Wealthy Affiliate claims to be the World’s leading online marketing training and hosting platform. They claim to teach you how to build and run a successful online business from scratch. Our wealthy affiliate review will look into the program to see if it really is everything you need to set up a profitable business and if it’s suitable for a travel Website. We will also answer the age-old question of Is Wealthy Affiliate a SCAM
As our aim is to help you build a profitable Travel Website, we look at Wealthy Affiliate from this angle primarily. Wealthy Affiliate is not designed as a Travel Blogging Product but instead offers the chance to build a site in any Niche you like, but naturally, we are focussing on Travel Blogs primarily here.
- Name – Wealthy Affiliate
- Product Type – Online Business Training and Hosting Platform
- Website URL – www.wealthyaffiliate.com
- Owners – Kyle and Carson
- Price – Starter FREE, Premium $49/mth ($497/year), Premium Plus+ $99/mth ($697/year)
- Training – Included, comprehensive, Step by Step
- Web Hosting – Included
- Community – Large, Active, Knowledgeable
- Experience Level – Zero – Expert
- Overall rating – 9 / 10
- Travel Specific – 9 / 10
What Exactly is Wealthy Affiliate?
It can be hard to describe what Wealthy Affiliate really is. Mainly as it’s so many different things to so many. Some see it as a University to learn the business of Online Marketing, Some see it as a community to spend time and enjoy talking to like-minded people, and others, us included, simply use it for its top-notch web hosting and SEO Tools. Others see it purely as a money-making tool.
The truth is it is all of the above and more. It’s a one-stop shop for everything you could need to build a Web-based business. It has top-notch web hosting with some industry-leading features that really put you ahead of the game. It’s got a fantastic knowledgeable community that can assist you whenever you hit issues. It has Zero to Hero training that will guide you from a total novice right through to a web guru. And some of the tools available to you are so powerful we couldn’t imagine running a business without them.
What is the Wealthy Affiliate Method to Success?
At the heart of the Wealthy Affiliate Process is affiliate marketing. This simple process allows you to write about certain products and companies and provide links to their products and service. If a reader purchases through your links you earn a commission. You have probably seen and used these links before when browsing the web, any Review site or influencer will at some point utilize Affiliate links to help monetize their content. There are links in this review, our Travel Blog users them as a major source of income, and even major News and traditional media pages all use affiliate links as an easy source of income.
How you go about this from scratch is a very complex subject, and this is exactly what Wealthy Affiliate teaches. It provides you with every tool and every piece of information you need to start your own affiliate business from scratch.
Is Wealthy Affiliate a SCAM?
The best way to answer this is to say it CAN’T be a Scam. It’s not offering the world, it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme. It’s a tried and true method of building your business from scratch. It offers everything you need and more to build that business up for an upfront monthly fee of $49.99.
It is not claiming you will make money. Just if you put the time and work in you can make a success of things. People fail with this process because they give up or just think from the outset they can put minimal effort in and get the maximum out. This does not make something a scam. It makes it Honest.
Programs offering overnight success for minimal outlay and effort are SCAMS. People Claiming you can build a successful business that has little to no intrinsic Value but will earn you $1000’s a day are Scams.
Wealthy Affiliate is not offering this, it is saying IF you follow the training and IF you put in the hard work. You will be successful. We know this process works, How? This is the exact process and platform we used to build our successful online Travel business. And we want to share that secret with YOU.
We have invested thousands of hours into our business, and we see it as an incredibly helpful and useful guide to our readers, and this is why it earns money. We did not just throw something together and let the money pour in. Anyone telling you that you can do that is setting you up to fail. Wealthy Affiliate teaches you to go about this the hard way, the long way, that in the end allows you to develop something you are proud of, that really helps people and earn a steady and consistent income.
Upsell
The Number-1 sign you are being taken for a ride is the UPSELL. With Scam services, you are enticed in with a low entry fee or even a FREE service. You are quickly introduced to the fact you need to spend more and more to get even the basic service. People are tempted after each purchase to keep buying to justify the money they have already plowed in.
