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 anything, and I don’t say this lightly. There is one that outshines them all, and has from its earliest days. As a long-standing member, here’s my story — my experience at Wealthy Affiliate, 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…
“Before you continue on reading we need to agree on something. Making money on the Internet is not a get rich overnight scheme. If it were that easy everyone would be doing it, making millions of dollars a year from the comfort of their homes. If you are not willing to put in the time to learn the proper Internet Marketing techniques there is no point in even considering Internet marketing.” — Kyle (from the weatlthyaffiliate.com home page) c. 2008
Kyle & Carson: The Wealthy Affiliate Affiliates
Two college students in Vancouver, Canada struggled to make ends meet. These two, Kyle and Carson, met and became friends and sometime in 2003, they began to toy around with affiliate marketing, going from one program to another, tried to unlock the affiliate marketing code amist the many conflicting training programs available then, which ranged from very good to absolutely useless and scammy….until they were able to figure out the solution from the conflicting and often fraudulent sources then available.
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 the potential of what they unlocked
Within a few months they became known as the wealthy affiliates in their local community. Having found the power of keywords and how they work in the business model, they detoured away from their chosen careers to get into the action.
As was the norm for most marketers in the Internet marketing training industry, even honest, ethical marketers dared not play out too much line to their subscribers for fear highly guarded secrets would become known to everybody, causing loss of revenue and effectively shut down businesses. During this time, Google was still an infant at the time, not yet able to put any of the riff-raff in check. Even the “honest” affiliate marketing programs out there contradicted with each other and many with good intent were putting out junk, not knowing what they were doing, not to mention the vast pits of snakes preying on the unwary opportunity-seekers offering inferior and worthless products and robbing them blind.
From the beginning, Kyle and Carson set out to teach others what they have learnt and to lay it all out on the table. It is a move that, what others feared would kill their businesses, would bring great fortune, not only to them, but literally thousands who came to learn, followed their instruction and implemented what they have learnt.
Wealthy Affiliate Is Born!
At the beginning of (or not long before) September, 2005, they unofficially-launched a keyword list site, one more on the Internet which was already teeming with such sites. They named the site after the nickname they acquired in their Vancouver, BC Canada, Wealthy Affiliate. This keyword list website would be different than all the rest. would quickly take the lead over the many others that were out there…
Within days, at $29 USD per month for the keyword lists, 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.
In September 2005, Kyle and Carson launched the keyword list site which, in lieu of a pay it forward mentality, resulted in a unique community that helped make it become the industry leader. At a modest price of $29/mo, subscribers jumped at the opportunity to get in on the action. Why not? The newly formed Wealthy Affiliate site featured, not only weekly keyword lists, but one-on-one coaching and support from the Kyle and Carson themselves in how to build successful businesses. Unlike any other keyword list site, the founders offered training and support on building websites, article marketing, email marketing PPC and basic SEO. From the beginning, everything was done on the Platform and a stand-alone forum, and the early tools of choice came from the best available at the time on the Internet.
On the Platform itself, the following benefits of this keyword list site quickly left all others of the time in the dust with these features:
- Came with a member’s forum
- Personal help from the owners/li>
- Keyword lists plus extras
- Instruction on keywords
- How to build websites
- Organic SEO instructions
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) instrictions
- A Pay-It-Forward environment
- A Pay-It-Forward encouraged
- Communications between members
- No guarded secrets, no frills
- What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get
- No hype, no black hat marketing!
- …And more!
The rest is history! Kyle and Carson continued to tweak and grow the membership site. During the next four years before I joined, web hosting, a member-supported job bank, a simple but comprehensive website-building tool, feeder site templates, a number of article-writing tools and more features too numerous to mention were developed and perfected beyond what anyone else had to offer. By the time I joined, many more of the features that are found on the Platform today rolled out. The continuous evolution and development which continues to occur at ever-increasing velocity, now with a massive community of like-minded members, unlike any other due to the same pay-it-forward mentality.
My Experiences Just Before Finding Wealthy Affiliate
2008 was an extremely explosive time for me, having a bad outlook on life due to my circumstances of the time.
Living in Florida, the summer months feature the well-known rainy season with daily lightning storms. In those days, I was working in the University of South Florida’s (USF) new student center, in the food court, servicing the rubbish containers and doing other mundane service and cleaning work. Making minimum wage and not getting anymore than about five hours per day, my income rarely made it past $600/month. I was living in a broken, leaky camper in a doctor’s back yard.
