Contributions from the 
Wealthy Affiliate is a popular affiliate marketing training platform.
(in-depth Wealthy Affiliate review)
Wealthy Affiliate has offered solid affiliate marketing training for much of its existence. But more people have been calling the program a scam in recent years as its teachings have become increasingly outdated and ineffective.
I’m hesitant to declare Wealthy an outright scam, because clearly a few people are still having success with it (examples).
But consider:
- 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)
Let’s dive into all those points and more below…
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.
WEALTHY AFFILIATE COMPLAINTS
Is Wealthy Affiliate a pyramid scheme? Is it MLM?
Wealthy Affiliate cannot be considered a strict pyramid or Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) scheme, but it does have elements of both.
I explore this topic in more detail in another article.
Briefly: most WA “success stories” appear to be students who earn the majority of their income by referring other students to Wealthy Affiliate.
In contrast, better affiliate marketing courses we’ve reviewed show many students earning significant income from unrelated affiliate programs, instead of primarily recruiting new students to the same training.
Unsubstantiated claims in Wealthy Affiliate
You’ll find many dubious claims within Wealthy Affiliate. These claims are either impossible to prove, or easily contradicted with a quick Google search.
Examples…
Highest Success Rate
From the first lesson of the Online Entrepreneur Certification:
And how is that measured, exactly?
You Won’t Fail
From the so-called WA Success page:
Only quitters fail.
Everyone else simply hasn’t succeeded… yet.
Riiiight.
Flip that around and it’s just as meaningless…
Dream Research Platform
From the eighth lesson of the Affiliate Bootcamp, referring to WA’s keyword research tool:
This would seem to contradict the findings of a survey of 137 internet marketing experts – including professional affiliate marketers – none of whom mentioned Jaaxy when asked which tool is best for keyword research.
Funny that.
The Best Domain Names
In a Premium-only video entitled, How to Become an Expert in Any Niche, Kyle says at the 19:30 mark:
“I recommend a .com or a .org domain name, simply because they rank better. They tend to stick in Google a lot longer too once you do get ranked, so they are definitely the best domain names.”
To the contrary, Google themselves have stated that, when it comes to SEO, all TLDs are treated the same, and both SEMRush and Internet.com have found that to be true.
Wealthy Affiliate Members OWN Google Rankings
From the WA homepage:
No, that is not a fact.
That is meaningless marketing speak, with no evidence to back it up.
Top Affiliate Marketing Platform
Mosey on over to wealthyaffiliate.com/affiliates and you’ll see the following:
It’s a safe bet that only the WA founders were invited to vote on this.
Misleading claims in Wealthy Affiliate
Peruse the WA training or marketing materials, and you’ll find numerous promises and statements that turn out to be false.
Examples…
Build a profit ready website in less than 30 seconds
From the free WA training:
I’ll let a WA member respond to that:
WA members benefit from every Google update
From a Premium-only lesson inside WA:
Strangely, members report otherwise:
- Anyone recovering from the June Google Update?
- Getting Back on Track After Google Update
- June Google SEO Update, Dust Has Settled And It Could Have Been Worse
You could easily scale a campaign to make over $1 MILLION per year
From a public blog post by Kyle:
Easily?
Install 20,000 plugins on your Starter website
After you sign up for a free membership, Kyle writes in an email:
Then, in lesson 5 of the Affiliate Bootcamp, Kyle says at the 1:15 mark of the video:
“I think there are over 45,000 different plugins that you can use within WordPress now. And as a Premium member you’re going to have access to all of these. As a Starter member you’re just going to have access to the first two.”
😔
WA’s website hosting is unbeatable
You’ll hear a variation of this claim dozens of times within WA.
I picked a random WA SiteRubix site and ran a couple of speed tests (with Google):
And a security test (with Sucuri):
Ouch!
But that’s just a free site for a Standard WA member.
Surely a Premium WA site would get better results…
State of the art?
Industry leaders?
Unparalleled?
Hardly.
Oh, and should you cancel your Premium account at any point, you’ll receive an email with a ridiculous claim about the value of WA’s hosting:
$250 per month!?
Sounds like they plucked that number out of thin air. You can get solid hosting with the likes of Dreamhost and SiteGround for less than $30/month.
Poorly organized material in Wealthy Affiliate
Within the core WA training, lessons often appear scattered, disjointed, and repetitive. It seems the entire course was not planned out in advance, but rather pieced together haphazardly over the years.
