Wealthy Affiliate Wiki – Frequently Asked Questions

I’ve put together this Wealthy Affiliate wiki because there are a lot of frequently asked questions about this training and hosting platform that people will always ask before joining or before upgrading from a free account to a premium account. It’s a little bit like a WikiPedia page.

Feel free to ask your own questions in the comments box below this post if you have any. I’ll always reply in good time.

Wealthy Affiliate Wiki – FAQs About WA


What is Wealthy Affiliate?

Every day, more and more people start shopping online. As an affiliate marketer it is your “job” to step in and create content which either recommends a product or doesn’t recommend one. Online shopping is only going to continue growing as more and more people come online for the first time and websites like Amazon continue to expand.

But how do we step in and become the middle man so that we can earn revenues?

Wealthy Affiliate is a website created in 2005 that helps you earn money online and this is done by leveraging the affiliate marketing method of making a living. Basically, you’ll learn how to blog for money. And that in a nutshell is basically writing about things you do or don’t recommend and placing a special affiliate link in the post so that when people click on it and buy something, you get paid.

A more thorough explanation would be that Wealthy Affiliate is a training and community portal for anyone wishing to learn how to do affiliate marketing online. Wealthy Affiliate also includes many useful tools such as website builder, keyword research tool, web hosting, to name a few.

Wealthy Affiliate also includes a 24/7 live chat where you can ask questions and get help quickly. Every friday evening (Canadian timezone) there is a live webclass which covers many different aspects of building an online business.

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Is Wealthy Affiliate a Scam?

The only people who will say that Wealthy Affiliate is a scam are people who’ve tried it for a week or two and not made money. Of course, they’re not going to make money as quickly as they expected. Building a real business online, as I’ve mentioned many times throughout this article, takes time and effort. There is no short cut.

People who call Wealthy Affiliate a scam just because they haven’t been patient enough, are the same exact type of people who will never make money online, because they don’t stick with anything long enough. Some people don’t do proper research about Wealthy Affiliate before they join and expect things to be as simple as sitting back and watching the money roll in.

Congratulations…You’ve actually taken a few minutes to read this review of the WA training program and that makes you way better informed than they ever will be.

There are others who might make claims Wealthy Affiliate is a scam. These are usually competitors using Wealthy Affiliate negative review techniques to suck people into whatever programs they’re promoting. Wealthy Affiliate has been around the block a good few times since 2005 and isn’t going anywhere soon.

If you’re looking for something that really is a scam, try MOBE – My Online Business Education. Now there’s a scam if ever I saw one. It’s official, too. MOBE was found by the SEC in 2018 to be a scam. You can read about MOBE and why I think it’s no good here.
Wealthy Affiliate is as Legit as they come. It’s lazy people that don’t want to put in the work who call it a scam.


Do I Have to Promote Wealthy Affiliate to Earn Money?

No, you don’t have to promote WA to make money. That’s a common misconception with newbies. When you start your training at Wealthy Affiliate, you get to choose a niche. And yes, you can choose to go with the niche that is known colloquially as the “MMO” niche.

The Bootcamp training course, which is 5 levels altogether, will teach you how to promote Wealthy Affiliate (but you also get to choose any niche you can think of if you don’t want to do that.)
You DO NOT have to promote Wealthy Affiliate to make money. You can create a site about any topic you like such as cycling, golf, fishing, knitting, fashion, remote control drones, or anything you desire.

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I’ve Never Built a Website – It Sounds Complicated

If I took you back in a time machine, let’s say 10 or 15 years ago, I would have agreed with you on this. It used to be hard to make a website. But building a website these days has never been easier. It’s so simple an 8 year old could do it.

Most of the time you’ll only have to drag and drop, and point and click to design your site the way you want it to look. The hardest part of creating a website is the content creation itself.
This is writing blog posts, maybe making your own videos, adding images, and maybe even audio and ebooks to your site.

Wealthy Affiliate’s Siterubix Website builder makes creating a website as easy as one two three. There are 5 simple steps involved and your website will be live online in less than a minute.

There’s a video here on this page about building a website with SiteRubix where you can watch to see how simple it is. Now the site foundation has been laid, you can begin creating content, which is the real meat and potatoes.


I Don’t Have a Product – What Can I Sell On My Website?

The training at Wealthy Affiliate will show you how to find products (and services) online that you can promote to your website visitors.

This is the most amazing thing about affiliate marketing and it’s why it’s one of the easiest businesses you can start online.

You get to become an affiliate of a product creator/vendor and you get a percentage cut as your commission for getting customers who buy through your affiliate link. It’s a 3 way win.

Your site visitor wins because you helped them decide what to buy to solve their problem.
The product owner wins because they got a customer they wouldn’t have otherwise had.

