Introduction

Internet has become the biggest source of information ever. It is the information gateway that covers every imaginable subject you can think of from entertaining for every age group and culture, numerous social networks, sports of any kind and at every level, a wide range of scientific research results and reports, up to date and immediate news from local to global scale, to marketing and business of the broadest amount of products and services… you name it, and you will find it. Now, if we focus only upon marketing we will find a huge load of affiliate programs but, what is an internet affiliate marketing program?

Through this post I will answer this very common question that so many people are asking by doing a thorough review of Wealthy Affiliate, its marketing program, its biggest affiliate global community and explain you how the online affiliate marketing program is offered therein as well as all of its awesome features.

Wealthy Affiliate Platform, Main Features

The online affiliate marketing platform of Wealthy Affiliate is very extensive and as opposed to other marketing platforms online it is offered as an integral all inclusive package at no start up cost. Yes, getting started is free! No credit card needed!

It does not matter whether you are a complete newbie, if you have no experience whatsoever, if you know nothing at all about online marketing. You can still start from scratch learning and building a legit online marketing business that pays off by using the resources offered at Wealthy Affiliate and achieve the “freedom lifestyle” that so many people only dream about, where you can become your own boss and you will no longer be tied up to a 9 to 5 job.

If you can understand what I am writing about you have all it takes to sign up, Wealthy Affiliate will give you the ability to work from wherever you are, whenever you want providing you have access to a laptop, desktop, tablet or smart phone plus internet connection.

Is Wealthy Affiliate a Rip-off?

After being ripped off several times myself by so called marketing gurus that ended up only being scam masters eager for money from innocent newbies, I found Wealthy Affiliate through a promotional website. I searched for reviews about it and I found all of them had only positive comments on it. This was not a get-rich-quick offer; it did not seem to be a scam or a rip-off either, so I was attracted by the free Starter Membership offer.

All I needed was to fill out a form that only required my name and a valid email. No phone number, no address, no credit card… that was all! So I signed up as a Starter Member and immediately received a verification email. The moment I answered the email I was able to log in. Just as easy as cutting butter with a knife! Signing up and logging in was such an easy and simple way that it made me feel this time I was not going to be ripped off.

Free Offer for Starter Members

As a Starter Member I got immediate access to the 10 Lessons of Course 1 as shown in the next table:

Not only that, besides the 10 Lessons of Course 1 I had 2 free sub Domains for my own use to build a couple of websites plus hosting them at Wealthy Affiliate Servers at no cost for as long as I pleased! I could hardly believe I had received such a free gift from Kyle and Carson, the two owners of Wealthy Affiliate!

As I began learning “Lesson 1 Getting Rolling!” I witnessed the high quality of text and video in it so I read it thoroughly and watched the excellent video, completed the tasks and I was already on “Lesson 2 Understanding How to Make Money Online” which I completed (devoured I must say)!

Then I remembered something I had read as part of the free Starter Member offer: For the first 7 days after signing up I had free access to everything within the Wealthy Affiliate Platform which is reserved for Premium Members only and includes:

• Support (Live Chat, Site Support, Q & A)
o Right here is where you write down your questions about anything if you ever need answers or get stuck. You will always find community members asking, helping and/or answering questions to or from other members.

• Personal Mentoring, (even from Kyle and Carson)
o You can send Private Messages (PM) to anybody within the community, usually to the most knowledgeable people including Kyle and Carson. This is especially important if you want direct private help from the experts.

• Community
o Huge loads of people within the community are eager to help and cheer up one another, post about a wide variety of subjects, share their success stories or just welcome recent Premium Members.

• Training Courses, Step by Step
o Any person with expertise and a minimum of three months as a Wealthy Affiliate Member can post Trainings to share his/her experience. Trainings are a wealth of top quality step by step information in themselves and an easy way to go directly to any subject of the particular interest of anybody.