Wealthy Affiliate has almost NO upsell. While there is a free trial, it is limited and we can tell you now you will not make a success of your travel business, or any other, by using the free version of Wealthy Affiliate. So you will join as a free member but you will need to upgrade to Premium to make a go of it. This begins to feel like the beginning of an Upsell campaign. You then find you will need to BUY a Domain Name. Again more upsell (although you get are free Domain Name with the Premium Membership)!
Then you are hit with Premium Plus+ where you are told Upgrading Premium Plus+ is desirable. At this point it feels like the Upsells will never end….but that’s IT. You are never asked or expected to spend another penny on the Wealthy Affiliate platform to become a successful business. The only cost is the monthly fee ($49), or the recurring Yearly Fee ($497), if you choose to pay for a whole year (which is very good value)
Everything you need is included in the Premium Membership, apart from any domains and you only NEED 1 of those, which is included in the Premium Upgrade. The Premium Plus+ Package is useful but NOT needed. The free integrated version of Jaxxy(more on this later), which comes with Premium, is all you need. Everything I have talked about above is included. The Web Hosting is included, the training is included, the community is included, the Support is included, and the tools are included. Honestly, there isn’t even anything on the platform to allow you to spend more than the Monthly membership fees.
It is an incredible offering for the $49 monthly fee. You would spend more than that alone on comparable Web hosting with a leading Supplier.
Training
The general premise of the Program is to teach you to build a Blog based business targeted to a “Niche” where you will refer readers to products and services where you can earn a commission. It does this in a future-proof tried and tested way that has earnt $billions in revenue for its members over the years.
The training provided is a multi-course step-by-step multimedia program that baby-steps you through every process you need to build a successful business. No experience in web design or internet marketing is needed at all. In fact, the only requirement is basic computer skills. If you have found this Page, you have enough skills to be successful in Wealthy Affiliate.
Unfortunately, the training is not based around the travel industry at all. But the process is exactly the same. There are
Live Class
On top of the Step by Step training, there are weekly live classes hosted by Jay. These are great, expert classes hosted by an industry expert with years of experience. Watch as he builds successful sites live and follow his advice to make a huge success of your business. You also have access to the FULL back catalog of years of weekly classes to see how Jay has built multiple successful sites year after year.
The Premium Plus+ Membership also gives access to extra live classes from other industry experts.
Community Training
There is also a heap of community-created training. As you will read later the huge community at Wealthy Affiliate is always on hand to help and assist and in doing so have built up a colossal library of training to help you out of any holes you find yourself in.
Web Hosting
Once you have your website you need somewhere to “host” it so the world can read your work. Wealthy Affiliate offers its members hosting included in the Premium Membership. Web hosting is a complex competitive industry with many levels of quality and service. The Service offered at Wealthy Affiliate is truly world-class. The WordPress-based web hosting allows you to build professional websites in seconds and provides class-leading safe stable web hosting for you to present your sites to the world.
Up Time
The stable hosting platform has industry-leading uptime meaning your sites are always on and you will rarely lose visibility providing you with an air of professionalism and trust.
Site Speed
The integrated Site Speed Feature means your sites load faster than your rivals Not only doe this help Google love you. It also means a better user experience. Have you ever clicked away from a slow-loading buggy ad-ridden site? No one will do this to your site as it loads in Milliseconds.
SSL
SSL is fast becoming an industry standard and while the technical side of this is complicated all you need to know is Google is fast requiring you to be SSL certified to rank well. Web hosting companies typically charge extra for this. With Wealthy Affiliate, it’s included in the Premium membership.
Security
WordPress is renowned for its security issues and flaws. But the Wealthy Affiliate hosting platform protects you from hackers and Spam behind its own bespoke firewall. This keeps your site safe from malicious activity and hackers. We have never personally had any issues with Hackers and so very rarely hear about any issues on the community forums.
Unlimited Traffic
Unlike most Hosting sites there is no limit to how many visitors your site has. This level of hosting can cost hundreds of dollars a month. While you may not need this level from the offset it’s nice to know prices will never change no matter how much you scale your business.
