There are tons of popular websites on the internet that are just not making as much revenue as they should be. It is because they are not being used for affiliate marketing. I have said this repeatedly before, if you have a website then you need to start using it for affiliate marketing so that you can monetize your traffic.
What is affiliate marketing you say? Well in simple terms affiliate marketing is a program in which you market a product to your audience and for every sale of that product you make a commission. You simply take a product that is related to your niche and suggest it to the visitors on your website. The good thing about affiliate marketing is that you make money with every unique visitor. You provide them a product which they really need and when they buy it you make a commission. It’s a win-win situation for both the audience and you. There is really no major downside with affiliate marketing.
Now, affiliate marketing is usually done through an affiliate network and today we’ll be talking about one such program, the wealthy affiliate.
I have been a member of the wealthy affiliate community for almost a year now and I’ll tell you all about my experience with the program.
Wealthy affiliate is an online program that educates thousands of individuals about making money with their website. The program trains individuals with their courses and by providing access to a community of thousands of members, some of whom are making $100,000k a year with affiliate marketing alone. To put it in simple words, it’s a marketing course for both beginners who know nothing about affiliate marketing and those who are not successful at affiliate marketing.
So, I joined wealthy affiliate in November of 2017 after hearing about it from a colleague of mine. I started with the free membership (as should you) and later bought the premium membership to evaluate the quality of their premium membership.
I’m going to tell you what you get with both these memberships and if you need to upgrade or not.
Here’s what you get with wealthy affiliate free membership.
* Beginner training – 10 lessons
* 2 Websites (you are allowed to use a custom domain)
* Website Backup
* Affiliate Bootcamp – 10 lessons
* A keyword research tool with 30 searches for free
* Live chat for first 7 days
* Community help for first 7 days
* Affiliate commission
When I started with wealthy affiliate I had earlier experience with affiliate marketing so I quickly went through the first 10 lessons, created my own website and started implementing what I learned from their lessons. I was shocked to see that I was actually making money which is why I bought their premium membership to get the most out of their program.
For a complete beginner wealthy affiliate can provide a platform where you don’t need to worry about creating a website and all the technical hiccups that come your way when you create a website. You get 12 free themes and the hosting is free too. All you need is a domain which you can buy yourself with ease. Now, many people have this doubt that if they can migrate their wordpress website when they decide to leave WA. The answer to that is yes, you can migrate your website to anywhere you want within 30 days of cancelling your subscription.
So till now everything sounds good but the problem with wealthy affiliate is that they sugarcoat everything. They make you feel that money making is just very easy. You just create a website add some affiliate links and voila, you’re rich. No, it does not work that way. You don’t just get your website live, add a few plugins and start making money. If it was that simple, everyone would be doing it.
After creating your website, you need to design it which can take weeks for a beginner. Even after designing your website you need to rank your articles to get any organic traffic. While WA does make it sound very easy, it’s not that simple. You need to do a lot of SEO before you can get anywhere near the first page on any search engine.
This is the only problem that I have with WA, they do provide valuable knowledge but they give a false sense that everything would be cake walk if you buy their premium membership. I’m not saying that their program is worthless but they do sugarcoat a lot to sell their premium plan.
* Beginner training – 50 lessons
* 50 Websites (you are allowed to use a custom domain)
* Hosting with powerful servers and SiteSpeed
* Website Backup
* Affiliate Bootcamp – 70 lessons
* A keyword research tool with unlimited searches
* Live chat
* Community help and private messaging
* Website support
* Affiliate commission – twice as much as free membership
The charges for the premium plan is $19 for the first month and $49 thereafter. While there is no significant improvement with creating your website over the free plan, the premium plan does get you access to the full course, community help and private messaging which can help you a lot in growing your website. There are plenty of users in wealthy affiliate community who are very successful in affiliate marketing so networking with them and learning from them can actually give you an edge over others in your niche who started with the same experience as you.
Certain tools provided by WA are worth their price such as the keyword planner which you get with both the free and premium membership. But you can get a keyword planner for $10 from other websites too so why pay $49 for a recurring course.
So, my advice to anyone looking to join WA would be that their courses do add value and there are community members in WA that can help you out a lot in becoming successful with affiliate marketing. But, you must have realistic expectations from them. Everything is not as easy or simple as WA makes it sound in their sales pitch.
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