Wealthy Affiliate Review 2023

Last Updated on February 29, 2024 by Eric Cantu

This Wealthy Affiliate review for 2023 will showcase all the latest updates and substantial changes made to the affiliate marketing training platform so that this review is the most accurate and up to date you’ll find.

As a 6 year veteran of this platform, I’ll break it all down in extreme detail, transparently, honestly, and I’ll share with you proof in the numbers that the negative reviews fail to show you.

Wealthy Affiliate Review 2023

The newly streamlined 2023 Wealthy Affiliate allows new members to grow and build faster. With new free .com domain perks, better price points, and more tools, it brings more value without the high ticket pricing and red flags of the competition.

Company: Wealthy Affiliate
Price: Starter Account is Free, Premium starting at $49/month
Years in Business: 18
Community: Global, over 2.7 million members
Support: 5/5 (If I could rate Support higher I would. They’re off the charts good.)
TrustPilot score: 4.9/5
Tools/Resources: 4.8/5
Training/Classes: 5/5
Websites/Hosting: 5/5
Community: 4.5/5
Free Trial: Yes. Create your free starter account here (no credit card required)

If you have questions or disagree with any point I make, please let me know in the comments section below the article. I’m completely reasonable and I’d love to hear your feedback and questions. You can also email me. I’m happy to help.

Wealthy Affiliate is best understood visually. I highly recommend watching the detailed video review below if you have a serious interest in building revenue online.

First Things First, Why Should You Listen to Me?

I found Wealthy Affiliate on my own in January of 2017. A firefighter since 2002, I had no background in affiliate marketing and had never built a website before.

Wealthy Affiliate was the first “no nonsense” affiliate marketing training platform I found without the flashy “guru” red flags, massive upsells, and unrealistic, overnight revenue promises you see everywhere else.

Allow me to be as transparent as possible. I put my head down and followed Wealthy Affiliate’s training like a robot. As you can see from the graphic below it took me a few months to get going, but within the year I had consistent monthly revenue coming in.

You don’t build a website and earn thousands overnight. If you’ve never done this before you have to remember that there has to be a focus on learning first. It’s something I actually appreciated about the training. There was a real focus on learning.

I made my first commission 6 weeks in and received my first commission check of $254 (after I had reached the $100 threshold) at the start of my fifth month.. This is completely normal. A well made affiliate site can expect to start earning revenue inside the first 6 months.

6 years later it’s consistent as ever. Here is my commission history for the last 6 months up to the time of publishing this review.

I dedicate my time now to helping people from all over the world reach their goals by following this same training that delivered for me. It’s something I truly enjoy, and if you do decide to create a free starter account with Wealthy Affiliate you’ll have full access to me and get my full support.

The are Wealthy Affiliate success stories being made every day. The training teaches true affiliate marketing, allowing you to promote products and services in any niche of your choosing to the millions of people online actively searching for those products and services. Unlike so many other “training platforms” that focus solely on you buying and then reselling their platform, Wealthy Affiliate gives you complete freedom.

In 2023 where does Wealthy Affiliate shine and where does it falter? What are the GREAT features and what are the annoyances? What does the training really cover? Let’s dive into this Wealthy Affiliate review so you can see for yourself!

How Does Wealthy Affiliate Work?

One of the first things I noticed about Wealthy Affiliate is the all-inclusive feel to the platform. It’s a true one stop shop, allowing you to learn, train, build, and scale all from one hub.

Wealthy Affiliate takes a straightforward approach to building a business online. It teaches how to connect people with the products and services they’re already searching for in any niche of your choosing and across many platforms. There’s no need for product of your own or prior experience.

The 4 core steps to Wealthy Affiliate’s approach are:

• Choose your direction (your profitable niche based on your own interests)
• Build your niche website (taught step by step, from earliest foundations to completion)
• Drive targeted traffic to your website (you’ll learn how to create content across multiple platforms that ranks at the top of Google’s search results pages organically)
• Earn revenue and scale (monetizing your traffic, getting consistent and repeat conversions, scaling across multiple platforms, and more.)

