Affiliate Marketing best explained
Affiliate marketing is a pretty popular approach to making some money on the side as it’s relatively low-effort and potentially very profitable. By low-effort, we don’t mean that it’s a form of passive income – some work is still required – but it’s not a hustle and grind. And by profitable, we mean that five-figure monthly incomes are not unheard of and there are plenty of people who make enough money from it to quit their 9-5.
Wealthy Affiliate can help you to achieve results like these. To be clear, it is certainly not a get-rich-quick scheme and they won’t do the work for you. However, they will provide you with the tools you need, teach you how to use them and provide ongoing support to help you develop a sustainable income through affiliate marketing and potentially become a wealthy affiliate yourself.
Important features of Wealthy Affiliate
First and foremost, Wealthy Affiliate is an educational platform. It takes that old saying that if you give a man a fish you feed him for a day, but teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime and applies it to affiliate marketing. It does so by providing on Online Entrepreneur Certification, consisting of five courses of 10 lessons each, with additional training courses available. Combined, they form a step-by-step guide that will take you from setting up your website and optimising it for search engines to signing up for affiliate programmes and adding affiliate links to your content and so on.
It’s important to stress that ‘online training’ does not mean a few pdf files and YouTube videos – the courses are interactive and require some input from to prove that you properly understand what you are being taught. You can even follow along with the process and build your business as you go through each class, giving you a lot more than just a digital certificate at the end of the training.
As impressive as this feature is, the star feature of Wealthy Affiliate is the community. You will inevitably have questions related to your own specific circumstances while you are setting up and running your affiliate marketing business and WA is there to help you, both in the form of real-time support from the team of nearly 2,000 expert coaches behind it and from more than 1.4 million fellow members, ranging in experience from absolute newbies to affiliate marketing veterans. Wealthy Affiliate is pitched as a platform for everyone, regardless of your experience level, and the diverse community is the best possible proof of that claim.
But teaching a man to fish will only get him so far, and he can have the whole village behind him suggesting improvements to his technique, but he still won’t catch anything without a rod and tackle. Fortunately, Wealthy Affiliate provides these, too. They have in-house web hosting and domain registration with live support along the way so that you can get these annoyingly technical steps in the process as quickly and easily as possible.
Of course, you then need to make sure you’re fishing in the right part of the river (is this metaphor starting to get a little stretched?) – by which we mean that you need to optimise your site to get as much traffic onto it as possible. Again, Wealthy Affiliate provides the tools to help you, with a keyword research tool and further training and support.
How does Wealthy Affiliate work?
Wealthy Affiliate uses the ‘freemium’ business model, which means that you can get the basics of their services for free but have to pay for a monthly membership if you want the more advanced stuff. From the moment you enter your email address on the home page to create a free account, you have access to, among a few others:
- Beginner Training Course
- Affiliate Bootcamp Training (Phase 1 only)
- Live help (for seven days)
- 1-on-1 coaching (for seven days)
- Video walkthroughs
- Support and backup for two websites
- Keyword Research Tool (30 searches)
- Affiliate programme
While that is enough to theoretically get you started, it limits or prevents your access to some of the most helpful features. However, it does give you a taste of what is available, allowing you to make your own value judgement and decide if Wealthy Affiliate is for you. If it is, you can then take a look at the options for signing up for a premium membership, which costs just $49 per month. This will give you, among plenty of others:
- Beginner Training Course
- Affiliate Bootcamp Training (all seven phases)
- Live video classes
- Unlimited 1-on-1 coaching
- Video walkthroughs
- Live help
- Private messaging
- Webinars
- Support and backup for up to 50 websites
- Keyword Research Tool (unlimited searches)
- Affiliate programme (with double the payout)
- Round-the-clock website support
- Website feedback platform
- Website analysis
There is an unfortunate perception that Wealthy Affiliate will provide a massive amount of instant income – at least enough to live on if, for example, you’ve just lost your job. Where exactly this perception came from is a bit of a mystery because they never claim that to be the case. It possibly came from inexpert promotion by their own affiliates. As listed above, one of the features of the site is that you can sign up to be an affiliate of Wealthy Affiliate, so there are plenty of people promoting the site in blogs and on YouTube, some of whom may be overselling it. As a result, you will inevitably find some disgruntled ex-members posting reviews that claim the system didn’t work for them.
