Authentic and Unbiased Wealthy Affiliate Review

Authentic and Unbiased

Have you ever wondered how every single Wealthy Affiliate review on the internet right now is basically promoting this program rather than giving you a genuine picture of what it really offers? It should come as no surprise why people promote Wealthy Affiliate instead of actually reviewing it. The coaches of the program have allowed their members to promote the course and earn 50% commission on the sales they make.

Makes sense now? Can you seriously trust these reviews? Don’t you think most of these reviews are biased?

If you are tired of coming across biased reviews of the wealthy affiliate program, then you have finally landed on the right page. This review from IBuyIReview is 100% authentic and unbiased and is definitely not promoting the WA program.

I actually went through the program just for my personal curiosity and now I want each and every one of you to know what you can expect from it.

During the course of this review, I am simply going to talk about the strength and weaknesses of the course.

I am not interested in making money by promoting wealthy affiliate because I already have a very well established local lead generation program that is making me thousands of dollars each month, that too automatically.

So why should you listen to what I have to say about wealthy affiliate when I am not even using what I learned in it to make money?

It’s simple really! Just like you, before I figured out about local lead generation, I was experimenting and trying a lot of things to make money on the internet. My curiosity brought me to wealthy affiliate a while back and I was super interested in the idea of making commissions by simply promoting other’s products.

I’d also like to mention that in the past I have actually studied various affiliate marketing courses and have actually been able to make some money out of it too. In fact, I even went under direct coaching from top affiliate marketing coaches privately who taught me how to make money through it.

I have even been able to generate as much as $50K from affiliate marketing before starting my current business. I know how affiliate marketing works and what it takes to become an affiliate marketer.

I just want to say that affiliate marketing is not as easy as people make it sound like. Let me try and explain everything I went through learning this art. But before that, let me briefly describe the program.

The Wealthy Affiliate is basically just another training course showing people how to make money with affiliate marketing on the internet. There are a few unique methods that I’ll discuss below. Otherwise, it is a fairly generic course with almost the same methods you’ll find on any other top affiliate marketing course today.

In this review, you’ll learn what the affiliate marketing course really is and what you’ll learn through it. And I’ll also highlight what happens when you become a WA member and whether it is worth it or not.

I’ll also run you down through the pros and cons of this program. And at the end, you’ll see my final verdict whether you should join it or not.

So let’s begin!

What Exactly is Affiliate Marketing?

For those of you who are very new to the term affiliate marketing, it is basically a method in which you promote other people’s product and make money by generating sales for them. You basically write a blog or a sales copy and add a link to a product you are affiliating. Once that product is bought, you are given a slice of the profit as commission.

To affiliate a product or service, you will first have to join a platform where product creators list their products for affiliate marketing. One of these platforms is clickbank.com. Anyone can really sign up on the platform and begin promoting a service or product listed there.

It is very simple if you look at it closely. You are provided a special link that you must add to your content and hope that the traffic coming to your page clicks on the link and purchases the product. When a purchase is made, you automatically earn a commission which can be anywhere from 5%-7% or more depending on the offer.

There’s like literally a thousand different offers on Clickbank right now to choose from. The best part is that you are going to find products and services from nearly every niche imaginable. But for the most part, you’ll come across weight loss products, pet care, cooking, games, and more.

Basically, what I am trying to say is that there is an offer for virtually anything on the internet right now. If you can’t find a product or service you want to promote on Clickbank, just Google the term ‘product name or service’ + affiliate program and you’ll be given a dozen of options to pick from.

Is There Anything Good About Affiliate Marketing?

Yes, there are many good and bad things about affiliate marketing. Let me go through the good ones first.

Affiliate Marketing is purely hassle-free

As an affiliate marketer, you do not have to worry about carrying the product yourself, nor do you have to worry about fulfilling the orders or giving customer support. The company whose product you are affiliating will handle these things. The only thing you’ll be doing is promoting their product to make a commission on sales.

