I have been around some of the better affiliate marketing business training platforms, both as a member and to get inside for review research.  There are some legitimate programs out there that are built to do the job they are intended to do.  The vast majority of them are not worth the pixels they are made of.  I do not say this lightly.  There is one that outshines them all, and has from its earliest days.  As a long-standing member, what is my experience with Wealthy Affiliate?  This article will tell you the story from a historical perspective.  This platform has a legacy behind it – the owners, the community within, the experience and the sheer potential of this outstanding learning opportunity.

Wealthy Affiliate Before My Time

Two aspiring netpreneurs were still in college and met at one point.  Both were struggling to make ends meet, as is the case with most college students.

The year is 2005 when the two, having met and befriended, tried to unlock the affiliate marketing code amist the many conflecting training programs available then, which ranged from very good to absolutely useless and scammy.  In an undisclosed amount of time it took for the two ambitious young adults to begin making sales in the affiliate outlets available then, they realized another opportunity…

Having found the power of keywords and how they work in the busness model, they decided to get in in the action.

On September 7, 2005, they unofficially-launched yet another keyword list site which they names after the nickname they acquired in their Vancouver, BC Canada, Wealthy Affiliate. This keyword list website would quickly take the lead over the many others that were out there…

• Came with a member’s forum
• Personal help by the owners themselves provided
• Extras beyond keyword lists – and help with these
• How to build websites
• How to organically-rank on the search engines
• How to rank using Pay-Per-Click (PPC) opportunities
• A Pay-It-Forward environment which was taught and encouraged
• Strong member relations and networking
• No guarded secrets and everything laid out on the table
• What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) no-frills, no hype, down-to-earth platform.
• …And more!

Within days, at $29 USD per month for the keyword iists, owners Kyle & Carson caring for their members like no other program owners, the levels of support and all the many extras unheard of at that time for keyword list sites, it took only a few days for the new Forum to hum with activity.

A legacy has begun.  Wealthy Affiliate, though activity was first noted in the Forum on the above date, the membership site officially began operations on September 10.

The Day I First Ran Into Wealthy Affiliate [University]

Shown above, the Wealthy Affiliate Front-End Site (otherwise known as the sales site with insiders’ view of the platform, as they were c. 2008. This is what the home page (down to the fold) looked like the first time I had been to Wealthy Affiliate.

Like many online opportunity-seekers in 2008, just about every email account I had was cram-filled with email subscriptions to all kinds of online opportunity authors and business owners, all claiming they had the key.  All but the very best companies from which I received emails offered little more than hype and unreasonable expectation in the advertising I was getting.

Of the top choices I had at the time I ran into Wealthy Affiliate, SiteSell, InternetMarketingCenter, and other top-notch training were at the top of my list.  I had by this time, found Ross Goldberg’s Immortal Internet Marketing.  I followed this guy for some time before he ran a seminar late that year.  I attended it and made some friends.  It was kinda the fore-runner and prototype of what was to come in my life.  However, the many speakers featured in the seminar, though they each had something to take home, the ultimate drive of the seminar was, as one would expect – one great big sales pitch.

By this time, I was well-accustomed of this sort of thing since 2004 when I began pursuing Internet marketing.

Without the details, after the seminar, I contacted Goldberg via email and quickly discovered this guy had no use for me.  Coming home from work the next day, I got a response that rose the hair on my back, “I’m trying to get a $10,000 product launch!  Don’t bother me again!”  My heart dropped.

By this time I looked into something that caught my attention, from one of the email subscriptions I had – Ryan Moran, at the time, an active member at Wealthy Affiliate, now owning an online empire of his own.  I was spell-bound by what I found when I followed the link.  Wealthy Affiliate was like nothing else I had ever seen before.  It had everything listed above, and by this time, was in its third platform version.  A quick run-down…

• Front-end sales website (no hype found here!) showing features & benefits)
• A number of writing and research tools
• Web hosting
• Wealthy Affiliate Spaces (blogging)
• Wealthy Affiliate Jobs (members offering services and job requests to each other)
• Onboard ranking system
• Training History Tracker / Schedule and Planner software built-in
• Notifications
• Wealthy Affiliate Blog
• SiteRubix (modular website-building tool)
• Feeder sites (pre-built, highly costomizable web documents ready-made to add content)
• 8-Week Action Plan
• NicheQ (tool to find desired niches to work in)
• 3 certification courses
• Massive library of training media consisting of ebooks, videos and articles.
• Extremely active membership community with like mind
• Not to mention a detail that highly impressed me…

I Finally Found It!  Nothing Like It to This Day!