This scenario followed almost a decade of dealing with stomach ulcers which refused to heal and almost took me down, even close to death. This issue was so debilitating that I wound up homeless before acquiring the camper and a place to put it.
I had to ride a bicycle to and from work, some four miles away from the camper, often in the rain. It was not fun. The work was absolutely monotonous and I watched the clock every day. My Journal is filled with complaints about this, the camper, my place in life, my failures…
The timing was right for what was to come. By late 2008, I was severely losing my patience with working at the food court.
My First Exposure to Wealthy Affiliate
Suddenly, during the month, in October, the Journal shows a heightened round of entries showing my bitterness towards the food court job. On November 22, 2008, a sudden spree of telling some of the Internet marketers whom I was subscribed to what I thought of them and their shady promotional methods and then unsubscribing from their lists. This is very likely around the time I followed a link from one of many Internet marketers I was subscribed to. I believe this was Ryan Moran but at this point, the original email lost, there’s no way of knowing however, the link took me to Wealthy Affiliate, to its sales website, and I was absolutely shocked at what I found there.
What I found on Wealthy Affiliate’s website was nothing like I have been seeing since 2004, when I first began delving into trying to market on the Internet. It was almost surreal for me to see sales pages without the normal hype, fantastic dollar amounts purported and guaranteed by a few mouse clicks and less than believable lies. It just was not there!
This was impressive. The day I followed that link, I was spellbound by what was there and spent a long time, reading every word on every page, and then more! My next course of action was to check this place out. I could not find a single negative review or any other kind of reference about this place anywhere. It just did not exist, not even on the complaint boards!
It offered onboard web hosting free to all members, keyword lists, website building software, all kinds of tools, a forum, not to mention one-on-one support and help from the owners, Kyle & Carson themselves.
I sent an email on November 28th, to Wealthy Affiliate’s Support, asking about the onboard hosting amongst other things. I was careful to tell them that I was impressed about not finding any bad reports about them anywhere. I received a response, filling me in about what affiliate marketing is all about. That week was a shocker to me and I knew I finally found what I was looking for! What I found back then, still characterizes Wealthy Affiliate today!
Could Not Join Wealthy Affiliate Yet
Unfortunately, with the income I was getting, I could not join right then. By this time, I befriended another Internet marketer, Ross Goldberg. I joined a seminar he hosted with top-name Internet marketers, some of whom I was subscribed to already. It cost $1 to get in. I went for it. This episode was the pivoting point in my life for what was to come.
The Masters Seminar lasted about five or six days. I had my first successful go at communicating on a chat engine and lots of instruction from the speakers at the event. However, near the end, I offered to create an ebook featuring the chat as they occurred. Ross took me up on the offer but in my inexperience, I got too fancy with it and overshot long overshot the window when the thing should have been finished. This was my first lesson on perfectionism. I had colour-coded every member’s name in that ebook. This took an incredible amount of time to do! Ross was very angry with me.
When I came up with an idea about the ebook, I contacted Ross about this. When I came home from work that day, I was met with a very short, angry response, telling me he was in the middle of a launch and that he didn’t have time for this. I contacted one of the other members of the seminar, who was a business coach. He told me Ross was done with me, to leave the guy alone. I had filled them in with too much negativity about my circumstances. His email was long and intended to show me comparisons, and that Internet marketers shut out negative people.
I had one more person from that seminar whom I had befriended, named Deborah. Losing contact with everybody else I knew there, our communications lasted into the 2010s. On April 23, 2009, she sent me an email showing me something she was getting. It was a broadcast email to her from Wealthy Affiliate. She was not too impressed with the email, but when I read it, again, it was Kyle, straight to the point and putting it all out on the table! This was the last time I would see anything from Wealthy Affiliate, but the impression of it stayed in my mind…
By Late 2008, the Time Was Becoming Ripe!
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…
- A number of writing and research tools
- Web hosting
- Wealthy Affiliate Spaces (blogging)
- Wealthy Affiliate Jobs
- Onboard ranking system
- Onboard Day Planner/Tracker
- Notifications
- SiteRubix (modular website-building tool)
- Feeder sites (pre-built websites)
- 8-Week Action Plan
- NicheQ (niche-finding tool)
- 3 certification courses
- Massive library of training media
- Close-knit business community
- This just scratched the surface!
