The truth about Wealthy Affiliate

Wealthy Affiliate is an online educational institution. It is an extensive site that offers unlimited training on every aspect of starting, building and maintaining an online business.

Wealthy Affiliate does not offer a guarantee to a successful online business. Yes, success is possible. But success is completely dependent on the tenacity, the drive, the desire, the skill level and creativity of the person who starts the business. Wealthy Affiliate can provide the tools but it is the person that has to follow it through.

Wealthy Affiliate does not provide a path to getting rich quickly. When someone comes here because they are unemployed and they need to pay their bills and feed their family, they are going to be sorely disappointed if they think that following all of the steps will lead them to a full time income in two months. There is no get-rich formula in starting a new business. You need to create a brand (finding a niche and choosing a domain), build a store front (setting up your website from the ground up), do consistent and diversified marketing (SEO, social media, video, email marketing), build trust in the community (writing consistent quality engaging content that supports you as an authority), and maintain and grow the business even when there are no customers (continuing to write and grow your website and your reach despite that fact that you are getting to little or no traffic). These are the same steps that are taken if you want to open a restaurant or a gift shop in your neighborhood. It takes time, and sweat, and tears, and tenacity, and the confidence that despite the odds (because the odds are indeed against you) that you will succeed.

The fact of the matter is most people who come to Wealthy Affiliate will not succeed and there a couple of reasons for this.

Some will not see the immediate result of their labors and after a couple of months they will drop out figuring that they will go to one of those other programs that promise you $1000's every month if you just pay these astronomical fees. We all know what happens in the long run.

Others will not succeed because let's face it, this is not easy. The learning curve is huge. Yes, Wealthy Affiliate offers a "wealth" of information, more information than you will get anywhere else, and that information is well-organized and presented in as simple terms as possible. But if you have little to no experience with computers, the internet, social media and a plethora of other things, you will find great difficulty understanding even the simplest of tutorials. I am a freelance web designer but I found that navigating around Wordpress was challenging at first. I had to ask lots of questions and go on the support forums of the products I was using numerous times in order to get my website to look and behave the way I wanted it to. Certainly, the support is there to walk people through the steps, but it is a steep climb to proficiency when you are starting from zero. Some people will not have the capacity or interest to overcome this steep learning curve. Think about it, everybody can go to college if they want to but for lots of reasons, not everyone can succeed in college.

The certification courses, classrooms, discussion boards and bootcamps make Wealthy Affiliate a truly excellent online learning university. However, the greatest asset of Wealthy Affiliate is the community. You are encouraged to interact with others who are trying to do what you do - some are succeeding, some are struggling, some are just starting out. If you have a question about anything, even the simplest thing, you can reach out to the community and get an immediate answer. If you have had a success no matter how small, you shout it out to the community and you receive an incredible amount of accolades. If you are struggling and don't know how or if you want to continue, you reach out to the community and you are deluged with positive reinforcement and support to keep you moving forward. This is unlike any other e-learning site out there.

But in the end, YOU are completely responsible for the success or failure of your business. If you are up for it, joining Wealthy Affiliate can be the best investment you can make. But you have to commit. You have to commit to do whatever it takes to get over the hurdles - and there will be a lots (some seemingly unsurpassable) of hurdles. You have to be willing to step out of your comfort zone every day. You have to be willing to learn and apply and then learn again when it doesn't work out the way you expected. You have to be consistent in your work. You have to put yourself out there otherwise no one will know who you are or care that you have something to say.

If that is YOU, then welcome home!