Why Am I Still A Wealthy Affiliate Member After 8 Years?
I've been a member of Wealthy Affiliate since 2010 - a full eight years, and still counting. I make a full time income online, and have done so for quite some time.
So why am I still a premium member here?
Don't I know everything I need to know?
Nope.
As a newbie, I know that many of you are bootstrapping your business. Every dollar counts.
For someone running a profitable business though, Wealthy Affiliate is a business expense that I cannot do without.
Every month gain some kind of benefit from this community that makes the $30/month worth it. (WA is normally $49/month but if you upgrade to yearly for $359 it's 359/12=30).
I look at that $30/month fee, and ask myself, "Does this help me make more than $30?". In other words, I pay Price X for membership, but that action helps me make [(Price X) + $10], then I just profited $10.
Of course, we're talking about much more than $10.
The education here at Wealthy Affiliate can teach you how to make thousands per month. The ROI is insane.
But let's talk specifics.
There are three main reasons I stick around at WA and still participate in Wealthy Affiliate as a member, and not just as an affiliate or mentor to my referrals here.
1. Weekly Webinars
A 1-hour webinar every week is included in your membership for free. I've attended $197/hour webinars before related to stock/real estate investing. The webinars here are FREE with your membership.
Aside from the insanity of not charging for these webinars, they are always topical, relevant, and helpful.
Even for an experienced member like myself, I need to keep up on trends and learn new things. For example, I learned AMP from Jay when Google launched that.
A few weeks ago I learned about how to create infographics, and I've been working on improving my funnels by following Jay's recent series about that. A funnel can always be optimized more!
2. Behind The Scenes Connections
Really, to make Wealthy Affiliate worth it for me I just need to make 1-2 important connections per year. I mean connections with other professional affilaite marketers.
There are tons of ways to make money online. I can't know everything. If one person can tell me one piece of advice or strategy that changes my campaigns that's useful. At $359 year, if a piece of advice can make me an extra $100/month that's $1200 per year gross profit on the transaction, and almost a thousand net profit.
JUST FROM MEETING ONE PERSON PER YEAR
Let's say that person helps me optimize a landing page, or tells me how increasinng line height can improve my RPM, or just confirms that they are converting at 40% when I'm converting at 5%, so I have a lot of room to improve.
Totally worth it.
These connections will grow, and may turn into collaboration projects, or other ways of making money online.
I've met so many cool, smart, helpful people here and hope to continue to do so in the future.
3. Getting Help When I Need It
Despite doing this stuff full time, I still get stuck. Actually, I'm not that smart when it comes to technical aspects of the business so I do have to reach out from time to time.
Just a couple weeks ago, a buddy of mine from Vegas taught me how to use Google Tag Manager.
The guy probably makes six figures online, and he spent probably an hour helping me via private messages. He probably could have charged me $300 for the time, but it was free because he wanted to help a friend.
Not everything is as clear-cut as "I need help doing X". Sometimes I just have a quick question about traffic or keywords, and I suspect I know the answer but want to confirm. Easy to do in live chat in 30 seconds or posting a question to classrooms then checking the answer the next day.
Where else can you do that?
Think of your favorite affiliate marketing or SEO blog right now. How long does it take for you to get a response? How many words is that response?
...most of all...can you get a response to follow up questions?
Maybe blog moderaters over at all the big "niche marketing" blogs will get back to you within the week, and maybe they'll spend 30 seconds on responding to you. Maybe your Facebook group will have a competent person respond to your questions.
That's a lot of maybes, and I think a lot of those maybes will end up being "NO's".
4. Discovering New Ideas = More $$$
As your business grows, ideas become more and more valuable. When you're making $5 a month, 10% increase in revenue means just $0.50 more next month. When you're making $50k a month, a 10% jump in money is an extra $5,000.
That's a lot.
One new idea you didn't think of course mean A LOT of money do you.
A WA membership is a tiny $359 per year. One great idea that I see in a passing moment in live chat, or a success blog post from another member could help me bring in thousands of more dollars per year...or per month.
I just need to glean ONE great idea from this community per year to make it worth the cost.
Wealthy Affiliate is a great resource for both newbies and experiened members. Sticking around Wealthy Affiliate has some incredible benefits!
Recent Comments
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You are so right, for years now I have tried to get a blog up and running, no way I'd got any success at all. This fee here is a big stretch for me but I pay it happily. Not only from the many ways of teaching and learning but also for the newfound friends which one get's easily over here.
YES, why are you still here?! :P
You're almost a part of the WA furniture LOL.
But from what you've discussed, WA is a godsend, especially for staying on top of Internet Marketing changes.
I've been involved in "fly by night" type of platforms in the past. Something works for a short while, Google changes the way things work, and then the platform(s) fail to adapt and close = ZERO online biz.
It happened to my Squidoo business back in the days lol. It was doing so well until I lost everything overnight because of Google. All those hours, traffic and affiliate commissions LOST.
And the training platform? YUP, that shut down shortly afterward because the owner couldn't be bothered to update his training.
So we're EXTREMELY lucky to have WA in our corner. If something changes, Kyle and Carson get right on to it. :)
I'm lucky I just caught the end of Squidoo and didn't invest too much time in there. Lots of people lost a lot of money in that venture.
Squidoo was one of the easiest things to get off the ground. You could create a costume or Xmas gift lens, for example, which would get ranked in a few weeks and BOOM during the holidays.
It's a good job you didn't jump on that bandwagon lol.
But if Squidoo hadn't have disappeared, I probably wouldn't even be here at WA. So it was a blessing.
Yes definitely here to stay its a journey that began with a firm decision and That to continue with the best possible and complete package here at WA
Yeaaaa, as Loes states, 'we are stuck with you!!
Thank you Nathaniell for being such a wonderful inspiration for me. I see no reason why I would leave.
Monica
Happy birthday, and best wishes, I really enjoyed reading your take on things. WA is way more than creating that first website.
Nice post! I am newbie still considering if I should upgrade to premium. So far I think it would worth it for just the training, but it is good to know that there are things here that will be useful even later.
Thanks Nathaniell. It’s great for a new person to hear that kind of confirmation. Wish I had known about this 8 years ago!
All the best to you.
KyleAnn
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This is really good to know. I wasn’t actually thinking about leaving later on, but the way you put it it has put it my mind there’s no reason to even think of it :)
I’m still only in the third lessons and have really learned so much more than I have from trying to learn from the more expensive places that require fees for every single thing. WA has been so well worth it already. I’m paying a heck of a lot less than what I was starting out trying to learn this stuff with.
Thank you so much for the post!!!
Kelly’O