Wealthy Affiliate University – My Story

Updated September 2022

Are you worried about finding your next source of income? I found Wealthy Affiliate after a lot of research because it appeared to be something I could do and wasn’t a get-rich-quick scam.

The main point of this article is to tell you how my five, yes five, websites are doing. You will see that I have had varied levels of success. You can jump straight to that part by clicking here,

First of all a little background. Being totally illiterate when it came to building websites and any kind of online marketing, I felt very intimidated by everything despite being assured by all those internet gurus telling me how easy it was, as long as I paid $97 for a course that then called for me to pay a further $797 or more before I would maybe learn anything of use. Sound familiar?

I had been fortunate enough to learn that patience is a virtue and had not jumped into a lot of those “get-rich-quick” schemes, mainly because I couldn’t afford to make many mistakes with my limited funds.

I researched a great deal because this was something I really wanted to do and, being in my fifties, the reality is that I need to find something that I could possibly do, regardless of being judged as too old by some headhunter or HR hiring officer.

My experience with Wealthy Affiliate University, or just plain old Wealthy Affiliate has not exactly been an incredible one, but it has been interesting, rewarding and opened many doors to me. Let me tell you about the major part of my online business – building websites.

I’m not going to BS you – I am going to recommend Wealthy Affiliate because it works and you can try it for free with no risk and no credit card. Please read this article first though as I think you will find it interesting.

When I Joined Wealthy Affiliate

I found Wealthy Affiliate to be the “least dangerous” of all the programs out there in my cautious mind. There was a free trial that doesn’t expire and I didn’t need to leave a credit card that could be charged even if I forgot to “opt out”. Granted, much of the information would only be available on my free trial for seven days but it was still free!

SEE WHAT ALL THE FUSS IS ABOUT WITH WEALTHY AFFILIATE, JUST CLICK HERE – NO CREDIT CARD NEEDED

When I started utilizing the materials available to me, to be honest, I was stunned at how much information I could gather, including the ability to build two websites, all absolutely free. I followed the training and after two days I had a pretty nice looking website built, had written content and installed graphics. The quality of this free training, how clearly it was laid out and the sheer volume of it was superior to anything that I imagined.

The most important thing for me was that I made good progress from day one which gave me the motivation I needed. Progress was rapid and I had the feeling of actually accomplishing something. I remind you, I am no computer genius, had no experience of coding (still don’t, you don’t need it), I knew how to send email and surf the net. This old dog did learn new tricks.

After three days, I felt comfortable in signing up for the “Premium Membership”, which cost $19 for the first month and after that, about $50 monthly. I could have just opted to pay annually with a big discount but still wanted to test the waters.

This unleashed the immense amount of resources that I could utilize. By the way, now they put on a “Black Friday Special” each year which works out to be just under $25 per month – that’s what I pay.

The training covers everything, advertising, writing, building websites, graphics, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, other social media, keywords, finding ideas for content; the list goes on and on. In fact, I still haven’t covered it all.

My favorite part was the case studies where you are shown a niche website being built from the absolute beginning, i.e. before you even know what niche you want to build a site around.

I wrote a more comprehensive review here

 

What Have I Achieved?

Website # 1

My first ever website, based on language learning which became my training ground, or perhaps crash-test dummy might be more appropriate, in many respects. It is a nice site but I found it to be very hard to monetize. There are lots of products to promote but increasingly there are a great number of free products coming on to the market.

I toyed with images, changed and updated the site “theme”, produced quality content, albeit not enough really. I promoted it on Facebook and lots of people liked the content, complimented me on it, but nobody really seemed interested in buying anything.

The lack of financial reward even left me feeling that maybe my SEO wasn’t up to standard so I hired an SEO expert to fix whatever was lacking. He did a good job, including a very nice redesign but in reality, I could have done most of it myself – I just couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Regardless, the sales still didn’t come.

Summary: Results have been a disappointment as far as revenue is concerned but the lessons learned have paid off elsewhere.