Examples…
Sign up for Google Adsense…
In Level 3, Lesson 7 of the Online Entrepreneur Certification, Kyle walks you through setting up a Google Adsense account:
Then, in the very next lesson, he tells you that actually Google Adsense is a waste of time and you should focus your efforts on affiliate marketing instead:
Psych!
Sign up for multiple social media platforms…
In Level 4, Lesson 1 of the Online Entrepreneur Certification, you’re advised to sign up for 3 social media accounts:
Several lessons later – after lots of advice and instruction related to each social platform – Kyle tells you that actually no, wait, maybe you should be more selective…
Gotcha again, suckers!
How to create a video (twice)
From Level 4, Lesson 9 of the Affiliate Bootcamp:
Five lessons later, Kyle has apparently had a memory lapse because he covers video again as if for the first time:
By the way, you’ve been writing all your articles wrong…
It’s not until the 46th lesson of the Online Entrepreneur Certification that you receive instructions on how to plan out an article before you start writing it…
Which wouldn’t be so bad… if you hadn’t already been advised to write 20+ articles throughout the previous 45 lessons!
Sorry, kids.
Those are all kinda useless now.
Content → Email → Content
Level 2, Lesson 3 of the Online Entrepreneur Certification is about creating content:
The very next lesson is about setting up an email address:
Next lesson, we’re back talking about content again:
Smooth transitions there, Kyle.
Take a break, do what you like
There are a handful of lessons within WA where you are either told to take a break, or to do whatever you like.
Perhaps they’re trying to avoid being a helicopter parent here, but given everything else wrong with Wealthy Affiliate, I’m more inclined to think it’s simply laziness on their part.
Examples…
Crucial info missing from Wealthy Affiliate core training
Wealthy Affiliate fails to teach many theories, strategies and tactics that are important for affiliate marketers to know about in 2022.
Going through all the core training lessons in WA, I noticed that there was no – or in some cases, grossly insufficient – training on the following topics:
- Nofollow
- Building backlinks
- Affiliate disclosures
- Google Adsense
- Alternatives to Google Adsense
- Caching
- Updating content
- External linking to authority sites
- Citing sources
- Outsourcing content
- Schema markup
- Featured snippets
- Video (no training in OEC series)
- YouTube SEO
- Alternatives to Jaaxy for keyword research
- Which sources of traffic are best and why
- Email marketing
- WordPress page builders
To be clear: most of these topics are addressed – with varying levels of proficiency – within Wealthy Affiliate.
The issue is that they are not addressed within the core WA training material!
You can use the search bar in WA to find loads of training and blog posts on something like nofollow, for example…
… but to search for nofollow in the first place you’d need to know it’s a thing.
And newbie affiliate marketers won’t know it’s a thing because the core training literally never mentions it.
Sure, some of the items in the above list aren’t a big deal.
But many of them are absolutely crucial to affiliate marketing success.
For example:
- Not having an affiliate disclosure can get you in trouble with the FTC
- Dofollowing all your affiliate links can get your site penalized by Google
- Regularly updating your content can have a significant impact on rankings
These are big, important things you might never know as a member of WA.
UPDATE
I found this video of Google’s Matt Cutts saying you don’t need to worry so much about nofollowing affiliate links…
So it’s not such a big deal after all that nofollow isn’t mentioned in the core WA training.
Everything else they neglect to cover is still a problem.
Bad advice in Wealthy Affiliate
At best, the core training in Wealthy Affiliate is unhelpful. At worst, it will actually reduce your chances of success, due to numerous recommendations and instructions that no affiliate marketer should follow.
Examples…
Backlinks “are a thing of the past”
Here’s co-founder Kyle telling a WA student in 2021 that backlinks are nothing to worry about…
Meanwhile…
- MonsterInsights recently rated backlinks as “the second most important Google ranking factor”
- SEJ ranks them as one of the top 7 Google ranking factors
- Ahrefs calls backlinks “arguably the most important ranking factor”
And Moz writes:
Links are immensely important for SEO and make up the lion’s share of “off-site SEO” (also called “off-page SEO”). Characteristics of a site’s internal and external links can greatly influence its rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs).
