Here's my answer to all three of these questions that will cover them, as there is an element in them that are common to all.
Those who ask these type of questions are looking for something to compare the situation or themselves to. The fallacy in this is, there is no way you can measure yourself to the person you're asking these questions to.
I personally have handicaps that I must deal with and work around. This has slowed me down and therefore, my success rate may not reflect what your own rate may be. You are doing a disservice to yourself by posing these questions and then making assumptions based on them. You may measure yourself by them which will cause undue disappointment.
I don't represent Wealthy Affiliate in this way.
I can't.
The following pages will cover the affective ways in which I can represent Wealthy Affiliate. Else, please let Wealthy Affiliate represent herself by doing the following things...
Here's the crux of this page...
How much I make, or how long I've been here, or how long it took for me to make money at Wealthy Affiliate, using the resources here, have nothing to do with the quality and effectiveness of the resources found on here.
They work. They work very well. They have effectively changed many, many lives of those who have been fortunate to find this community. They have seriously changed my life, though at a slower rate than many who has enjoyed success enough to quit their day jobs in the first six months being here.
For others, this takes longer, but the quality and effectiveness of the resources are exactly the same for you, me and the other person. It's just like the fact that we all have 24 hours in a day. Some people are going to use every minute and second, and others are going to squander most of them! Time is time. The resources here are the resources here. It is what it is.
The bottom line in one simple phrase...
"It's All Up to You!"
The resources here are top quality and at the time of this writing, nothing I've come across compares to it. Some programs or entities may have some of the qualities, but it's extremely rare to find other programs or entities that have developed and evolved quite like Wealthy Affiliate has!
My advice to you...
Take the ball and run with it! The only obstacles you will encounter is YOU!
I myself have been in some of the worst conditions almost all of my time on here, with personal handicaps, but I've chosen to keep going in spite of it all. If something didn't work and was inhibiting me, I kept at it. Sometimes I had to stop and change the circumstances. I have at this point.
I will never be out of the woods with this, and neither will you. Accept it. All athletes deal with this exact same problem. Some days the sun shines and other days it rains. Nothin' you can do about it. What you do have control over, that you change.
It's the song and dance of the entrepreneur!
What you say it's true. But it's too harsh, and somehow goes around the straight answer. Those questions are natural and logical. We have all come here to earn money.
I think it would have been more honest just to say: "People, if you don't have any kind of financial backup, don't rely on the business you opened through WA. Here is simply a school, that you have to pay for, for at least one or two years, till you can actually earn enough to sustain yourselves from your websites."
OK, you can elaborate a lot starting from here, but what would be the point? This is true. Any senior here knows it.
There are people here, who mention how much they earn. No secret at all. Ivetriedthat says in his site, he earns like $6000 a month and his site is from 2007 (I'm not exactly sure) and Nathaniel says he has MANY websites (by many I understand like 20) running for good years, and that there are months with almost no money and months with $11000.
And I think this kind of honesty is enough for everybody to get an idea.
Laura
Like the majority of people who first join WA, I too, was looking for a great way to make legit cash overnight. While I knew logically that it doesn't work that way, I was willing to hope that I might be able to pull it off.
Needless to say, I wasn't. But that hasn't in any way made me think less of WA. It's like you say - there's no such thing as overnight success.
One thing I would like to point out that is not a new concept, but one that we constantly need to remind ourselves of is that what we're doing here is starting a business.
As a retailer myself I know that a brick-and-mortar business starts off with an investment of capital and slowly but surely, as the business takes off, and the money comes in, debts begin to get paid off and only after that does the profit show itself.
It takes time, patience, effort, time, perseverance and, dare I say it?, time, to achieve the goals that we set for ourselves. Embrace the journey!