Wealthy Affiliate Guide

Welcome, I assume you found this guide while researching Wealthy Affiliate Guide. It is also possible you are starting the program and need a little help. No worries either situation is fine and this is a great resource for either scenario.

The Wealthy Affiliate program has a great tour feature built-in. It’s designed to show you around the website.

If you are like me, you may want to do a bit more research before you hand over an email address. That is the purpose of this guide. To answer your questions and for you to get a feel for what Wealthy Affiliate is and how to use it.

What is Wealthy Affiliate?

I like to call WA an online community of learning because of the vast amount of knowledge you can get. At the core, they teach affiliate marketing on the blogging platform WordPress. Unlike most programs, Wealthy Affiliate offers some nice extended features. That make WA more than some ordinary place to learn.

Buzz Boxer’s Top 5 Favorite Features.

No credit card required for a FREE seven-day trial. Keep 2 free websites as an extra bonus for as long as you like. Again this is ZERO cost!
Free hosting for your websites! Get up to 25 websites hosted for free with a premium membership. This would in most scenarios cost 4 dollars to host a single site per month.
Top of the line training in Affiliate Marketing. Learn to promote an interest of your choice or promote Wealthy Affiliate. The choice is yours. I like the residual monthly payments I get from WA!
Live video classes and replays for premium members. I always feel that I learn more when I can see and hear the person teaching.
Free keyword tool for the premium members. This tool can help you rank high in the search engines when used correctly.

In my Wealthy Affiliate Review, you can see all the of the features in detail. These top five features should give you a solid idea of what Wealthy Affiliate is. I want to focus now on how to use the program and website.

Creating Activity

Creating activity in Wealthy Affiliate is easily accomplished in a few ways. The pen icon on the top right menu will unveil several options.

Create new training – This lets you make training that may be useful to others in the community. You can make videos, tutorials or even an entire course!

Write a new blog – A great way to create content within the community. Use this tool for sharing your thoughts but do not promote links here. There is a success button that will put your post in a special section of Wealthy Affiliate. Any success story is great to share with the community!

Build a new website – This will take you through the website creation process. It only takes a few minutes to get a website online. The longest part is thinking of a name for the site!

Ask a Question – Give your question a title and in the next box ask the question using a question mark. Choose the best classroom that you think pertains to your question.

The Activity Dashboard

The activity dashboard is the first button on the right sidebar menu at the top. Inside the activity dashboard, you will find four buttons at the top of the screen. Placed underneath the main search bar.

Activity – you will see a bar of buttons under the activity button. These will change how you look at the activity. There are two grid buttons on the far left that shows more or less of what each person is saying.

The “All” button will show everything currently going on. Besides that, the Unanswered button will show you unanswered questions. From the people who used the ask a question feature.

Next, to that, the popular button will show you hot topics that are going on in the community.

Last in that section is the success! This will show all activity from members who used the write a new blog feature. Then pushed the success post button.

There is a little section with three buttons for sorting. You can sort all the information by friends, referrals, and everyone in the community.

Classrooms – Listed vertically in the center pane of the screen. Upon entering the classroom’s screen. Each classroom listed will have four sections and links that may interest you.

Recent questions – See some of the latest questions asked in this classroom. This engages a feel for what the training will be like.

Trending training – Find what people want to learn about the most.

Top contributors – Meet and talk to the classroom contributors. Often times these folks have been doing this for a long time and can help you.

Training types – These links are in the lower right area of the classroom. They are NOT titled but they are helpful little links to get to the specific type of training you desire. Choose from comments, questions, tutorials, videos, or courses for certain topics of interest.

Enter classroom – Each area has a green enter classroom button. These will take you to a questions and answers tab inside the classroom. Inside this Q&A tab, you may choose to type in a question or view questions others have asked. There is also a set of filter buttons. Use these to view all questions, unanswered questions, or personal questions.

Tutorials – Next to the Questions and Answers tab is the Tutorials tab. Members of Wealthy Affiliate have the ability to create short tutorials. These teach you how to do various things and get categorized by classrooms.

Videos – To the right of the Tutorials tab you can find the videos tab for the classroom. When you get into this tab it is going to bring up all the videos that relate to the classroom you are in.

Courses – At the end on the right you will find a courses link. These are courses that Kyle is instructing. You will also find other random courses done by some of the top contributors in the program. Be sure to skim through and take note on anything that looks good for later.