There is no Confusion When It Comes To Payment

Affiliate programs by companies are well-tracked, meaning that you do not have to track the sales or payments yourself. The affiliate marketing platforms will tell you when you make a commission. They will also automatically pay you when a certain amount of commissions are made. So basically, what I am trying to tell you is that everything is accurate and on point.

There is a Potential to Make a Lot of Money

Let me be clear, people in the affiliate marketing business are making millions of dollars yearly. If you have the right skills to generate traffic and promote a product, you have the potential to make loads and loads of money.

Abundant Offers Out There

Another big thing about affiliate marketing is that there are so many offers out there that you can comfortably pick a product or service that you are good at promoting. This way, it is easy for you to promote and make a sale rather than promoting a product or service you don’t know jack about.

Is There Anything Bad About Affiliate Marketing

You bet there is! Let me go through all the bad stuff you will likely come across in affiliate marketing.

It’s a Super Competitive Business

If you were thinking you are the only person who will promote and sell a product through affiliate marketing, think again. There are literally thousands and thousands of bloggers, website owners, and other entrepreneurs promoting and selling products through affiliate marketing. This makes it a highly competitive business. If you do not have the art of promoting and selling products or the internet, and if you cannot generate loads and loads of traffic for your page containing the affiliate link, forget about making a dime out of this.

Affiliate Marketing these days is full of people who use paid traffic to rank on Google. The Wealthy Affiliate program only teaches you how to organically rank your website on Google which is next to impossible these days unless you are like the master-Jedi of ranking websites organically.

Sometimes there are offers that give you a low commission or have bad conversion rates

The problem with affiliate marketing is that not offers are always good. Some may pay you a good amount of % per sale, while others may never convert no matter how much traffic you are sending their way. This is why it is important to pick an offer that converts well and pays high. Often times it is impossible to find such an offer.

For me, I usually look for offers on various affiliate marketing platforms. I search the product + affiliate program on Google and go through nearly all the offers available on the first page. If an offer is there on the first page, it will likely be good.

Affiliate Marketing is Over-Hyped

If you try looking at Company Reviews of affiliate marketing on the internet, you’ll see people telling you how they managed to make more than $50k in just one month as a new affiliate marketer. This is perfect example of misinformation. No matter how good you know about the internet, there is no way you can make that much money as a new affiliate marketer because it isn’t a get rich scheme to begin with.

The fast results people usually boast about on the internet are acquired by getting traffic from paid ads. Most people use Facebook ads to promote their affiliate product and if they are successful, they do make a lot of money. But the problem is that this income is not consistent. If you’re very lucky and an ad performs well, you’ll earn good, otherwise most of the times the ad doesn’t perform well and you lose money on paying ad fee.

Another big problem is that Facebook doesn’t like people promoting affiliate products on their website. When you start promoting products consistently on Facebook, your ad account usually gets banned and it takes quite a while to get it back. I know this because I have already tried this several times.

It is no doubt fun to see an instant growth in your income, but once the ad burns out, the income just stops right there. It is impossible to sustain it in the long term. So it’s just not worth it.

You’ll Never Develop A Unique Brand

In affiliate marketing, you are mostly promoting other people’s product which means that your hard work is only going towards building the brand of the company whose products you are promoting. What about your own brand? It can never happen with Affiliate marketing.

Unethical Marketing Tactics

One of the worst things about affiliate marketing is that most of the marketers will do anything to promote a product, this includes unethical marketing. Most of the times these guys have never actually tried the product themselves. How can you believe someone who is lying about a product just to make some commissions? Imagine buying dietary supplement from lying affiliates. No wonder most dietary supplements brought from the internet never works.

How Much Does Wealthy Affiliate Cost?

Wealthy Affiliate offers two kinds of memberships, one is free and one is paid. Here’s what you get out of each.

Wealthy Affiliate Free Membership

Anyone can sign up and become a member of WA. The free membership offers you basic training on how to build an affiliate website and how to get traffic on it. You are also allowed to promote the program on your site and get 15% commissions on sales. You also get two free websites if you decide to develop your website with WordPress.

