This is the definitive Wealthy Affiliate review for 2024.
We’ve collected 35+ reviews from verified WA students. And I have personally signed up to Wealthy Affiliate as a premium student multiple times over the years, spending 50+ hours reviewing the community and training materials.
(Have you taken this course? Add your rating!)
If you want to know:
- If Wealthy Affiliate can help you make money online
- If the training is still effective nowadays
- The common complaints people have about WA
- If the whole thing is legit or a scam
Then you’ve come to the right place.
If you’re in a hurry, below is a video version of my Wealthy Affiliate review. (It’s a few years old but little has changed with WA in the meantime.)
Wealthy Affiliate claims to be the best affiliate marketing platform and training to help you make money online. They offer an all-in-one solution that seems to have been effective up until about 2016.
Nowadays, most of their successful students seem to be earning the majority of their affiliate income by convincing other people to sign up for Wealthy Affiliate.
Jump to…
About the Author
Hey, I’m Niall Doherty.
I quit my last 9-to-5 job back in 2010.
Since then, I’ve earned my living online in various ways. Over the last 4 years (through 2023) I’ve earned $842,000 from my laptop, mostly via affiliate marketing.
I’m on a mission to accurately rate and review all the best affiliate marketing courses. My team and I have spent 900+ hours investigating these courses and getting feedback from real students.
All that to say: we know a thing or two about such courses and making money online.
The Best Affiliate Marketing Course?
We’re on a mission to find the best affiliate marketing course, based on our own extensive research plus feedback from real students.
Unfortunately, Wealthy Affiliate doesn’t make the top of our list…
🏆 Best Affiliate Marketing Courses 🏆
How does Wealthy Affiliate help you make money?
Wealthy Affiliate is a course and community that promises to teach you how to make money online with affiliate marketing.
Here’s an image from their free training showing you how affiliate marketing works…
Wealthy Affiliate basically aims to help you set up a website, promote products on that website, and earn a commission for every sale you refer.
There are two main tracks to the core training…
- Affiliate Bootcamp promises to teach people how to create a website promoting Wealthy Affiliate.
- Online Entrepreneur Certification promises to teach people how to create an affiliate website in a non-MMO niche. For example, your site could be about dog training, pool cleaning, or website hosting.
Within those two core sections and the rest of Wealthy Affiliate, you’ll find 100’s of training modules of varying quality and recency.
Who is Wealthy Affiliate for?
Wealthy Affiliate sells itself as a platform for anyone interested in affiliate marketing…
However, I would say it is mainly a platform for people with no experience with online business or affiliate marketing, who are looking to grasp the basics before quickly moving on to more advanced training.
This is a sentiment echoed by several verified students…
I think the Wealthy Affiliate course is a fair deal for people with no experience at all in areas like how WordPress and affiliate marketing work… Years after I used the course and advanced my knowledge on affiliate marketing, I would say WA is too shallow, though. This includes the premium plan.
Gerrid Smith
I would recommend the course to people who want to have a rough idea of how affiliate marketing works but NOT anyone that wants to make money from it. You will be disappointed!
Goodell David
While the training promised to cover everything one would need to succeed in the business, I found it quite shallow and had to research deeper. I used the program mostly as an outline or summary of what to do, then dig deeper from external sources.
Thomas Brown
- Read more reviews from Wealthy Affiliate members
- Full list of ways to make money online (including better options)
Does Wealthy Affiliate have a good reputation?
Not really, no.
Wealthy Affiliate is owned by Canadian entrepreneurs Carson Lim and Kyle Loudon.
Kyle and Carson have been in business since 2005 under the corporation name Niche Marketing, Inc.
Wealthy Affiliate claims to have helped more than 1.4 million students over the years, making it the most popular affiliate marketing course in the world.
However, I’m hesitant to recommend anyone sign up for Wealthy Affiliate.
I say that as someone who:
- Has earned more than $200,000 from affiliate marketing in one year
- Has signed up as a premium WA member multiple times
- Spent 45+ hours reviewing the training and community
- Surveyed dozens of verified Wealthy Affiliate students
A quick summary of my main complaints with Wealthy Affiliate:
- Much of the core training material is rarely updated (examples)
- The core training is riddled with bad advice (examples)
- The core training is filled with misleading claims (examples)
- The core training is very poorly organized (examples)
- The lead trainers – Kyle Loudon and Jay Neill – appear to have had little success with their own affiliate sites since 2016 (read more)
- Wealthy Affiliate offers no refunds (read more)
- Members are explicitly encouraged and instructed to recruit other paying members to WA (read more)
- The most “successful” students of WA seem to earn most of their money from referring other people to WA (examples)
I cover several of those problems in my video review of Wealthy Affiliate.