You win because you get a commission for sending a new customer to the product owner.
So Everyone’s happy, and nobody’s been ripped off. Take amazon as an example. If you wanted to create a website all about mobile devices like Android tablets for kids, you could join Amazon’s affiliate program and create reviews of all the different kids’ tablets there. There are oodles of tablets on Amazon.

If you decide to recommend a certain Android tablet to your visitors on your site, and they like your review of it, they can click on your affiliate link land on Amazon’s website. If they purchase the tablet you recommend, you make a commission.

Another benefit of Amazon is this –
If a visitor to your website clicks the link to take a closer look at the product you recommended on Amazon but decides NOT to buy it, they can often buy something else. You still get a commission, even if the item they buy costs a thousand dollars. Bingo! Amazon isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, though. And that’s okay. There are more companies you can use like BestBuy, Walmart, Target and many, many others.


What Happens to My Websites If I Leave Wealthy Affiliate?

Personally I think anyone who leaves Wealthy Affiliate is crazy. But, if you have a website which is hosted at Wealthy Affiliate and you decide you want to leave (not be a member at WA anymore) then you will have 30 days to transfer your website out of Wealthy Affiliate’s hosting.

This is easy enough to do. Say you want to keep your website but you want to move the hosting to Bluehost or WPX Hosting, it’s up to you. Your website is YOUR website. Wealthy Affiliate does not own your site even if you bought it and built it there. Your website is 100% yours to keep, even if you leave Wealthy Affiliate. But I still think you’re insane for leaving!


How Long Does it Take to Make Money with My Website?

This is a tricky one and cannot be answered because everyone is different. No niche is the same, no two websites are the same, and there are lots of variables to keep in mind. It might take you 3 months, 6 months or more depending on how much content you put on your website.
If you’re lazy, and you only create one piece of content per month on your website, it’s going to be tough.

But if you work hard and try to get content published every single day, you’re going to achieve revenues a lot faster than the lazy guy.
More Content = More Traffic = More Sales.


Why Can’t I Get a Free Wealthy Affiliate Account in My Country?

Not all countries are able to get a free account at Wealthy Affiliate.
People in some restricted countries can join Wealthy Affiliate as premium members (which I recommend) but they will not qualify for a free account.

[UPDATE] Some restrictions have been removed for some of the countries.

If I were you and you’re in one of the restricted countries above, I’d take a leap of faith and go premium right off the bat.


If I Make More Websites Will I Make More Money?

While this would be true for experienced bloggers and affiliate marketers, it isn’t true for beginners. You’ll be shooting yourself in the foot if you go down that road of thinking more sites for you is the best way to go. Start just one website and learn all you need to know. Get that site making money and then start a new site.

But don’t neglect your original site, keep adding content on there to keep it ticking over. If you tried to build 10 houses at the same time, it would take forever, right? But if you focus on just building 1 house at a time, you’d get done quicker. The same can be said of any websites you build. You can always outsource content creation to writers later.


How Will I Receive My Commissions?

This depends on what your niche is and what affiliate programs you’re promoting. You could be promoting Amazon products and I know that Amazon doesn’t pay affiliates using PayPal. Amazon will pay you by check or they will let you earn gift cards.

Clickbank, which sells a lot of digital products, will pay by check or by deposit into a bank account. But they don’t pay via PayPal. JVZoo, a digital marketing affiliate network will pay into PayPal. As will Warrior+, which is another digital marketing network with many products from many vendors that you could make money with.

If you do decide to promote Wealthy Affiliate itself, they will pay you into a PayPal account, which is nice and handy. PayPal is the way I get paid from WA. I’m pretty sure they have other methods of paying their affiliates, too, such as check or bank deposits. As I’ve never been paid via a method other than PayPal I’m not sure exactly. You could ask inside once you join.

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Is Wealthy Affiliate an MLM Program?

No. Wealthy Affiliate is NOT MLM. MLM is multi-level-marketing. In my opinion, MLM sucks BIG TIME. I would not be involved in any MLM if you paid me. Wealthy Affiliate has an affiliate program just like Amazon has one. But Amazon is not an MLM company either.

Affiliate programs are not the same thing as MLM. MLM, in my view is way too shady (and too pushy) and most products that inside MLMs are not very good. Often times in MLM programs you only get paid to refer people under you and they have to refer people under them. Sounds like a pyramid (ponzi scheme) to me. Thanks but No thanks! WA is not MLM. The commission structure for those who do decide to promote Wealthy Affiliate is only one level deep.


Are There Any Upsells at Wealthy Affiliate?

