Wealthy Affiliate Scam

Wealthy Affiliate Scam!15 Reasons Why…

15 Reasons why Wealthy Affiliate has been called a SCAM!

To add context: Wealthy Affiliate is an online membership site that teaches people how to build successful WordPress websites (read make money). It has a free membership option and a premium option.

It also has 2 core training programs ‘WA Bootcamp‘ for people who want to build websites focused on the make money online marketplace and ‘Online Entrepreneur Certification‘ for people with other niche interests.

Let’s dish the dirt…

15 Wealthy Affiliate Complaints…

We’ll look at the complaints against WA first and then dig deeper…

1. Wealthy Affiliate Scam Reviews. The biggest WA complaint by far is the number of Wealthy Affiliate Bootcamp students that litter the Internet with reviews of competing make money products. You can spot these ‘fake’ reviews as they are usually poorly researched and end the review by labelling the product inferior or a scam but offering the option to read about ‘their #1 recommendation’.

2. Overwhelming. The WA learning curve is overwhelming.

3. The WA sales message is misleading. Meaning that Wealthy Affiliate purposefully make everything sound easier than it is.

4. It takes too much work to succeed.

5. It’s too expensive to stay a premium member at $49 per month.

6. You can lose the content you worked hard creating on your free WA websites if you stop using WA and miss the WA warning emails.

7. Most people fail to make money.

8. Wealthy Affiliate should strongly discourage beginners from entering the make money online niche.

9. It’s hard to move your website from Wealthy Affiliate hosting if you decide to cancel your WA premium membership.

10. You can get all the training information for free on the Internet if you look for it.

11. The build a website in 2 minutes marketing message is misleading.  Again suggesting the whole process is easier than the reality.

​12. When you cancel your Wealthy Affiliate Premium Membership you lose access to the Wealthy Affiliate community.

13. Wealthy Affiliate used to be called Wealthy Affiliate University. Some people think this is misleading as it’s not a University.

14. The member ranking system is distracting and should be removed.

15. Wealthy Affiliate free membership does expire.

Bonus complaint lol…

16. Wealthy Affiliate is a pyramid Multi Level Marketing program.

OK Let’s Dig Deeper

Disclaimer: I want you to know that I am an affiliate for many programs including Wealthy Affiliate.

I’m a big fan of Wealthy Affiliate BUT I do want people to make INFORMED decisions…

Meaning I am biased but hopefully helpful…

1. Wealthy Affiliate Scam Reviews. 100% agree that reviewing products without owning them and doing proper research is WRONG!

To be clear this is mostly done by beginners that join WA and follow the WA Bootcamp training. No, the training does not advise doing this, but it does suggest honestly reviewing make money products, with view to promoting the good ones and offering alternatives for the less good.

It’s open for misinterpretation.

2. Wealthy Affiliate can be overwhelming. Again 100% agree. There is a steep learning curve and I think experiencing overwhelm along the way should be EXPECTED. Your learning a ‘potentially’ life changing skill-set. Feeling overwhelmed along the way is like a rite of passage.

3. The WA Sales message makes it sound too easy. Personally I think the WA message is that succeeding online requires hard work and dedication to follow the ‘plan’.

In the make money online space WA are positively understated.

The truth is making money online does require really hard work until you’ve developed your skills.

4. The work is too hard. It’s really the point of the WA free membership and free sites. ​

You’re learning new skills and you’ll be doing a lot of work.

You might like it, feel it’s an ability you can develop…

Or 

You might not.

Try it for yourself. If it’s too hard too much work…

Move on.

It’s cost you nothing other than a little time and some effort.

This is fair …isn’t it?

5. WA’s too expensive at $49 /mo ongoing. Agree. Once you’ve learned what you need to succeed why not revert to free membership and save $49 / mo. 

That’s how membership business models work. People only pay for as long as they’re getting what THEY need.

Don’t let any negative thoughts about cancelling put you off learning something that could change your life.

It’s always your choice.

6. You can lose your free site rubix content if your not careful. Yes you can. But it’s easy to avoid. WA host a lot of free websites for people (read spend a fortune on hosting costs) if people stop using them they warn them by email that they will delete sites to save on storage costs. You have 30 days to act on these warnings.

So if you’re planning on taking a break from WA and can’t keep check on your email use the WordPress ‘Export’ feature (under the ‘Tools’ tab in the WordPress site admin Dashboard) to create a file of all your content (pages, posts and media) which can be ‘imported’ again in case of problems. These’s a video at the bottom of this post that demonstrates this feature.