(Also, note the irony of Kyle – a guy teaching affiliate marketing while selling an affiliate marketing course – saying that “anyone teaching ‘backlinks’ is almost certainly selling you a back link service.” 🙄)
“There is NO SUCH THING as choosing the wrong niche.”
Lead trainer Kyle hammers on this point several times throughout the core WA training, saying things like:
“You can create a lucrative business within absolutely any niche online.”
And if you fail in a particular niche?
Well, that’s totally your fault, buddy…
Oh, and don’t worry about competition when choosing your niche…
Kyle also says in a video for Premium members:
“Never think that you’re too targeted. More often the case is that you’re too broad with your niche’s starting point.”
Okay, great.
I guess I’ll go start my “Tiddlywinks for African American amputees” affiliate site then.
I’m sure that’ll do well.
🙄
Also:
Despite Kyle’s claims that there’s no such thing as choosing the wrong niche, many members end up – you guessed it – choosing the wrong niche…
Use H3 or H4 tags instead of H2 tags
Kyle says an amazing thing at the 7:15 mark of this video within WA:
His exact words:
“If I wanted to make this a heading tag, I would simply go up here and I’d scroll down to the Heading 3 or the Heading 4 tag. I find the Heading 1 and Heading 2 tags a little bit too big, so I usually try to keep it to an H3 or an H4 tag.”
He repeats this horrible advice several more times throughout the core training.
Apparently, he has little understanding of what Yoast refers to as a basic part of SEO, or how to style headings using CSS.
Use the Site Content platform
WA teaches you how to set up a WordPress website and fill it with content.
Unfortunately, instead of adding content directly via the WordPress admin, students are taught to use WA’s “Site Content” platform instead.
This is essentially a layer on top of WordPress, the purpose of which is to simplify the process of creating content.
And that’s great.
Until you realize that you can’t do the following basic things via Site Content:
- Edit posts you’ve already published
- Add tags or categories
- View source / edit the HTML
No, for any of that you need to use the WordPress editor.
Which begs the question:
Why bother using Site Content at all??
Sure, it might make it easier for newbies to get started, and it does have a couple of features – eg grammar check, stock image search – that you’d need plugins for in WordPress.
But here’s what happens:
- Members have to learn their way around two content editors (SC + WP) instead of one (WP).
- Members end up confused because it’s never made clear when you should use one editor vs the other.
If you’re reading this and you’re a member of WA, trust me: skip the Site Content thingy and create all your content via the WordPress editor.
You’ll thank me in the long run.
List the price in your Amazon reviews
In May 2019, a WA member noted some bad advice within the core training:
When I checked 4 months later, the training had yet to be updated, and new students were still being taught to list prices in their Amazon reviews.
smh
Pay writers $5 per post
Premium members have access to Kyle’s Diamond Traffic Program…
In it, Kyle casually mentions that you can pay writers $5 per post and end up with “a ton of traffic” and “A LOT of revenue”…
Anyone who has ever outsourced content creation knows what $5 will get you.
It ain’t a ton of traffic.
And it ain’t a lot of revenue.
As the saying goes, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
Manually backup your WordPress site every week
As recently as 2020, Kyle was recommending the following in the Affiliate Bootcamp training:
I guess Kyle didn’t know that for years there had been free plugins that would back up your website automatically.
Web hosts like Dreamhost and SiteGround have also long included daily site backups on all their basic plans.
Outdated training in Wealthy Affiliate
The free training in Wealthy Affiliate is mostly up to date, but the deeper you go into the Premium (ie paid) training, the more you encounter lessons that haven’t been updated for several years, rendering many of them confusing and/or useless.
You’ll see many questions and blog posts in WA regarding outdated training…
And we’ve heard repeatedly from students complaining about outdated training in WA…
I also think the whole thing is too old to make digital marketing sense today. If you use the content to try and make money today, you will end up with frustrations and $0.00 in annual earnings. There are tons of wrong information and misleading claims which I believe are made to spice up the course and lure customers into purchasing it.
Jonas Rasmussen
Jonas RasmussenI think the course is not useful today. The content is the same as what we had way back in 2017. A lot has changed and some of the things in the course no longer exist or they have been simplified. The marketing approaches, for instance, are too traditional if you compare them with the current ones.
Mia GreenLooking at the training program today, it is the same as it was when I paid for it. No update has been made. I think if anyone was to use it today, it would not add any value to them nor lead to any successful affiliate business. The strategies are outdated and much of the content would not apply on modern websites, let alone guarantee any success. In short, the program was worthy back in the day. Today, it is not!
