An Honest Wealthy Affiliate Review – Can You Make Money Blogging?

I want to write an honest Wealthy Affiliate review. Every time I read someone’s review of Wealthy Affiliate, the person is either hardcore promoting Wealthy Affiliate as an affiliate or calling Wealthy Affiliate a scam to promote some other product. I hardly ever see people talk about Wealthy Affiliate from an objective standpoint.

I want to give an honest Wealthy Affiliate review from the perspective of someone who has not only been a Wealthy Affiliate premium member for years but has also taken many high-quality courses on the internet.

Can you make money blogging? Let’s find out in my honest Wealthy Affiliate review.

What Is Wealthy Affiliate?

Wealthy Affiliate is an all-in-one platform. A premium subscription to Wealthy Affiliate will give you access to affiliate marketing training, the Wealthy Affiliate community, website hosting, and various tools that will help you successfully build a new affiliate marketing blog online.

For this review and Guru Audit, I will mainly focus on Wealthy Affiliate’s training aspect and briefly mention the other things you get as bonuses.

As the name suggests, Wealthy Affiliate will teach you how to make money from affiliate marketing. It is a platform started by Kyle Loudon and Carson Lim designed to help you create a profitable WordPress blog.

The Wealthy Affiliate Training Contents

There’s a lot of training on the Wealthy Affiliate platform. Most people will start with the Online Entrepreneur Certification (OEC) or the Affiliate Bootcamp and then take other bonus classes to supplement their knowledge.

Since Wealthy Affiliate separates its content into multiple courses, I will be dividing this section into three categories. The first will be Wealthy Affiliate’s OEC, the second will be Wealthy Affiliate’s Affiliate Bootcamp, and the third will be everything else, including user-created content and Jay’s weekly webinars.

Let’s start with what you’ll be getting in the OEC.

Wealthy Affiliate’s Online Entrepreneur Certification (OEC)

Wealthy Affiliate’s OEC consists of 5 levels. The OEC is Wealthy Affiliate’s primary training. Kyle is the main person teaching the OEC and designed the OEC to walk you through creating an online blog in any niche.

Level 1. Getting Started

Level 1 is an introduction to affiliate marketing and blogging. In this section, Kyle will show you how you will create and monetize a blog. This section is your roadmap for what you need to learn to build a successful affiliate marketing blog.

Level 2. Building Your Own Traffic Producing Website

Level 2 is when you start diving into the work. This is where you’re going to learn how to set up your blog via WordPress, how to do keyword research, and write articles to generate traffic in the future.

Level 3. Making Money!

Once you created a basic website with a few articles, you will move on to Level 3, where Kyle will teach you how to monetize your website. The main monetization strategies you will learn are display ads and affiliate marketing, primarily through Google Adsense and Amazon Associates. For affiliate marketing, Kyle will also recommend looking for various affiliate programs for whatever product you’re reviewing.

Level 4. Mastering Social Engagement

As the name suggests, in Level 4, you will be going through social media marketing. This section is pretty basic. You will learn to set up multiple social media pages, share your articles on those platforms, and create “socially engaging content.” Kyle doesn’t detail how to make something “socially engaging” apart from creating content on topics with divided opinions.

Level 5. Achieving Maximum Success Through Content Creation

Level 5 is the final section of Wealthy Affiliate’s OEC, and it is mostly about productivity. In this section, you get a few essential tips on publishing more blog posts. Most of these tips involve things like timing how long you take to write a blog post and how to create article publishing schedules.

The most important part about the OEC’s Level 5 is Google’s Search Console tool. Although Kyle never goes deep into using the Search Console tool to improve your website, it is an essential tool that will become more useful as you learn more about SEO.

And that’s it for the OEC. Now we’ll move onto Wealthy Affiliate’s Affiliate Bootcamp training.

Wealthy Affiliate’s Affiliate Bootcamp

The second most prominent training on Wealthy Affiliate is its Affiliate Bootcamp. Wealthy Affiliate designed its Affiliate Bootcamp for people that wanted to create a website in the make money online niche and promote Wealthy Affiliate.

