Wealthy Affiliate Review 2019: Is it a Pyramid Scheme Scam?

I have wanted to write a Wealthy Affiliate Review for a while now; It’s a course I recommend as a better alternative in my other make money online reviews and have seen some people change their lives with it.

I am not a beginner in making an online income. I have a current total of 5 successful affiliate websites and have generated close to a million dollars in sales through affiliate marketing (that’s revenue, not profit). I have a good understanding of what it takes to make money online and feel like I am sitting in an excellent position to show you in my Wealthy Affiliate Review if it is a scam or not.

My income is not dependent on this Wealthy Affiliate Review paying me. I saw one Wealthy Affiliate Review, and it was just a guy posting pictures of how much affiliate commission he had made from promoting a Wealthy Affiliate Review. That doesn’t sit well with me.

I hope you can believe me when I say the following review will be my honest opinion and that I won’t let the thought of affiliate commissions sway my opinion.

What is Wealthy Affiliate Exactly?

Created by Kyle and Carson; Wealthy Affiliate is an online education platform set up to teach people the basics of Affiliate Marketing. The initial training focuses on teaching the user how to set up a basic niche affiliate website and get it off the ground.

Signing up for a free account will give you limited access to most of the premium features like live chat and level 1 of the training. After that, it’s $19 (they offer a discount if you don’t upgrade straight away) for the first month and $49 after that if you choose not to cancel. You can also pay $234 for six months or $359 for one year with both these options offering sizable discounts.

Inside of Wealthy Affiliate in 2019, there is a very active community and always somebody to get advice from which is perhaps the stand out feature especially for beginners.

Great examples of Wealthy Affiliate Success 

There are plenty of success stories of people making stacks from promoting their Wealthy Affiliate Review. I am not going to be sharing those. For me, true success in online business is building something that is a real asset and offers at least some value to the world.

Example Number 1:

This is an interesting story, and it's how I first came across Wealthy Affiliate. One of my affiliate websites is in the Gaming Tech Niche. One day I was doing some competitor analysis and was looking through the backlinks of a website. This site was on page 1 for a lot of keywords and was making a couple of thousand dollars per month passively with the Amazon Associates program.

While I was looking at the backlinks, I came across a link from the owner's Wealthy Affiliate Blog. It gets even more interesting though. I started analysis on another website on page 1, and this owner ALSO had a Wealthy Affiliate blog!

The two guys had used Wealthy Affiliate training to build two genuinely profitable websites! The first website has since been severely neglected, and the owner has moved on to other things, so I don't feel bad sharing it with you guys. This is the first website (looks like it won't even load anymore). The other website is still active and growing so I won't share it publicly.

PS. If you don't know what a Backlink is, you will learn more about that inside the platform and this Wealthy Affiliate Review.

Example Number 2:

I found a Wealthy Affiliate user who shared a post letting everyone know that she had created a profitable affiliate website and sold it for 30k! She accidentally left her site URL unblurred in the picture. I checked the URL, and it is indeed now 301 redirecting to a Hair Loss website that is generating multiple millions of dollars per year.

I am actually in the process of making a clone of that website she sold (Don’t hate the player, hate the game). My website already has close to 15,000 published words.

Message me through Wealthy Affiliate if you want to see her website, my cloning spreadsheet and the other active website. I might share it with you.

Other Examples

I found the two previous examples without even looking that hard! There are thousands of success stories with most of them not yet published online for a good reason. Most people making money online are too busy getting paid online to write about making money online. Those people are building niche sites like the ones taught inside Wealthy Affiliate.

There is a section for both free and premium users on the homepage for users to share their results. Check that out if you want more social proof but be wary of the people sharing the screenshots of their Wealthy Affiliate Commissions.

Is Wealthy Affiliate a Scam?

Thousands of people search every month on Google for negative reviews and to find out if Wealthy Affiliate is a scam. I can see why some people may think that. Yes, SOME Make Money Online courses are 100% a scam. Here is my take on it:

Pyramid Scheme Vibes

As mentioned earlier, There are people whose entire income is dependent on getting people to sign up too Wealthy Affiliate. They show readers their monthly 2000 dollar check and make it seem like the course content inside did that for them when it’s people paying through their affiliate link with the false promise of similar success.

Quite Basic Information

While the information is enough for someone to start earning money online, It is quite basic, a little outdated and more suited to beginners in my opinion. Saying that though, If I was in the shoes of a beginner, I think that it would be a great starting point.

So is Wealthy Affiliate a scam or not? By definition, Scam means “a dishonest scheme; a fraud”. Some of the people promoting the course are scamming you yes. If you read another Wealthy Affiliate Review they might make it seem like if you sign up you can get get rich quick or that YOU WILL achieve results like them by signing up and building a niche site. 

Kyle & Carson, the owners of Wealthy Affiliate, don’t make any of those claims. They have just built a friendly community and produced a lot of useful solid information. That is NOT A SCAM in my eyes. I honestly do think they had good intentions when creating Wealthy Affiliate.

