Wealthy Affliliate Review - Scam or The Real Deal?

I bit the bullet and joined Wealthy Affiliate University. After getting my welcome email from the owners, Kyle and Carson, I logged in and was amazed at how much info was on the site. Tutorials, an active forum, web site building tools, their own version of My Space pages, etc. To say there is a lot would be an understatement. One of the first places they recommend to look at is the 8 week action plan to get you moving in the right direction. After reading the first week's plan and all of the related articles, I was ready for more. Unfortunately, you can not see week two's plan until you have been a member of Wealthy Affiliate University for a week.

Do not worry though, there is plenty to do in the meantime and you can read ahead, thanks to the Learning Center. They have broken out all of their tutorials into Junior, Intermediate and Senior sections. Although, I do not suggest reading the tutorials beyond your current level. They have done a very good job of pacing with the 8 Week plan at Wealthy Affiliate University and I highly suggest you follow it. I didn't and it cost me over $100 in failed advertising schemes.

On my second day I spent most of that time exploring the Wealthy Affiliate University site. There is a ton of information on the site on how to be successful and contains a lot of step-by-step instructions on what I should be doing.

I won't bore you with all of the details here, but if you would like to follow my exploits, I have a blog where I'm tracking my day-to-day activities at Wealthy Affiliate University .

Gimpy Knee's Internet Marketing Blog

I have included an RSS feed below to my blog, if you want to jump to my most recent adventures.

When you join Wealthy Affiliate University you gain access to a browser based website creator program called Site Rubix. If you do not know HTML or are new to building web pages and sites, this is a great program. It is easy to use and comes with some web page templates to get you started.

I currently use Site Rubix to build my web pages.

Here are a few examples:
World of Warcraft How To Make Gold Guide Comparison
Guitar Hero Games and Accessories

Site Rubix is not a very robust program but it does what it is supposed to do well. It is meant to give the new website builder a tool to build quick and easy websites with a professional look. It achieves that goal. The built-in FTP program is adequate but too limited for my tastes. You can't rename existing files. You can download files to your local hard drive but you can't upload local files to your site via the built-in FTP program. You can use other FTP tools to upload files but they will not be recognized by Site Rubix. So, you will have to do your web page editing with another program if Site Rubix is unable to do what you need.

I suppose that is a feature to help the new user from misplacing files and breaking links, but experienced users will probably move on to other website building products pretty quickly.

Part of your Wealthy Affiliate University membership is web site hosting. They will host up to 3 domains for free as part of your membership. They also provide the tools and instructions you will need to setup and administer a web site such as custom site related email, domain aliases, and subdomains to name a few. So far, I have found these tools to be everything I need. They also provide instructions on where to go to register your website so it will get added to the search sites, like Google, faster.

After a lot of reading on how to write articles and where to post them, I finally wrote my first article at GoArticles.com. I also put it up on my personal website for a "prettier" appearance. I'm not much of a writer but the whole process was fairly painless. It took me a while to get it done, but I imagine the whole process will speed up as I gain experience.

I have actually changed the article on my website because I had not done a very good job (I jumped in without reading all of the material at Wealthy Affiliate University). I'm leaving this screen shot here for nostalgia purposes.

Wealthy Affiliate University suggested joining EzineArticles.com and then post articles there to help your website get placed in the bigger search engines. So, I joined, wrote a couple of articles and went to change my author name because I didn't want to use my real name.

Well, it turns out they don't allow author names with nouns (Knee) and adjectives (Gimpy) and rejected my request to change my author name. An actual person had reviewed my request and I obviously don't think my pen name is offensive and I don't agree with their hard line attitude towards author names. So, I promptly deleted all of the articles I had there and notified them why I had done so.

Unless they change their naming policy (doubtful), I will not be using them and will stick to other services, like GoArticles.com, who are not so anal.

I have to give this site a mention. To my knowledge, they are not affiliated with Wealthy Affiliate University.

USFreeAds.com has been incredibly useful.

If you don't have a lot of time to write articles or just don't have the skills yet to write full 500+ word articles, USFreeAds.com will let you develop your ad writing skills for free. The drawback to the free adds is you can't put HTML links into your adds directly because they don't allow you to write ads with their HTML editor for free. You'll have to rely on the their "link" field to get your affiliate links out there, if you don't want to spend any money.

However, for $10 per month, you can put as many HTML links, images and other HTML objects into your ads as you need. You just need to be careful because their HTML editor does not recognize JavaScript and other advanced HTML features.

One nice thing I recently noticed was your ads will actually show up in Google and other search engines, if you write them correctly. This is a great way to build backlinks to your website or Squidoo pages of products you are trying to sell.

Perhaps the best thing about USFreeAds.com is you can go back and edit your ads and tweak them when they are not performing up to your expectations. This has saved me a lot of re-writes and trying to remember how I had classified the ad originally. I'd also like to think my writing skills have improved somewhat due to writing so many shorter ads.

It was pretty unexpected, but I made my first, second and third sales on the same day. Three different unrelated products. When I checked my first account, I was pleasantly surprised to see I had $3.70 in my account. It wasn't for a product I had put a lot of work into and was a nice way to wake up.

In a pretty good frame of mind, I went to another one of my accounts where I had been trying to sell this one product for about two weeks without success and the other I had only been working on for about a week. To say I was jazzed to see $16.06 in my account would be an understatement.

These weren't big sales by any stretch of the imagination, but it's good to see everything I've learned at Wealthy Affiliate University is starting to pay off. Now I just have to keep the ball rolling.

This was somewhat surprising as I hadn't been actively promoting Wealthy Affiliate University. A referral link here, a referral link there and that was about it. I logged into Wealthy Affiliate University one morning and I noticed I was being offered a new product for free. I wondered why it was now free because I had been seeing it promoted but I would have to buy it if I wanted to see it.

Well, it turns out if you refer just one person to Wealthy Affiliate University, you get the product for free! So, not only did this referral save me the cost of the product, I made $20. The great thing about referrals is I will get $20 each month for as long as that person keeps their subscription. I have to admit subscription referrals are nice. I guess I should probably put more time into creating Wealthy Affiliate University referrals now.

Well, I can honestly say I do not think Wealthy Affiliate University is a scam.

It's only been a little over two months since I started in this new (for me) field. I have learned a lot about advertising, but still have a lot to learn. I'm not making $100 per day or even $10 per day, for that matter. I have made over $100 though (under $2 per day. Ha!) and I am starting to see hints of making some income on a consistent basis. I just think I have picked some of the harder areas to get into and it's more difficult to get started.

However, I'm being patient and have started looking into areas that might be a little easier to get into and make some money. I am constantly checking what I have already done and making tweaks here and there as needed. Maybe it's the optimist in me, but I have a good feeling about all of this.

So, if you're looking to get into internet marketing, I suggest you give Wealthy Affiliate University a try. There are a lot of helpful members and they always seem willing to help people who struggle with the internet marketing game. I have picked up a lot of good tips from the forums when I didn't quite get what a lesson was trying to tell me. Wealthy Affiliate University is a good community and I intend to hang around for a while.