Only 10% Of Wealthy Affiliate Members Are Successful!

The idea that 10% of Wealthy Affiliate members are successful is a silly bit of misinformation that gets passed around, so I figured I'd write a blog post about it, and share my thoughts. Rather than get to clever and wordy about it, let's just jump in.

1. Wealthy Affiliate doesn't track your earnings because they cannot

I participate in about 50+ affiliate programs. ONE of them is Wealthy Affiliate. I've posted many blog posts over the years highlighting my earnings outside of Wealthy Affiliate, and make sure to include screenshots as proof of earnings.

Examples:

• What Does A $1000 Day Look Like
• Small Commissions Are Good Too!
• How I Added $1500+ To My Monthly Income
• $12,000 For Christmas 2019 + Actionable Advice

These websites are not hosted at Wealthy Affiliate. I like to diversify my hosting to gain experience, and also some of these websites are quite old. I've been a member here for 10 years and have tried many hosts over that time period (more than five).

Wealthy Affiliate doesn't know how much I earn because they are not involved in my other affiliate programs. I sold coffee enemas for 2 years and they had no idea!

On top of that, how on Earth could you calculate my "success rate" when many of my websites are not inside Wealthy Affiliate hosting. You can't see my traffic, let alone clicks.

2. Traffic Doesn't Always Correlate To Earnings

It's a pretty common refrain that you'll see posted here inside Wealthy Affiliate from time to time that even just one well-positioned blog post can earn a lot of money. I posted about making $300/month from a single blog post back in 2016.

Dale wrote about making $286 from a website he created years ago and forgot about.

Here's another one which earned 31 sales from a $3600 item with a single review post on his website.

A single blog post can earn hundreds or thousands of dollars, so the earnings from a website are not always tied to traffic results. You can have a small website with some well-positioned product reviews that convert well, versus a website with 10x the traffic and only monetized with display ads, versus a website which only collects emails and earns money with email marketing.

Which website earns more? Only the owners know. You can speculate all you want, but it's wrong to assume that everyone is running their business in the exact same way as you.

So what I've seen done by a couple of haters over the years is that they'll basically look at WA servers and do some real wonky estimates about how many websites are hosted on WA, then how much traffic is going to WA websites, and how much people are earning based on that.

Obviously, tons of variables in there, and even much more guessing based on erroneous estimations, so these numbers people spew out mean absolutely nothing.

3. Success Is Relative

What is success? It's seems silly that I have to say this, but success is relative. Each person here in Wealthy Affiliate has different goals, and different ideas about success.

A stay at home mom who earns $500/month while tinkering with her website on the weekends could be totally happy with that. She doesn't need a 500 column spreadsheet to pick the perfect niche. She doesn't need to build backlinks. She doesn't need to outsource content. She can have a great side business blogging about a hobby and rockin' Pinterest.

A young guy with dreams of lambos and a couple of daily energy drinks could pump out 5 articles a day for six months and have a $10k/month business in that time period. He might still feel like a failure though because he's not a millionaire, can't afford a lambo yet, and is working too hard.

A third person could be working on their website for many years and not see much in terms of affiliate earnings, but then they start their own content creation service, or local SEO service, or manage WordPress websites for a fee. Maybe they never see a dime in affiliate earnings, but start an online business because of what they learned here inside Wealthy Affiliate.

Are these people successful or not? Only they can decide that. When you look at what another person has achieved and decide if they are successful or not, you are projecting your own goals onto them.

Why Do People Love This Statistic?

I've seen various things over the years from "haters" speculating that only x% of Wealthy Affiliate members are earning income from their websites. While writing this blog post, I was thinking about why people latch onto that statement.

In my opinion, people like to see that number because it sets them up for a soft landing.

Oh, only 10% of Wealthy Affiliate members actually earn money? Then it's not my fault my website isn't working. The training doesn't work! Time to move on.

What Wealthy Affiliate teaches isn't magic. It's not a secret formula.

1. Pick A Topic
2. Build A Website
3. Publish Content
4. Add Affiliate Links

There's no "best niche". There's no "fast track". There's no "secret formula". Any niche can work. Anyone can make money. It takes a lot of work, and the path to success is a windy one. If you get caught up in believing that only 10% of people are successful, then you'll probably end up in the 90% that fail.

Focus on taking daily action to reach your goals. Don't worry about what other people are achieving. Someone else can earn a million dollars a day, and it doesn't take away from your ability to earn $1000 per month.