What Wealthy Affiliate Looks Like For Paid Users

I am now going to part with $19 of my hard earned money and sign up for a premium membership. With a Premium Membership I will get access to All of the premium training, Premium website features, Premium Support, Jaaxy Lite, Webinars, Hosting and Full community access.

The stand out features are the training, access to the community and you also get a nice big cool looking badge on your profile that says you are part of the premium crew.

You can pay with your Debit/Credit Card, Paypal or WA Credits. If you want to cancel your recurring payment with Paypal, then log into your Paypal and cancel the payment there.

Immediately after paying you to get taken to a page where you get to watch a welcome video (the video wouldn’t load for me), and you get to read about the owner Kyle’s life story. It talks about his struggles and then his success and ends with him telling us that we are “Freaking Awesome”. It’s very American and should make you feel inspired if you are into that kind of thing.

After this, there are more videos and are told to write down your goals, and then there is more motivational talk. The content is in blog format.

Level 1 

Level 1 training is available to free members. It covers things like what a niche is and how to choose one. It shows you how to build your own website through the Wealthy Affiliate platform.

You get the option to use something called SiteRubix for your website. This will give you a free subdomain. If you are serious about making a living online, don’t do this! Just invest in yourself, future and buy your own .com domain.

Remember I talked about that girl who sold her website for 30k? She wouldn’t have been able to do that if she used SiteRubix. It will hinder your Search Engine Optimization. If you are a complete beginner and just starting and you want to get a feel for how things work, then yes go for it. Just know that if you're going to make a serious income online, you do need complete control of your domain.

At the end of level 1 you should have your own bare-bones website set up. A massive step for a complete beginner.

Level 2

Level 2 training is only available for Premium Users. It aims to help you turn your bare-bones website into something bigger.

It does this by showing you how to create keyword rich content and how to write the content with research. They show you their keyword research process. Some of the metrics they use for finding good keywords include your KW having at least over 30 people per month searching for it and minimal competition — both pretty good advice for a beginner.

Kyle says your content should be over 1000 words long. That isn’t exactly true. You should check the average length of every other piece of content ranking on page 1 and use that as a benchmark. It could be as high as 5000 or as low as 500 words.

In level 2 you also get taught how to set up your Email website account. You learn how to use Jaaxy for keyword research. Their mantra is that more keywords equate to more traffic, which is true.

Further along in training, you discover where to find free images for your website. This will help you avoid Copyright issues down the road, which is a genuine issue with many unsuspecting webmasters.

To summarize Level 2 up. You learn how to find low hanging fruit keywords with minimal competition that you can use to get visitors to your website.

Other Levels

Level 3 has a total of 10 lessons all about how to monetize your website with Affiliate Programs or ads. Level 4 also has ten lessons and is about how to utilize Social Platforms for traffic. Again it’s quite basic but valuable for a noob. Once you manage to get through the hours of training there, you finally make it to the end at Level 5. This section finally gets a bit more advanced, and wealthy affiliate teaches you how to set up webmaster tools and analytic tracking. There was also an interesting section about editing comments on your blog to either sell through them with affiliate marketing links or encourage other real comments. That was probably my favorite part and a fresh tactic not talked about a lot.

Honest Thoughts On The Premium Training

All of the information is available for free on places like YouTube. Is it worth paying for that? If you spent your whole life learning from School and University, then Wealthy Affiliate will be a smooth transition for you. Some people need to learn how to learn. Self-Education isn't as easy as some people think, especially for people just starting.

Wealthy Affiliate can save you a lot of time if you are new by putting all of the relevant information in one easy to follow place. There are also tasks you can tick off after each training module, and the most significant selling point is that if you get stuck along the way, someone from the community can answer your question right away.

The First Modules are not enough to build a successful niche website. Once you have gone through Kyle’s training, you should have a niche website with a sizable amount of content. Content is indeed an important ranking factor in Googles algorithm, but perhaps the most significant ranking factor is backlinks. I would highly encourage you to search “backlinks” in the training section and absorb as much information there as you can. That can take your website to the next level. That training is not provided by Kyle but by other experienced users.

Closing Thoughts

Making an Online income is hard! If you want to make money with an Affiliate Marketing Website and traffic from Google, it is going to be a long, arduous process. I would compare it to trying to get a 6 pick or running a marathon. It seriously requires the same amount of effort or more. Wealthy Affiliate is just like a personal trainer. You still need to show up every day.

Pros

Cons

Wealthy Affiliate Is Not For:

Wealthy Affiliate Is Best For:

If you want to make money by signing up to Wealthy Affiliate and taking the pyramid scheme route by showing your WA affiliate commissions and using that to generate even more sales, I won’t judge you.

I would only pay for a premium membership if you are committed to seeing things through to the very end. There is enough information in the premium membership training to make a difference in your life.

Good Luck and feel free to leave a comment or private message me on the Wealthy Affiliate platform. I will try to get back to you. If you are still here reading this, I hope something I wrote in this Wealthy Affiliate Review has helped you.