Top Ten – The activity dashboard also has a link next to the classroom link called the top ten. When you go in here you will find a list with two columns. The left side is for the top ten most popular comments and the right is the most popular training in WA.

My Notifications – To the far right on the activity dash you will see a link that lists your notifications. Here you can select all the comments. View what you have or have not read or change what you want to see with the change options button. On the end of this menu, there is an action button. You can choose “mark as read” or remove me from this discussion. That second one comes in handy when you are part of a huge thread.

The Activity dashboard is rather large. To combat confusion I encourage you to start with the Get Started Here link

Get Started Here

For most, this is the starting point for new people here at Wealthy Affiliate. This link is going to get you to some very rich training materials right off the bat. If you are looking to promote offers other than Wealthy Affiliate start this first. This training is everything from getting your website up to mastering content creation.

As a free member, you will only get some of the training in this section. Yes, it’s a bummer that we can’t give out all the training for free. If you can’t go premium yet start soaking up all the free training for now and get started on your site.

But, let’s say you are going premium and you’re not sure what niche you want to pursue. There is always the Wealthy Affiliate Bootcamp button towards the bottom. This is for those who WANT to promote Wealthy Affiliate.

The regular niche training starts by hitting that green button “get started here”. Then as you complete stuff, it will save your place in the training. When you come back to the training hit the same green button. Then you will continue your training where you left off.

Rather than explain or outline all the training in this program. I will tell you that most of the training is typed out or summarized in the text. Most of the time there is also a video tutorial that shows processes in detail. Next, you will learn a bit about another valuable resource on the website, Chat.

Live Chat

The live chat room link button is the blue link under the green get started here button. This is a simple chat room but very effective for getting your questions answered!

The chat room operations are simplistic which is good. There is an input text area to join in the live discussion. Under everyone else’s names, you will see a reply button to reply to what they said in chat.

Then there is a actions button to the right that allows you to mark the person as spam or private message them. Another tidbit, if there is a star next to their name then they are on a premium account. Next, you will get an overview of SiteRubix.

SiteRubix – Wealthy Affiliate Guide

SiteRubix is your set of tools for creating the ultimate online experience. These seven menu items are all part of a robust system that makes it simple for you to manage your website.

Site Manager – This is your website management system. This manager will list all the sites you have and allow you to login to the WordPress admin panel. Along with some useful tools and information about your site.

Site Builder – The builder starts off by giving you three options for getting your domain rolling. You can choose the free domain which will have an extension of .siterubix.com. You may also choose to buy a domain from a third party such as Godaddy. You may also register one with SiteRubix with the last option. Once you complete one of those options you will be able to get started creating web content.

Site Domains – This screen is like the Site Builder’s starting point. On this screen, you will have the option to search for an available domain name. The .com domain names start at 14.00 per year.

If you buy a domain from a site like Go Daddy then use the button in the center labeled “Transfer a Domain to WA”.

Site Content – This is a rather new and exceptional set of tools for your disposal. There are three main screens for site content.

My content – This tab is where you can create new articles for your blog and see previous articles you have written. When you create new articles you can sort them into buckets and get alerts when they get indexed by Google.

Writing Stats – If you are one who likes to set goals for yourself then this is a very handy tool for you. On this tab, you can set two different types of goals one by the word count and the other by article count. You may also set this for a daily, weekly, monthly or custom basis.

Templates – This tab is useful as you can set up templates for different types of articles. Imagine that you have 500 or so articles planned out for your blog. Now wouldn’t it be nice if they all had the same structure? That’s what this tool can do for you. There are a few built templates in there already but tailoring a few of these templates can save you hours of time.

The Editor – The last thing in this section I will discuss is the editor. This is a simplistic editor and it’s for a good reason. Distractions are everywhere including in writing programs. This editor has eleven buttons for formatting. Then two other buttons for categorizing articles into buckets. This makes creating a template from the current piece you are working on easy.

The editor has a spell check button that works well but won’t check your work automatically saving you from the distraction of the squiggly red line notating your error. If you are like me as soon as you see those mistakes pop up you want to fix them right? This editor saves you that time and later you can hit the spell check and find them all.

Other than that you get a simple core of tools that most bloggers use frequently. Headings and paragraph buttons are in the first section. Bold, underline, and italics in the next section. You will also find an alignment, link, and list creation tools as well.

Also worth noting is that the editor will autosave as well and comes equipped with a save button. When the article is complete you have some options when using the publish button.

You will choose what website to put the content on first. Then if it will be a page or a post. Then you select a display name for the author.