Email Client
A fully functioning email client with unlimited Email addresses is included in the premium account again often an added extra with hosting packages.
We still use the hosting at Wealthy Affiliate as our primary (only) Host and just have never needed to look past it. It’s super fast, almost unlimited and
Community
The huge community of like-minded individuals is one of the biggest assets of Wealthy Affiliate. There are thousands of active, like-minded individuals all engaged in various stages of the same process as you. This leads to an unprecedented depth of knowledge, advice, and support.
The Community is the lifeblood of the platform and every day we help out fellow members with a huge myriad of issues from basic start-up problems to complex issues even legal advice and issues completely unrelated to Web marketing.
We found the community to be so important as the training is not directly geared to travel blogs, we found so many helpful and like-minded members in the community.
Forum
The heart of the Community is the forum. Hundreds of posts every day about a hugely diverse subject matter. Here is where you can get any support or advice about building your site and business and anything web related.
Live Chat
Live Chat runs 24/7 and someone is always available to chat about any problems you have. This is best for quick questions that require a quick response.
Site Support
When things go beyond what the community can deal with the Platform has a full support center on hand 24/7 to deal with any technical issues with your site. The speed of their responses can be staggering at times as they work through your issues. We don’t need them often but when we do they are top-notch.
Tools
The Key to successful internet money-making is a good suite of tools to help you complete the process of building out your website and branding. It is difficult to fully explain how important these tools are without understanding the process of successfully building a web-based business. However, once you start out you will quickly see how valuable these tools are.
Keyword tool
Keywords are the cornerstone of any website and it’s Google’s number one metric for linking you with people. Having a tool to research the best keywords for your site is essential. Wealthy Affiliate now integrates Jaxxy Keyword tool into its platform free for Premium Members. This market-leading tool provides everything you need to find and implement the perfect keywords into your websites.
Web Site Builder
If you think you need to learn complicated HTML Skills to build a website, and this is the blocker stopping you from building a web presence, think again. Wealthy Affiliates Site Rubix site builder lets you build a great website in literally seconds. The training walks you through this process and will have you a professional website for your business faster than you ever possibly imagined possible.
Content Writer
Content is the heart of any online business, as you will learn, and writing this content can be a long drawn-out process. Streamlining this is essential to make the process as painless as possible. Wealthy affiliates Site Content Writer allows content to be written quickly and efficiently, with built-in Grammer and duplicate content checker you can quickly and efficiently build out fantastic content for your customers. The platform also has a built-in Image uploader and editor which also has access to millions of FREE images.
Free Images
All websites and especially travel websites benefit greatly from having beautiful images to visually enhance the content. One of the hardest things for content writers is getting hold of Free images to build out their pages. Wealthy Affiliates Site content has access to millions of royalty-free images of fantastic quality for you to use. No other platform we know of comes close to this.
Domain purchasing
In the past buying, a URL was a complicated business and then you would need to migrate it over to your web host, with Wealthy Affiliate this is all integrated. You can purchase your .com URL for a competitive $14.99 and have it instantly assigned to your website. With the auto-renewal, you will never accidentally lose your URL to a predatory URL hunter.
Comment and Engagement Platform
Having comments, interaction, and engagement on your website shows Google that your site is interesting to users. With time this will happen naturally and organically. But to begin with, The Comment Platform allows you to connect with other Wealthy Affiliate members to make comments on your site to help boost your googlyness. Leading to faster rankings.
How Much Money can I make?
With a Travel blog, it can be hard to make a living from the Wealthy affiliate platform. You shouldn’t go in with the expectation of making thousands of dollars in a few months. It won’t happen. This is why we feel Wealthy Affiliate can’t be a scam. It isn’t offering that. It isn’t offering you the chance to get rich. It provides you with the training and tools to build a long-term successful business in any sector you want. We focus on travel sites but it could be anything. Really the sky is the limit and you will be rewarded for the hard work you put in.
While the work can be difficult if you are writing about Travel and places you love it is really not “work” at all and you can easily produce incredible content that can be made profitable in a huge number of ways.
