later, I’m still doing this stuff. Still making money. I’m still working at home building affiliate websites, and happy what I’m doing. In the end, it turns out that yes, Wealthy Affiliate was worth it for me.
What about you though? Is this place worth your money?
Is Wealthy Affiliate Worth It?
Whether or not Wealthy Affiliate is worth it will have to be a personal decision for you. I’ve picked out a few topics to discuss to help you decide whether this program will meet your expectations.
What Wealthy Affiliate Teaches
The Cost Of Wealthy Affiliate
What Are Your Life Goals?
How Much Time And Motivation Do You Have?
Do You Have The Time?
Do You Have The Motivation?
Can You Overcome Obstacles?
Final Conclusion: Is Wealthy Affiliate Worth It?
What Wealthy Affiliate Teaches
The core of what Wealthy Affiliate is, as a business, is an affiliate training center. They will teach you how to build and grow an affiliate website that makes money.
For myself, and many others, they live up to this expectation. You can read about me, but in a nutshell I started in 2010 with my WA membership. I had no previous experience with website building, affiliate marketing, or business. Within 18 months my websites crossed the $10k/month mark, and now I’ve been working for myself for the past 9 years.
You can read more about successful members on my website, but a list like that doesn’t really do any justice to the number of people whose lives have been changed by learning how to build an online business.
The principles and steps are quite simple, (Website > Articles > Links), so anyone can do it. The people who see success, and create legitimate businesses with income they can rely on are the ones who stick around long enough and have the patience to troubleshoot problems they run into. I truly believe this is a business everyone could get into and make some money because the playing field is so diverse.
Someone building a website about natural cures for baldness isn’t going to step on the toes of another person making a website about how to coach youth women’s soccer. Both of these people could benefit from WA training, including helping each other inside the community.
Aside from my evangelism of the training, my point is that Wealthy Affiliate’s business is to teach you how to build a money-generating affiliate website, and they are good at what they do.
The Cost Of Wealthy Affiliate Broken Down
A membership at Wealthy Affiliate costs $49/month. You can join for free, and get access to some Premium features for a 7-day period. After that, you are offered a discount to join the first month for just $19, but every month after that will be $49.
You can also opt to pay yearly at $359. With 365 days in a year, that’s about a dollar per day to run your entire affiliate business, even if you include the $14/year domain name cost.
I’m pretty confident in saying that the training alone is worth a single dollar per day, but you get a lot more than training with your membership. Hosting, weekly webinars, and a personal affiliate mentor are also included with your membership, so the “value” WA provides is undeniable.
It’s pretty hard to make an argument saying that it’s not worth it to be able to access training, hosting, and support for a dollar a day.
What Are Your Life Goals?
Let’s get personal. What do you hope to achieve in your life?
The reason I’m asking this question is because if you are going to decide whether Wealthy Affiliate is worth it or not, you need to be able to decide what’s valuable to you. Will Wealthy Affiliate actually help you achieve your goals, or is it just another shiny object? Is it just distracting you from your real goals?
Do you want to work from home? Learning how to do SEO, build WordPress websites, and write articles that rank in Google are all useful skills you can use to find online gigs so that you can work from home, even if your affiliate websites are not very successful.
Do need more money? If not, you can earn supplement income, or even replace your income with an affiliate website.
Do you want more free time? A profitable affiliate website income would allow you to work fewer hours at your job and still make extra money.
Are you unhappy at your job? Income from an affiliate site would allow you to supplement your income while working a lower-paying job you love, or even fund school so you could get trained to work a new job.
Want a better lifestyle? Want to travel more? These things can be achieved by having online income.
It’s pretty obvious that having extra money solves a lot of problems, and increases available opportunities. What’s more, is that the income you earn is completely online, and can be achieved from anywhere in the world as long as you have a laptop and an internet connection, you can make affiliate marketing work for you.
Even if your affiliate websites are not successful for the next 5-10 years (highly likely they’ll be successful before that anyway), why wouldn’t you want to invest your time into learning how to do it? I always try to tell people – invest in yourself to make your future better!
How Much Time And Motivation Do You Have?
Building a business takes time, no matter what. It doesn’t matter if you are starting a scrap metal retrieval company, a home cleaning service, launching a new product, selling digital products, drop shipping stuff from China, or building an affiliate website.
Whatever the business, it’s going to take time.
Personally, I’ve always had more success with anything I do by doing it consistently over a long period of time, rather than going in intensive spurts. In other words, playing 20 minutes of piano per day will yield better results than 1 hour per week.
Whether or not Wealthy Affiliate is worth it to you will depend on if you have the time and motivation to put in the work. If you pay for your membership, then don’t put in the time, you’re not going to see results!
Do You Have The Time?
At a minimum, you’re going to need an hour per day to build your affiliate site. It’s OK if you only have 30 minutes a day Mon-Fri, then extra hours on the weekend, but you need to be putting in about 10 hours a week to get some momentum going.
If you can do more, great.
