Wealthy Affiliate is a popular affiliate marketing training platform.
(in-depth Wealthy Affiliate review)
Something you may have noticed about Wealthy Affiliate: neither of the lead trainers – Kyle Loudon and Jay Neill – appear to have had much success with affiliate marketing since 2016.
Kyle Loudon
Kyle Loudon and Carson Lim are the owners of Wealthy Affiliate. You don’t see much of Carson within the program, whereas Kyle is the primary trainer and responsible for the vast majority of the core lessons and videos inside WA.
If you’d like to get a feel for Kyle’s teaching style, check this video:
Kyle seems like a nice guy, and he’s clearly seen success as an affiliate marketer.
The trouble is, that success appears to be far behind him.
Kyle reveals three of his affiliate sites throughout the WA training. Here’s how those sites have fared over time, as per Ahrefs:
That’s a combined 92 visits and $70 traffic value per month, folks.
From the lead trainer of the most popular affiliate marketing course in the world.
I know, Scarlett.
Unbelievable.
I also found it somewhat incredible that Kyle does a whole lesson inside WA on how to create socially engaging content…
…and demonstrates with an article that didn’t prove very socially engaging at all…
And I haven’t even mentioned his design skills…
Probably what happened is this:
- Kyle knew enough about SEO and affiliate marketing back in 2005-2015 to build some profitable sites.
- He shared his knowledge in WA and students started getting good results, too.
- WA blew up and started earning a ton of money, way more than Kyle ever earned from his affiliate sites.
- Since then, Kyle’s been so busy buying yachts (or whatever) that he’s had to abandon his affiliate sites and can’t find time to update the WA training.
So you see, it’s not like he’s a scammer or anything.
Which is more than I can say for the other lead trainer in WA…
Jay Neill
Jay Neill runs the weekly live training webinars for members of WA Premium. A member of the program himself since 2007, Jay describes himself as “The World’s First Wealthy Affiliate Influencer.”
Which is appropriate, since he’s likely earning big $$$ by misleading convincing people to join WA.
From the Wealthy Affiliate about page:
Jay sounds like quite the expert, doesn’t he?
Let’s do a little digging…
AffiliateResources.org
This appears to be Jay’s primary website.
It was registered in 2010 – three years after he joined Wealthy Affiliate.
Gotta say, the traffic numbers are quite low considering it’s the main site of someone who’s supposed to be an expert affiliate marketer, but Jay is quite likely earning a decent living from that site.
Because the whole thing is essentially a funnel to get visitors signed up to WA as his referral.
Stay on the site long enough and this pop-up will appear:
Or this one:
Wow, $300 a day!?
$9,300 a month!?
Let’s take a closer look at the site he’s referring to…
FootballSnackHelmets.com
It’s a fairly simple affiliate site that looks like this:
Here’s the organic traffic data for that site via Ahrefs:
SimilarWeb estimates that the site gets 91% of its traffic from search.
Combined with the Ahrefs estimate above, that would mean ~400 people visit the site each month.
But let’s be generous and call it 500.
Let’s be even more generous and say that:
- 100% of those visitors click on an Amazon affiliate link (this never happens)
- 50% of those clickers purchase a football snack helmet on Amazon (also unheard of)
- They all buy the most expensive helmet available ($65.91)
- And Jay earns an 8% commission per sale (actually not possible anymore, but we’ll get to that)
By my (generous) calculations, that works out to $1,318.20 in commissions each month.
Which is pretty good.
But Jay is claiming the site earns 7x that amount!
On Day 9 of his email series, Jay reveals his “proof”…
The attached screenshot:
See anything wrong with that?
I’ll make it more clear…
It doesn’t add up, does it?
So I jumped on WA and shot Jay a private message…
It seems I was indeed asking for too much, because I never heard back from Jay after that ☹️
Probably what’s happening is this:
- Jay had an amazing 3-day stretch as an Amazon affiliate in February 2016 – you know, back when the WA training was still fairly effective.
- Jay hasn’t been able to replicate that success in all the months and years since.
- But he’s still using – and exaggerating – his February 2016 earnings as “proof” that his tiny niche site earns $9,300 a month.
- And he’s using that “proof” to convince people to sign up for WA as his referral…
(The case study he links to is from 2015, btw)
- All those WA referrals are making Jay rich.
- To the point that he felt compelled to change his Facebook profile photo to this…
Read more about Wealthy Affiliate
- Wealthy Affiliate Review
- Wealthy Affiliate: Positive Reviews, Poor Results
- Wealthy Affiliate Scam?
- Is Wealthy Affiliate a Pyramid Scheme? Is it MLM?
- Wealthy Affiliate’s Kyle Loudon & Jay Neill
- How Much Money Does Wealthy Affiliate Make?
- The Wealthy Affiliate Affiliate Program
Video review of Wealthy Affiliate…
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