Thomas BrownHere are a few examples of outdated training within Wealthy Affiliate…
Google+
Google+ was an ill-fated social network that was shut down in April 2019.
There was a core lesson in WA devoted to Google+, which now appears like so:
I took that screenshot in August 2019, for months after the lesson had apparently been last updated.
Checking again in November 2021 – more than 2 years later, and 2.5 years after Google+ had shut down! – the lesson was STILL included in the core training.
So I guess “very soon” doesn’t mean much at WA.
You can still find mention of Google+ in many other parts of the core training…
Search engine market share
From a Premium lesson that was apparently updated in April 2018:
I have no idea where Kyle is pulling that 33% number from.
As per statcounter.com, Google has held a ~90% market share since as far back as 2009.
But Kyle believes so thoroughly in the power of Bing and Yahoo, that he devotes 10 whole lessons of training to such in the Affiliate Bootcamp…
Worse still, those 10 lessons come BEFORE any training on Google PPC.
🤯
Everything related to social media
I’ve mentioned the Google+ stuff already, but it’s not a stretch to say that nearly ALL the social media training within WA is outdated.
For example, here’s Kyle talking about Pinterest in 2019. (Pinterest has been around since 2010.)
Meanwhile, videos showing Facebook in the core training in 2021 appeared to have been recorded in December 2012…
You’ll also hear Kyle throwing out numbers like 12% for organic reach on Facebook, even though it hasn’t been that high since 2013.
Design your content in the default WordPress editor
Up until 2021, pretty much every video related to creating content in WA was recorded before the rise of WordPress page builders such as Elementor and the native Gutenberg block editor.
So up until the end of 2021, you’d always see Kyle fumbling around the old WordPress editor, underlining his headings and trying to highlight his CTAs ==> like this <==
The end result was a very bland blog post belonging to the dark ages of the Internet.
You can see the full blog post here on one of Kyle’s websites
(Don’t say I didn’t warn you!)
It wasn’t until October of 2021 that Wealthy Affiliate finally updated their training to use the Gutenberg block editor…
This was almost 3 years after Gutenberg was considered stable enough to become the default WordPress editor (source), and a couple of years after many other affiliate marketing courses had updated their training to account for it.
But true to form, Wealthy Affiliate waited until the last moment to update their training, literally 2 months before the Classic Editor would no longer be supported by WordPress.
Wealthy Affiliate support
There’s good news and bad news when it comes to the support inside WA.
The good news is that you’re likely to get an answer to whatever question you may have.
Often co-owner Kyle is the one responding:
The bad news is that the answer you get might not be great…
(You can check Kyle’s responses to scores more member questions in the comments of his profile here, no login needed.)
You can also get feedback on your website inside Wealthy Affiliate.
It works on a credit system, so you need to give before you get.
Unfortunately, the first two times I tried to offer feedback – four days apart – I got the same error message…
Oh well.
UPDATE
After I wrote the above, a member of WA contacted me to note that Kyle isn’t always so responsive:
I have emailed Kyle several times with no response, despite the “email me anytime” mantra form letter that everyone gets when they sign up. Very misleading.
It seems Kyle also fails to respond if you ask him anything about getting a refund…
Wealthy Affiliate community
Much like WA support, there’s good news and bad news when it comes to the WA community.
The good news is that the community is super active.
Partly because the WA platform is built like a social network and optimized for engagement.
The bad news is that much of the community activity in WA seems utterly pointless, and will probably just distract you from building a successful affiliate website.
For example, when I first signed up for WA Premium, 18 other members saw fit to drop by my profile and leave generic comments welcoming me to the cult club.
Many members also like to leave pointless comments after each training…
While others reserve their ramblings for blog posts within WA…
Community moderation also appears to be lacking:
Lastly on this topic: there is a live chat feature within Wealthy Affiliate, which is fine for connecting with other members, but don’t expect to find many pro affiliate marketers hanging out there.
Rankings and Ambassadors
All members of Wealthy Affiliate are ranked according to their contributions to the WA community (details here), and the top 25 are referred to as “Ambassadors.”
This is all completely meaningless.
This explains why you see so many people posting so many generic messages and comments within WA: they’re all trying to improve their ranking!
