Beer with Kyle Fridays: Inside the New Wealthy Affiliate (Dashboard, Ace, Studio and More)

Hey Everyone!
Like the past few weeks, I am giving you an exclusive look at the new Wealthy Affiliate platform, which is being released in the coming weeks. Early October is our anticipated launch, and I think we are on track for it.

What I really want to do with these Beer with Kyle episodes leading into the launch is get you acquainted with the platform. How it works, the ideas behind it, and your involvement as we move forward. Like everything over the past 21 years, this environment and community has been built on you, your feedback, your wants, and your needs.

Your Feedback, Implemented in Days

Here is what has us so excited. In the old world, the development process looked like this: come up with a design, program the back end and front end, test it, implement it, find all the bugs once it is live, and then spend the next year fixing them. Sometimes a request took six months. Sometimes it never happened at all because we did not have the capacity with other projects on the go.

That process has been sped up drastically. Moving forward, your feedback is going to come to us, and in many cases it will be implemented in DAYS. We can now build the things you need at a rate we have never been able to before.

This Week's Beer

This week's beer is the Tilt Lager by Phillips, our local brewery here in Victoria. I have done several Phillips beers on the show before, and I have had this one before too. It is a nice lager, and if you like lagers, you will definitely like this one. Poured into my fancy WA glass as usual. Tasty. Cheers.

A Dashboard That Works Like a Cockpit

When you arrive in the new back office, you get a proper dashboard with a bird's-eye view of everything happening in your personalized experience at Wealthy Affiliate.

In the past, you came back and landed straight in the community feed. Now you get a bit of everything. What is going on in your business, tasks you need to work on, your revenue if you are promoting the Wealthy Affiliate program, and progress you have made. It is like a true cockpit. If you were flying a plane, you would want oversight of everything that is going on, and that is exactly what this gives you. You can still jump into the community, but you are positioned to get productive right away.

Where We're At in Development

We are in the late stages of development, which means we have started introducing live data. With the large data set we have at Wealthy Affiliate, we can now load test for efficiency and speed, how quickly you move from page to page and environment to environment. As one example, we rolled out 30 efficiency tickets just today. We are moving really quick.

Our goal is to get this in your hands in early October. Ideally the week after next, as there are still some things we need to polish off first.

This is the desktop environment, but mobile has been accounted for throughout development, so it is very easy to use on your phone too. I get a lot of questions about an app. It is actually not as difficult as people might think, because we architected the platform with an app in mind. So that is certainly something we will be considering down the road.

Ace Knows Your Business

On the right side, you have Ace, your personal assistant. Ace understands everything about your business (or businesses), your activity, and your writing voice. It is also highly knowledgeable, so you can ask it anything.

That combination is the key. It is not just an intellect, it is an intellect that understands YOUR business. It can guide you on what is next, help with the nuances of your business, and initiate actionable tasks. Say "I want to build a webpage for my website," and it asks which website and gets you going. You can also manage multiple threads within Ace.

As a quick example, I asked Ace "what should I work on next?" It told me my Traveling with Kyle hub had three fresh game plans and nothing started yet. Basically, go over there and start building. So that is what I did.

Building Content Inside a Hub

Inside the hub, I can click to start an About page, and it walks me through building it right there. Each of these flows is customized to what you are trying to accomplish.

Then I took an essential gear article. Ace reads my hub profile and understands my angle and my writing voice. You will be able to inject your writing voice into all of your content, and even set a specific voice for each hub and website. It gives me an outline, I choose the length, and it writes the content in real time.

A few things I love about the content side:

It naturally integrates internal linking. It counts the words as it writes, aiming for the target (my target was 1800, and this one came in at 1532). It checks readiness, like whether the title fits search results and whether keywords are in the title. It also handles your slug and meta description.

Then there is imagery. I can have it suggest images for the article, and because it understands the context of the article, it makes far better recommendations than you would expect. We are using the latest image models for this. It suggests a title image plus images for different sections, each contextually relevant to what that section covers. I can create any of them, remove the ones I do not want, and even add a removed one back later. From there, I can publish directly to my website.

Instagram and Other Channels

We have accounted for everything on the website side, but this extends across all the social platforms too.

My hub has game plans set out for Instagram and YouTube, and I can add other channels. I added an Instagram channel, and from there I can ask Ace to add five relevant Instagram posts to my game plan. I can be as specific as I want, or even ask what kind of ideas would work well for my hub.

Ace added five posts. I picked one, and it wrote the caption: what my private guide in Kyoto taught me about slow travel. It even left a spot for me to add the specific moment or detail that struck me most, assuming I actually traveled there. Then it created a contextually relevant image to go with it. I can copy it, download it, and open Instagram to post it.

For launch, posting to social will be manual. We are going to be adding connectors so you can post automatically, but those require an approval process, so they will not be there on day one.

Logos and Direction Through Conversation

After you build a hub, you can also go through a logo creation process. I chose a symbol with text and a transparent background, and it connected all the pieces from there.

At any point, you can direct what happens within your hub just by communicating with Ace. Your conversation shapes what gets built and what ideas get added to your game plan for future creation. I did spot a small bug where my logo did not get added to the hub, which will be fixed before we roll out.

Community, With Site Comments Built In

The community is still a very big component of Wealthy Affiliate, with its own dedicated section, and live chat is still there too. You can create posts, create images, and upload videos exactly as before.

What is new is that we can help you with things to write about. If we notice wins in your business, or things you are questioning or working on, we can help turn those into community posts. The feed is also contextually relevant to your interests, while still presenting new things to you, so you are not getting a data dump of everything. And you still have control. Newest, top, and your choice of list, grid, or the bigger card layout you see now.

Here is something I am really excited about. We are integrating Site Comments and the share components directly into the community. As you build content, you will be able to share your blog posts with the community, and you will be able to interact and comment on other people's websites right from within the platform. The more you interact on other people's sites, the more exposure you get.

We also have criteria to filter out spam and bogus AI comments. People trying to game the system are going to get captured (honey potted, in a sense), because that is not the activity we want. We are going to reward quality activity, both here and throughout the community. I think this is going to be a significant win.

Learn Anything, In Context

The Learn environment is where you can learn absolutely anything, in a contextually relevant way. If I want to learn about Pinterest for my travel blog, it should speak to me as though it knows I am in the travel niche, with insights relevant to that. It is in really good shape right now, but we are running some big updates on it this week, so I will give you a fuller preview once those are in.

Studio (Formerly Library)

Last week this was called Library. We have renamed it Studio, because that is exactly what it is. You go to your studio to build and create.

Everything I have been creating lives here. My Instagram posts, the logos I just built, images, and both articles I am working on, with filtering and organization on the way. You can also create directly from the Studio. If I want to create an email newsletter or a Facebook post, I can do that without starting inside a hub, and then assign it to a hub through Ace whenever I want.

The idea is that you can create anything related to your business within the Studio, while your hubs, tasks, and channels can call on these same tools from inside the hub. Really streamlined.

Websites is getting some updates too, so I will save that one for another time.

Affiliate Program and Vegas

Our affiliate program is going to offer a lot of new features as we move forward and gather feedback. And we are reintroducing the Vegas incentive, so stay tuned for news on that.

Now I Want to Hear From You

That is the overview for today. There will probably be one or two more Beer with Kyle episodes before the release where I keep walking you through things. After the release, I will be going through various elements, discussing updates, and showing you how to take advantage of different components. We will also have expert classes around the new environment, and I will be blogging about it regularly.

I would love any feedback you have on the direction. We are really excited to get this in your hands, and it is not far away now. Drop your thoughts in the comments below.