Is Wealthy Affiliate University A Scam? – The Truth [Uncovered!]

Wealthy Affiliate in an affiliate marketing training platform founded in 2005 by then two Canadian University Students in Kyle Loudoun & Carson Lim. 

In the early days Wealthy Affiliate was an online business service dedicated to providing keyword lists to website owners and affiliate marketers. 

Later, through hardwork and constant investment, Wealthy Affiliate evolved into what it is today. 

Exactly what Wealthy Affiliate is, is hard to pin down as they are significantly much more than "An Affiliate Marketing Training Platform". 

Having been a member since 2015 and, as you can imagine, having been a member for so long I can legitimately call myself an expert on that subject of what Wealthy Affiliate Is. 

Wealthy Affiliate is a: 

• An Affiliate Marketing Training Platform
• A Social Network For Online Business Owners (Think Facebook For Internet Marketers!)
• A Website Hosting Company
• A Provider Of Online Business Tools. 
• A Business Opportunity

I prefer to call Wealthy Affiliate as one stop shop for Affiliate Marketers and online business owners. With Membership to the platform you get 

• World Class Affiliate Marketing Training 
• Full Website hosting (up to 10 of your own websites)
• Access to a community of 2.5M+ like minded online business owners
• Full set of tools such as their proprietary Jaaxy Keyword Research Tool, Secure Socket Layer (SSL certificate) affiliate program finder +much more
• An Opportunity to make money with Wealthy Affiliate.

(that last part is not obliged, there is no obligation to promote Wealthy Affiliate as Product, entirely optional).  

So, it is fairly evident that to simply refer to Wealthy Affiliate as an online affiliate marketing training platform does not truly nor accurately depict what Wealthy Affiliate Is.

Two things that Wealthy Affiliate is not: 

1. Get Rich Quick Scheme
2. A University

Those two I want to make crystal clear. If you are looking for a way of instant riches then go buy a lottery ticket.

Wealthy Affiliate does not and never has claimed that you can make a lot of money in an insanely short period of time, anyone claiming that is plain old "Equestrian Excrement". 

We are all adults here - time to face the plain old hard truth of the matter there are no short cuts to success, no elevator, you need to take the stairs!.

Success in any endeavour takes time, effort, patience, dedication and a yes, hard work.  

Nobody at Wealthy Affiliate tries to pull the wool over your eyes or "cheat" you into thinking you will achieve magical success overnight - not even the site owners. 

As for the second point - Wealthy Affiliate is NOT a university, they hold no accreditation with any government or educational institute.

Why it is nicknamed "Wealthy Affiliate University" I have no idea and yes, it is a little misleading in that sense. 

The lack of official accreditation or an official title as a university does not detract from the quality of what is taught inside the training area. 

After all Udemy and Teachable are well respected educational platforms that are unaccredited by any institution.

In my opinion, you will find the training just as good if not better at Wealthy Affiliate than anything you can find on Udemy or Teachable, and comes with a whole host of tools that you need while those platforms come with nothing!.  

No tools and no hosting!

Wealthy Affiliate is owned by an Entity Called Niche Marketing Inc, which in turn is owned By Kyle Loudon and Carson Lim. 

The two founding members are highly active in the community and very accessible across a number of channel. 

Both of them have other business interests including various niche marketing websites and a Keyword Research Tool Jaaxy, which is included, integrated into Wealthy Affiliate but is a separate business and entity in its' own right. 

By far running and managing Wealthy Affiliate is their biggest passion and consumes the vast majority fo their time.  

Wealthy Affiliate is something that they spend a lot of time at and dedicating themselves to helping others to succeed with their online business's and to continually improving the platform to stay at the cutting edge of affiliate marketing training. 

In my time at Wealthy Affiliate they have added the following features:

• Content Creation Platform
• SSL Secure Socket Layer Certificate
• Integrated The Jaaxy Keyword Research tool
• Highly Advanced Site Speed Optimisation Suit
• Affiliate Program Finder
• A New Year Long Super Affiliate Training (available only 1x per year)
• Added and Improved Site Comment Engine
• Updated training several times - done yearly!. 
• Upgraded and improved Hosting to State of the art servers!.

And all without increasing the membership fees. 

Both, Kyle and Carson are easily contactable, and really do go that extra mile to help you out when you need it.

I recall struggling in particularly tough niche to build a site in and just reached out to Kyle for some help and really needed him to "pass judgement" and review my site and what I can do. 

Rather surprising he replied back, giving my site a full analysis. his expert opinion and boy! I shot up the rankings!. 

From that Screenshot I distinctly remember being Ahrefs rank 48/49million (the lower the better) and UR 22 DR 2! (higher the number the better). One tip, an done day later...Booom!.  Significant improvement. 

Obviously, and evidently these guys care a lot about their members which is very unlike many other affiliate marketing training programs or platform in this industry where it is quite literally impossible to contact or get hold of the actual owners - that is if you can even find out who they are!

Wealthy affiliate teach you to how to create highly profitable niche sites using a variety of monetization methods including Affiliate Marketing and the use of display advertising. 

There are two main training courses - Online Entrepreneur's Certificate Course which is focused on building profitable niche sites in any given niche that you so wish or desire. 

This is pretty powerful as you have a number of options available to you including the rather joyful and fun idea of building a site around your hobbies or passions, or build a site around something that you are curious about. 

Build your first site, get it earning money and then you can have, if you wish a passive or semi passive source of income and start building more sites and create a portfolio of income producing assets. 

Many people chose to "flip" niche sites build them, take them to a certain income goal US$1,000 or US$2,000 per month and then sell them for 25x to 30x the monthly income!. 

The other training course available at Wealthy Affiliate is The Wealthy Affiliate Bootcamp. 

