Wealthy Affiliate – My Thoughts

Internet Marketing / , , /

Some History

When I started my foray into Internet Marketing, I was hungrily eating up all the information that I could from every source I could find. It didn’t take me long to realize that a lot of this information was either incomplete, scant in information or just very wrong.

Not only that but I bought all the ebooks and WSO’s and all that stuff, never the really expensive ones, as I didn’t have the money for them, but still I bought them and some were pretty good, but most were average at best. It wasn’t long before I realized that this wasn’t the way to go and I felt like all that internet marketing was, was people trying to sell you the dream of internet marketing without actually giving you anything that would help you succeed.

So I stopped buying the ebooks, stopped searching for information. In some ways I had given up though I was still hopeful that the sites I had could turn a profit.

It was a while later when I was reading through one of the numerous IM emails that landed in my inbox everyday that I came across Raymond Selda, a Filipino guy whose blog spoke to me not as someone trying to sell me something but just of his story in Internet Marketing and his struggles and successes.

It was here that I first heard of Wealthy Affiliates.  I’d love to say that I instantly went out and became a member but that isn’t true, I sat on the fence for months wondering if this was just another scam, but one that would cost me $47! So I waited, and I was so tempted to sign up, to see if this was the thing that could help me to break out of the rut and actually start earning money, but I didn’t.

Then in November there was a deal I simply couldn’t resist, the first month for just $1 – bargain! So I signed up there and then.  Inside Wealthy Affiliate I found just tons of information – not the half baked info I was getting from the ebooks and WSOs but a full plan of action, tools and nuggets of information everywhere. In the first 10 minutes I thought to myself, “Why the hell didn’t you sign up earlier?!?”.

Goodies

Ok, so let me run you through some of the features:

Live Chat

You will find me here most days and I think that this is worth the $47 a month fee alone. Imagine being able to talk to successful, knowledgable Internet Marketers in real time, asking questions and advice about your site and business. Well you can! I have learnt more from this chat in a few weeks than all the ebooks and Google searching I did over 6 months prior to joining.

30 Day Success Plan

A fast paced (though its fine to fall behind, I did it all the time) action plan, sent to you by email but available on the site. This plan teaches you how to get a site up and running and to start promoting your niche and affiliate product via article marketing.

Free Hosting

If you want to cut your costs a bit WA offer free hosting for the life of your membership, up to 3 sites for the normal membership and unlimited for the Platinum membership.

Keyword Research Tool

Though you can do all your keyword research in Google Keywords, the tool here is useful, cutting out some of the leg work and allowing you to group and save researched items.

Link Cloaking Tool

A free way to cloak your affiliate links so that they say something user friendly and it also track the clicks as well. Really useful tool.

WAbinars

These are great for visual learners and just as good for text based learners like me. These happen live once a week, and are saved so that if its 3am your time when they go out (I sometimes consider moving to America just because of time zone issues) then you can watch them at your leisure. These are full of incredibly useful tidbits of info from branding, to backlinks, social media, you name it and you could literally spend hours and hours watching them. Oh and these videos are only available inside WA, no where else.

Training Documentation

Written training material on a variety of topics, such as article and email marketing, PPC and SEO. You will once again more find a ton of information to digest, learn from and take action with.

Forum

The forum is world renown and contains well over 400,000 posts. Pretty much any question you want answered will have an answer here and if not, simply ask the question. Invaluable research and problem solving tool.

This is by no means the full list, just what I regularly use and benefit from.

No B.S.

One thing that I have discovered is that Wealthy Affiliate doesn’t bullshit you. Theres no ‘follow this guide and you’ll get rich’ mentality. Its follow this guide, work really HARD and you will succeed, or not. Sometimes failures happen, take it on the chin and try again in a different niche or with a different angle. The aim is to keep trying until you find the formula that works for you, because there certainly isn’t a magic formula out there, that’s for sure.

But with Wealthy Affilate, the tools, the information and the support is right there for you, to help you get over the mistakes and insecurities, to help you pick up the pieces after something didn’t work and to share in your triumphs and successes.

To me Wealthy Affiliate isn’t just about the training and information available, its about the community, that’s something I never found outside of it and thats something no one new in any industry can be without or you will just float around without much focus like I did.

If your still not sure about Wealthy Affiliate, I would say don’t buy any WSOs or ebooks or whatever for a month, and spend the money on one months membership of Wealthy Affiliate, that way you can see first hand exactly what’s on offer, and trust me it’s a hell of a lot.