But the main reason I recommend you avoid Wealthy Affiliate, is simply that very few students seem to make money from it…
Are Wealthy Affiliate students getting results?
You would think so from reading all the positive reviews of Wealthy Affiliate posted on other blogs or Trustpilot.
But take a closer look at such reviews.
Often you will find that the person giving the positive review is making most of their income by referring other people to Wealthy Affiliate.
Jerry Huang is a prime example. He once boasted of earning 85% of his affiliate income by promoting Wealthy Affiliate…
A WA member called littlemama has a similar story, reporting that she earns about 75% of her income by referring other people to Wealthy Affiliate and its keyword research tool (Jaaxy)…
It’s no surprise to find so many WA students actively promoting Wealthy Affiliate itself, since 60% of the core training is devoted to showing them how to do exactly that.
This is why many people come to view Wealthy Affiliate as a pyramid or Multi-Level Marketing scheme:
Many of the “success stories” seem to be students making money primarily by convincing other people to sign up for the program.
It’s a complaint we’ve heard repeatedly from Wealthy Affiliate students…
Inside the course, they are really pushing the students to invite others to join. I would say this is a double tragedy; they sell you a course then use you to make even more money by inviting others!
Ray Charles
Very early into the course, I realized that they keep asking you to invite premium members to them. This raised my suspicion and I decided to dig into their reviews online. Funny thing is that most of the people who claim to have made significant money from Wealthy Affiliate, earned their commissions by referring others to WA.
Chris Brown
If you’re new to affiliate marketing then do yourself a favour and ignore any positive reviews of WA you see – and you will see a lot of them; commissions for promoting WA can be huge – and look elsewhere.
Validated Reviewer
But those MLM-style success stories aren’t enough to explain all the positive ratings and reviews for Wealthy Affiliate on Trustpilot…
Turns out that the owners of Wealthy Affiliate “actively manage” their reputation on Trustpilot, and have used “various marketing campaigns” to increase their rating there…
Read through the reviews of Wealthy Affiliate on Trustpilot and you’ll notice something remarkable:
The vast majority of people who leave a positive review of Wealthy Affiliate seem to have earned very little money online.
Barbara Richnow is a prime example.
She posted a glowing 900+ word five-star review of Wealthy Affiliate on Trustpilot…
Just a few days later, Barbara posted within Wealthy Affiliate that she was celebrating 4 years in the program, but had yet to create her website…
In other words, Barbara had spent 4 years and more than $1000 on the Wealthy Affiliate training, never created a website – and therefore presumably never earned much income as an affiliate – and yet still gave WA a positive review and a 5-star rating.
🤯
Unfortunately, Barbara is not alone in giving high praise to a program that has failed to help her make money online.
To conclude this section, the vast majority of positive reviews you’ll see of Wealthy Affiliate come from two types of people:
- Affiliates who earn a commission if you join WA through their link
- Excited and hopeful students who have yet to earn significant affiliate income
In contrast, better affiliate marketing courses we’ve reviewed show many of their students having success without promoting that same course to others.
How much does Wealthy Affiliate cost?
There are three membership levels in Wealthy Affiliate:
- Starter – free
- Premium – $19 first month, then $49 per month.
- Premium Plus – $49 first month, then $99 per month.
The free membership gives you limited access to the training material, Wealthy Affiliate community (7 days only), and website building tools.
You can save money on the Premium and Premium Plus memberships by paying for a year in advance. Premium Yearly costs $495. Premium Plus Yearly costs $995.
The free training in Wealthy Affiliate is a decent introduction to affiliate marketing, and the content is mostly up to date.
But be warned!
The free membership is nowhere near enough to help you build a successful affiliate site and make money online – everything in there is geared towards converting you to a paid account.
If you do want to give Wealthy Affiliate a proper try, I’d recommend starting with a free membership, then availing of the $19 offer for the first month of Premium.
Wealthy Affiliate Discount?
There are a couple of ways to save on your Wealthy Affiliate membership.
One is to pay for an annual subscription rather than paying monthly. Last I checked, the yearly membership works out 16% cheaper.
Wealthy Affiliate also seems to do a big discount offer each year around Black Friday. I’ve seen them offer up to 45% off their annual Premium and Premium Plus plans during that promotion.
Refund Policy
Officially, Wealthy Affiliate does not give refunds.
As per the WA Terms of Service:
Given that, if you are tempted to try Wealthy Affiliate for yourself, I recommend you sign up for a monthly membership and test it out for a few weeks.
But be very hesitant to upgrade to the yearly membership option.
All that said, I’ve seen multiple reports within WA of affiliates noticing that some of their referrals received refunds (example).