You Can Promote Over 550 Million Products. Free.

Have you ever bought anything online? So has just about every other human being out there. There has never been such a massive demand for buying things online and with that comes a massive opportunity with affiliate marketing.

Just about every single product, service, and company online has an affiliate program that you can partner with free of charge. I’m talking the heavy hitters, too. Amazon, Walmart, Nike, eBay, Etsy, Apple, you name it.

With all the billions and billions of dollars being spent every single day online, there is a massive percentage of affiliate marketers generating revenue and commissions behind each purchase. Affiliate marketing has a market value of over $17 billion in 2023 with 83% of all marketers using affiliate marketing to raise their brand recognition.

Wealthy Affiliate connects you with the affiliate programs you’re looking for. No matter the niche and direction you’ve chosen, you’re covered.

• Easy to search and find relevant affiliate programs in your industry
• Access to over 10,000 of the highest paying and reputable affiliate programs online
• Ability to reach out directly to affiliate managers and company owners
• Manage your affiliate programs from a one central hub
• Exclusve relationships with large networks to simplify acceptance

How Long Has Wealthy Affiliate Been Around?

Created in 2005 by founders Kyle Loudoun and Carson Lim, Wealthy Affiliate’s membership is a global one that has steadily grown.

One of the huge perks to this massive online, global community of entrepreneurs is that there is always someone available to answer any question you have. There’s a live chat running 24/7 in the members area and it’s filled with other members growing their businesses. You’ll find experts in the chat helping other members daily.

• ZERO questions go unanswered.
• Network within the largest entrepreneur community in the world
• Direct access to other members, experts, Wealthy Affiliate founders, and support coaches

How GREAT is Wealthy Affiliate’s Support Team?

Before we even jump into the training, I have to say hats off to Wealthy Affiliate’s support team. Whether you’re having a minor technical hiccup, or you’re just not understanding how something works on the technical side of things, Site Support has you covered. They are friendly, respond in minutes, and are heads and shoulders above the rest.

What Are the Wealthy Affiliate Tiers of Membership?

The first new update for 2023 is that there are now 4 tiers of membership inside Wealthy Affiliate:

• Wealthy Affiliate free starter account, newly streamlined for 2023
• Wealthy Affiliate Premium
• Wealthy Affiliate Premium Plus+
• and the brand new tier of Premium Plus+ with Dedicated Server (for pros and power users)
• All Premium tiers contain 100% of the core training.

How Much Does Wealthy Affiliate Cost?

Each premium tier of Wealthy Affiliate has monthly and yearly payment options. They are set to auto-pay and you can cancel at any time from your account settings.

Monthly Premium Membership Costs:

• Premium: $49/month
• Premium Plus+: $99/month
• Premium Plus+ with Dedicated Server (for pros and power users): $399/month

Yearly Premium Membership Costs:

• Premium Yearly: $497/year ($41.42 avg. cost/month)
• Premium Plus+ Yearly: $697/year ($58.08 avg. cost/month)
• Premium Plus+ with Dedicated Server Yearly: $3990/year ($332.50 avg. cost/month)

Yearly membership offers considerable savings especially at the Premium Plus+ tier. Check out the graphic below showing yearly membership rates.

Wealthy Affiliate allows you to test drive the training first, risk free. You don’t enter payment info. It’s literally just sign up and jump in to start your test drive. You can do so directly from this post. As you’d expect, monthly membership is paid once per month and yearly membership is paid once per year on the anniversary of your enrollment.

In my opinion, Premium Plus+ yearly is the best bang for your buck deal. It cuts your dues almost half off compared to monthly. It’s what I’m enrolled at and when you’re ready to save on your membership it’s the way to go.

You can cancel at any time, and you’re free to upgrade and downgrade between the premium tiers as much as you like.

What’s Included in the Streamlined Wealthy Affiliate Free Starter Account?