The costs, except for the one-off hiring of an SEO expert / designer for $60 along with some $40-$50 for outsourced content, were limited to the annual domain registration of about $12, plus about $40 in Facebook advertising.

I basically leave this site alone to concentrate on others as the likelihood of it becoming lucrative are slim at the moment. Despite this, the site rank is still very slowly improving and the lack of consistent, new content doesn’t seem to have hurt it much. While I was adding content fairly frequently, the rankings were not really improving.

I am barely maintaining the site now, updating occasionally but it is not a priority. I will keep the expenses to a minimum and watch the rankings. If they continue to improve, I may try adding more content and selling the site.

February 2018 Update:

Rankings still improving, more people linking to my site but still negligible sales.

January 2019 Update:

I have done absolutely nothing with this site except for renewing the domain.

Same as last year – rankings getting better by some 30%, believe it or not, and traffic has been the same.

Sadly earnings are also the same. The sheer volume of free apps available in the language learning field makes it very hard to convince people they should pay to learn a new language as they can simply talk into their phone and a translation appears! That is often enough for them to get directions, order a meal or go shopping. If they become serious about learning a new language to the point of actually understanding what people are saying and how to function, then they will discover that those free apps don’t really cut it.

September 2022 Update:

Completely ignored this site for almost three years and the results reflected it. In late 2021 I decided to write some new content, changing the focus away from strictly language learning. I just had this feeling that it might lead to a better chance to grow the site.

Although I say so myself, the content I added was excellent and informational as opposed to affiliate income-type articles.

As the traffic was still extremely low, I also  decided to migrate the site to a new domain that reflected better the new direction the site was now taking. Again, I changed the theme as the other theme I had was installed by the above-mentioned SEO expert and was out of date. I reverted to a free theme, Generate Press, and I really like it.

After switching domains, the traffic basically went to zero but I am prepared to wait. Traffic is improving, I have had a few successes with getting a couple of articles in the top three of Google.

I will leave this site alone again and see what happens.

 

Website # 2

This is a niche site in the book/DVD category using products from Amazon. I have some good content, and finding content is not particularly difficult.

I did everything myself and again have only really played around with it as another building block. I changed the theme twice, added content fairly consistently and kept the SEO up to date, to the best of my ability.

Summary: The major lesson I learned so far is that it can be extremely hard to make money selling books and DVDs via Amazon, especially so-called mainstream titles. Most of the commissions are just a few cents, as many customers buy the “Kindle” version of a book. DVDs can be a bit more profitable but with the advent of downloadable material, they are becoming less significant.

The saving grace here has often been the “Amazon Cookie” that means that if people click on your link and then, whether they buy your product or not, carry on shopping and purchase something else. For example, if they go and buy a $3,000 garage kit, you get a commission on that as well. OK, they might not want to buy a garage when shopping for books or DVDs but they might look at a box set of another series, or a DVD player, even a couch! Read about what happened to me.

I’ve made a little of money with this site and will keep tinkering. As a site gets older, it gains more traction in rankings so it may be OK. The only expense I have is the annual domain registration fee, about $15.

February 2018 Update:

Rankings have slightly improved, I have added some more content and more importantly, sales have increased. For example, during the first 10 days of February I have sold about 80 books, which sounds OK, but is only about $34 in commissions – still better than nothing and with no real expenses, it is fine by me. Again, thanks to the “Amazon Cookie”, of those books only about a third of them were being promoted on my site.

January 2019 Update:

Again site rank has improved year over year by 20 percent but traffic has dropped by the same amount. I did very little work on it; a few posts, some images added; I think the ranking improved due to the age and the fact that it isn’t full of affiliate links but the traffic would not have dropped as much if I had put some effort into the site.

Earnings are extremely modest – maybe $20 – $30 per month except for one month when it hit $70 because of a few customers buying all sorts of other stuff from Amazon after checking out a book through my link. If Amazon ever gets rid of their “cookie”, this site won’t be worth the effort financially. I still believe this can be a steady small earner if I work at it.

