I’m not 100% product-centric here, and I like to extend my reach and skills into as many areas as possible. As you probably also know, I’m very interested in return on investment, and buying things with value, rather than just buying things at a discount. If something is marked down from its normal price, but there’s little demand for it, then it’s not a value buy, it’s just cheap. Today I want to review a product with real value: The Wealthy Affiliate Marketing Bootcamp. When I choose to review a product, it’s usually going to fall into one of two categories:
- I like the product enough that I want to promote it
- The product is not a valuable asset and I want to dissuade others from wasting their time with it
There’s really not much of a middle ground for me. You can expect me to not review products just for the sake of reviewing them. A lot of financial blogs do that, and they link to affiliate after affiliate just in order to drive traffic. There’s some sense to that, as far as profiteering goes, but I want my site to have value to my readers.
Introducing the Wealthy Affiliate Marketing Bootcamp
With all that being said, I wanted my first major promotional review to be of the program that got me interested in affiliate marketing to begin with. It’s a site called Wealthy Affiliate. There’s a beauty in the common sense approach to their domain name, don’t you think? Wealthy Affiliate’s goal is to provide its subscribers with the fundamental basics of how to establish a niche blog and make money from affiliate marketing.
I subscribed to Wealthy Affiliate about 2 years ago and off-and-on went through their basic subscription to get an understanding of affiliate marketing.
What I learned was not mind blowing or ground breaking. It was a common sense approach; it was a crash course in marketing 101. The course reinforced a lot of my preconceived notions about online marketing. It also turned a few of my preconceptions on their head. Still, it was able to introduce me to new aspects of online marketing that I felt would be incredibly useful in the path ahead.
Why Bootcamp?
The terms bootcamp get thrown around a lot. We think of any kind of intensive course that takes us out of our comfort zones as a “boot camp.” Now, I’ve been to a real bootcamp for the Marine Corps, and I can tell you first hand that the Wealthy Affiliate marketing bootcamp is not nearly as challenging… but in some respects it is similarly rewarding, depending on what you do with it.
The Best Affiliate Training in the World
The training program consists of six separate Wealthy Affiliate marketing bootcamp courses. They range from getting your basic business plan hammered out, all the way to Bing, Yahoo and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns. If you go through all six, you’re going to be a guru, plain and simple.
But truth be told, you can start capitalizing on the Wealthy Affiliate program after the first or second courses. Everything else after that becomes icing on the cake.
You pay for what you get
Few things that are useful are also cheap in this world, and even fewer are free. For about a year, as I got my start with blogging, I followed the advice of affiliate marketers on YouTube for free. There was no way to validate their claims about the efficacies of their programs. They took pictures in front of fancy cars and fancy houses, which very well could have been rentals.
Most often they “blogged” from small, poorly decorated bedrooms. Occasionally they’d adorn their walls with artwork or books that looked smart or important to try to sell their image.
These people are mostly frauds. And I don’t mean they’re not successful. I just mean they are peddling snake oil. I’m sure they’re making good money from their videos. But they’re doing it through their videos. So if a guy on YouTube in a tank top, who looks like he’s 22 years old, claims that he’s making 5 figures every month through passive marketing schemes, and that you can too if you buy his course to learn how… well, he’s making that money off of your purchase, not off of his schemes.
It’s kind of a chicken and the egg sort of deal. It’s like getting rich off of a book that’s about how to get rich. I digress.
Wealthy Affiliate isn’t a program by some guy in his mom’s garage telling you how you can get rich. It’s designed for people to learn, communicate, collaborate and grow from. All over the web site, are mentions of how much work will be involved on your part. This is why it’s different.
Support breeds success
One of the things I liked most with my membership at Wealthy Affiliate was the supportive community. A lot of the people involved are starstruck dreamers without any real ambition or drive. They’re not particularly helpful in getting where you need to be. But a hefty percentage are seasoned affiliate marketers, who truly are reaping the rewards of the program. And they are abundant enough that it makes the program worthwhile.