Free Starter Account Lessons:

• Lesson 1: Getting Rolling
• Lesson 2: Understanding How to Make Money Online
• Lesson 3: Choose a Niche
• Lesson 4: Building Your OWN Niche Website
• Lesson 5: Congratulations and Your Next Steps

Wealthy Affiliate’s free starter account gives you access to all of Level 1 of the training along with the ability to ask questions and participate in the 24/7 live chat for 7 days. You’ll see how Wealthy Affiliate’s training is set up, how affiliate marketing works, how to choose your profitable niche, and you’ll even start building your website in lesson 4.

Previously, there were 10 lessons available in the free starter account, but this has been condensed and streamlined for 2023 to 5 lessons so you can get to the action quicker with a more direct approach.

The entire point of the free starter account is for you to test drive Wealthy Affiliate and see if it’s a good fit for you. The main question you should ask yourself during your free test drive: “Is this training a good fit for my style of learning?”

Take a sneak peek at Wealthy Affiliate’s new 2023 welcome video from inside lesson 1 below! See inside the updated members area and hear from co-founder Kyle as he walks you through the platform. (Video opens in a new window)

What New Tools are Available in the Free Starter account?

Updated for 2023, lesson 3 of Wealthy Affiliate’s free starter account introduces you to the brand new Niche Finder tool to help you choose your profitable niche. This tool is available to you from inside the Wealthy Affiliate members’ area.

Type in any interest you have and you’ll have a list of ready-to-go profitable niches to build your business around.

In this particular lesson of the starter account, Wealthy Affiliate makes it a point to emphasize that the key to choosing a profitable niche is to base it around your actual interests. This places you smack dab in the middle of your target audience and brings relatability to the content you’ll be creating. It’s also so much easier to create content around something you actually enjoy.

In Lesson 4 you’ll get your hands dirty actually building your very own website on a free siterubix domain. Think of this first website you’re creating in your free starter account like a rough draft. Once you upgrade to premium you’ll move this rough draft site to your own .com domain.

State of the Art Hosting and Websites

Where you build your website matters. Content is obviously king, but Google also ranks websites based on factors like speed, security, your core vitals. The website and hosting platform at Wealthy Affiliate is built for speed and state of the art.

This website you’re on right now is built and hosted at Wealthy Affiliate. As someone who had never built a website before my training at WA, I can say I’m beyond satisfied with the end product.

At Wealthy Affiliate all hosting costs are 100% included with your membership. Comparable hosting costs to maintain your website and keep it secure and running 24/7 with full site support would be upwards of $250-$300 month anywhere else.

What’s Included with Wealthy Affiliate Premium?

So what is unlocked when you upgrade?

If you’ve ever tried out another affiliate marketing training platform, you’ll remember the frustration you feel when you realize each and every training module is sold a la carte style, meaning you have to continue to buy each module separately with each one being more expensive than the last. Thankfully, this is is not the case with Wealthy Affiliate. Upgrading to any level of Wealthy Affiliate Premium unlocks all levels of the core training.

In these Premium levels of training Wealthy Affiliate trains you step by step on how to fill your site with engaging content, how to do keyword research to drive targeted traffic to your content, how to build and scale across multiple platforms like YouTube and other social media platforms, how to automate, and more.

Each lesson has its own video tutorial to follow along. I’m a visual learner so this made a huge difference for me. The first “a-ha” moment for me was understanding keyword research in Level 2. Driving targeted traffic to your content is a simple formula, and once you know it, traffic and revenue follow.

Additionally, as a Wealthy Affiliate Premium member you get 100% access to the Affiliate Bootcamp training. This is a 7 course, 70 lesson training for those wanting to take part in Wealthy Affiliate’s own affiliate program with recurring, high-percentage commissions and more.

Brand new for 2023 are the free .com domain perks you get when you upgrade to premium. As part of your upgrade to Premium or Premium Plus+ you’ll get either 1 or 2 free .com domains that you’ll register and own (1 free domain with Premium, 2 free domains with Premium Plus+).