I have just written a few articles that will be posted over the coming month so I’ll give this one more go.

September 2022 Update:

I added the articles mentioned above but could not get up in the rankings. I have basically ignored this site for almost three years now and the rankings are basically the same.

I have changed the theme but book reading seems to have dropped drastically. I don’t plan on doing any more work on the site, and may look at selling it although I don’t think there would be a great demand. The domain also is fairly specific with not a lot of room for pivoting.

 

Website # 3

This is a niche review site that sells actual products in the home and kitchen category using the Amazon affiliate program. I have had this site for about 10 months now and it is starting to show some promising results.

I started the site with about four posts and have been adding one post a week, with about half being reviews and the other half informative and advice posts. My first couple of sales came after about five months, nothing for the next two but since then, it has started improving.

Recently, I ran a Facebook campaign, costing a total of $77, and followed up with a Google Adwords campaign, which has a maximum budget of $80. My traffic improved greatly with both, but the Adwords has given me more clicks. I had run Adwords campaigns in the past but basically wasted my money as I didn’t research it properly.

I outsourced some content writing as this niche was something I knew very little about, actually I knew nothing about it. The content I outsourced was for “expert advice and tips” kind of articles. I believe it was four articles plus a quick “cheat sheet” list and the writing was of excellent quality. For this, I paid about $120 – well worth it as I needed to show some authority on the site, not simply review after review. I used iwriter for this.

My rankings have improved a lot in the last three months, so my organic traffic is increasing, partly due to the fairly regular content and also the fact that there is some quality articles as I mentioned above.

I believe this will be a nice, steady little income stream of a few hundred dollars a month – nothing spectacular, but not too bad.

Summary: Easily my most successful site to date. I was able to learn a lot from experiences with the first two sites without breaking the bank.

So far, I paid out a grand total of about $340 in domain fees, a premium theme, a quality logo (all of $10) and the aforementioned advertising.

I earned just over $500 to date, sales are increasing and I am confident that this site will continue to grow. I plan to outsource some of the writing to give a different perspective and add variety, as I already have about 50 posts, while keeping a close watch of my expenses.

February 2018 Update:

This site is still doing well, although there was a dip in December and January. December’s drop in sales surprised me at first, but having analyzed a bit more, this niche doesn’t exactly land in the “nice Christmas gift” category. February seems to be back on track.

Black Friday was pretty good and to get the name out there, I did a few boosted posts on Facebook and a small campaign on Google PPC Adwords – the Google results were much better than Facebook.

Regarding Facebook, it has driven some traffic and this should help in the long term, but in my opinion, the money spent on advertising has been a waste as conversions were non-existent.

January 2019 Update:

Still improving. Rankings are 50% higher, traffic has more than doubled.

Again, I spent some money on Google advertising and tried a little Facebook again as I figured I must have just been unlucky with it last time. Google did OK, but Facebook was a flop.

Best month was just over $200 and it generally hits around $100, which is a little disappointing but it’s OK.

I keep posting about once a week and have had to outsource a few articles as I didn’t have enough knowledge on the subject. I can often turn one article into two or three by expanding on it – not just adding fluff.

September 2022 Update:

The site was very slowly improving although I backed off the frequency of adding new content as it was hard to find new topics.

Then it got hit, and hit hard in more than one way.

Amazon Commission Purge

First, at the start of the pandemic Amazon decided to slash commission rates, with most of the products I sell being cut from 8% commission to 3%. Sales did increase but not nearly enough to make up the shortfall.

An SEO Expert

Next, I hired an SEO expert, through Upwork, to redesign the site as it had a lot of content, was looking dated and was very hard to navigate around. I didn’t have time to do it myself so I decided to outsource again. He had an excellent rating from Upwork and proceeded to install a premium theme and the site looked and worked great.

Unfortunately, after a while the rankings actually started to drop a bit, along with my earnings.