This is a very nice improvement to Wealthy Affiliate and another great reason to be apart of this growing community.

Site Comments – This is a platform designed for giving and receiving website comments. I will get my biased opinion out of the way first on this and then explain the platform. Comments should come from interested readers. My opinion is that this part of Wealthy Affiliate is unnecessary. It’s okay to use it for starting up comments on an article but that is about it. That’s my two cents and now I will give you the rundown.

The Site Comments dashboard has two main links. These lead to either requesting comments or offering them. You must offer one comment for a single credit. Each comment you want to receive will cost you two credits. The dashboard also has links for comments pending approval and comments received. Also, credit balance, comment approval, credits this week, and total credits used. Below that, if you have used the system before you will see your top contributors to comments on your site.

Request comments – To get comments you will need two credits from offering comments. Once you have offered a comment you will get one credit to spend on comments.

Earn Credits – In this tab, you will see a random WA member’s article pop up on the left. Click the spyglass link that says view this page. This links you to that person’s webpage that they wish to receive comments on. BEWARE – when you finish reading the article you must return to the WA offer comments page to post your comment. If you write the comment directly on their blog you will NOT get credit for leaving the comment. On the right side of the blog preview page, there is a spot for your email and your comment. Note: You must leave thoughtful comments, cheating the system doesn’t work. People will report you and the system auto checks all comments. So be kind and write good comments like the ones you wish to receive.

My Settings – This tab lets you decide what types of posts you will get to comment on. There is a wide variety of boxes to check to show your interests. So leave any topic unchecked if you are not interested in commenting on these. The tab also has a section at the top that has you enter your Gravatar email address. Gravatar is a free service that lets you have one profile for thousands of online platforms. This is useful for bloggers that want to comment on other blogs and forums where you must create an account to post.

Take a Tour – This tab will give you the quick details on how the commenting system works.

Site Feedback – This section of the site is like the Site Comments section. Only you will give feedback and receive feedback on your site from folks here at WA. You will have to gain credits in the same manner as the comments platform. Both systems use the same bank of credits for both comments and site feedback. You will also get one credit for every site feedback you offer. Every feedback you request will cost two credits as well.

Site Support – This section of the menu is for any technical problems you may encounter with your site.

It is pretty straightforward but all you need to do is fill in the fields. Give them some site information and a ticket will get submitted. I usually hear from them within a few hours.

Site Support Screen

Site Email – This isn’t a main menu option in the Site Rubix sidebar. Yet, it is in the top navigation bars of all the other Site Rubix pages. You have two options when it comes to website email. You may choose to set up a new email box. That you will have to check through the this WA link every time. Or my suggestion is to do an email forward. You can set this up so that all your websites emails go to your Gmail or preferred email provider. Then once set up you can also reply from that email as well. If you were to receive an email from me it would say it is from david@buzzboxer.com for example.

Affiliate Bootcamp

The Affiliate boot camp is for those who wish to start promoting Wealthy Affiliate. There are seven in-depth courses to help jump-start you into a very rewarding niche.

The question gets asked often “Do I have to promote Wealthy Affiliate on my website?” The answer is NO but the option is there and that is why there are two different training programs on the WA website. One is for teaching how to promote Wealthy Affiliate. The other is for promoting other areas or Niches.

Sidebar Links

Training

My history – Lists all your recent training activity

Classrooms – Quick link to all the classrooms at Wealthy Affiliate. These are generally text-based with some video.

Live Video Classes – Quick link to all the video webinars. Upcoming and replay training is available.

Tools

Websites and Hosting – This is another link to the website manager like the one in the Site Rubix section.

Keyword Tool – Very handy keyword research tool. You have unlimited use when you are a premium member.

Rapid Writer – Quick link to a very simple article editor. This is great for those that like to do everything on one website.

Link Tracking – With this link tracking tool you can track all your links. Also, get real-time information on how each link is performing.

Keyword Lists – These are some older keyword lists that you can download and browse upon. These are a bit older and created using the Jaaxy keyword tool.

Affiliate Program

WA Affiliate Program – This is a quick link to the program details. This is for those interested in promoting Wealthy Affiliate. This is optional but can be very rewarding. Every premium membership earns you 23.50 Recurring monthly revenue.

Affiliate Classroom – This is a quick link to the classrooms area at WA. At the top, you will see Q&A, Tutorials, Video, and Courses. This is great for finding material that you want to learn and how you want to learn it.