The Affiliate Bootcamp goes into much more compared to the OEC. In addition to the content on keyword research and writing articles, the Affiliate Bootcamp also explores making videos and running PPC campaigns. Let’s jump into the Affiliate Bootcamp’s lesson structure.

Phase 1: Getting Your Business Rolling

Phase 1 of the Affiliate Bootcamp is about setting up and creating a website to promote the Wealthy Affiliate program. This section is equivalent to Level 2 of the OEC. You spend your time here learning to build a WordPress website and prepare it for content.

Phase 2: Content, Keywords, and Conversions

Phase 2 is a combination of the OEC’s Levels 2 and 3. As the title suggests, you will learn how to do keyword research and monetize your website with Wealthy Affiliate’s affiliate program. Then you’ll write a ton of articles.

Phase 3: Giving Your Site Social Value

Again with the comparison to the OEC, Phase 3 is like Level 4 of the OEC. In Phase 4, you will set up social media accounts and start building a social following for your website. Additionally, this is where you add Google Analytics to your website and focus a lot on producing a ton of content.

Phase 4: Get Visual. Get Aesthetic. Get a Brand Through Media

Although Phase 4 is supposedly the section where you’re learning how to grow a brand with fantastic design, the design lessons are honestly not that good. Thus, most of this section is a filler section as you continue to write more articles and grow your blog. I will say that it’s good that Kyle introduces you to creating videos since the number of people who prefer watching videos is crazy high.

Phase 5: Knowing Your Audiences & Catapulting Your Referrals

The most crucial part about Phase 5 is getting started on YouTube for the same reason I talked about in Phase 4. Again, everything else in Phase 5 is not that important. Truthfully, a lot of the training is outdated when I’m writing this Wealthy Affiliate review. Thus, Phase 5 is another section to create a ton of content.

Phase 6: Bing, Yahoo, & The Power of PPC

Phase 6 is when the Affiliate Bootcamp finally dives into new, relevant content… although not as relevant as you might want it to be. Nonetheless, Phase 6 introduces pay-per-click ads or known as PPC, via Bing and Yahoo. Although some of the details in the training are outdated, the general idea of running PPC ads is still relevant.

Phase 7: How to Scale Successful PPC Campaigns

Phase 7 is an extension of Phase 6, except more relevant. Since Google is the search engine that’s dominating more than 90% of the search engine market (according to Statista at the time of writing this article), you need to run Google Adwords if you plan to run PPC ads at all to be successful.

Again, the training is somewhat outdated, but the general message is still relevant. I will talk about what I like and dislike about the Wealthy Affiliate training more down below.

First, let me review the third type of training you can get on Wealthy Affiliate – Wealthy Affiliate’s user-created training and Jay’s weekly webinars.

Jay’s Weekly Webinars (Expert Classes) And User-Created Training

Since the introduction of Wealthy Affiliate’s Premium Plus membership, Premium Plus members also have access to more formalized training from top affiliates other than Jay. These expert classes are live-streamed once a week (but you can watch replays anytime) and cover various topics depending on what each teacher has planned out.

These topics are often focused on affiliate marketing and WordPress blogging, but there have been instances where teachers covered subjects such as dropshipping and local marketing. These weekly webinars can be very informative, depending on your level of expertise in the internet marketing field. Personally, I find that the content on blogging can be a little repetitive if you have taken Wealthy Affiliate’s main courses.

What I do like about these weekly webinars, though, is the chance to ask questions. Although I haven’t reviewed some of the other experts on Wealthy Affiliate, I can testify that Jay is very responsive during his Q&A sessions at the end of each webinar.

On the other hand, the user-generated content is not always created by people who know their stuff. Any Wealthy Affiliate who has had a Premium or Premium Plus status for over three months can make training, and there isn’t a quality check.

Usually, I find user-generated content useful for particular technical situations that aren’t covered in the primary training. One example is when I was trying to install an ads.txt file on my website.

But depending on where you look, you may find gold nuggets here and there.

