The Wealthy Affiliate

Affiliate programs are created by companies to pay you for promoting their products and services. When you join you are given access to a special coded link to place on your website or to advertise in other ways. When people click on the link and buy the product or service, you get paid a portion of the sale.

The Wealthy Affiliate is a company that teaches you how to do that. I actually just joined in Jan. 2009 and am still trying to figure it out. I am used to the Site Build it! method which is about creating a website around a topic or niche that you know a lot about and are passionate about. When you find a topic you next search for reputable affiliate programs that complement your site.

From what I understand so far is that the WA program suggests just finding a topic that is in demand. It doesn't matter how many other sites are doing something on the same topic. It doesn't matter if it works or is a good product. You can promote anything by using Google Adwords which is a pay per click advertising program and other online advertising. You also do not need a website to start or be successful in affiliate marketing but it does help.

The basic concept of the Wealthy Affiliate Program is to research one of the many profitable areas online such as dating and relationships, website hosting or any topic that you are interested in and find out everything you can about the market. The biggest question to ask is why do people buy in these markets. Most of the topics such as weight loss or website hosting are too broad to tackle. To get the top of the search engines for these keywords will take a large adwords budget as well as writing hundreds of articles or pages on a website. What about weight loss for instance are people really looking for? They want to lose weight for their wedding, tropical vacation or summer. Adding those words to weight loss narrows down a specific population. You can then create campaigns around those keywords and find products to promote.

Choosing an affiliate product to promote is also difficult with so many different affiliate programs out there. If you have a product you have bought and used successfully you can start there.

They also have an 8 week lesson guide that walks you through the process of finding a niche or topic to promote and how to create a marketing campaign around it. You can start a campaign without a website using just article marketing but I have found that having a website done using Site Build it! will jumpstart your campaigns. You can focus on building website pages that are optimized for the search engines and then promoting your site.

Update- 4/6/09. The Wealthy affiliate 8 week action guide is really poorly done compared to Site Build it! It is more of an overview. The provide tons of information in the Niche HQ but little info on how to interpret it or use it. They also just released a new ebook that they hyped up and gave away for free to anyone who just got a new affiliate for them. While that is some incentive to promote their program, I actually can't promote it because it didn't work for me. It really takes too much work to create campaigns when you really could be creating pages on a website using Site Build it! that will get you to the top of the search engines for your keyword if you have some patience.

The biggest help I got from the Wealthy Affiliate was from a woman named potpiegirl who has written a good ebook called One Week Marketing that actually has an action plan on how to create and implement a marketing campaign using all free resources. It is a great way to start if you really don't have any money to invest in an online business. I do recommend that you use this program to raise money to purchase the full Site Build it! Online class that will take you step by step through the action guide. It is a 12 week class that will give you a solid foundation for creating an online business along with continued support for your journey.

Let me know what your experience is using the Wealthy Affiliate Program - especially if you use the SBI! affiliate program too!

Update: 06/28/09 The Wealthy Affiliate is really poorly designed and run compared to Site Build it! I recently joined again through their $1 trial offer thinking that I would get the free Ebook Adwords that I had wanted to see but didn't want to pay $67 for. You of course don't get the "Free Ebook" until you pay! Their affiliate that I went through advertised differently and I emailed both parties and got no response or help. If they were customer service oriented, they would have just given me the ebook since they give it away for free with memberships and I already had a membership before but didn't know that you could get it for free if you went through a special offer link.

I got their "Beat Adwords Ebook" and it wasn't worth the price of the membership. You can find most of the information for free online. These two young kids are good at making money online but make it from all the people using the Wealthy Affiliate and taking people's money for nothing.

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Wow!!!! Thanks for saving me time, money and stress!!!  Not rated yet
Hi I am a fellow SBI owner and was also drwan to the WA program-- It has been flopping around in my head for a while but I just wasn't getting the DO IT ...