Wealthy Affiliate – The Open Education Project

My Thoughts About Wealthy AffiliateIt’s been a little while now since I wrote my original Wealthy Affiliate review and much has changed since then. A lot! Just for completeness sake, let me tell you a little story about me and my history with WA.

I started out in Internet Marketing (IM) by accident, purely as a by product of me trying to find a way to support myself as I couldn’t find employment in my newly adopted home (I moved abroad). As you may know yourself from experience, starting out in IM is a treacherous and confusing situation. You tend to get offered tons and tons of information, most of it garbage and out of date and the few diamonds in the rough tend to get overlooked easily due to inexperience and the sheer mass of information.

And that’s exactly how it was for me, until I stumbled upon a honestly written blog by a chap called Raymond Selda, in which he talked about his own journey into Internet Marketing and how he was a member of Wealthy Affiliate.

Well it took me some time and a special offer ($1 for a month!) before I finally took the plunge and joined Wealth Affiliate, and I haven’t looked back since.

Anyway, back at the farm, Wealthy Affiliate was focused heavily around their famous forum when I joined, it having something like over 130,000 posts on it. Sooo much information, I kind of felt like I was back at the beginning with information overload!

The beauty of WA though is that it is not just built around a slab of information but around a community of like minded people all trying to do the same thing, grow an online business and making it succeed. So whilst being able to read through the forum and watch the myriad of WAbinars (webinars, get it?) you can also talk to people who have succeeded in IM and ask them questions, and other people who are at a similar level to you, and those who might not know as much as you, you can help. Pay it forward. There are that many people there with differing skills its quite easy to partner up with people for different projects. I have done it a few times now already for some small projects, with a big one in the pipeline.

Wealthy Affiliate has now had a radical makeover, lots of new, shiny toys to play with and more in the pipeline. They are always focusing much more heavily on training resources and teaching methods, The Open Education Project (OEP).

In order to help spread the word about their offerings WA has done something that no other Internet Marketing community has done before (that I know of at least), they are opening the doors, no holds barred, for 10 days for FREE. So you get to test drive the new site, read the literature, talk business on live chat (or just shoot the breeze!) and watch all the WAbinars.

FULL ACCESS.

FOR 10 DAYS.

FOR FREE!

Pretty good deal if you ask me. So I thought that it might be a good idea to give you a little tour of the site, so that if you do fancy trying it out you aren’t completely lost.

An Overview

When you first log into Wealthy Affiliate you arrive at the dashboard. It has a little bit of a Facebook feel (well before this timeline stuff anyway) with a navigation menu on the left, a news feed in the middle and live chat on the right.

Wealthy Affiliate Dashboard PageThe Timeline

This is a really good way to stay informed, and you have three flavours of it:

  • Global Activity – Whenever someone blogs, adds a forum post or adds training, it hits this stream. It also shows everyone’s activity not only those in your network (see below for more info on that)
  • Personal Feed – does the same as above but only for those people that you follow, so you can keep tabs on what your favourite WA’ers are up to.
  • My Notifications – Alerts you whenever someone comments on your posts, or when there is activity on a post you commented on.

The Live chat system on the right is my personal favourite area and you will often see me in there, asking the pro’s a question or three, or discussing some finer points of Internet Marketing, or well just chatting about random stuff. One word of warning! It can become a time sink so if you can’t multitask well make sure all your important jobs are done already lol!

In the main menu there is a lot of key areas, which i’ll break down for you ( I will skip a few though so make sure if you sign up, to do some explorin’!)

Training

Wealthy Affiliate Training PageUpdated along with the new site changes, the training has become much easier to find and learn from. Not only that but the previously outdated training has been updated to reflect the newest changes in the IM world. Any user can add to the training and even earn from it! Combined with the feeds, training has been brought back to its rightful place, in front of the students, like you and me.

I’m expecting great things from the training and Kyle and Carson have hinted the system will only get better.

Forum

The forum is still alive and kicking, and with over 100,000 posts is a great repository of knowledge.

My Profile & My Blog & My Network

Wealthy Affiliate Training PageThese areas are your own personal section on the site, where you can tell others about yourself, aspirations and dreams. You can link to your sites as well. Creating blog posts that are interesting, and informative can also help you increase your network (people who follow you and your articles) which is a great way to network and grow your online business. I have met a number of people and done business with them after they have simply commented on something I wrote and opened a dialogue.

Rapid Writer

Being able to write articles on site is a nice little feature and Rapid Writer now also links to your Street Articles account and you can publish direct from Wealthy Affiliate. Personally I still use Google Docs, but Rapid Writer is a basic alternative, though I do like their keyword density checker!

Link Tracking

Being able to cloak and track your affiliate links is a wise thing to do (unless you are using Amazon of course) as it makes the links look less scary to users and allows you to glean information about your click rate. Wealthy Affiliate provides you with a little service to do that quickly and easily.

Projects (Jobs)

Still yet to be unveiled, you will be able to quickly find others to get together in joint ventures, businesses and other types of outsourcing. I’m can’t wait for this to become available.

Websites

As a basic member WA will host up to 10 websites for you at no extra cost. Training, support, hosting all wrapped in one package… 😀

Keyword Tool

Wealthy Affiliate Keyword Tool PageThe Keyword tool has undergone some changes, and not for the good, as it has lost some of its functionality. Its still useable but takes a little more work. There are however plans afoot to bring in a new, improved version!
WAbinars

Visual training, you can attend live WAbinar events or watch the recorded version if you aren’t in the right time zone for the live ones. These are great and allow you to see how to do something in real time. Highly recommended.

Conclusion

All these features are included in the monthly fee, no hidden extras.

I have been a member of Wealthy Affiliate for a while now and I doubt that will change, I get my moneys worth just from the networking possibilities there and the training to me at least is a bonus!

If I had to give it a rating, what would I give it? Well I would say it is a strong 4.5/5! Why not 5/5? Well though I love Wealthy affiliate, it isn’t perfect, but no system is is it? Currently my half a mark off is for the keyword tool not being fully functional.

If you are interested in starting in Internet Marketing or if, like me, you have been stung by dodgy “help” in the past just trying to sell you something, you should give Wealthy Affiliate a chance, especially now with the 10 day free trial available!

Click the big a$$ banner below to sign up.

Wealthy Affiliate 10 day FREE trial!

Want to read my previous Wealthy Affiliate review?