Wealthy Affiliate $49 Premium Membership

You can become a premium member of Wealthy Affiliate by paying a $49 per month fee or $359 per year fee. You get access to all the training available from the program. You also earn 50% commissions promoting the program on your site instead of 15%.

If you ask me about my opinion on the memberships, I would say that the free membership is enough to give you a couple of ideas on what affiliate marketing really is. But if you wish to truly become successful with it, you will need to join as a premium member. So in other words, if you want to become an affiliate marketing guru through the Wealthy Affiliate program, you must pay $359 a year.

How Can You Make Money With Wealthy Affiliate

There are actually two ways you can make money with Wealthy Affiliate.

Follow the training course and build your website and try to generate traffic and promote and sell other’s products.

Or promote the Wealthy Affiliate program itself from your website and earn 50% commission on every sale. But this also means you need to pay $359 per year to WA.

My Biggest Concern With Wealthy Affiliate

I really don’t like the fact that Wealthy Affiliate allows its members to promote the program for 50% commissions if they are premium members. I mean how can you allow someone who has just learned the program to sell it on the internet. There are always going to be a few members on the platform that may never reach the level required to find success with affiliate marketing, yet they will be promoting the program by speaking volumes about it on the internet.

Basically, this creates a lot of hype about something you have actually got no experience with. Do you get what I mean? It also creates the notion that most people will join the course to actually promote it and not learn it.

If you are familiar with MLM, this may start to feel like Affiliate Marketing is similar to MLM, but they openly claim they aren’t.

This is just my personal opinion because I run into many sites that are low in quality and promoting the Wealthy Affiliate program like it is the best thing on the internet. Which is the reason no matter how much you search about the program, you’ll always find positive reviews that are often biased and unauthentic.

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Most good online training programs never allow their students to promote the course they are studying, that too for 50% of the sale. What I am trying to say is that shouldn’t the course be something that students use to go out there and make money online rather than promoting it instead?

I mean during the course, you are told to go out there and find affiliate offers that give you 5-25% commissions yet you still give them an opportunity to promote the course and make 50% of the sale instead? I don’t think this can be called an ethical strategy to promote something that you have not used to experience success yet.

So is Wealthy Affiliate Worth It?

To give you an idea of whether Wealthy Affiliate is worth it or not, I am going to show you the course overview first. There are both certification courses and the full course available. Here’s how they look like.

Certification courses

● Online Entrepreneur Certification – Getting started (level 1)
● Building your own traffic producing website (level 2)
● Online entrepreneur certification – making money (level 3)
● Online entrepreneur certification – Mastering social engagement (level 4)
● The business of content – achieving maximum success through content creation (level 5)

Here’s how the first 3 levels of the training are broken down.

Level 1

● Lesson 1 – getting rolling
● Lesson 2 – understanding how to make money online
● Lesson 3 – choose a niche
● Lesson 4 – building your own website
● Lesson 5 – setting up your website
● Lesson 6 – getting your site ready for SEO
● Lesson 7 – finding content ideas from keywords
● Lesson 8 – understand website pages and creating your pages
● Lesson 9 – creating quality website content
● Lesson 10 – congratulations and your next steps

Level 2

● Lesson 1 – your own domain, your brand
● Lesson 2 – building out your website theme-based content
● Lesson 3 – setting up a domain specific email account
● Lesson 4 – the traffic breakdown
● Lesson 5 – making use of visuals
● Lesson 6 – getting crafty with the WordPress editor
● Lesson 7 – understanding the low hanging fruit
● Lesson 8 – making face as a real person
● Lesson 9 – amplifying your Google love with Google
● Lesson 10 – boosting your WA ranks

Level 3

● Lesson 1 – understanding the money in online business
● Lesson 2 – understanding affiliate programs and networks
● Lesson 3 – relevant affiliate programs are everywhere
● Lesson 4 – adding affiliate links to your pages
● Lesson 5 – instant access to a million products
● Lesson 6 – leveraging product reviews
● Lesson 7 – getting paid for ads on your site
● Lesson 8 – earning pennies or dollars?
● Lesson 9 – a brilliant way to track and understand your offers
● Lesson 10 – with help comes financial success

Wealthy Affiliate was created by Kyle London and Carson Lim in 2005, almost 14 years ago.