And what’s the reward for achieving Ambassador status within WA?
You know, intangible stuff…
And yeah, sure, there’s something to all that.
But here’s the thing:
It’s entirely possible to rank high in Wealthy Affiliate and still suck at affiliate marketing!
For example, Cld111 is #12 on the leaderboard above. She’s been a member of WA since 2009.
In case you missed that:
- This lady joined Wealthy Affiliate more than a decade ago
- She’s ranked as high as #12 on the WA leaderboard
- And she’s only getting 30 visits a day to a site she’s been working on for 11 months
Just wow.
UPDATE
That WA member found my video review and left a comment, which turned into a bit of a back and forth.
You can see the full discussion here on YouTube
That discussion highlights something I’ve noticed about many long-term members: they passionately defend the Wealthy Affiliate program despite never making much money from it.
Baffling.
Useless SiteRubix websites
As a Starter member of Wealthy Affiliate, you can build a website on a free SiteRubix domain. But this kind of website is practically useless.
These sites are touted as “fully operational,” “profit ready” and capable of generating 💰💰💰
What you aren’t told during the free training is that your website is practically useless until you sign up for WA Premium and move it to your own domain.
Here’s lead trainer Kyle stating explicitly that SiteRubix domains are NOT sufficient for building a successful website.
Several Premium members give their opinion of WA’s free SiteRubix hosting in this thread (no login needed).
Among them:
Wealthy Affiliate Lock-in Effect
By default, Wealthy Affiliate manages the domain and hosting of your website. If you cancel your WA membership, you will no longer have access to your site and it will be immediately taken offline.
I occasionally get emails about this:
I’m absolutely fuming. I actually own my domain and since my Wealthy Affiliate membership ran out I received a message saying my account has been suspended and I cannot now get into my website. Shouldn’t I still be able to access my own domain and still have my website without going through Wealthy Affiliate? WHAT CAN I DO ABOUT THIS?
If you want to cancel your WA membership but keep your website, it is important to move your site BEFORE canceling your membership.
Unfortunately, Wealthy Affiliate provides little information or support for moving your website elsewhere. (Meanwhile they have lots of info and support for moving an existing website TO Wealthy Affiliate. Go figure.)
This article by Marion Black is a must-read if you want to move your website AWAY from Wealthy Affiliate.
Positives of Wealthy Affiliate
Wealthy Affiliate is a bit like Tony Soprano: generally not a good human being, but he does have some redeeming qualities.
Here are five things I actually like about WA…
Decent training on the fundamentals
If you’re completely new to affiliate marketing or how to make money online, you will learn some worthwhile things going through the free WA training.
Such as:
- What affiliate marketing is and how it works
- The basics of WordPress
- Basic keyword research
Just be warned that the further you go into the core training, the worse it gets.
(It’s almost like they made the free stuff good enough to convince folks to sign up for Premium… and stopped caring after that 🤔)
Sense of progress
The WA training is broken up into bite-size chunks and you are given manageable tasks at the end of each lesson.
With that, it’s easy to feel a sense of progress and stay motivated, even if you’re not actually accomplishing much.
Write honest reviews
Lead trainer Kyle repeatedly advises students to write honest reviews of whatever products or services they choose to promote.
One such example:
It’s just unfortunate that most WA affiliates don’t follow this advice 😕
White hat throughout
I didn’t see any grey or black hat SEO techniques promoted in the 120 core lessons of Wealthy Affiliate, and Kyle states explicitly in a (rare) 2019 update that it’s best to play by the rules:
Text + video content
Almost every core training lesson in WA comes with video and text, so it’s quite easy to find and refer back to material later on.
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…
Wealthy Affiliate Alternatives
Here are the top affiliate marketing programs we’ve reviewed…
Wealthy affiliate doesn’t even fix their websites that the use in their options for you to create your own site with. I’m canceling my premium membership with them after just a few weeks since I am unable to use their training as is, I set up my site through them yet every time I go to my website and sign on it wont even show my websites name above the dashboard just the one they gave me and I’ve followed the lecture 100% several times over but it doesn’t match what they are showing. They make it look seamless but their own site options are totally buggy and outdated to the point where I can’t even get something as simple as my sites name with my information on it through the options they provide. If it’s this unprofessional already I can only imagine it getting worse and of course they never truely address your concerns. They appear to be using extremely outdated sites and software.