Wealthy Affiliate’s premium training takes you from affiliate marketing basics like mastering WordPress and keyword research all the way to understanding and applying advanced concepts of affiliate marketing like email marketing, social media marketing, sales funnels, landing pages, scalability, outsourcing, pay-per-click campaigns, and more.

How Many Websites Can You Build as a Wealthy Affiliate Premium Member?

As a Wealthy Affiliate premium member, you can build and host multiple websites.

• Free Starter tier: Build one website on a free siterubix domain
• Premium tier: Build and host up to 3 premium websites on premium domains
• Premium Plus+ tier: Build and host up to 10 premium websites on premium domains
• Premium Plus+ w/Dedicated Server tier: Build and host up to 50 premium websites on premium domains all housed on your own dedicated server

Each website you create is basically its own business, each in its own unique niche, each potentially creating a unique stream of passive revenue for you.

What’s Included with Wealthy Affiliate Premium Plus+?

Wealthy Affiliate Premium Plus+ includes everything you get with Premium along with more tools and resources.

• Host up to 10 websites with Premium Plus+, as compared to hosting up to 3 with Premium.
• Jaaxy Enterprise is included with Premium Plus+ membership (more on Jaaxy in a second).
• Access to over 200 interactive Expert Classes live-streamed nightly, taught by expert members who share their insight and tips on countless topics so you can fast track to success and avoid the common pitfalls. (Think 1 on 1 coaching on steroids.)

Keyword research is a key aspect of affiliate marketing training. Researching the exact topics to target so you can rank on page 1 of Google’s search results and drive targeted traffic to your content is crucial to your success.

Included with your Premium Plus+ membership comes the Enterprise version of Wealthy Affiliate’s fully integrated keyword tool, Jaaxy.

Jaaxy gives you the the ability analyze data on the most popular Google searches your target audience is making, the ability to dissect the competition, and create content that ranks at the top of the Google searches. You’re taught step by step how to master this tool correctly and drive free, targeted Google traffic directly to your content.

Wealthy Affiliate’s Live Premium Plus+ Expert Classes

In my opinion, Wealthy Affiliate’s live-streamed expert classes put Wealthy Affiliate over the top. They cover a huge array of affiliate marketing topics and help you to scale your business across multiple platforms, learn expert level strategies that work, and more.

The classes are taught by experts within the community who have found success through affiliate marketing and are now sharing their insight with you.

I’m proud to be one of these experts! Personally, I’ve taught almost 100 expert classes to date covering YouTube, Instagram, WordPress, copywriting, and more. The global audience and in-class engagement is awesome!

These classes are live-streamed so you can ask questions and engage in real time with the expert and the rest of the global community watching. As a Premium Plus member you get 200+ live expert classes per year (in reality they’re almost nightly) and as a Premium Member you get access to an expert class every Friday night.

On the classes calendar Premium expert classes are shown with a purple diamond and Premium Plus+ expert classes are shown with a gold crown.

So any time you want to deep dive into an aspect of building your business, sit in on a Premium Plus+ expert class. Miss a live class? The on demand replay will be available shortly after the live stream has ended giving you the ability to pause, rewind, and go over the instruction as much as needed.

• Learn directly from expert members at WA
• Speed up your success by years, avoiding common pitfalls and following proven strategies
• Expand upon your skill set nightly
• Current training, live streamed, covering trending topics

How Does the New Tier of Premium Plus+ with Dedicated Server Work?

I’m going to be brief here because, more than likely, the new Premium Plus+ with Dedicated Server tier doesn’t apply to you just yet. This tier is for pro and power users who want to house all their successful websites under their own dedicated server.

Premium Plus+ with Dedicated Server gives you all the features of Premium Plus+ along with the ability to build and host up to 50 websites, all bringing in maximum traffic, all secure and with no hiccups or downtime to ever have to worry about. All your sites are under one hub with full 24/7 support.

Are There Extra Costs Involved with Wealthy Affiliate?

As of 2023, extra costs to get started with Wealthy Affiliate are eliminated. Before the 2023 update you used to have to purchase your first domain. But now you’re given up to 2 free .com domains as a Premium perk.