There are zero upsells within Wealthy Affiliate. Nobody ever pays more than the maximum of $49 a month for their membership. You do not join premium and then get told you need to pay extra for something else.

I despise those types of companies (like MOBE) who get you in cheap and then tell you that you’ve got to pay another $999 to access the next level, then another $3000 to get to the next. That sucks! At Wealthy Affiliate everyone has the same access to ALL that’s inside.

Once you’re a premium member, that’s all you need. It really is an affordable way to learn, earn and create a real online business.


Why Have I Seen Some Negative Wealthy Affiliate Reviews?

My answer to this one is similar to the question about WA being a scam. The negative reviews you’re likely to have seen are usually competitors of WA and they will slander anything and everything else, other than what they are trying to make money from.

You will likely find people in the world who will label Amazon, Ebay, Walmart, Target, Clickbank, and many other things as a scam just to get you to pay for something else they’re recommending. No matter what you do, you cannot please everyone. And you can’t force everyone to be honest.


Is Wealthy Affiliate’s Training Really All I Need to Make Money Online?

Yes. You can really make money with just Wealthy Affiliate training, hosting, keyword tool and website builder. I also added an autoresponder such as Aweber to my online business to do email marketing. Wealthy Affiliate doesn’t include an autoresponder, but that’s because it’s not an essential. An autoresponder is for email marketing and that is a matter of choice as to when you want to include one in your business.

I do recommend you include email marketing at some point in your online business but it’s not something you should try at first when you’re just getting started. You don’t need to worry about autoresponders at all until you decide you have to have one. Again, an autoresponder is NOT essential to your success, but an added benefit once you get to a certain level with your website.

Premium WordPress Themes and plugins are also NOT required for your website to make money online. Again, this is a choice. I use Thrive Themes because it’s awesome. I don’t HAVE TO use Thrive for my website, I could use a free WordPress theme and still be successful. The same can be said of WordPress plugins.

You do not have to buy them. $49 a month plus $14 a year for your own domain name is all you will ever need if you want it that way. The rest is optional.


Is Wealthy Affiliate For Beginners Or Do I Need To Be An Expert?

You don’t have to be an expert at all to do the affiliate marketing training courses inside WA. Kyle, the co-founder, will take you step by step from the very beginning. Follow the tasks and tick them off using the checkbox below each training module.

If you’ve already got experience, that’s fine, too. There may be a lot of things you’ve never learned and now is the chance to fill in some of the blanks you might have. And if you’re a super affiliate already before you join, then Kudos to you. You are going to be a massive asset to Wealthy Affiliate if you can help people out.

Wealthy Affiliate is a “pay it forward” type of community. Everyone helps everyone. Being a complete beginner or a seasoned super affiliate doesn’t stop you joining the community.

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I’m Overwhelmed – What Do I Do?

It’s completely normal to get overwhelmed when you’re learning all of these new skills. It can seem like a gigantic mountain standing in the way of your success. Here’s the thing.

Do not let this stop you in your tracks. We are all affected by this problem and I’d be pretty concerned if you told me you never feel overwhelmed. At first you’ll be more overwhelmed than you ever will be. But all you need to do is stick with the proven training and you’ll be fine. Don’t let shiny objects get in your way.

I want you to imagine this training at Wealthy Affiliate is a big jigsaw puzzle. All the pieces are there in the box, but you won’t know how many pieces there are. You also won’t know what the picture is yet. But as you begin taking the pieces out of the box and placing them where you’re told to put them, things do start to make sense.

The longer you keep at it with the jigsaw puzzle, the clearer the picture becomes. There are fewer blanks to fill in and you can start to see there aren’t too many pieces left before the puzzle is complete.

Eventually, you’ve put all the pieces in the right place and you’re looking at something really cool. That’s your online business and you’ll be loving it.

Suddenly, you’ve got a beautiful picture and you cannot wait to put another puzzle together (another website, perhaps?) When you get a feeling you’re overwhelmed, contact me, or ask anyone at Wealthy Affiliate what you should do. They’ll set you straight again. Stop stressing. Enjoy the journey!


Can I Earn Money With A Free Starter Membership At Wealthy Affiliate?

Yes but it’s harder to do than with the premium membership. This is because in levels 2 and above in the training at WA, there are many more things you can implement on your website. It’s all about getting traffic at the end of the day and most of level 2 and above are geared toward getting that to your websites.

You can earn with the free membership but you’re going to have to work much harder with no access to the advanced training beyond level 1. If you’ve finished level 1 training and you’re wondering what to do next, you should do yourself a favor and upgrade to premium so you can access all the other features that WA has to offer.