• Weekly Live Classes (and 100’s of hours of replays)
o Every Friday at 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time (Vancouver, B.C., Canada), Jay stars a very interesting and interactive live video presentation on a specific subject that is around one hour long with a Q&A section at the end.

• Ambassadorship Program
o Wealthy Affiliate Members participation is tracked and ranked according to the

following parameters:

 Helping other Wealthy Affiliate Members
 Creating content such as posts, pages and trainings
 General activity within Wealthy Affiliate like welcoming new members, answering messages, participating in Live Chat and so on

o Members ranked in the first 25 places are nominated Ambassadors and there are some other categories:

 Awesome Members (26 to 200)

• Online Entrepreneur Certification
o These are the 5 Courses most new affiliates start at, especially Starter Members, since the first Course’s 10 Lessons are free for them.

o The whole Programme is comprised of 5 Courses with 10 Lessons each, which sum up 50 Lessons altogether, including videos done by Kyle himself in every single Lesson.

• Affiliate Bootcamp
o Another highly popular Programme that specializes in promoting Wealthy Affiliate is Bootcamp, which takes students step by step to building excellent promotional websites.

o It is comprised of 7 Phases with 10 Lessons each, including 1 or more videos from Kyle within each one of them.

• The Affiliate Program
o This is where you can start making Money directly from Wealthy Affiliate by referring people through your social networks, email, offline friends and acquaintances, etc.

o There are some other ways to make money through Wealthy Affiliate like writing Trainings that attract an important number of visitors through time, generating passive income to the authors.

o The shares offered at Wealthy Affiliate are some of the highest I have ever known of and they are sent to affiliates on a timely basis every month.

• Networking
o At Wealthy Affiliate you can network with Community members to ask or answer questions, share successful stories or just hang around to say hi.

o Many close friendships have developed through networking between members, especially because of their interests, affinities or locations.

• Building Websites
o Well, this is the main reason why all of us join Wealthy Affiliate. We all have an interest in learning a legit online marketing method to create top quality websites that we can monetize by drawing visitors to them that can turn into potential clients and loyal customers of the products or services offered in them.

• Website Performance Tools (SiteRubix)
o SiteRubix is an amazing set of tools that takes you step by step in building your Websites by using its unique features:

 Site Manager
 Site Builder
 Site Domains
 Site Content
 Site Comments
 Site Feedback
 Site Support
• Website Engagement Platform (Site Comments)
o With this tool you connect with visitors to your websites and keep them interested in them.

o This is basic to improve your conversion rates from one time visitors to recurring visitors and potential buyers to loyal clients.

• The Hosting Platform
o Hosting is included in the Wealthy Affiliate package. You do not have to pay extra money for it as opposed to other platforms that charge separately for different services, hosting being one of the hidden costs that could amount to $25 per month or more.

• SiteContent Writing Platform
o You write down and edit your pages and posts using this most valuable and complete tool which includes spelling and grammar checks among some other helpful features like placing images wherever you want in your texts.

• Keyword Research Tool
o Keywords are extremely important to be included in titles and the first couple of paragraphs of every single page and/or post you publish in order to be better ranked by search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

o Additionally they are a great help for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

o Jaaxy is one of the new features of Wealthy Affiliate, which replaces the prior Keyword Research Tool. Jaaxy is a prime quality, hard to beat by any other Keyword Research Tool in the market due to its superb characteristics.

But this is not all Wealthy Affiliate offers; there are some other extremely useful features of the Wealthy Affiliate platform that are included at no extra cost:

• Free SSL certificate
o Typically, SSL is used to secure credit card transactions, data transfer and other sensible data from being seen by third parties. It is included as part of the integral package Wealthy Affiliate offers at no extra cost for Premium Members.

• Free site speed
o Loading speed is essential to prevent visitors to leave websites and lose potential clients. That is one of the main reasons why Wealthy Affiliate tries to optimize every website for that matter.

