Wealthy Affiliate Review

I joined the Wealthy Affiliate membership site on 16 December 2005. I looked around in the forums and resources and I wasn’t 100% satisfied with what I saw.

Here’s what you’ll receive in the Wealthy Affiliate membership site:

1. “Personal Coaching” in the forums. I have seen members sending the 2 owners of Wealthy Affiliate their Google AdWords campaign details privately for them to critique. This could be useful to learn how they optimize their campaigns.
2. Keyword lists of a bunch of affiliate programs. I am not sure how they came up with their keywords lists. Its just a long list of keywords in a text file. There are no indications of the amount of searches made for these keywords, neither are they arranged in ad groups. There is still a lot of work for you to do in order to use these keyword lists. I personally wouldn’t simply take their keywords and assume it will make me loads of money. I ran them through my keyword software to see the exact search statistics.
3. A simple get started guide. I don’t like the guide at all. It is very vague and I have complained about it in the forums. You’ll be better off reading a guide like Google AdWords 123 and then join a forum like Wealthy Affiliate if you think you need a support group.
4. 2 review landing page templates. I like these templates. If you search on Google.com for “Wealthy Affiliate Review”, you’ll see a landing page comparing Wealthy Affiliate to other related affiliate marketing resources.

I have very high expectations of someone I pay to be my coach. Paying $29.99 per month isn’t going to get me a coach of the highest level. If you can afford it, you might want to pay someone like Perry Marshall or Mark Widawer to train you how to get your campaigns in order. I believe my expectations were a bit too high for the low monthly fees I am paying right now.

I had a list of questions to ask the guys in there…

• Why not create video tutorials to further explain the PPC stuff you talk about?
• How do you guys deal with the ridiculous min. CPC Google throws at you?
• I usually gauge my max CPC judging from the commissions I will earn from the affiliate program. How do you guys do it?
• I personally am not comfortable bidding more than $0.20 per click… Do you always want to have your ad at the position 2-5 no matter the cost?
• Sometimes when I see my min. bid is too low to get top 8 positions, I generally stop bidding on those keywords. Am I selling myself short here?
• How to create a landing page?
• Do I collect the name and email of my visitors at my landing page?
• How to optimize, split test to get the max. conversions at my landing page?
• When do I abandon my campaign?
• I am curious to learn how you guys came up with your keyword lists so that I can do it myself. Care to share?
• I also see a lot of people asking about how to create landing pages and the topic is always being side stepped. Why is that so?
• May I ask if I am supposed to create only the campaigns with the keyword lists provided here?
• What if I want to create other campaigns myself? How do I research for an affiliate program?
• How do I generate keywords for my campaign if you do not want to teach us how to do it?

I was surprised with the answers I got from the owners of Wealthy Affiliate. They told me I was being negative and critical of them when all I wanted was answers to my questions. The only areas I feel that might have offended them were the ones in bold above… I got upset when I saw a lot of questions about building landing pages were not answered with enough detail so I asked them why they were not answered. Yes, they have a review landing page template but they don’t have a landing page that was geared for 1 affiliate program only.

After a few email and private message exchanges, the owners decided it was better that I leave Wealthy Affiliate so that they could focus on helping the Google AdWords newbies and intermediates. Wealthy Affiliate isn’t for more advanced and expert level marketers and I didn’t know that till I joined and asked them some of my  advanced questions above.

They are going to release an ebook that might cover the topics above. That is why they can’t really cover those topics in the membership site right now. So if you’re willing to wait for the ebook release that is coming out in a few weeks time, then go for it. If you would like to find out for yourself what the Wealthy Affiliate membership site is like, please sign up and take a look. It might be good for you even though its not for me.