Wealthy Affiliate Review - So Many Promises - Internet Marketing Australia

If you are reading this article, you are seriously considering Internet marketing and more specifically, Wealthy Affiliate University. This is a Wealthy Affiliate review, but different than all the others you will read. You will find no links in this article as I am not selling Wealthy Affiliate (WA) nor am I selling one of its competitors.

I am writing this Wealthy Affiliate review as a former member of WA; one who went through the bulk of training provided by this service. I am no longer a member and felt the need to write a review for those of you who want to find out a bit more about WA; no strings attached.

To give a proper Wealthy Affiliate review you must first understand a little about Internet marketing (IM) in general. People or groups selling internet marketing as a job are selling a dream, the dream of making lots of money today, from the comfort of your home and with easy training. These ads, as you can probably witness to the right of this article, make some big promises.

The failure rate in IM is near 95% due in a big way to a basic human nature of many people wanting to be rich and not wanting to work for it. It is from these people that WA and others like it make their money, promoting this dream in every way they can.

Regardless of how it is promoted, the real IM success stories take years of hard work, often times working more hours than a full time job. But that sort of promise would not read well in a PPC ad. The truth and good salesmanship are often poor bedfellows.

Back inside the Wealthy Affiliate review, just what do you get for your $30+/month membership fees? Well, from day one you are barraged with a plethora of add on products that will make your job of Internet marketing even easier, or so they say. WA sells ebooks, third party products and services and a host of other "tools" that all come highly "recommended" and all with an additional price tag.

During the eight week starter course, in which each set of lessons is provided one week at a time, there are many links to products that WA is "marketing" to its students. Add to this the constant self promotion WA does to its new members, always making it easy to sell WA, and a student might start to wonder if they are more customer than student to WA.

However slick the WA website might appear at first glance, it doesn't supply easy navigation. Add to that confusing lesson formats and you have less than perfect learning situation. Their forum seems to be filled with more newbies asking the same floundering questions than with truly successful IM people handing out trade secrets. Members making "$250/day" are the exception not the norm as they say on one of their many sell pages for the site.

A Wealthy Affiliate review would not be complete without a word on their highly touted forum. The success stories that do make the forum read with more hype than veracity, but then this is the business of IM; the business of sales. As for learning the "secrets that make you money" they aren't in the lesson plans or on the forum, but then would you really expect them to give up the secrets that REALLY make them money? That's how they make their living, why would they?

The WA active membership is currently hovering around 12,000 people according to WA records. But after an informal survey of over a third of those, I found 46% of them had never posted to the forum, not even once. This is an unusual statistic considering WA promotes its forum as one of the strong selling points of the whole program. Every new member is encouraged to post on the "supportive" forum their first day of membership.

All of these members surveyed had been with WA for at least six months and some as long as two years. I then proceeded to send private messages to several dozen of these people; no one replied. Could WA be faking one of the basic social influence factors by pumping up the membership numbers? 12,000 members can't be wrong, right? And if WA is lying about this fact, what else are they lying about?

One of the main teaching points at WA is to find your niche market and leverage it for all its worth. Quite possibly Kyle and Carson (the WA creators) found theirs with WA. WA is merely supplying a product that many people want, a way to make money without working for it. The fact that that product doesn't exist doesn't matter, they are selling a dream.

And after the majority of people attempting Internet marketing give up and move on to the next big thing (usually within a few months), WA doesn't have to worry, because in the words of PT Barnum, "there's one born every minute."

This Wealthy Affiliate reviewer says if you want to learn Internet marketing, you could join WA for a few months, spend a couple of hundred dollars and get some of the basics while facing a deluge of self promotion, or you could get on the web and track down much of the same info for free. After all, everything is on the internet.

What WA offers is akin to those big gift boxes you see in department store windows, they look good on the outside, but once you open it, it seems to be somewhat empty. And although this is only a Wealthy Affiliate review, I suspect that others hawking their ability to help you make easy money through Internet marketing are making similar promises with similar results.

Please remember, Internet marketing is sales and sales is not for the weak of heart. IM takes selling to a very competitive place where return on investment is king, not the customer. If you're going into IM with the idea you can make money fast, easily and without too much work, then the odds are very sadly stacked against you.

And Finally, a Wealthy Affiliate review wouldn't be complete without a comment on the cult status of WA. Is WA a cult? Nah, it's just an excellent example of niche marketing. Use all the right call to action words and social influence to get new members and use as many of your new members as you can convince to go and get more new members. Because if Kyle and Carson know anything, they know that the bulk of the members joining today won't be around in a few months time.