• Free site privacy
o Wealthy Affiliate guaranties the privacy of every Website hosted in their Servers by using some of the most sophisticated protocols and algorithms so that nobody can hack or break in.

• Free site protection
o To protect your websites from hackers, virus, malware, ransomware and any intent of attacks.

• Free site backup
o The Wealthy Affiliate team of experts backs up every website hosted in their Servers on a daily basis to prevent loses of data or even whole websites due to mismanaging or mistakes made by website masters.

• And lots of more features which otherwise would have a quite higher cost if they were bought separately elsewhere, even around $250 USD a month.

Final words

So, what is this Wealthy Affiliate platform also called Wealthy Affiliate University? Who are these people giving away this legit online marketing opportunity with $0.00 product cost for Starter Members? Will I be ripped off once again? Will I be scammed once more? I do not think so, since all they ask anybody who wants to subscribe as a Starter Member is a user name and a valid email account. No credit/debit card, no phone number, just that.

I did some research and compared Wealthy Affiliate University to other online marketing courses, affiliate programs, hosting platforms, networking and so on and so for and I found Wealthy Affiliate surpasses them in quality and amount of educational materials, support, community interaction, website hosting and security, but especially price, due to the fact that it all comes as an integral package for Premium Members that includes all of the items in the above list for less than 20% of what it would cost elsewhere for the same items. Am I dreaming? I pinched myself, I slapped myself… no, I am not dreaming, I am awake and this is real.

After my personal research browsing the internet I made up my mind and decided to “take a look”, so I subscribed as a Starter Member and what I saw… well, just blew my mind! Course 1 included 10 superb, clear, simple Lessons, quite easy to understand even for a newbie like me who had no previous knowledge of internet marketing, each with a video and some tasks to be done before going to the next Lesson.

I also realized that during the first 7 days as a free Starter Member I was allowed to check the whole platform. My jaw was down to the floor when I began browsing the huge amount and wealth of information offered. For 7 days I was able to even send and receive personal communication with Kyle and Carson, which I did, the owners of the platform!

I read some posts and trainings written by Wealthy Affiliate community members giving advice and offering their expertise to whoever may benefit from or need them as part of the pay it forward philosophy of the platform. I realized that the community here is full of nice, collaborative, knowledgeable, people eager to help one another.

I also found this platform works great if you follow their advice of learning the Lessons in an orderly way so you do not skip any important issues and put what you are learning into practice as you build your first website.

Something they make clear from the very beginning is that this is not a get-rich-quick offer. They do not provide magic software that you just install and start making lots of money and thus become rich in a matter of days and ends up being just not more than scam.

What they do emphasize is that if you want to be successful in making money online you have to stick to the learning process and begin your hard work, constant, legit work. They also let you know from the beginning that there are no immediate results. In order to monetize your website, first you need to build a scheme: optimize it for search engines (SEO) like Google, Yahoo and Bing; look for competitive keywords to include in the titles and body of every post you write, do a lot of quality writing, include images, calls to action (CTA), develop a strategy to attract visitors and lead them from potential buyers to loyal clients… As you can see, there is indeed a lot of work.

As Chris –my Mentor, the person who referred me to Wealthy Affiliate- states:

“One important point that I want to make very clear is that making money online takes work. There is no “turn-key” method out there folks (believe me, I’ve looked!). The real name for a get rich quick program is a “scam”. Everything in life worth having takes real effort to get.
What I’m showing you here takes REAL WORK. If you are willing to put in the work and effort then keep reading. If not, then I don’t know what to tell you…”

“Notice the picture, the guy on the bottom gave up too early and lost out. You want to be the guy on top, making money online is possible, but you need good training and support! Never Stop Trying!”

Last but not least, if you have any questions, doubts, comments, complaints or else; I can be reached through the comments section of this post or at https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/eosegueraf and I will be more than happy to help you work them out.

Thanks for reading!

Eugenio.