I Didn’t Know What I Didn’t Know

My time was spent wisely there, and I did level one of the training which is available to all free members. After I set up my first SiteRubix website which was a sub-domain on Wealthy Affiliate’s servers, I just played about and discovered what I could do.

Although the free account at Wealthy Affiliate is somewhat limited, I got more than enough of a taste of the training and the community, plus the live chat feature which gave me a real sense of what the premium membership would be like. (this is what you should also do!)

I asked my wife if I could join the paid premium membership and told her it was clearly the real deal. Of course, at the time, my wife wasn’t keen on me spending any more money online in order to “make money online”…

I explained to my wife that it was an investment in myself. I was paying for training, hosting, tools, access to help 24/7, a Website builder and also the ability to rub shoulders with lots of successful people.

There is also a weekly live training webinar every Friday, I told her. I must have been quite persuasive because she said “okay.” As I knew it was such a “monumental” moment, I got my 3 year old daughter to click the mouse on the “pay now” button in PayPal.

It’s Not Rocket Surgery!

Creating an online business wasn’t going to be a walk in the park and so I struggled to get my head around a lot of concepts such as keyword research, SEO, and Social Media marketing.

I was overthinking these things because it’s actually so simple a 10 year old can do it. Just do what the training tells you to do, even if you don’t quite yet understand what it is you’re doing. It will all fall into place later like a jigsaw puzzle.

When everything you’re learning starts sinking in to your brain, you do actually realize the purpose of all the steps you have to take. You will also see that it’s all dead simple really.

The hardest part about doing affiliate marketing is staying motivated and creating content frequently. You’ll get where you want to be much faster if you can create and publish lots of content as often as possible. If you can publish daily, that’s fantastic.

You’ll get more and more website traffic and you’ll start making money sooner. But if you only publish once a week or even less, you’re going to have to keep going for months and months and maybe over a year before you make anything. It really is a matter of ‘content is king.’

I recommend you learn how to do this and then in the future, when you’re making a little bit of money you can start outsourcing some of your writing jobs on sites such as wordclerks.com

The first few weeks and months are going to be the hardest of all. You’re going to have to let your brain soak up a lot of new things and then naturally over time you’re going to become more adept at everything you do in relation to your online business.

Blogging frequently may be the hardest thing about the training at Wealthy Affiliate, especially when you barely see any results for a long time. It puts most people off. Which is a great shame, because when the money does start trickling in, it can build up nicely into more of a torrential river.

This will give you the motivation to keep going. I just wish people would be more patient with themselves. They give up way too soon. I’ve known people to quit in as little as a week. However, it’s the ones who refuse to quit that always seem to crack the code.


Do You Have More Questions to Add to This Wealthy Affiliate Wiki?

I’m sure there are many more questions that could be added to this Wiki about Wealthy Affiliate. If you have them, please don’t hesitate to pop them in the comments section below this post and I’ll address all of them.

If you still want to learn more about Wealthy Affiliate, I advise you to read my full Wealthy Affiliate review.

It’s been a pleasure talking to you today. Have a good one.

Regards,

Jim

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6 thoughts on “Wealthy Affiliate Wiki – Frequently Asked Questions”

  1. Hi Jim,

    I am also a Wealthy Affiliate member, so I think I can back you up today. Those people who complain about WA cannot deliver what they want, but the reason might be that they only look for get-rich-quick schemes…

    Building an online business through affiliate marketing does take hard work, patience, and perseverance to see positive results. It won’t fall on your laps overnight, so doing the homework before joining WA is the right way to proceed. For example, reading this article to know more about Wealthy Affiliate. 🙂

    Cheers,
    Matt

    Reply
    • Hey there, Matt. Nice to see you are a member also at WA. Let me know what your username is and I will follow you there. We can exchange ideas and strategies.
      Regards,
      Jim

      Reply
  2. Awesome post, Jim. I like how you have covered all the important questions about Wealthy Affiliate. It’s a rare case to find a well-structured post like this, so thank you. I managed to find all the answers I was looking for! Wealthy Affiliate seems like a great place to start your own online business and your work here just proves the point! Once again, awesome post and thanks for sharing. 🙂

    Reply
  3. Wow, this really is great.
    It’s obvious wealthy affiliate is a great community to be.

    I’ve been scammed over and over again online and I told myself I’m not going sign up to any online business again. But seeing what wealthy affiliate has to offer here, I’m definitely going to give it a try.

    Thank you for all the questions you have answered here.

    Reply
    • Hi there, Albright. It is a good community. I wish I had found it a year before I did. It’s not easy to find something that is legit, but WA has been around since 2005. It’s only going to continue growing as the best place to learn how to make money with affiliate marketing. It’s not perfect, but nor is anything in life.
      Regards,
      Jim

      Reply

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