With all the online opportunities out there, it can be hard to decipher which ones are scams and which ones are legit. This Wealthy Affiliate Scam Review will focus on answering the question: “What is the Wealthy Affiliate scam?” Or do real results prove that Wealthy Affiliate is absolutely worth it?
There are countless online “systems” that promise to train you on how to make money online. Many claim to be “full proof”, with spokespeople telling you how they went from coffee shop to mansion. And with their “full proof” system usually comes a very hefty price tag.
And then there is Wealthy Affiliate. No glitz, no glamour. And an offer of a free test drive of their platform which promises to be the best training platform and mentoring community for anyone looking to build a successful online business.
This Wealthy Affiliate Scam Review is going to cover the following:
- Is the Wealthy Affiliate test drive really free?
- What do you get with your Wealthy Affiliate free starter account?
- Is there eventually an upsell to premium? How much will it cost you?
- What do you get with Wealthy Affiliate’s premium training?
- How much bang for your buck do you get? Is Wealthy Affiliate worth it?
With this Wealthy Affiliate Scam Review I’m going to show you how Wealthy Affiliate turned me from skeptic to believer. I’ll show you point by point why it is now my #1 recommendation for anyone looking to start an online business. I’ll share my personal $4k/month results & show you how to get the most bang for your buck.
Is the Wealthy Affiliate Test Drive Really Free?
That’s a screenshot from the Wealthy Affiliate enrollment page. To get started all you enter is your email address. There is no payment information required. It’s really free.
This stands out to me. With most “freemium” trials you enter payment information. This isn’t the case at Wealthy Affiliate. It’s free to start and you can stay free as long as you like.
You, of course, you don’t get 100% of Wealthy Affiliate’s training with the free starter account. It is, after all, called a “starter account”. Some of the Wealthy Affiliate complaints I’ve seen claim to be misled by this. Truly though, it is clearly labeled as a starter account, and it wouldn’t make sense to give it all away free from a business standpoint, so there’s no real surprise here.
- So how much do you get with the free training?
- Is it a “look but don’t touch” kind of trial, or can you start building?
The picture below is a screenshot of the training tab inside the Wealthy Affiliate members’ area. The two main training curriculums inside WA are the Online Entrepreneur Certification (50 lessons) & the Affiliate Bootcamp (70 lessons).
What Do You Get With Your Free Starter Account?
The course lessons at Wealthy Affiliate are all about teaching you how to build an affiliate marketing business in any niche you choose. Affiliate marketing is all about connecting the largest possible audience online with what they’re searching for. Don’t confuse it with network marketing. Thankfully Wealthy Affiliate has nothing to do with downlines, recruiting, or a pyramid scheme.
Through affiliate marketing and tools they provide, Wealthy Affiliate promises to guide you from start to finish in building your own successful online business through its 4 core steps:
The lessons you have access to with your starter account get you started building your website. Here are the first 10 lessons you have access to in the OEC (Online Entrepreneur Certification).
These lessons, each with video tutorials and tasks to complete before continuing to the next lesson, are much more thorough than I thought they would be for a free account. You’re not going to complete all these in a day or two. These are in depth course lessons. The first ones explain how WA works, how affiliate marketing works, and then you actually start building out your website.
I was quite impressed with this.
As you can also see, Lesson 3 is about choosing a niche. This means you have full creative control over what your online business is going to be about. Most platforms I’ve reviewed are 100% about promoting their content and don’t give you that choice.
Particularly eye opening is Lesson 9 on keywords. Even with your free account you’re get access to understanding how to target the largest audiences possible for your niche and start using the integrated keyword research tool.
When it comes to building your website, you’ll have it live in less than a minute. It’s built on a free siterubix domain, meaning your url will have “.siterubix.com” at the end of it. Should you choose to go premium and buy your own domain, you’ll be able to move the website and its contents over to your own .com, .net, or .org domain with the touch of a button.
Did I mention I was impressed with this?
I’ve never built a website before and I left these lessons not only happy with the ease of doing so, but I also felt like I completely understood how I was going to scale this business for the future.
