My HONEST Wealthy Affiliate Review (2022)

This honest Wealthy Affiliate review (updated for 2022) will tell you literally everything you need to know about Wealthy Affiliate

So if you’re wondering how it works, if it’s legit, whether you can really make money with it & how long it’ll actually take you to begin earning then be sure to stick around.

I’ll be leaving no stone unturned & sharing my brutally honest thoughts.

Plus if after reading this Wealthy Affiliate review you decide you’d like to join, I’ll also explain how you can get access to a free bonus to fast track your results.

What Is Wealthy Affiliate?

Wealthy Affiliate is a place that enables people to earn money online through a method known as affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing basically involves promoting products or services for third-party companies (such as Amazon) in return for commissions which are paid out on successful sales.

So as an example, you could sign up to the Amazon affiliate program (named Amazon Associates) which is free to do and then promote any of the products from the Amazon website in return for commissions.

In fact, here’s a screenshot of that Amazon program, which as you can see pays up to a whopping 12% in commissions:

If you send somebody to the Amazon website & they purchase something, you get paid.

And Wealthy Affiliate provides you with everything you need to get started.

You get step-by-step training, all of the tools you need, access to community support & even access to personal 1-on-1 mentorship.

You’ll learn exactly what affiliate marketing is (in more detail), the best ways to get started with it & you’ll also be shown how you can find lucrative affiliate opportunities.

You see, whilst the process of affiliate marketing is pretty straight forward, actually finding success with it depends on how effective you are at promoting your links.

So anybody can quite easily get started affiliate marketing, but not everybody who does get started actually makes money – and that’s what Wealthy Affiliate is there to help with.

Wealthy Affiliate is there to show you how you can effectively promote your links in order to earn regular commissions & it also provides you with all of the resources you need to put what they teach into action.

You could basically call it a “one-stop-shop” for everything affiliate marketing

So if you’ve previously tried affiliate marketing & not had success or are new to it completely then Wealthy Affiliate is a program that’s designed to help you to actually get results.

How Does Wealthy Affiliate Work?

So as mentioned in the previous section of this Wealthy Affiliate review, Wealthy Affiliate teaches people how to make money with affiliate marketing, which involves promoting products or services for companies online in return for commissions.

Now, there are a number of different ways that you can promote products as an affiliate online.

Most programs teach methods such as paid advertising & social media promotion, and Wealthy Affiliate does indeed offer training on those methods, but it primarily focuses on a different one.

Wealthy Affiliate focuses on a method named search engine optimisation, and it’s my personal favourite method because it’s pretty straight forward, but most importantly it’s free to do.

Search engine optimisation basically involves leveraging websites like Google, Yahoo & Bing to send you unlimited amounts of visitors (for free) through to your affiliate links.

This means that once you implement this method you can stand to earn daily, consistent commissions & there’s absolutely no limit on the amount you can earn.

All you need to do is create small, simple webpages & Wealthy Affiliate both shows you how to do this, and provides you with the tools that you need to actually do it.

You see, when you create content online search engines like Google, Yahoo & Bing automatically discover it & list it within their results as an option for people to click on.

So as an example, if you had an interest in cycling & created a webpage outlining what you believed to be the best cycling backpacks, then Google would list that page whenever somebody searched for something related to “cycling backpacks”.

Here’s an example of that:

As you can see somebody has written about what they believe to be the best cycling backpacks for commuting & when I searched for something similar, the post is shown in the results.

This means that the person who wrote that post will now be getting visitors arriving at the page coming from Google

And guess what that means?

That means that they’ll have the opportunity to promote products to them as an affiliate & that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Take a look:

As you can see from the image above, next to each of the backpacks shown on that page the creator of the page has added affiliate links to view the products on Amazon.

This means that if somebody visits that page, clicks on a link & then buys something, the person who created that page will get paid a commission.

So from a small one-time effort of initially creating that page, the person who created it could now be earning daily, consistent, and completely passive commissions.

The best part is that there’s absolutely no limit on the amount of these pages that you can create.

The more you create, the more money you potentially stand to make.

As a result, some affiliates earn as much as 5-figures per month.

Some affiliates even earn as much as 6-figures per month.

And that might sound like quite a crazy amount of money, but providing you’re willing to work hard at it then it’s actually realistic to say that you could achieve it.

Especially with a method like search engine optimisation which is taught by Wealthy Affiliate because with each piece of content you create you’re basically compounding your results.

Think of it like real estate. Each piece of content you create is like an additional piece of property that you can earn from.