I also made a bad mistake because with a serious family matter happening, I wasn’t visiting my site very often. I checked on Search Console and saw there were regular “errors” being returned. I contacted my SEO “expert”, as it was something he was supposed to have fixed, and he found some conflicts with plugins, etc. (which he had installed).

When I wanted to make a minor change with some of the layout, I couldn’t because he had the license to the theme and I wasn’t able to gain access. The errors returned every time there was an update to some of the plugins as a conflict arose with the theme. He wanted me to reopen the contract on Upwork to fix the problem so I told him where to go.

I subsequently found out the theme was well known for having issues.

I changed back to a free theme (Astra), and I haven’t had any issues since. Again, traffic started to slowly improve, but it had taken a drop after so many errors cropping up when Google crawled the site.

Google Algorithm Update

Oh dear! Just as things started to get better, earlier this year google hit us with a couple of updates.

About half of the content was product reviews and those kind of sites seemed to get hit hardest. My traffic, such as it was, dropped about 60%.

I will not give up. About a half of my product review articles were getting no traffic, partly because those items being promoted were now obsolete, so if they also had no backlinks, I deleted them. I ended up deleting approximately 50 posts. I have started freshening-up and improving the remaining articles. The articles that were getting traffic are getting most of my attention.

Website # 4

This site you are on now. I have been kicking this thing around for nearly a couple of years now. I only started it because I was following the Wealthy Affiliate Bootcamp and initially that’s all it was used for. It’s a bit of a mess as it’s all over the place with the articles I’ve written.

All those of us in this niche soon realize that it is extremely competitive, so you need to be patient here. I recommend doing what I did – use it to complement your training. Don’t do what I did and ignore it for long periods of time because that has put this site about a year behind where it should be.

One thing is that the rankings are finally moving in the right direction with absolutely zero promotion, in what is an extremely competitive niche. I believe that because it is “aged” and still receiving content which, though I say it myself, is of very good quality are two major reasons for that. I intend to work on this one, along with Site # 3.as the basic premise of affiliate marketing, working from home, etc. appeals to me.

As far as work, I changed the theme once, played with a few plugins and added content and a logo.

Summary: I need to get my arse in gear on this one. It can be a long term revenue producer, but, as with any site in this niche, it needs almost constant attention.

February 2018 Update: 

Actually have seen much better results in relation to number of clicks but rankings are still about the same.  I have been adding content slowly and tweaked some of the design. This is an incredibly competitive niche as I mentioned above, so patience is a virtue. The biggest plus is that it has started to make me a little revenue.

January 2019 Update:

Shame on me should be a headline for this. I have hardly touched the site. Rankings have dropped by about 15% but, surprisingly, traffic has been steady. I think that shows how competitive this make money online niche is.

September 2022 Update:

Same old, same old basically. A few months back, I changed the domain to something more relevant, broader as far as topics go, and more memorable. I also changed the theme and have started getting articles rewritten.

Website # 5

I finally got my site built for me. I purchased it through a reputable online site, which was operated by someone well-known to many at Wealthy Affiliate.

The site is well designed and again, promotes products using the Amazon Affiliate Program. Articles are published weekly with a mix of information and review articles. It’s in the home improvement niche so there are lots of products but it is also a very competitive field. Rankings are starting to show and I threw a little money at it through Google Adwords which generated some revenue but didn’t cover the cost.

To date, this is my most expensive site, having spent about $1,200, which included outsourcing several articles as it’s a subject that I am not familiar with.

I think this has good potential as the traffic is already increasing and is better than most of my other sites.

In addition, I am using this as a sort of case study, as well as great material for a review article of the builder of my site.

September 2022 Update:

As with site #3, this was badly hit by Amazon’s commission raid and a couple of Google algorithm updates. This was not particularly weighted towards affiliate content but many of the informational articles had an affiliate link or two.