Your membership includes 100% of the core training lessons, your own support coach, live classes, a keyword research tool, all your websites, full secure hosting for each of them, a global community for questions and answers, domain email, and full 24/7 site support.

Later on as you build and scale, you are free to add any third party services you like from auto-email responders to SEO tools and more, but these aren’t needed to get started and be successful.

Are There Wealthy Affiliate Complaints?

The top complaint I see in negative Wealthy Affiliate reviews is that the training is outdated. As a 6 year veteran of the Wealthy Affiliate training, I respectfully disagree.

As I just mentioned with the Expert Classes, you can’t get more current than LIVE. If you noted on the calendar image just a few paragraphs up, the live class for March 2nd is all about AI, ChatGPT, and Bard. These are the trending topics people are wanting to learn about and the training is filled with them.

And quite honestly if Wealthy Affiliate taught outdated content I wouldn’t have had success when I started nor would I continue to have success now. To me, that’s really the bottom line. The numbers don’t lie.

I’m not saying the negative reviewers are liars or bad people, but they simply haven’t done their due diligence and research. Most have only spent a few days in the platform. Proving their points wrong can be done in seconds.

If you’d like to see me debunk point for point one of the top negative Wealthy Affiliate review’s complaints you can click on the video at the top of this article and skip to the 11:02 point of the video.

(You’re welcome.)

Where are the Areas Wealthy Affiliate Needs Work?

When you have a community as large and as global as Wealthy Afiliate’s there’s always going to be members that are a little “out there”. To that point, there are some members of the community who seem to be a part of Wealthy Affiliate purely for the social aspect of it.

Sometimes you’ll see the WA members’ area filed with WA blog posts about things completely unrelated to the platform or members using their space to bicker about utter and completely unrelated nonsense. Feel free to ignore those if you like.

That being said, Wealthy Affiliate’s community has some seriously successful experts in it who share their insight regularly. I make a point to message my referrals a list of who these experts are so they can follow them and learn from their experience.

Another thing to keep in mind as you start your journey with Wealthy Affiliate is that there is a LOT of training. If you don’t attack the training in a linear fashion (lesson 1, lesson 2, lesson 3) you could feel overwhelmed.

It’s natural, we join a group of entrepreneurs, see several succeeding, and we want to skip to the good part, right? We forget that they had to WORK to get to where they’re at, and so will you. But trust me, it’s worth it.

Final Thoughts

Straightforward and without the red flags and upsells you see in other platforms, Wealthy Affiliate delivers. All tiers of membership over-deliver with consistent value, tools, training, and support at an affordable price. Wealthy Affiliate is my #1 recommendation for learning online business.

My personal tips for success at Wealthy Affiliate:

• Put in the work and focus on learning first.
• Follow the training like a robot. Trust the system.
• Avoid shiny object syndrome. You’re given all the tools you need in the training right as you need them. Avoid thinking you’re the first brain to arrive at WA. Don’t cherry pick what lessons to follow. Follow them all!
• Ask questions. If you sign up through any of my links you have full access to me. Let me know what your goals are, what your previous hurdles have been. No question is a bad question and I’m always available to you!
• Have fun with this opportunity! Wealthy Affiliate is the best business decision I’ve ever made. This is the fun part! Enjoy the ride.

How do you feel about this updated Wealthy Affiliate review for 2023? Have I been transparent and thorough enough? What aspects of the Wealthy Affiliate platform do you still have questions about? Let me know in the questions and comments section below! I always look forward to hearing from you and I answer the questions 100% of the time.

Bottom line, you’re probably like me and make your decisions based on what you see for yourself rather than what other people tell you. Create your free starter account through any of my links on this page and see if it’s a good fit.

Look for my welcome message on your profile when you create it. It should come in around 10 minutes after you create your account. Reply to it! Let me know what your goals are and what have been the hurdles in the past that have held you back. My entire goal to get you on the fast track to success. I look forward to seeing you on the inside!