First-year profits are typically small, but so is the outlay. Second-year Profits can be much higher and lead to upwards of $10,000 a month for large scaled successful operations. We are now full-time Tavel bloggers and use the money earnt traveling to the places we love. We tried for years to achieve this goal and only when we found Wealthy Affiliate were we able to realize the dream.
There are several revenue streams useful to Travel Bloggers. We tend to rely more on pure advertising revenue than Affiliate Marketing. We regularly make $40 per 1000 visits to our site simply from Display ads. So that’s $400 per 10,000 visits, if you can achieve that a day that worked out to $146,000 a year, and 10,000 visits per day is not a hard-to-reach number. This is on-top of the many Affiliate Revenue streams that can be leveraged to help make a regular income from your site.
But it must be stressed you get out what you put in. It’s no get-rich-quick scheme. It’s a tried and true process for achieving your dreams.
Memberships Levels – Let’s Get Started
Free Trial
There is a free trial available and this a great way to get started and get a feel for how the platform works and what it is all about. Actually signing up and experiencing how the training works and what it is all about, using the tools, and seeing the whole process in action will paint a far better picture than any review ever could. You really have nothing to lose in signing up for a free trial. You don’t have to add any payment info and won’t be “accidentally” charged if you forget to cancel. So why not give it a try?
But make no mistake the free trial will almost certainly not make you any substantial money. To get anywhere you will need a premium membership.
Premium
This is priced at $49 a month or $49/mth (or $497 yearly discount). It seems a big investment, but it is phenomenal value when you consider just how much is included. The hosting alone could add up to far more than that for a comparable (hosting)service, those attractive $9.99 a month hosting packages are not up to the job of handling the amount of traffic a successful Website will generate!
It also comes with all the tools, training, and support to go from absolute zero to fully fledge online entrepreneur. This is exactly the route we took from desk drones to spending our days traveling the world!
Premium Plus+
The premium Plus+ $99/mth (or $697 yearly discount) Membership level is the top tier membership. It comes with every conceivable tool and enhanced training to really let you build the most successful business possible. It even comes with hosting for 50 websites so you could build an entire empire of Travel Sites!
Which to Choose?
Really, it’s all a bit of a no-brainer. The Free Starter Package is the perfect test drive for the Program. This level of membership will not cost you a cent. Simply create an account and start to get to grips with all that Wealthy Affiliate offers. There is NOTHING to lose. You may find it’s not for you, and you are going to be told over and over, this is not a get-rich-quick scheme, it requires hard work and dedication, and that’s not for everyone.
The free membership is only for a taster though. It’s not everything you need to build a business unless you are willing to invest a little, then you will not be successful. So if you think this might be the right choice for you, consider upgrading to the Premium. It’s $49 a month and not the biggest outlay. This then gives you the full platform. All the Training Modules, access to the Jaxxy Keyword tool, and the ability to build out a full .com website. The best thing you can do for your future is pay for a full year. This shows real commitment and helps drive you forward to a future where Travel is your LIFE!
Travel Specific?
Wealthy Affiliate is targeted to ANY kind of online business. Travel is no exception and beautiful travel blogs can be set up easily so you can showcase your blog in a stunning and professional way. A lot of our customers are Travel Bloggers who have a fantastic site already and are looking for ways to turn this hobby into a profession. Wealthy Affiliate is fantastic at guiding you through the process of monetizing that blog so you can turn passion into profit!
When we started Wealthy Affiliate we really didn’t know what we were doing. We just loved to travel. It was only after failing to build a different type of affiliate site, we realized just how well the platform can be leveraged to travel, and we have never looked back.
What is Stopping You?
With the free trial available there is really nothing stopping you from signing up and giving it a go. The first stage of the training is free and by the end of it, you will have a much better understanding of what it is all about and whether Wealthy Affiliate is right for you.
We promise it will cost you $0 to get going with the platform and try it on for size! There really isn’t a better platform out there for turning your Travel Passion into a full-time Profession.
<<<Sign up here to give the Platform a try for FREE today>>>