You can get away with less, but it’s just going to take longer to see results.
There’s no specific rule of how long until you see income, or how many articles until you see traffic, or anything like that. It’s different for everyone. However, just as a broad rule of thumb, if you dedicate 10-20 hours a week, it’s fair to expect organic traffic rolling in about the 3 month mark, sales coming in at 6 months, and reliable income by year 1 or 2.
Of course, I’ve seen extremes on both sides of the achievement spectrum. I know people who did 10k/month in less than six months, and but there are also folks with Wealthy Affiliate accounts 5+ years old who still don’t make a full time income from their websites.
Can you guess who’s working more hours?
The training is only going to be worth it to you if you have the time do the training and work on your website.
Do You Have The Motivation?
You might be surprised to find out that a lot of wannabe entrepreneurs don’t actually have a lot of motivation to build a business. They just want the money. I totally get this mindset, so I’m not criticizing too much, but I also work hard to keep me from getting too deep into this way of thinking.
EVERY success story you see online is because someone did hard work. They were met with challenges, overcame them, then kept on trucking. The were not satisfied with something, so they worked to change it.
That takes some serious mental motivation because the truth is, nobody cares about you being successful except for yourself.
When it’s Friday night and you want to go out with your friends, what choice will you make? Will go get drunk and wake up with a hangover the next morning, or will you use those 12 hours wisely and write an article?
As I write this article right now, I really just want to go have a coffee at Starbucks and watch YouTube videos. I want to go take a nap. I want to go to the gym and finish painting my bathroom.
But I’m stuck here writing this article. Why? It might be able to help me get a couple sales from someone who reads and and decides that yes, Wealthy Affiliate is worth it to them.
The truth is, this article might go nowhere. It might be a waste of my time. I’m putting it out there though, and we’re gonna see what happens.
This is the attitude you need to get your site flowing with traffic and converting to sales. You WILL HAVE TO SACRIFICE some things to achieve what you want.
How bad do you want to achieve your goals?
Can You Overcome Obstacles?
Here’s a tough topic to address. The truth is, a Wealthy Affiliate membership might not be worth it for you if you can’t handle running into a few hurdles along the way. Time for a tough reality check.
I mentor a lot of people in WA. I’m inside the community, answering questions every single day, both privately and publicly, so I see a lot of personalities come though.
Some people just can’t handle the challenge. Some people just fold under pressure, or are not confident enough to even attempt to solve the problems they run into.
Does that describe you?
Don’t get me wrong. It’s OK to stumble. It’s OK to doubt yourself. It’s OK to rant inside your head. I did it when I was building my own sites for the first time, and I still do it to this day (AKA Why Am I Not A Millionaire Yet?!). There’s nothing wrong with getting frustrated.
The problem is when you quit. When you quit, there’s no more trying. You’ve ended that path. The key to success, in my opinion, is that you need to be able to fail, then try again. If you can do that, then welcome to the club!
If you can’t handle failure without quitting, then I think you’re going to be better off sticking to a regular job.
When your website isn’t behaving how you want, are you going to walk away and go turn on the TV? Or will you fire up YouTube and Google to find a solution. And if you aren’t naturally in the latter category, do you have the strength to train yourself to do so?
My Experience With Long-Term Consistency
I truly believe you can change your personality. I was naturally a “give up” type of person throughout my younger years. I tried various DIY projects both IRL and online, but never followed through because I quit when things got boring or difficult.
Two years later, I was doing well in terms of income. 7 years after that, I’ve achieved some stability, and have my goals set higher than ever. I’m not there yet, but I know I can get there.
Leverage past experiences from your life to build confidence. Use those mental dividends to fund this new business venture!
Final Conclusion: Is Wealthy Affiliate Worth It?
Objectively speaking, just looking at the tools that Wealthy Affiliate provides, yes, it’s very much worth it. The value/cost ratio is extremely high. You get training, hosting, support, AND extra things like weekly webinars and 1-on-1 coaching for a dollar a day.
If you think there’s no practical value in that, well, then, just LOL. See ya’ dude. I’ve got nothing else to say.
Whether or not this service is valuable to you is the question, and that hinges on two things:
Your ability to work consistently
Your ability to recover from failures
If you can’t do both of those things, then you will not be able to create a profitable affiliate business, no matter who trains you. There’s no such thing as easy money, and starting a business is never going to be a straight path.
So you’ve got the motivation and the time, but what about the money? Here’s how much Wealthy Affiliate will cost you for your first year of operation, which is more than enough time to make your money back and start earning a profit from your websites.
What’s up ladies and dudes! Great to finally meet you, and I hope you enjoyed this post. I started my first online business in 2010 promoting computer software and now I help newbies start their own businesses. Sign up for my #1 recommended training course and learn how to start your business for FREE!
I’ve been building profitable affiliate blogs for more than a decade, and built six-figure blogs in a wide variety of niches, including computer software, self help, and home & garden topics. I do things a bit differently, and I hope you like my perspective and my style of teaching.
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