Eurika! I Found It and My Search Was Over!
The above-mentioned website was a shocker to me. It was a sight for disillusioned sore eyes. For you to get the ultimate in what I experienced, I have provided a few links to original sources as they were as I found them.
In late 2008, after having been to a number of other affiliate marketing training programs, I got an email from an online marketer, Ryan Moran, whose list I was subscribed to at the time. The link takes you to a historic video made by Ryan from that time. It portrays what was on the Platform at the time. The email spurred interest and I was hooked. Unfortunately I couldn’t afford the low subscription at the time. Looking at the video, this is what you got for $39/mo. or 359.88/yr.
Even by today’s standards, what’s on that video is impressive! It only gets better as you will see.
I was pretty amazed at what I found on this website, something I had not ever seen the likes of. It was almost surreal finding what I had in those pages. Something from the get-go, even that which I read in the original email, I knew this was it – I finally found, above and beyond, what I was looking for!
A Year Later (Late 2009) The Features & Benefits List Had Grown:
- Web hosting
- Wealthy Affiliate Spaces
- Access to the WA Jobs System
- Onboard ranking system
- Onboard Day Planner/Tracker
- Notifications
- Feeder sites
- 8-Week Action Plan
- NicheQ (niche-finding tool)
- 3 certification courses
- Massive library of training media
- Close-knit business community
- Turnkey Feeder Sites
- Website Templates
- Rapid Writer – Content Generator
- SEO Optimizer
- Link Cloaker
- Website Development Training
- One-on-One Support & Coaching
- PLR Packs (no longer recommended
- Video Training
- The Famous Wealthy Affiliate Forum
- Keyword Research Tool
- Clickbank Research Tool
- Competition Spy Tool
- Adwords Tools
- Analytics Tool
- Keyword Lists
- Instruction on Google Adwords/YSM
- Instruction on Analytics
- Instruction on PPC Marketing
- Instruction on SEO Training
- Instruction on Article Marketing
- Instruction on Blogging
- Instruction on Customer Relations
- Instruction on Email Marketing
- Instruction on Copywriting
- Instruction on Website Development
- Instruction on Landing Pages
- Instruction on How to Use the Tools
- Instruction on Common Mistakes
- …And More
This Internet Marketing Training Platform Changed My Life!
Wow! I jumped right in. However, Wealthy Affiliate wasn’t free, I still subscribed to his list. He had a publication available for download, “Wealthy Affiliate Unplugged.” He also provided keyword lists to me and generally, told me about Wealthy Affiliate. Everything I had come to expect was truly real. Finally, after preparing my income tax, found I had a refund coming and this became my portal into Wealthy Affiliate. In January 1, 2010, I joined Wealthy Affiliate…
What happened in Ross Goldberg’s seminar and right after, was a taste of things to come. I found I was not ready to be in a membership like Wealthy Affiliate nonetheless, this is where I grew up and matured as an Internet marketer even with the issues I brought on board. Once inside, I was totally satisfied with what I saw on the sales website. There has never been anything that could even come close to this astounding Internet marketing busness training platform! I truly found where I belonged! There is simply way too many things to list here that makes Wealthy Affiliate so unique, but one thing starts it all off…
From the very beginning, when Kyle and Carson (founders) figured out how to do affiliate marketing, beginning in 2002, their outstanding ideal…”Lets show others exactly what we found, leaving no stone unturned, laying it all out on the table…”
No other membership or program of this kind could or would even dare try this. What makes Wealthy Affiliate so unique?
It’s Pay-It-Forward approach to Internet marketing, and this concept not only begins with them, but permeates the entire community, the entire products and services on the Platform and throughout all of the training media. Nothing like this exists!
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.
Unfortunately, with the income I was getting, I could not join right then. By this time, I befriended another Internet marketer, Ross Goldberg. I joined a seminar he hosted with top-name Internet marketers, some of whom I was subscribed to already. It cost $1 to get in. I went for it. This episode was the pivoting point in my life for what was to come.
The Masters Seminar lasted about five or six days. I had my first successful go at communicating on a chat engine and lots of instruction from the speakers at the event. However, near the end, I offered to create an ebook featuring the chat as they occurred. Ross took me up on the offer but in my inexperience, I got too fancy with it and overshot long overshot the window when the thing should have been finished. This was my first lesson on perfectionism. I had colour-coded every member’s name in that ebook. This took an incredible amount of time to do! Ross was very angry with me.