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What I Like About Wealthy Affiliate

Before I jump into what I like and dislike about Wealthy Affiliate, I will say that I am mainly focusing on the training aspect of Wealthy Affiliate. I will not be going into very much detail on some of the other elements, such as Wealthy Affiliate’s keyword research tool and hosting.

With that out of the way, let’s jump right into what I like.

1. The Checklist Training Style

My favorite part about Wealthy Affiliate’s OEC and Affiliate Bootcamps are the checklists. Most courses I reviewed have videos or text that you watch and follow along with if you choose to. I love the checklists on the Wealthy Affiliate training because you’ll know exactly what to do in every lesson.

The checklists allow you to stay much more focused, and if you go through the courses doing everything on the checklist, you will have a pretty decent website set up at the end.

2. Everything Comes In One Package

One of Wealthy Affiliate’s biggest strengths compared to other courses is that everything comes in one package. You will get pretty much everything you need to follow the training with one payment every month or year.

You won’t need to pay for a separate keyword research tool or hosting. All the technical and community support can be accessed directly on the Wealthy Affiliate platform.

Wealthy Affiliate also has very nice tools that you don’t easily find anywhere else, such as its Site Comments, Site Feedback, and user-generated training systems where you have the opportunity to make some money directly on the platform or use those tools to grow your blog.

3. Very Positive Wealthy Affiliate Community

While I have seen other negative Wealthy Affiliate reviews talk about how the community feels like a cult, I do like how the overall community is super positive. If you are new to starting a business, you will meet people that will say harsh things and bring you down, especially online.

It’s always nice to have a group of people that will say uplifting words to you and encourage you to move forward. That’s what the Wealthy Affiliate community has set out to do.

4. A Good Introduction To Online Blogging

Wealthy Affiliate is one of the first places I came upon to make money online, and I learned quite a lot. I learned how to create a blog, get traffic, and monetize it. My knowledge of setting up and growing WordPress blogs is an excellent foundation for learning more complex things about internet marketing. It all started with Wealthy Affiliate.

This is the first website I set up at Wealthy Affiliate: https://getgoodatbadminton.com/.

At the time of writing this, Get Good At Badminton gets between 6-8 thousand visitors and earns between $10-$30 from Google Adsense and Amazon Associates every month.

Sticking with the theme of honesty, my first website at Wealthy Affiliate has been around for more than two years now, so the numbers are a bit low. That being said, I did stop focusing on growing the blog the way Wealthy Affiliate taught me to after about five months. Get Good At Badminton could be much bigger if I had consistently followed the Wealthy Affiliate strategies.

What I Don’t Like About Wealthy Affiliate

1. Training Is Often Outdated

Although the core of Wealthy Affiliate’s strategies – the keyword research and writing content strategies – work, the training is often outdated, one example is Google Plus. Google Plus was taken down a long time ago, and yet, Wealthy Affiliate is still “teaching” Google Plus in various parts of its training.

So while following Wealthy Affiliate’s training will get you somewhere, it isn’t easy to grow very big without taking courses outside of Wealthy Affiliate.

2. We Don’t Learn How To Produce Good Quality Stuff

One of my biggest problems with Wealthy Affiliate is that their primary training never teaches you how to create good stuff. As someone who has taken multiple courses on design and writing, the things I make are generally pretty good or at least acceptable.

No disrespect to other people, but sometimes the websites I find from people who created their websites following the Wealthy Affiliate training are very low-quality.

The articles often make no sense, and the websites’ color schemes often make the content unreadable. If I look at some of the content I created when I first got started at Wealthy Affiliate, I realize that I was pretty bad too.

To increase the success rate of its members, Wealthy Affiliate needs to teach people good content and design practices from the get-go, or at least, how to improve over time.

3. Email Marketing, Social Media Ads, And Funnels?

Sometimes I wonder if Wealthy Affiliate should really be called Wealthy Affiliate. With what their main courses teach, it feels like Wealthy Affiliate should be Wealthy Blogger. Wealthy Affiliate’s main courses don’t teach or have very good training on many marketing strategies that should be implemented in all affiliate marketing businesses.