Why am I telling you this? Because in 2019, the techniques and lessons in Wealthy Affiliate feel outdated even after the founders add stuff here and there.

Here’s the complete strategy of the program in a nutshell.

● Look for a niche you are comfortable with
● Identify keywords that are not competitive
● Build a website and write content about the keywords

Now if you were doing this in 2005, it would have gotten you the perfect amount of traffic you wanted to make tons and tons of money. But in 2019, this doesn’t really work anymore.

Since I have already told you that success in affiliate marketing means being able to generate free traffic. In 2019, these tactics no longer work to generate enough traffic to make you mounds of cash.

Back in those days, SEO guys used to rank a certain keyword on Google and got affiliate sites on the first page. But now its a completely different story. There are videos, social media, and other forms of content that Google prefers more than keyword stuffing.

Although this is dated, I won’t lie to you that it can still be pulled off.

But here’s the thing, in order to work with these tactics, you are going to need insane SEO skills, something which you’ll never learn in the Wealthy Affiliate program. I’m not just saying this, you are hearing it from someone who is successfully running a lead generation program that has more than 50 clients.

In 2019, things have changed and you must have skills like creating a powerful blog network with powerful domain names under the niche you pick so that you can use them to create your own backlinks to the affiliate site you have. These are strategies that are used by very high-level SEO professionals, which again you won’t be taught in this program.

The worst part is that you can no longer hope to rank in Google by getting backlinks from low-quality content links. Only high-quality content backlinks from very good websites work these days.

Basically, when a well ranked site links back to you, its like a thumbs up for your site in Google’s eyes. So the more quality sites linking to you from the relevant niche means that the higher you will start to rank in Google.

And if you are thinking writing high-quality content will naturally work for you, then you need to come back to reality and read what I have written above. The tactic of writing high-quality content with your relevant keywords no longer works if it is not linked back from a higher-quality website.

In 2019, the only thing that is really working for people is the ability to create their own powerful blogging networks where they can backlink to themselves. This is the only way affiliate marketing works these days.

So what I am trying to say is that affiliate marketing is one of the toughest money making strategies on the internet right now. And in my opinion, if you are a beginner, just avoid it. There’s just too much competition out there!

Trust me when I say this because I have tried a lot of different money making opportunities and Affiliate marketing is probably one of the toughest on my list.

You can even see this within the course itself. The coaches within the program will tell you to go for low-competition keywords only because they know it is impossible to rank for medium sized-keywords in 2019 with what they are teaching.

If it was still 2012, you could have used these techniques to make several sites that target these low-competition keywords and would eventually make $50-$100 per day. But in 2019, even that is not possible anymore. You have to work a lot more and even then you will be earning less money than others who have better skills suited for 2019.

So why not just invest in getting the skills that are trending these days instead of spending money on skills that worked 10 years ago? You’ll probably have better luck making more money that way with less work.

I mean hard work, discipline and dedication is very important if you want to be successful, but what if you are in the wrong vehicle? You are probably not going to get anywhere far no matter how good you get.

I learned this the hard way. Instead of making various small affiliate websites, I focused on the local lead generation which works for 2019.

What Else Is Offered Inside The Wealthy Affiliate Program?

Once you become a premium member with the Wealthy Affiliate program, you’ll also get the following.

● Web builder by Siterubix
● Support from a team if you run into problems with a site
● Free health checking of your site
● Fee site comments to help increase engagement on your site (This didn’t work for me)
● Website builder with at least 3,000 free templates
● Web hosting for at least 25 sites
● Free feedback on your site
● Backup & security for your site

While these features are good, you can get them from many other web hosting companies for free if you sign up with them and their membership fee is a lot less than WA. Also, their technical support is much better.