So it does seem to be possible to get a refund, though the process for doing so remains unclear.
Meanwhile, some students report that their refund requests are ignored…
How is the training structured?
Once you sign up for a Premium account, your Wealthy Affiliate dashboard will look like this…
As you can see, the program looks and feels more like a social network than a training program.
The core training consists of two separate tracks:
- Online Entrepreneur Certification (OEC)
“a 5 phase (50 lesson) series of courses walking you through the process of creating and growing a business within absolutely ANY niche that you want.” - Affiliate Bootcamp
“a 7 Phase (70 lesson) series of courses walking you through the process of creating and establishing a business in a niche related to the promotion of Wealthy Affiliate.”
About 40% of the core training is devoted to the OEC, and the other 60% to Affiliate Bootcamp.
(Yes, you read that right: the majority of the core training is about how to promote Wealthy Affiliate itself.)
The lessons within the core training are all in text format, often with an accompanying video or two to explain more visual concepts. Kyle writes and presents most of this training.
If you’d like to get a feel for Kyle’s teaching style, check this video:
Outside of the core training, there are 100’s of tutorials created by members of the WA community…
These are of varying quality. Often the person teaching the information does not appear to have any significant experience with the topic.
Jay Neill (aka magistudios) does a live training class for the WA community each week, all of which are archived and can be viewed at any time. Premium Plus members also get several additional weekly trainings from experienced WA members (aka “Super Affiliates”).
As a Wealthy Affiliate member, you also get access to the Jaaxy keyword research tool, which seems decent but is rarely mentioned in lists of the top keyword tools.
You also get your own social media-like profile page on Wealthy Affiliate, where other members can post messages. Once you sign up, you’ll notice that lots of members drop by to leave you some words of encouragement.
As noted elsewhere, much of the motivation for posting such messages seems to be a desire to climb the internal “Ambassador” leaderboard…
You may find the layout of Wealthy Affiliate somewhat confusing and overwhelming, as this student did…
I was very confused by how they organized it. For example, they will be talking about some concepts in chapter 2 as if the learner knows them only to go and 'introduce' them in a later chapter. You need to go through the whole course before you start figuring out which step should come before the other.
Jonas Rasmussen
Thankfully their search function works quite well, so you can always use that to find what you’re looking for…
Green Lights 🟢
Here are a few things to like about Wealthy Affiliate:
- Decent training on affiliate marketing fundamentals
- Lessons are short and simple, easily digestible.
- 7-day (limited) free trial and only $19 for your first month.
- White hat throughout
- Many students love the sense of community
Red Flags 🚩
A few things about Wealthy Affiliate that might give you pause:
- Lack of significant success stories from students.
- Too MLM-y for my liking (60% of core training is about promoting WA)
- Core training is rarely updated (examples)
- The lead trainers – Kyle Loudon and Jay Neill – appear to have had little success with affiliate marketing since 2016 (more info)
- Core training is filled with misleading claims (examples)
- Core training is riddled with bad advice (examples)
- Core training is missing crucial info (examples)
- Core training is poorly organized (examples)
- Silly and distracting internal ranking system (more info)
Other things you should know
- You may see claims that Wealthy Affiliate is one of the more affordable ways to learn affiliate marketing. But keep in mind that the cost of 2 years’ membership in Wealthy Affiliate is comparable to the cost of lifetime access to an alternative course. So if you’re in it for the long run, Wealthy Affiliate can end up being far more expensive than alternatives.
- Don’t expect to earn any money from the free SiteRubix websites you get as a Wealthy Affiliate Premium member. As noted elsewhere, those sites are practically useless.
The sites they help build are too sketchy that they look unprofessional. I don’t think any serious consumer would follow through on such websites. The bounce rate you get from the free sites you get in the course is alarming!
Ray Charles
Is Wealthy Affiliate worth it?
Not really, no.
Despite the few positives listed above, be wary when signing up for Wealthy Affiliate.
Sure, you can go through 20 training lessons for free, then sign up for the $19 special offer, slog through all the Premium material in a month, and then cancel your account before you get charged again.
As a newbie doing that, you’ll learn a lot in a few short weeks.
But, as you’ve seen throughout this review, the majority of what you learn in WA is either outdated, misleading, or flat-out wrong.
If your goal is to start making money online and eventually become a successful affiliate marketer, you’d be much better off investing in a better alternative.
Wealthy Affiliate Alternatives
Here are the top affiliate marketing programs we’ve reviewed…
🏆 Best Affiliate Marketing Courses 🏆
Your Thoughts on Wealthy Affiliate
- Have you taken this course yourself?
Add your rating so others can see if it’s worthwhile. - Do you have a question about this course?
Let us know below and we’ll try find the answer.
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…