What made Wealthy Affiliate so attractive and jaw-dropping to me?

There were items that were completely missing.  It was nothing like I had ever seen before on the Internet.  The promotional information completely lacked the usual hype and false promises found in those email subscriptions and the websites they were linked to!  That alone really hit me.

Kyle & Carson’s disclosures and statements were frank, to the point, and nothing left out.

Was this for real?

I searched for a day trying to find negative reviews and customer rants about Wealthy Affiliate and found virtually NONE! This didn’t seem real at all, but the searches resulted in countless positive reviews, many of course, were reviews by members, but even in the Warrior Forum at the time, could not find anything negative about it.

I was certainly impressed and sought to join at that time in 2008, sent an inquiry to Support at the time whether or not this program would work for me.  I received a very quick response from Support by Cara.  I was hooked.  I finally found the place I was looking for!  I didn’t have the money available to join at the time, working a part-time minimum-wage job.  I wanted so badly to join!

There Was No Second-Best that Satisfied Me

I looked at SiteBuildIt and found that too expensive.  Wealthy Affiliate had that beat by a mile.  I settled for IMC because it was running a sale.  I purchased the Insiders Secret to Marketing Your Business on the Internet Course and was disappointed with it.  The company tanked very shortly after, from mismanagement.

Nearly another year had passed.  I was given information about Wealthy Affiliate again, from one of the friends I made in Ross Goldberg’s seminar.  She was skeptical about Wealthy Affiliate but I wrote a lengthy email why I didn’t think there was anything to be skeptical about.

Hating the job I was doing, and nearing the end of 2009, it dawned on me that I could use my refund to join Wealthy Affiliate. Albeit, I could not quite remember the name, forgetting one of the words that make up the name, so I searched for it.  It took no time to find it, but I found something I thought was a new development – Wealthy Affilate for Free!

No, it wan’t what I thought it was.  It was one of the members (who is still there) with a guidebook he was offering that gave the ins and outs about Wealthy Affiliate.  We befriended.

That day finally came!  On January 2, 2010, I joined Wealthy Affiliate.  I discovered that my subscription would benefit Ryan Moran because of the cookies.  I wanted my new friend, Marcus Cox, to get the affiliate sales.  I requested to be put on his roster, and it was done.

Conclusion

I have been at Wealthy Affiliate now for almost eight years.  I have yet to see anything come close to this amazing business-training platform.  Nothing comes close, not even remotely close!

Since I joined, the updates and added benefits are way too numerous to list out here.  It’s not easy keeping my review of Wealthy Affiliate current with this.

Technology has changed but the very core within Wealthy Affiliate has not.  Buried beneath it all, you can still get those keyword lists!  The philosophy has not changed.  The sheer success of this community was made possible by Kyle & Carson’s approach to business – pay-it-forward.  Wealthy Affiliate is a legacy of our time and has made history to be noted by the Internet community – a phenomenon shared only by very few entities, and none in the affiliate marketing training industry.  Wealthy Affiliate is extremely healthy and is still growing.  The owners truly take good care of their members – something you need to see for yourself.

Like never before, and it took me awhile because of my own shortcomings – a little over two years after I became a member at Weaalthy Affiliate, I started earning online residual income.  It has not stopped since except for a single month during the 5+ years the income has been coming in.

If you’ve been taken by scammers whilst trying to find a reputable, honest and proven business model to provide extra income and even replace your job in time, I strongly invite you to look into this.  You will not be disappointed.