If you don’t learn from any other course except for Wealthy Affiliate, you will find that it takes a significant amount of time and work to build a blog that generates a good amount of money. Email marketing, funnel marketing, and running social media ads are some of the best ways to scale any online business, and Wealthy Affiliate doesn’t cover much on them.

==> Click Here To Get Started At Wealthy Affiliate For FREE!

How Much Does Wealthy Affiliate Cost?

As of 2021, Wealthy Affiliate has three membership levels: Starter, Premium, and Premium Plus. The Starter membership is completely free.

The Premium membership is $19 for the first month and then $49 every month, or you can get a discount and pay $359 per year.

Wealthy Affiliate has recently added the Premium Plus membership, which is $50 for the first month and then $99/month after. You can also get 16% off by paying a yearly fee of $995.

Additionally, I would recommend waiting until Black Friday, where Wealthy Affiliate often has some serious discounts for yearly bills where you can get grandfathered in at a low price. For example, I only pay $299 every year for a Premium membership, which is about $25 per month, since I took advantage of Wealthy Affiliate’s Black Friday deal.

With the differing prices you pay for the membership, you will receive various levels of services.

The Starter membership is only good as a free trial to see what Wealthy Affiliate has to offer. For the first seven days as a Starter member, you get access to pretty much everything a Premium member gets. After seven days, however, there’s not much to do as a Starter member.

The Premium membership is where you’re unlocking pretty much all the training and stuff you need to get started building an income-producing blog. The only thing you’re not getting is a bunch of Expert Classes and technical spec increases that come with the Premium Plus membership.

And that brings me to the next membership level, the Premium Plus membership.

The Premium Plus membership doesn’t differ much from the Premium membership. From the training perspective, instead of getting access to only 52 Expert Classes (Jay’s weekly webinars) per year, you get access to 200. Otherwise, the only other difference is that your hosting and keyword research tools become more powerful.

Here’s a graphic summarizing the main differences between each membership level when it comes to the training aspect of Wealthy Affiliate:

Additionally, there is one extra thing you need to pay for to become successful at Wealthy Affiliate, and that’s a domain name. A standard .com domain will cost you about $14 USD per year.

Is Wealthy Affiliate Worth It?

The big question: is Wealthy Affiliate worth it?

When I first got started at Wealthy Affiliate, I was a broke high school student. I had just come off losing all my money from creating a dropshipping store, and I wanted to find a way to make money online for free. That’s when I came across Wealthy Affiliate.

I read blog posts on making money online for free, and I eventually came across a blogger who recommended Wealthy Affiliate. When I heard that you didn’t need to submit any credit card details to get started, I thought, “Hey, there’s no harm in trying Wealthy Affiliate and seeing what it consisted of.”

Then I went through what I got as a Starter member, got excited about the money-making potential, and upgraded to Premium with the little money I had. Luckily, I got a part-time job a few months later so I could cover my Wealthy Affiliate subscription easily.

In the beginning, I loved what I was getting at Wealthy Affiliate and thought everything was awesome. I even wrote multiple Wealthy Affiliate reviews before talking about how good Wealthy Affiliate was.

After a few years of learning even more from taking other courses and working on various online businesses, I realized that Wealthy Affiliate wasn’t as good as I thought it really was. I deleted some of those reviews I wrote in the past, and now I’m writing this review.

Is Wealthy Affiliate really worth it? Short answer, yes, but there’s a lot left to be desired.

Wealthy Affiliate is not worth it if you’re solely paying for the training. Although it will seem a lot cheaper than other training programs out there, most people will not go through all of the training within a few months. If you take five months to complete all the training, it will cost you $215 (4 x $49 + $19 for the first month). $215 is basically the same price you’re paying for many other affiliate marketing training programs, except you keep those for life.

The Wealthy Affiliate training itself isn’t all that good either. The first two levels and phases of the OEC and Affiliate Bootcamp are pretty good, but then you stop learning new things. Since Wealthy Affiliate misses out on a ton of important affiliate marketing content, I give the content aspect of the course a 3.5.