Pretty powerful stuff.

Is Wealthy Affiliate Legit?

Yes absolutely, Wealthy Affiliate is 100% legit. It’s actually the largest, longest-running, most reputable & most actively used affiliate marketing platform in the world.

At the time of writing this Wealthy Affiliate review, they have over 1,400,000 members across 193 countries, have 1,800+ expert coaches & help 23,000 people every single day.

Plus, they even let people get started with their platform completely free of charge.

There’s no payment details required & no trial period or anything like that – you can get in with just an email address meaning there’s absolutely no risk to check it out.

All you need to do is create a free Starter account.

The Starter account will enable you to begin working your way through the first 10 training lessons & you’ll also be given full access to the community as well.

That way you can check it out all first-hand to see whether or not you actually like it.

Then, if you decide you do like it you can opt to upgrade to the Wealthy Affiliate Premium membership which gives you access to literally everything there is to offer.

And unlike many other programs, Wealthy Affiliate has NO upsells.

Once you upgrade to Premium, you’ve got access to everything. There’s no annoying extra “levels” that you have to pay for like its common to see at most other places.

Wealthy Affiliate is honest, open & transparent.

And the same comes with cancelling your membership, there are no tricks there either. If you wish to cancel you can do it at any time with just a click of a button.

No ties, no contracts, nothing like that.

Wealthy Affiliate Pricing

As mentioned in the previous section of this Wealthy Affiliate review, Wealthy Affiliate offers an entirely free Starter membership so that you can check the program out.

The free Starter membership requires no payment details whatsoever, meaning there’s absolutely no risk to try it.

Free means free… And if you decide for whatever reason that you don’t like it, all you need to do is simply sign back out. There’s nothing you need to cancel.

The free Starter membership gives you access to the first 10 lessons, enables you to build a website & gives you access to the community.

Then, if you decide you like it & wish to continue you can opt to upgrade to the Premium membership.

The Premium level of membership gives you access to everything inside of the Wealthy Affiliate platform & the important thing to note is that there are no upsells after this.

So you’re probably thinking it’s going to cost a lot, right?

Well, nope – it’s not.

Wealthy Affiliate Premium membership costs just $49 per month & you can even bring that cost all the way down to just $30 per month if you pay for the full year in advance.

The full-year only costs $359 & once you’ve paid for the year that means you’ll have full access to everything & won’t have to pay another penny until the next year.

Plus like I also said in the previous section of this Wealthy Affiliate review there are absolutely no ties whatsoever.

You can cancel your membership at any time with the click of a button. There are no hoops to jump through & you don’t need to talk to anybody to cancel.

Wealthy Affiliate Success Stories

There are lots of good things to say about Wealthy Affiliate but what you’re probably most interested to know is whether or not it actually helps people to find success.

The answer, in short, is that it does, and that’s backed up by the HUGE number of Wealthy Affiliate success stories.

I mean there are literally thousands of success stories inside the platform itself but here are just a handful of them that I’ve picked out for you to see in this review:

(and feel free to click on any of them to verify that they’re real)

And if that’s not enough for you, here are even more:

Wealthy Affiliate Complaints

The truth is that if I said everything was great at Wealthy Affiliate I’d be lying.

I mean it is a great platform, don’t get me wrong – but at the same time, I do have some Wealthy Affiliate complaints.

For example, rank chasers.

Rank chasers inside of Wealthy Affiliate annoy the heck out of me.

You see, Wealthy Affiliate has an internal ranking system which ranks each member based on things like how active they are & how much they help other members.

The rank is not “important” and it has absolutely no effect on your business, but some members get totally obsessed over it & want to get ranked high to give them a feeling of self-importance inside of the community.

Of course, if a member is providing truly helpful content in the community then I have no problem with it. They deserved to be ranked well & they deserve to feel important.

But the problem comes when people try to cheat the system. They leave comments on almost everything (usually totally unhelpful) in an attempt to gain rank.

For example, when somebody asks a question its common to see a response with “great question, wish I could help, but I can’t”.

At a glance that might not seem too annoying, but when you repeatedly get emails notifying you of answers to your questions only to see BS answers like that, it gets pretty annoying pretty quickly.

It also often leads to bad advice.

Because of the ranking system, many members end up answering questions that they really know nothing about just in an effort to try to increase their rank.

This often leads to bad advice been given to members which is also pretty annoying to see – especially when its a new member to whom the advice could be detrimental to their success.

The only positive here is that more often than not, the more experienced members often come in & end up correcting them… But as you can imagine this often gets quite heated.

