What Is Wealthy Affiliate?
Wealthy Affiliate is a platform designed to teach people how to make money by marketing websites online.
They designed their platform to allow anyone to succeed, even those without technical knowledge or prior experience with marketing or website building.
How Does Wealthy Affiliate Work?
The core of Wealthy Affiliate is to teaching you how to make money by making and marketing websites through the use of affiliate programs.
To accomplish this, Wealthy Affiliate provides training, hosting, and a community to help you succeed with your efforts. I’ll expand on each of those in the next section.
What Type of Training Does Wealthy Affiliate Have?
A picture of Wealthy Affiliate’s OEC Level 1 course image. There are five courses total in the OEC training.
Online Entrepreneurship Course – This is the foundation training course of Wealthy Affiliate and it’s where they take you from zero experience to having a website that you’re actively marketing.
It consists of five different levels/courses with 10 lessons each. Each lesson consists of written and video instructions showing you what to do.
At the end of the lesson there are tasks for you to accomplish before continuing to the next lesson. It’s very much a process of learning by doing.
Wealthy Affiliate gives free access to their first level/course which consists of getting a website setup and starting to research topics for your website.
Screen shot of the WA Classes page
Classes – These are training webinars covering different topics as they relate to building, marketing, and monetizing websites.
You can think of them as the equivalent of continuing education. They help keep you up to date and cover topics not addressed in the Online Entrepreneurship Courses.
The classes are both live and recorded. If you can’t make a live class for whatever reason, then it’s recorded for you to access at your convenience.
They even have a comment section where the recordings are placed which allows you to ask questions after the fact.
Classes are hosted by a select group of people who have proven success with affiliate marketing.
Training classrooms
Classrooms – These are collections of videos, course, and tutorials about various topics. Here you’ll find community-generated training that will show you the nitty-gritty of how to do specific tasks.
Wealthy Affiliate community members will often creating training showing other members how to do specific things or explain various topics.
Hosting
Wealthy Affiliate “Website” drop down menu where you can access all aspects of WA’s hosting platform.
Wealthy Affiliate provides a managed WordPress Hosting platform which allows you to easily set up a WordPress website. Having their own hosting platforms enables Wealthy Affiliate to support its members in resolving website related issues.
It’s not required to use Wealthy Affiliate hosting, but some features such as Site Content, Site Comments, and Site Feedback are integrated with WA hosting. If you want to use those features, then you’ll need to host your website at WA.
I won’t explain every detail of their hosting, as I’ve already covered it extensively in my Wealthy Affiliate review, but I will cover what I consider to be the main items:
First step of Wealthy Affiliate’s Site Builder tool.
“Site Builder” – WA’s Website Builder – This gives you the ability create a WordPress website with a few clicks that you will use throughout the Online Entrepreneur Courses.
Each time you want to create a website you just use the tool and your new website is ready to go in just a few minutes.
The Site Domains page at Wealthy Affiliate.
Domains – You can register a domain through Wealthy Affiliate, use an existing domain you already have, or register a domain at the domain registrar of your choice.
They’ll even let you setup a website using a subdomain of their SiteRubix.com domain. This lets you get your hands dirty with building a website without having to spend money on a domain.
If you take advantage of their free 7-day trial Starter membership, then you could even get your hands dirty with working on a WordPress website without any money.
Where you manage your email at Wealthy Affiliate.
Email – They allow you to host email for your domains.
Community
The WA community is what separates WA from its competitors. The WA community is a very “pay-it-forward” type of community in that we are actively helping each other out with any issues that pop up.
When you join WA you not only get the training, but you get the full force of the WA community to power you through any problem. It’s a great source of inspiration as well.
Interaction with the community takes the form of Personal Bogs, Asking Questions, and Live Chat, each of which I’ll elaborate on below.
My Wealthy Affiliate Blog
Personal Blogs – Within Wealthy Affiliate, you’ll have your own profile area. This profile contains a place for you to blog.
This blog is different from the niche websites that you will learn to build and will show up in the feeds of other Wealthy Affiliate members when they’re signed in.
The best way to think of it is it’s very similar to how Facebook and LinkedIn works with regard to posting. The types of posts vary from member to member, but the blogs of successful members can provide valuable information.
Where you can submit questions to be answered by the community.
Ask a Question – If you’re stuck on something, then this is a place for you to type a question, elaborating details, and select the relevant classroom to post it in. Other members will see this question pop in their feed and will answer if they think they have something useful to contribute.
Some members ask questions on their blogs and in Live Chat which is perfectly acceptable as well. The biggest difference with the Ask a Question feature is the question gets placed in a classroom where it makes it easier for others to find in the future.
A Live Chat happening at the time of this screen shot.
Live Chat – This is a feature that allows you to chat directly with other members in real time whether it’s to shoot the breeze, ask for help, or help others. You even see Kyle, one of the owners of Wealthy Affiliate, in Live Chat chatting with people.
Private Message area of Wealthy Affiliate.
Private Message – You are able to private message other members. This gives you the ability to converse with other members about things that you might not feel comfortable talking about in public on the WA platform.
Private Message also doubles as the Site Support ticketing system. Once you put in a Site Support ticket, further responses from support or two support are received and sent through the private messaging system.
Wealthy Affiliate’s Affiliate Program
Wealthy Affiliate does have it’s own affiliate program for people to promote and they have a separate training course called the Affiliate Bootcamp which is focused solely on promoting Wealthy Affiliate.
If you’re new to affiliate marketing, then this might seem a little weird until you learn that major box store retailers such as Wal-Mart and Target also have affiliate programs. In fact, it’s more likely than not that the last website you bought something from has an affiliate program.
It would almost be weird for a website that teaches you how to do affiliate marketing to not have one. With that being said, they do encourage people to start off promoting things other than Wealthy Affiliate.
Summary
As you can see, Wealthy Affiliate is a community designed to help you learn how to build and market websites with the goal of earning money with those websites.
Wealthy Affiliate created supporting structures of training, hosting, and an active community to help you make your websites profitable.
Put simply, they try to remove as many as the road blocks they could that might prevent you from creating a profitable website.