This training is dedicated to building a site in the rather tough but infinitely lucrative Make Money Online Niche. 

The focus of the training is on promoting Wealthy Affiliate as a product.

This is not obliged and "set in stone" you can if you so wish promote another product instead of or alongside wealthy affiliate and offer your visitors an alternative.  

in fact, 

I highly suggest that you do just that. Wealthy Affiliate is not for every one and you will have visitors to your site that Wealthy Affiliate is just not what they are looking for - offer an alternative. 

Don't be like the fruit shop that sells only apples!. 

The training in this course, The Wealthy Affiliate Bootcamp, is fully comprehensive and if you apply it - I am confident that you will succeed. I detailed The Wealthy Affilaite Bootcamp in this article. 

Writing Fake Reviews is NOT Taught At Wealthy Affiliate!

It is has been claimed that Wealthy Affiliate teaches it's members to create fake reviews slamming other similar products.

Nothing could be further from the truth!. 

Inside the Wealthy Affiliate Bootcamp you are taught to create informative, detailed reviews that are above all accurate, well researched and help to better inform your reader to help them to make the best decision for them. 

We are not taught to show a product up in negative light. That is completely false. 

Sure,

I have given negative reviews - I am entitled to my opinion, I do keep my reviews in a positive tone - even got commended for it in a comment on the article by a Billion dollar+ company that I did not recommend, they thanked me for my "somewhat positive review". 

We live in the digital age and in a society of highly informed consumers of a variety of products - including business opportunities.

We live in an age of the informed consumer. 

If I review a product using the keyword "is Product name a scam" I am simply providing the consumer with the information that they are seeking.

Using such a search term ("Is Product a Scam") is by no means certain that I review the product in a negative light - I may even review it rather positively.

I am simply leveraging a search term and creating content around it and helping consumers to make better more informed decisions.

Consumers are searching for that information on their own accord and are seeking balanced well informed quality reviews.

Don't believe me? 

Then enter the name of any product in the "is "product name" a scam format in the box below and you will see how many people are searching for that in a given month. 

There is nothing "fake" about that. Nothing at all.  To call that fake is like saying a consumer has no right to an well informed review of their product - which in my opinion is an indication of something to hide!.

What irks some product owners is their products being reviewed negatively. This is a quality issue for the owner of the Product or system and nothing to do with the authenticity of a review or reviewer. 

If you review something in a positive light why is it all of a sudden a genuine review and seen as great one by owners of certain products but if you review it in a negative light it is all of a sudden a fake review?. 

The poor little snowflakes need to grow a pair, improve their products and learn how to handle a little bit of criticism!. 

(and stop crying like little girls!)

That is the hard fact of the matter!

Boo freaking hoo! So somebody didn't like your product.

Grow up! Stop Crying and go Make your product better! 

It has been claimed that Wealthy affiliate members promote Wealthy Affiliate without demonstrating or showing any proof of success at Wealthy Affiliate. 

Firstly, 

That kind of marketing strategy is low quality and very scammy and it what is associated with that kind of product.

Wealthy Affiliate members set themselves apart by not having that bovine excrement type of marketing "Earn US$13,000 in the next 7 days". 

The marketing style by wealthy affiliate is more value driven and focused on the product and the training. Money is not the focus of, a should not be the focus of your online business. Helping people is. 

Money is the biproduct of what you do in any business both online and offline. 

For the record there are a ton of success stories inside wealthy Affiliate - literally hundreds!. 

(there might even be thousand I wasn't willing to count them all, sorry!)

Most people at Wealthy Affiliate tend be rather quiet about it on their own sites simple because their sites tend not be about themselves but for their readers. 

And that is the way it should be!. 

The success stories tend to get shared more on their own blogs inside of Wealthy Affiliate to encourage current members.

There is an endless list of success stories of all kinds and types of success from traffic based, to getting indexed in google to very first sales online to one phenomenal member that earned US$100,000 in single week!.

A picture speaks a thousand words, all those screenshots below are from Wealthy Affiliate members and their internal blogs on the platform. 

Something I always do, and enjoy doing is to investigate business opportunities in detail and leave nothing out. 

Wealthy Affiliate, Owned by the entity Niche Marketing Inc is not Accredited by The Better Business Bureau, in their favour it can be said that they attract very few complaints, 14 complaints in 3 years out of over 680,000 members having joined in that period is a tiny amount. 

Also commendable is their perfect A+ rating with the consumer advocacy group. 

Far from it, nothing could be further from the truth. 

Few, if any products in the Affiliate marketing sector could be more genuine and authentic. I can say that with absolute honesty and hand on my heart.

If I told you Wealthy Affiliate are the opposite - The fight scammers and help the public to be aware of known scams would you believe me? 

If I told you there were sued by a Known scammer and spent multiple six figures in legal fees refusing to take down an offending article and stood up to the scammer in a 3 year court battle what would you think? 

What if I told you they donated a large part some 50% of their winnings that they were awarded by the court to victims of the scam what would you think of Wealthy Affiliate then? 

That they are highly trusted, certainly not a scam or anything close to it?.

If you have any doubt, or fancy a little nosey into a little court drama - you can read about the court case here in which Wealthy Affiliate Prevailed.

What ever you goals in life might be, your dreams and aspirations, at wealthy affiliate you have everything you need right there in the one place to make them a reality. 

Make Wealthy Affiliate Worth it for yourself, and your family. Immerse yourself in the community and the world class training. 

Take full advantage of everything that you have at wealthy affiliate, the tools, the training, and the years of expertise of other members and make your dreams real. 

If You are ready to get started at Wealthy Affiliate Click Here To Create Your Free Starter Member Account and start building your dream online business. 

If you have any questions about Wealthy Affiliate, Or Any lingering Doubt, leave a comment below.