When I came up with an idea about the ebook, I contacted Ross about this. When I came home from work that day, I was met with a very short, angry response, telling me he was in the middle of a launch and that he didn’t have time for this. I contacted one of the other members of the seminar, who was a business coach. He told me Ross was done with me, to leave the guy alone. I had filled them in with too much negativity about my circumstances. His email was long and intended to show me comparisons, and that Internet marketers shut out negative people.
I had one more person from that seminar whom I had befriended, named Deborah. Losing contact with everybody else I knew there, our communications lasted into the 2010s. On April 23, 2009, she sent me an email showing me something she was getting. It was a broadcast email to her from Wealthy Affiliate. She was not too impressed with the email, but when I read it, again, it was Kyle, straight to the point and putting it all out on the table! This was the last time I would see anything from Wealthy Affiliate, but the impression of it stayed in my mind…
On November 20th 2009, I remembered Wealthy Affiliate, but forgot exactly what the words in its name was. A short search did the trick and I very quickly reunited with Wealthy Affiliate, once again, going through the information about the membership site. Then, as it was too good to be true, I ran into another website I thought belonged to Wealthy Affiliate, owned by Marcus Cox, who lives in the UK. The title that had me going was, “WealthyAffiliateForFree.”
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.
When I first found Wealthy Affiliate, I was struggling with a part-time, minimum-wage job and occasional side work, I simply did not have the money to to join. With renewed interest, and remembering this experience in November 2009, I once again sought out this website, and thought I found a free version of it, but it wasn’t. This is when I met Marcus Cox and his website, wealthyaffiliateforfree.com. From the UK, this person and I struck a friendship and I subscribed to his newsletters. I was impressed with his success story about leaving the factory, replacing it with doing aspired him.
I had learnt some hard lessons in Ross Goldberg’s Seminar. I joined Wealthy Affiliate. The Day had finally come! On January 1, 2010, a date I had planned for this milestone in my life, I joined Wealthy Affiliate University (as it was then called)
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.
I Thoroughly Checked This Place Out
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 Wealthy Affiliate.
Any title that drew me in, The Truth About Wealthy Affiliate, Read This Before Joining WA and even Wealthy Affiliate Scam!, were all attention-getters. Once reading the articles and reviews, they all said the same thing – This IS the place to join!
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!
The Roll-Out of the Open Education Project (OEP) in 2012 and Beyond…
I became very ill during the early part of 2012, now having been a member of Wealthy Affiliate pushing for my third year, and in bed with little energy and in pain, had been away from my computer for several weeks.
Upon returning, I was shocked when I went back to my account and saw the Platform. It had gone into it’s third major roll-out – a complete overhaul of the Platform, many new additions and updates.
I was sad to see the old look of the Dashboard go, but the new one was no doubt far better, easier to navigate and far improved over the old.
Nine Years After Joining Wealthy Affiliate…
As has been said by many others, Wealthy Affiliate stands alone as the most powerful and unique affiliate marketing business training platform of all time.
I have been at Wealthy Affiliate now for going on nine years. I have yet to see anything come close to this amazing business-training platform. Nothing comes close, not even remotely close! I have searched many times since the day I discovered Wealthy Affiliate.
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 Wealthy 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.
My Final Thoughts and an Invitation!
It’s now August 4th, 2018, 8:30 pm EST.
I am still a happy member of Wealthy Affiliate. A few people who were there when I joined the community are still there today. I can’t say just how much larger the community is today compared to what it was when I joined, but it’s many, many times larger! From what I understand, about a million people have been through Wealthy Affiliate’s doors, many of whom have forever changed lives. Total revenue, even back when I first joined that was earned by members up to that time was “several hundred million!” It is inconceivable what that is today. My own income at Wealthy Affiliate began in 2012 and has not stopped since. It is the first place and time I ever made a dime on the Internet. Wealthy Affiliate has always delivered on what its promotional website says. It flies high and nothing rivals this amazing place in any way!
For more information, please visit my honest review on Wealthy Affiliate
Both the entrepreneur and consumer, in the basic form, are human beings, all with the same general makeup and characteristics that make us humans what we are.
Thought is one of the three most important aspects of entrepreneurship because it takes education, which teaches you how to think and helps develop the mindset required in becoming an entrepreneur. However this must be the right kind of education, which is delivered by entrepreneurs with the intent of showing others how to be the same.
Recent Comments