Unless you have support, or someone other than yourself to hold you accountable, it’s easy to fall of track. It’s easy to see a month go by without traffic to your web site, and get discouraged and give up. With a community of bloggers and marketers who have walked the same path, it’s much easier to stay motivated.
You’ll see first-hand how people report their first earnings from their niche blogs. It will hopefully inspire you like it inspired me.
Tiered Memberships
I understand if you’re on the fence about it. The truth is, so was I. Since becoming debt free, building our net worth to over $500,000, and fast-tracking our way to financial independence, the most clear lesson I’ve learned is that expenses are worthwhile if they provide a value that is commensurate with their cost.
In this sense, expenses aren’t expenses… they’re investments. And that’s how I feel about Wealthy Affiliate.
At first I was skeptical, and so I signed up just for their trial membership. It offered some basic information, most of which I already knew, but it also exposed me to their community and the vast amounts of information hiding in plain sight behind the curtains. I was hooked and signed up for the Wealthy Affiliate Premium Membership shortly thereafter.
What I got back from that investment was a treasure trove of knowledge and resources that more than justified the price.
Free Membership
To get a feel for the program, you can always sign up for a free Wealthy Affiliate membership. This will get you access, like it did for me, to some of the basic information the program provides. It will also allow you to see how successful some people are with the program. There is no incentive for anyone in the community to lie about their results. Remember that motivation thing I was talking about? The free membership will get you there!
Premium Membership
Like any successful marketing or sales platform, their goal is to make money. Your goal should be to make money as well. One way we do that in the world of online marketing is by creating tiered subscription services. Wealthy Affiliate’s premium membership will require some investment on your part, but the return on that investment is out of this world. It might not be a monetary return just yet, but with the right focus and work on your part, it will be.
Right now Wealthy Affiliate is offering a promotion on their premium membership!
If you sign up using this link, you’ll be eligible to receive a steep discount on the first month of a premium membership. If you don’t like it after that first month, you can always downgrade to the standard free membership again, but I think you will likely renew like I did.
The premium membership discount is only $19 for the first month. If we’re talking return on investment, then that’s a pretty incredible price.
Premium memership provides:
- Weekly live, interactive classes
- Access to all previously recorded live classes
- A 50 lesson course on entrepreneurship
- The holy grail of affiliate bootcamp training (70 lessons)
- 12 classrooms with constantly evolving discussions and information
- The ability to write your own content! You can even monetize it!
- Track your progress with your own customized profile so you can show off to the world
The list of benefits is even longer, and I strongly urge to to visit their promotional page to get the full list.
They’ve also partnered with SiteRubix in order to provide you with an amazingly easy to use web site builder. If you’re new to creating web sites, I strongly suggest you take advantage of it.
Personally I did not use SiteRubix, as I have a background in web design and am very familiar with WordPress and other platforms already. I also don’t use Wealthy Affiliate’s hosting platform either (I use HostGator), but from what I’ve seen it’s very intuitive and user friendly, especially for getting your feet wet.
Conclusion
So if you’re new to affiliate marketing, or if you’ve tried it and failed and are looking for support or more information, I think Wealthy Affiliate is the best online program you can sign up for right now.
There are other affiliate communities that I will review in the future, but please take those reviews with a grain of salt. Although I may or may not promote them, I can tell you right now that to date I haven’t found any that are as comprehensive, or loaded with the amount of information and community that Wealthy Affiliate provides.
That isn’t to say there is no other value out there. Some other programs are actually quite useful, and based on what you need, may be preferential to Wealthy Affiliate’s giant offering. But if you’re just getting started and are truly looking to become an expert, then this program gets my highest recommendation.
Click here to sign up for a free account
Or click here to dive in and sign up for their $19 premium membership promotional offer, which is what I’d recommend. $19 is a lot depending on what you’re spending it on, but for this particular price, the offer presents an incredible value.
Have you had any success with Wealthy Affiliate’s programs? Can you think of any affiliate marketing programs out there that even come close? Feel free to let me know and I’ll check them out and maybe do a review!