With your starter account you also get access to the first 10 lessons of the Affiliate Bootcamp. These are closely related to the OEC training, but are for those who are maybe having trouble choosing an interest or niche they would like to pursue. With the Bootcamp course, you get a preselected niche to build in: the “make money online” niche.
So What’s the Catch With the Free Starter Account? Are There Upsells?
Yes, from the free starter account there is the upsell to a premium account. However, unlike other training platforms I’ve reviewed, Wealthy Affiliate takes a completely different approach to this.
I thought the upsell would get me access to the next 10 lessons, with more expensive upsells to follow as I got deeper into the training. Instead, the upsell to premium actually gives you access to ALL of Wealthy Affiliate’s training available.
After going premium, there wasn’t one area inside the platform I couldn’t get into. Going premium also unlocks Wealthy Affiliate’s weekly live webinar training. These occur weekly on Friday nights, and if you miss the live class you get access to the replay starting the next day. I checked this catalog of replays and there’s easily over 300 hours of training covering a wide array of topics.
I checked every corner of this platform looking for upsells and the only additional costs I could find in the platform are for registering your own paid domain and another for unlocking additional features in their free integrated keyword research tool called Jaaxy.
The domain upsell is actually a really good deal. Your own .com, .net, or .org domain will cost you only $13.99-$15.99 per year with Wealthy Affiliate. There are enough features included with their hosting package that the same type of hosting could easily cost $150-200/month elsewhere.
How Much Does It Cost When You Upgrade to Premium?
This is the real kicker. This premium upsell is all of $19. Click here to see everything you get.
A normal upsell for a training platform like this is somewhere in the ballpark of $99-$299 with several training modules to follow anywhere from 2x to 10x the cost of the original buy in. This can literally lead to someone paying tens of thousands of dollars for training. Wealthy Affiliate’s upsell is $19 for your first month of premium. After that your monthly premiums would be $49/month, with a yearly membership upgrade option that actually cuts your dues in half to around $29/month.
What Do You Get With Wealthy Affiliate’s Premium Training?
You will get 100% of the training Wealthy Affiliate has to offer with no upsells. You get expansive training in affiliate marketing , step by step guidance in website building, spectacular hosting packages, community support, live training from experts, endless classrooms, forums, member training, and much more. It is set up for both the absolute newbie & experienced marketer to thrive.
Click here to see everything that comes with Wealthy Affiliate Premium
To be 100% honest with you, in my time reviewing online scams this is the most affordable all inclusive deal I’ve come across.
Wealthy Affiliate Scam Review Summary
Ladies and gentlemen, in my humble opinion you are getting quite a lot of training for your buck with Wealthy Affiliate. As the training progresses you go from the basics all the way to expert level strategies. Email marketing, social media marketing, traffic building, conversions, landing pages, squeeze pages, email autoresponders, Pay Per Click Campaigns, and much, much more are covered.
Not only are the main training curriculums thorough, but you also get member training, hundreds of forums with training available, and a global community to help you when you need it. Members regularly message you, welcome you, congratulate you on your accomplishments, check in just to see how you’re doing, etc.
What started as something I was skeptical about turned into a real business in a number of months. Don’t get me wrong. There’s work involved. Google doesn’t just take you to the top after you choose an audience to target and come up with a cool domain name. You have to be consistent, build quality content, create a positive user experience, and more. But you’re trained on exactly how to do it every step of the way.
I’d say that $19 first month investment turned out very well.
My Recommendation
My recommendation would be to create your free starter account through the link at the bottom of this page and try out a couple of the lessons. Check out a couple of the video tutorials and see if it’s all your speed. Then, take full advantage of the $19 first month. Take that full month to learn as much as you can and see how far our progress.
If you fall in love with the community and training, either stay with the monthly membership or upgrade to the yearly membership and save. It’ll cut your membership dues almost in half down to an average of $29/month. And if you feel after a month that it’s not for you, you can always walk.