7. Most people fail. Yep. It’s true.

It’s estimated that over 90% of people that try online ventures fail.

Pretty bleak message. Sorry.

It really does take more than a proven system like WA’s it also needs consistent hard work, support and a sprinkle of inspiration.

8. WA should warn beginners from entering the make money online niche (taking the WA Bootcamp training). In my opinion I think they do.

Here’s how Kyle ( company co-owner) puts it…

“If you are REALLY STUCK at this point and you cannot decide on a niche, perhaps you may be interested in the make money/affiliate marketing niche. If you don’t have a niche at this point, this will be your niche and we have an Affiliate Bootcamp dedicated to those that are interested in promoting Wealthy Affiliate”.

Also remember that Kyle see’s a small percentage of beginners who against all the odds do succeed breaking into the make money niche. 

He’s never going to please everyone on this topic.

9. It’s hard moving your website from Wealthy Affiliate Hosting to a new web host when you cancel your premium membership. Yes, moving any site between any hosting companies requires a logical process.

Here’s a video of the process from WA member Craig Smith…

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10. You can get all the information you need on the Internet for free. You just have to look for it, find it collate it and ignore the crap.

Good luck with this.

11. The 2 minutes to build a website idea that WA promotes is BS. The WA website builder takes about a minute to create a working WordPress website. At this point the site is EMPTY.

The hard work is filling your website with lovely helpful content that visitors are going to love.

The marketing messaging around this is that the technology isn’t hard. Consistently creating good content is hard but the tech really isn’t.

12. If you cancel premium membership going back to free membership means you lose your community access. Yes 100%. Free members only have community access for the trial 7 days.

Why would WA Premium members downgrading to free WA membership have higher rights than ordinary free members?

13. WA is not a real University.  WA used to be known as Wealthy Affiliate University. I guess they had to drop the ‘University’ from the messaging to avoid confusion lol.

14. The WA Premium member ranking system is a huge distraction and should be stopped. WA has a ‘ranking’ system for members that measures ‘engagement’.

It has nothing to do with your online success and earns members nothing.

It does recognise people for outstanding effort in the community.

Yes, it is a distraction if you let it be.

15. Free WA membership sites do expire. To clarify there is no expiry of free membership. But if you build free websites which use WA resources and stop using them you run the risk of them being deleted after be warned through email.

16. Bonus Wealthy Affiliate complaint… WA is a pyramid scheme. 100% FALSE. 

Here’s a good definition of a pyramid or multi-level-marketing scheme…

WA only offers one level of affiliate compensation. Meaning If I ‘recruit’ you into WA and you promote WA successfully I don’t earn anything from your success.

Wealthy Affiliates in house affiliate program is a traditional affiliate program paying approximately 50% commissions on purchases made by people introduced via the affiliate link. There are no payment tiers or levels, no ‘sponsors’, teams or other structures associated with multi level marketing business models.

Additional WA Good Housekeeping…

WA offers a 30 day refund policy that applies to all product / membership purchases

• The $19 First Month 1/2 price Premium Membership.
• The $49 Monthly membership (the last month not total membership paid)
• The annual membership – including the Black Friday special (within 30 days) 

If you intend getting a refund my advice would be to make sure you apply within the 30 day window during the working week.

Don’t cancel premium membership before sorting out the rehosting of your sites.

If you create a lot of content for your free WA websites and decide to ‘take a break’ keep a check on your email in case WA are purging old unused websites to free up storage for new members.

If you want to move your content from your free WA site the video below will help…

Conclusion 

Is Wealthy Affiliate a scam?

Is Wealthy Affiliate guilty of making succeeding sound too easy?

Should WA prevent or restrict beginners from entering the make money online niche?

Should WA simplify the training and reduce the suggested action goals?

Maybe.

What do you think?

All agree that building a successful website requires hard work and dedication…

Unfortunately too much for many people.

No way around it. Sorry.

Now in it’s 13th year Wealthy Affiliate has clearly amassed a number of valid (you decide) complaints. 

What I didn’t find were ANY stories of hidden upsells, or additional costs of following the system, or of people not getting refunds when requested.

So if the thought of hard work following a proven system doesn’t put you off why not read a few stories of Wealthy Affiliate members that have succeeded by consistently doing the work…

Want to see if your hard work combined with WA training works for you click here…

Source sites include Google.com Quora.com Crajun.com and Youtube.com

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