Yeah, that is so not how it works.

I struggled for months and spent more money than I care to admit on ways to make this process work for me. I have to say, it’s still not easy but I think I’m figuring it out.

So the first thing I realized is that there are many ways to implement affiliate marketing. And as many ways as there are to implement there are tons of people willing to teach you their way, for a cost of course. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I can assure you, if I had the desire to teach what I’ve learned, I would most definitely charge for it. I mean really, this is my livelihood, why would I give it away for free. The folks that are creating these courses spend years perfecting their process, then more time building and perfecting their courses. They do have something valuable to offer.

So while I don’t necessarily endorse these courses, they are three that I have found that will offer you valuable training and success, as long as you finish the training and follow the program. Again, each has its own focus but the goal is the same, to teach you how to become successful at affiliate marketing.

Wealthy Affiliate

This program has been around for upwards of 15 years. The owners are still active with the program by providing blog posts, personal emails, and webinars to their members.

Clickbank University

This program is fairly new and they have come out with their 2.0 version. It has two focuses, teaching you to create your own product that you can market on Clickbank, and teaching you to market other people’s products.

Super Affiliate System

This program is taught by an affiliate marketing “guru”. Attendees suggest this might be one of the most “beginner friendly” online business models that they’ve experienced.He has learned the ins and outs of affiliate marketing

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Well, it turns out, it’s neither. Wealthy Affiliates is a legit training program that shows the average Jane/Joe, how to break into affiliate marketing in a way that it’s not necessary to buy ads on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube, or buy solo ads to fund email campaigns.

Affiliate Marketing Basics

Let me start by saying, “I am not an expert!” I am someone that was looking for a legit way to start making money from home. I left my corporate job following the “transformation” of my department and decided at 10 years from retirement age, I don’t want to go back to that life. But being 10 years from retirement, I have to earn income.

That’s when I started researching options and ran across the term “affiliate marketing”.

Dictionary.com defines affiliate marketing as :

noun: a marketing arrangement by which an online retailer pays commission to an external website for traffic or sales generated from its referrals.

Cool, but what does that mean? Have you ever been searching reading a site and you run across an article that has a link that takes you to amazon.com. Well, including that link in the website is affiliate marketing. But that’s just one way to do it.

You may also have received an email, not sure where they got your email address, but there was a link in it to a book that you find interesting. Yep, that’s affiliate marketing.

What about when you are on facebook and a sponsored ad shows up. Someone then proceeds to tell you have great they find this new shiny object, program, or service. You guessed it, affiliate marketing.

Each time someone clicks on one of those links and proceed to purchase that object, program, or service, the person that posting the link receives a commission. If you have enough links, promote it to enough people, you can make a pretty penny.

What’s The Deal With Wealthy Affiliate

That’s affiliate marketing in a nut shell, sounds simple, but there are so many nuances that it has taken years for the successful affiliate marketers to get where they are.

Thankfully, they aren’t hording the knowledge and Wealthy Affiliates is one of the programs that was created out of that multiyear journey to successful affiliate marketing.

With Wealthy Affiliates, you can get a basic membership free that will show you how to create a website and begin adding blog posts. Once you have that done, you are ready to move into the big leagues. But of course, everything in the big league costs. But that’s okay, because you will more than get your money’s worth.

The next membership level, which is “Premium”, gives you access to additional training and daily interaction with the program creators and the Wealthy Affiliate community. The training is all self paced and easy to follow. It takes you step by step through the process of turning the blog you started in the basic membership, into a blog that you can monetize using affiliate marketing.

Not only do you get this wonderful training, but you also become an affiliate of the program. That means, if you decide you want to give this program a try today and sign up, at some point, you might want to brag on the program and it’s benefits. You can include your affiliate link on your site and anyone that joins the program by clicking your link, would trigger an affiliate sale for you. That equates to commission in your pocket.

But What If It’s A Scam

Free Vector Art by Vecteezy

I don’t think I’m an authority at spotting a scam, but in my opinion, if a program takes your money and the only way you can make money is for you to get someone else to pay money into the program, it’s probably a scam.

That is not Wealthy Affiliates!

Yes, the premium membership costs money. And yes, you can chose to make money by promoting the program as an affiliate. But that is not the only benefit of the program.

This is a training program that gives you the tools and knowledge you can use to create your own income stream using affiliate marketing. There is no scam in that.

This is not a get rich quick scheme or an overnight success process. It takes thought, planning, and a lot of work. You basically will get out of it what you put into it. The good thing about it, if you decide after a month or two, this isn’t the route for you, you cancel your membership and can walk away. No harm, no foul.

I don’t think that’s what you’ll do though. I think once you realize your potential, you want to keep going to see how far you can go.

No Regrets

Wealthy Affiliates is not the first program that I’ve invested in. I’m not even going to say it’s the best program I’ve come in contact with. What I will say is I don’t regret my decision to invest in the membership.

For me, it laid out a clear plan that I could follow to get my affiliate marketing career off the ground. It’s the first program that I’ve been able to follow because it provides clear step by step instructions, and who would have thought it, but that’s exactly what I needed.

So while initially, I had decided, I was not going to be one of those people that wrote yet another blog post about Wealthy Affiliates, yet here I am doing just that. Not only that, but I’m urging you, since you are still reading this, to give them a try.

Like I said, the initial signup is completely free. If you get in, look around and decide you don’t want to invest, you don’t have to.

You can keep spinning your wheels like I did, getting frustrated because you want to do it, but just don’t know where to start or what to do next. Realizing that another month has gone by where you should have been making money online.

Or maybe, you’ll see the benefit that so many others have seen and stick with it, upgrade the program, and start living the laptop lifestyle instead of dreaming about it.

I have no regrets and I don’t think you will either.

Go ahead, last chance, tap here and sign up.

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