I purposely didn’t write too many review articles as I hadn’t purchased any of the products, but I would do something like this (let’s use car seat cover as an example):- “if you are taking your dog with you on a road trip, you should think of using a car seat cover to protect the seat material. Here are examples of one or two of the most popular (insert link to Amazon or wherever). No review, and by using “most popular” it doesn’t give the impression that you are actively promoting it.

The site still got hit though but is recovering a little faster than site #3.

Summary Of All My Sites

This is where I am now.

I have five sites now, which is far too many if you are still holding down a day job, but I only really ever work on two at a time.

Sites 1 and 2 will get a little attention but they’re essentially running on fumes. Site 2 will get a few articles and some tweaks but as I mentioned earlier, trying to make money in the books, DVD area is very tough, especially when the niche is narrow, as mine is.

That is my fault in not following the training here at Wealthy Affiliate properly because the range of products isn’t there. In a nutshell, I don’t really know how to make good money from them.

Site 3 is going to be OK, it is getting a little revamp to try and boost conversions; maybe I need to be a little more aggressive on the sales end. The one concern is that it is still hugely reliant on Amazon and who knows what will happen there?

Display ads are OK but I have had to back off on them until traffic starts improving. There is no point in advertising to almost nobody and I don’t want to bombard visitors with ads until I see some growth.

Site 4 is still up in the air – I just need to give it more structure, updated material and most of all, consistent content.

Site 5 took a few steps backwards, so the jury is out. The content is also being consistently updated and the potential is there. We’ll see.

 

The Future

If possible, I want to build up at least one of the sites, probably #3 or #5, to a point where I can sell it. The first two just don’t generate the traffic or income to make them attractive to potential buyers. This will free me up to work on a few ideas that I have to improve this aspect of my business

I have thought about digital products/training courses, etc. but it takes an awfully long time to gain the trust unless you want to roll the dice and blow a wad of money on advertising. These areas are also ultra-competitive and unfortunately overcrowded with scam artists, so for me, physical products are still the way to go.

I have started adding an eCommerce element to one of my sites by selling a related product directly as opposed to through Amazon. The profit margin is usually higher although you do have more work to do regards fulfilling orders. etc.

I prefer to build trust first and then try to grow from there; it may be slower but will pay off in the long run.

Another Way I Am Making Money Online

Another result of the training I am getting from Wealthy Affiliate concerning building websites is that I can build or update sites for anybody.

I have started renovating a website for a local business. My marketing efforts were limited to mentioning to the owner, who I knew, that I could help design websites. His site was terrible and he had paid a small fortune for it a few years ago. (where are customers like that now?), and as with many small businesses, he hadn’t done anything with it. I hope to convince him to let me maintain the site and allow me to gain a small monthly income from it.

September 2022 Update:

Well, I updated that website and everyone seemed happy but they didn’t see the need for the expense to keep it updated all the time.

I’ll pursue this line of business as I go along although it is so competitive and I turned down several opportunities because I had no intention of competing with people working for next to nothing, especially during the pandemic. They had the advantage to be “working from home” while collecting a wage or some governmental benefit.

I haven’t had time to do this due to my day job being busier than ever. I also feel it’s more important for me to try and master the creation and development of sites first.

 

 

Is Wealthy Affiliate Legit?

Absolutely. I accomplished all the above due to the training I learned at Wealthy Affiliate. It is still the best training out there and in my three years since signing up for the Premium Membership with them, they have NEVER tried to upsell me on a new feature, tool or program because there are no upsells.

The materials are added constantly, thereby kept current and valid.

The cost, compared to the benefits, is incredibly low and I know you will find it’s worth much more. Don’t forget, it includes all your website hosting, SSL certificates, the training, 24/7 support and answers to every question, including what may be thought of as the stupid ones, ever asked about websites and affiliate marketing. Just the hosting alone is worth it if you have a few sites.

As I said elsewhere on this site:

Would I recommend Wealthy Affiliate to my friends – YES.        Would I recommend Wealthy Affiliate to my family – YES.

In the meantime, you can check out the Free Trial. JUST HAVE A LOOK…..