So those are my personal Wealthy Affiliate complaints. I’d say that aside from those complaints I’m pretty happy with the platform overall (aside from silly niggles).

It’s definitely safe to say that the positives outweigh the complaints, put it that way.

The Bottom Line

If you want to find success with affiliate marketing then Wealthy Affiliate, in my opinion, is the best place to start.

As far as I’m concerned there are NO other programs out there that off anywhere near the same level of value for money & in-depth training that Wealthy Affiliate does.

Most of the other affiliate marketing training programs are either insanely expensive (sometimes into the thousands of dollars) or they leave you to discover that they don’t truly offer the full package & that you need to purchase several other things in order to stand any chance of seeing success.

Or worse, they’re both expensive AND still don’t offer the full package.

But Wealthy Affiliate, on the other hand, provides you with absolutely everything you need to get started & see success, and they even let you try it all out completely free of charge.

On top of that, the training they provide is laid out in a step-by-step format (including both video & written material) which makes it absolutely perfect for beginners.

But at the same time, Wealthy Affiliate shouldn’t be disregarded for experts either because even though an expert may not need the training, the tools they provide alone still make it excellent value for money.

In fact, as shown below, they actually offer the best value for money managed web hosting in the industry:

So if you have not yet joined Wealthy Affiliate then my advice to you, regardless of whether you are an expert or beginner, would be to at least create a free Starter account & check it out for yourself.

Free Fast-Track Bonus

Realistically you not only want to see results, but you want to see them as quickly as possible, right?

It’s human nature.

So here’s the deal. If you sign up via my Wealthy Affiliate referral link & go Premium then at no extra cost to you whatsoever, I’ll get paid a commission.

And if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

If you sign up via my link & go Premium, I’ll offer you my own personal 1-on-1 mentorship to help you get your business off to a quick a start as you possibly can.

I’ll show you all the things I’ve learned over the years to put you on the fast-track to success.

Sound good?

All you need to do to take advantage of the bonus is to create your Premium account via referral link here.

But if you’re unsure then don’t worry, you can still check it all out as a free Starter member first & then upgrade to Premium later, that’s not a problem.

There’ll be no pressure on you to upgrade – but just know that when you do upgrade, I’ll be there by your side ready to help you to get things moving as quickly as possible.

So here’s all you need to do to take advantage of the bonus:

Create your Starter account via my link here
Complete your profile so I can see that you’re a real person
Look out for my message on your profile outlining the next steps
Go Premium when you’re ready to secure my bonus

Wealthy Affiliate FAQ

Obviously, I hope that most of your questions have already been answered in my Wealthy Affiliate review above, but just in case you still have some more, here are the answers to the questions that I most commonly get asked.

Is Affiliate Marketing Legal?

Yes, affiliate marketing is 100% legal. As an affiliate, you are basically just advertising products or services for companies & getting paid commissions in return for doing so. It’s perfectly legal & even most big-name companies like Amazon & Best Buy have affiliate programs.

How Long Does It Take To Make Money?

Technically, you could sign up as an affiliate today & make money tomorrow, but realistically if you’re brand new you should set yourself a goal of 3 to 6 months before expecting to see your first commissions.

The good news, however, is that once you do get your initial commissions, the commissions after that typically begin to come much faster. Here’s a chart showing the growth of a real Wealthy Affiliate member’s income:

Is Wealthy Affiliate Outdated?

Some of the Wealthy Affiliate training is outdated, but not the core training. The core training is regularly updated & still works in 2022.

Is Wealthy Affiliate a Pyramid Scheme?

No. Wealthy Affiliate does indeed have a referral program through which you can earn money by referring others, but this only pays out commissions for direct referrals. Pyramid schemes, however, payout commissions on multiple levels (hence the name) and typically stand to only benefit those at the top of the scheme.

Can You Really Make Money With Wealthy Affiliate?

Yes, you can. The Wealthy Affiliate training teaches affiliate marketing & all you need to do in order to begin making money is get somebody to click through your affiliate link & purchase something. When somebody does that, you’ll get paid a commission.

How Do I Cancel My Wealthy Affiliate Membership?

Cancelling your Wealthy Affiliate membership can be done with 1 click from within your account settings. There are no ties or contracts & you can cancel at any time.

Is Wealthy Affiliate a MLM?

No. Wealthy Affiliate does have a referral program through which you can earn money by referring friends but it only pays out commissions for direct referrals. There is no multi-level-marketing compensation plan.