What does make Wealthy Affiliate worth it is everything you’re getting in the program at the price point you’re paying. When you become a Premium member at Wealthy Affiliate, you get a built-in keyword research tool and website hosting. Yes, there are better keyword research tools and website hosting on the internet for cheaper, which is why Wealthy Affiliate does not get a 5.0 for its bonuses.

Again, I won’t go into much detail on how good the hosting or keyword research tools actually are.

But I’m also rating Wealthy Affiliate super high in terms of its price and bonuses because the Wealthy Affiliate platform offers more than a keyword research tool, website hosting, and training. There is a supportive community to interact with and a chance to make income directly on the Wealthy Affiliate platform.

Wealthy Affiliate has a give-and-take Site Comments and Site Feedback system where you offer comments/feedback on other websites for credits and then use those credits to get comments/feedback on your own website. This is not only a great way to get initial traffic to your website, but you can also earn money by offering comments on people’s websites.

Once you make 50 approved comments, you become a certified commenter. Then, every two comments you offer gets you $0.50 USD. The Site Comments system depends on the number of people buying Wealthy Affiliate credits, requesting comments, and offering comments, so don’t expect to spend 10 hours commenting every day earning a living wage.

Additionally, you can also make money on the Wealthy Affiliate platform after spending 90 days as a Premium member by creating training. You can write articles and/or create videos on the platform, and depending on how many people view, like, and comment on the training, it will gain experience. Once you reach certain levels, you get paid in credits which you can then cash out.

Wow, this was definitely one of my longer “is it worth it” write-ups. In short, Wealthy Affiliate is worth it because of everything you’re getting from its all-in-one platform. If you’re not going to use all the features Wealthy Affiliate provides, it might be better for you to look elsewhere.

But don’t just take my word for it, try it out! A Starter membership is completely free and will allow you to see what Wealthy Affiliate is like.

==> Click Here To Get Started At Wealthy Affiliate For FREE!

Should I Pay For Premium Plus?

A new update that many people have not talked about much yet is Wealthy Affiliate’s new Premium Plus membership.

For nearly a decade, the only two memberships at Wealthy Affiliate were the Starter and Premium memberships. Wealthy Affiliate recently added the Premium Plus membership in 2021 and thus, raised some questions for outsiders who are not up to date with Wealthy Affiliate’s new changes.

One of the most commonly asked questions is, should I pay for Premium Plus? If you don’t have an existing blog with Wealthy Affiliate generating thousands of dollars every month, the answer is no.

As much as I want you to buy stuff through my affiliate links and help me earn as much as I can, the main benefit of Premium Plus is that your keyword research tool and hosting become much more powerful; unnecessarily powerful for those who aren’t getting millions of viewers on their website.

You are getting more Expert Classes with the Premium Plus plan, but it does not justify paying double the Premium subscription. I would start with the Premium plan, build a website, and then upgrade to Premium Plus when that website is generating a couple of thousand dollars every month.

Hopefully, this small section helps those wondering what the difference was between the Premium and Premium Plus plans. Additionally, any new major Wealthy Affiliate updates will be reviewed and written below this section.

An Honest Wealthy Affiliate Review

And that does it for my honest Wealthy Affiliate review. You can make money online from blogging, and Wealthy Affiliate is a great place to get started. That being said, Wealthy Affiliate’s training is often outdated and misses out on many topics that would help you a lot in the online business world, so I didn’t give Wealthy Affiliate’s content section a high rating.

What does make Wealthy Affiliate worth it is what you’re getting in a Wealthy Affiliate Premium subscription. The community, hosting, keyword research tools, Site Comments/Feedback, and more all come in one package for only $49 per month or much less if you take advantage of yearly deals.

Are you a Wealthy Affiliate member? Let me know in the comment section below! If you have any other questions or comments, I will be happy to answer them to the best of my ability. Thank you for reading this honest Wealthy Affiliate review!