It will have only cost you $19 and for as much as you got for your buck, I can’t see anyone being upset at that.
Feedback
Have any questions for me? Feel free to ask away in the comments section below. I always reply and I’d love to hear your story. What brought you here? Have you tried out other platforms with no success? Have you been taken for a ride by one of those other platforms looking to slowly empty your bank account? Let me know and I’ll be happy to offer my help in every way I can.
Hi Eric, I liked your approach with this review of Wealthy Affiliate. With there being so many scams out there on the internet today, it is hard to trust anything or anyone, and I like how you answered the main questions I had with regards to WA. I’ll be checking it out with the free start as soon as I submit this comment! Great Article, thank you.
Welcome aboard! I look very forward to helping you in every way I can 🙂
I like your approach with this Wealthy Affiliate review. I’ve gotten into some bad deals before and I’m always a little nervous when a new opportunity comes around. Thanks for your honesty and for sharing your results. Really got me excited now! A $4k month in the first year is well worth it!
Thank you for sharing your honesty. For me Wealthy Affiliate has been everything I wanted and more. I can’t recommend it highly enough, and the best way for me to show that it works is to show that the training delivers. That $4k month was huge for me. Thanks so much for the comment!
I like that WA offers a free course. What better way to show confidence in what the company is selling than to offer a what seems like a trial period to examine the product before purchasing. They put it out there, some of what they offer, and respect the buyer enough to not keep them in suspense on what it is they are buying into. WA has my full respect.
When I found the free starter account to be legit, I was sold. It’s my top recommendation for its refreshing, straightforward approach, and I fully stand behind my backing of Wealthy Affiliate. Thanks for the comment!
This looks like what I’m looking for. Is the wealthy affiliate online platform really set up for newbies like me? I’ve dived into new concepts before and then almost quit but I’m so motivated for this to work if I give it a shot. With the help of training I think I could do it.
Absolutely! This training is the best I’ve found online and it works for newbies and online veterans alike. I think you’ll have a great time with the training and community especially. Get started! I can’t wait to do everything I can to help you out 🙂
Hello Eric, did you know about affiliate marketing prior to the training with Wealthy Affiliate?
No, none at all. In fact, whenever I saw the “affiliate” tab at the bottom of sits like Amazon, or Best Buy, I honestly thought it was more for employees of the company or something. Learning about partnering with merchants and affiliate programs really blew me away. This training was very eye opening to me and I never looked back 🙂 Thanks for the question!
Hi Eric,
No beat about the bush here on this article. Great review! You have hit on all the major points I’ve been looking into, no question there. I like the way you write it is a no-nonsense type of writing, it’s great. Is the offer still up for being my personal 1 on 1 coach? I’m a self motivated person, but just in case I have some questions…
Thanks for the great review
Regards
Janet
Absolutely, Janet. That’s what I’m here for. Going through any of my links locks me in as your coach and I’m more than happy to help answer any questions you have, big or small. Thanks so much for the kind words!
Hi,
Thank you for reviewing Wealthy Affiliate. I’ve been looking into similar training platforms, but you just don’t know anymore with these online courses, they all seem to be worried about just sales… But then this free trial comes up and I see a difference. Thanks for breaking down exactly how this all works. I’m looking forward to giving it a shot.
Thanks for chiming in. Agreed. The free try was exactly what drew me in, and once inside, I never looked back. I look forward to helping you in every way I can 🙂
Dear Eric,
Your article was spot on. All I ever find in my searches are training platforms that cost a fortune and their “coaching call” sounds way more like a sales call to me. Is there any kind of weird coaching call involved? I love that there are no upsells. Thank you for putting this together. Have you helped many people like me who were brand new?
We’ve all been there. All over social media I see the hype machines. The fact is you need straightforward training to build a successful business, and you can’t buy shortcuts. And to answer your question, no there are no weird coaching calls that turn into sales calls, lol. I’ve helped people from all over the world get started, and the vast majority are people like me and you starting out for the very first time. I really look forward to seeing you on the inside 🙂 Take care!