I was very happy to hear that the coaches provide site feedback. But when I actually sought feedback for my site, I realized that the feedback they offer is very basic. They only focus on things like loading speed, site content, and social engagement. In 2019, a site with only these will never survive on Google. You’ll need mobile optimization, engaging content, and a lot more.

My Final Thoughts On Wealthy Affiliate

I’ll be very honest with you. In 2019, the things that Wealthy Affiliate teaches you are not going to make you good money because they are very outdated. You simply cannot depend on writing quality content and expect your site to appear on the first page of Google and start generating good traffic, even if you target the lowest-competition keywords.

Just think of how many more people are doing this right now compared to 2012 or 2005, the year in which this program was created? Every year, the algorithms of search engines, the skills required to rank your site, change. And you need good SEO skills to rank your affiliate marketing site and these skills have become harder to master than ever before.

These days, it is all about creating high-quality content with niche relevant backlinks. I can guarantee you that no WA student of this era is making any good money right now. So why in the world are so many people still talking about WA and promoting it as the ‘facto’ online money earning opportunity?

Because Wealthy Affiliate is letting them promote the program with 50% commissions once you have joined their $359 a year premium membership. This has caused a lot of people that aren’t even successful affiliate marketers to create sites that promote the program even though they have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. From someone who has been there and done that, it is very easy to tell.
If you look closely, the only people making money after going through the WA program these days are the ones who are actually promoting the program. I can provide you with enough evidence that this is indeed the case.

My Final Thoughts

For example, let’s look at one of the WA student’s websites promoting the program for 50% commission. Try Googling the term ‘Wealthy Affiliate Review’ and you’ll see a few sites on the top that are only promoting the program. These sites are operated by the top students of the program.

And if you look closely by using authority checker tools, you’ll get the basic idea of how strong these sites actually are. For example, the number one site that appeared on my Google after I searched using the above term gave me a site with a DA of 18. One of my sites is at 30DA.

Similarly, another site I found was at DA23, which is not amazing at all. All of these sites are easily beatable today with more powerful sites or sites that are made with good SEO skills.

Basically what I am trying to say is that the sites on the first page of Google with the term ‘Wealthy Affiliate Review’ are all weak sites that are very easy to beat these days. Now try searching on Google using ‘best carburetors’ and you’ll see sites with DA40-80 on the first page.

Do you see now what I am trying to tell you? I strongly believe that beginners should not sign up with Wealthy Affiliate program. If you want to build powerful websites with powerful backlinks in 2019, you need something else.

Just look at the link quality of the sites I mentioned above owned by the best students of WA and you’ll see a bunch of low quality links pointing to them. A site which is getting such low-quality links is only going to get hurt.

You’ll also notice that most of the blog comments on these sites are made by the same people over and over again. These are considered no-follow links which means that you are not going to get any ranking power out of them. The site still has a few do-follow links which is why it is on the top when you search for WA revi. But they’re still not really high-quality links that are enough for a site to be on page 1 right now.

Just by analyzing these sites run by WA students, you can quickly and easily judge their skill level in SEO. And with these backlinks, I know that they are not making a single penny with actual affiliate marketing because if you want to really make good money with affiliate marketing, you need to have a site with DA40-80. This guy’s website is at DA18. Just imagine.

So Is There Anything Really Good About Wealthy Affiliate?

I don’t know why you would even ask me after reading what I have written above. All I can say is that let Wealthy Affiliate be a good example to you that there are much better opportunities out there. You can still join the program and learn a few basic things because back in the day, the program was good with its techniques. It just hasn’t matured well with time.

At the end of the day, after learning the techniques and skills from the training course, you will still be able to make enough money to pay some of your bills. But you are not here to do that. You want to change your life. You want to make money that generates itself while you are enjoying your life sitting someplace in the bright sun and cool water breeze near you.

If that is what you were thinking about how making money online should sound like, then look elsewhere. Wealthy Affiliate is not going to help you make that kind of income in 2019.