Sure enough, it won’t work for everyone because it requires you to put a bit of work in. You need to have an idea of what kind of content you would like to write, at which point the coaches and community can help you set up your website and monetise your idea. At no point does the website claim that you can be racking in tens of thousands of dollars within your first month. They are realistic about your prospects, saying that even following their training and advice to the letter, it could take months and potentially years before you start seeing significant returns. What they do stress, however, is that patience and persistence is rewarded.
Wealthy Affiliate Website Builder
Probably the most convenient tool in the many that Wealthy Affiliate provides is the website builder. Setting up a website is easier than ever these days, but it still has a habit of kicking up complications that it takes a technical expert to solve. Every step of the process can be a hassle, if you’re new to web design. Setting up the hosting, linking it with the domain name, designing the look of the site, getting the back-end setup right, using the right size of images and so on – it’s all highly technical and complicated and involves a lot of very specialised language that makes it an almost impenetrable world to the layman.
What’s especially annoying is that this one hurdle – getting your website set up – is all that stands between you and the significantly easier and potentially very profitable process of writing your blog. It is such a massive hurdle for many that it can end your dreams before they’ve even begun.
Fortunately, the Wealthy Affiliate Website Builder does significantly ease this process. Not only is is a pretty simple system, allowing you to make very impressive sites without the need for a degree in computer sciences, but all of the tools are in one place. You have the hosting, domain registration, site builder and even additional tools like keyword research and analytics all in a single place, meaning that there’s no confusion about how to integrate one with the other. There are plenty of site themes to choose from, so there’s little risk of your site looking like just another cookie-cutter design. Most importantly of all, you have constant support to help with any and all technical challenges.
Wealthy Affiliate vs Udemy
As we said before, the educational aspect is the most important part of Wealthy Affiliate. You could, in theory, run through the courses available and then cancel your premium membership and go set up your own website. Alternatively, you could go to training sites like Udemy and get access to some very good courses by proven instructors. However, you would be missing out on those all important features.
We’ll avoid reverting to the fishing analogy again here, but the reality is that what Wealthy Affiliate provides that Udemy doesn’t is ongoing support. A Udemy course will show you how one person achieved success, illustrating only one specific approach which may or may not be repeatable. By contrast, with access to thousands of coaches and community members, Wealthy Affiliate provides a near-infinite array of variety, with the added advantage that you can directly ask for clarification and feedback – something which Udemy does not provide.
And, of course, there are those all-important tools. Alongside a course on affiliate marketing, you would need take further courses in web design and IT in order to get your site set up as well as another in SEO to get it ranking in Google’s search results. All of these tools are provided by Wealthy Affiliate.
Wealthy Affiliate vs Affilorama
Affilorama is roughly comparable to Wealthy Affiliate in terms of what it offers. Like WA, it claims to help you to set up an affiliate marketing business of your own. Like WA, they even help out with the website design – they’ll even design the site for you and seed it with a bit of content. Sadly, this is not the boon it may sound like.
What Affilorama lacks that Wealthy Affiliate provides is the community. With well over a million active members, the knowledge and experience you can draw from is constantly refreshed, adapting to changes in digital trends. By contrast, the training and even the websites of Affilorama are increasingly outdated. They also lack many of the tools that Wealthy Affiliate boasts and the optional training courses are very expensive – comparable in price to a full year’s membership of Wealthy Affiliate, where all the training is included.
Some final thoughts
Thanks to those inaccurate perceptions mentioned above, it’s important to stress that Wealthy Affiliate will inevitably not suit everyone. If you’re looking for a way to get rich quick or you need to immediately replace a recently lost income, you are better off looking elsewhere. However, if you are looking for a side hustle that could eventually become your primary source of income, you won’t find many better options.
The system is not without its flaws. Most notably, not all of the over 1.4 million members are experts and, as with any community, you will inevitably come across those you don’t get along with. However, the fact that the community has so many success stories and is also supplemented by thousands of experienced coaches means that the overwhelming majority of the support available will be helpful to you.
If you are willing to put the work in to make your affiliate marketing business a success, then Wealthy Affiliate will certainly help you to become a wealthy affiliate. It will remove the most frustrating obstacles to getting started, which is certainly one of the most important features. However, once you’re on the other side of that hurdle, it will then continue to support you, helping you to fine-tune your site, your content and every aspect of your business. Not bad for $49 per month, eh?