Miscellaneous links

Jaaxy – This is a quick link to Wealthy Affiliate’s main keyword tool. As a premium member, you get a free keyword tool with your membership. Jaaxy is much faster and gives you a lot of bells and whistles. Jaaxy is a great tool but is not required for success at Wealthy Affiliate. It is certainly not an upsell by any means.

Jaaxy Keyword Tool

Ambassadorship – This will take you to the top 200 contributors of Wealthy Affiliate. These folks are the most active and contributing members. Please don’t confuse this with how much money they are earning with the program. There are many folks making a tremendous amount of money with what they have learned on the website. But, not all contribute to Wealthy Affiliate’s content creation. If you are looking to become an Ambassador in Wealthy Affiliate, click the learn more button. You will find an in-depth explanation. In short, to gain a better ranking you need to help others when a question comes up. Also, produce helpful content on the Wealthy Affiliate website. Being active on the website in general also helps your rankings.

Account Settings – The final sidebar link on the website is an important one. The link enables you to set email, password and your subscription settings. After some time at Wealthy Affiliate, you may start to get a bunch of notification emails from WA. To tone those down a bit you can find the notification settings at the bottom of this page.

Top Of The Website

In the creating activity section, I covered the pen menu at the top of the website. Now I want to reference the rest of what’s going on at the top of this website.

Top Bar on Wealthy Affiliate

First of all, there’s a great tool at the top called the search bar. You can type in anything and it’s like a Google machine for Wealthy Affiliate. If you have any questions about anything start here first. Questions about affiliate marketing, web design, or how to work on your business, type it in that box first. Chances are that someone has had the same issue and you can get the answer in a couple seconds.

Moving to the right there is an airplane logo that acts as a sales to go counter. Get to zero and win a trip to meet the Wealthy Affiliate owners. This is also a drop down box with a list of the following helpful links for the Wealthy Affiliate promotion. If you plan to promote Wealthy Affiliate then this section is for you.

Sales

Program details – This gives you a comprehensive look into promoting Wealthy Affiliate. The earning potential is vast here at WA. As a premium member, you will earn $23.50 each month on a new subscription that you refer. The “how much you can earn section” at the bottom of this page is very fun to look at.

My Stats – This page will show you all your stats as an affiliate marketer for Wealthy Affiliate. You can add and remove metrics to your liking if you click the + icon on the right side of the metrics. Payment settings, revenue details, and how referrals joined WA are on this screen.

Tasks – New referrals that make a profile and post some goals will earn you a small amount of money. You will also get some tasks that you need to complete. Comment on goals they set for themselves. Then comment on what they are expecting out of Wealthy Affiliate as a program.

My Referrals – This link will give you a full look at everyone that has joined Wealthy Affiliate using your link.

Links & Tracking – Your Wealthy Affiliate links get tracked on this page. You can view all these in my stats page as well but here you can create a custom link. As an example, right now if you were to use my link to join WA it would take you to my personal welcome screen on the Wealthy Affiliate website. That screen has my photo that you have seen on my personal website. It gives it more of a personal effect to new members. Here is a video tutorial on how to integrate this into your account.

Messages – This is your autoresponder for new members that join. There are five of them you can set up and they are life savers. You might think, oh that’s just lazy. Well if you have 50 or so referrals coming in a day. Welcoming them will get a little too repetitive and time-consuming. So this set of tools makes things easier.

Banners – This a link full of your personal banners that have your affiliate links already for use. All you need to do is copy and paste right them into your website. This is a great little pack of tools.

Next to the airplane icon is the blue icon that will take you to your personal network. It shows you everyone in WA that you are following and those who are following you. As this list grows you will get more

email notifications from Wealthy Affiliate. You may need to go to account settings and change what notifications you receive.

To the right is another life-saving icon. The world icon is your quick link to your notifications. Here you can view all your notifications and change what you see. Now, this is only your notifications you get while you are online. This icon does not include options for what emails you get.

Those options are in the sidebar menu in account settings as described before.

Moving to the right is the mail icon. This screen will show you all your private messages from other members. Support tickets will also come here. Click the plus icon to create a new private message.

Last, the settings button will allow you to turn on and off the autoresponder.

Next, to the right is the pen icon. Find details about this in the creating activity section near the top.

Another blue icon is to the right and this will show your current rank at all times before clicking the button. When you do click this link you will find that it is another link to the My Rankings page and Statistics page. This will show you your rank as well as the top 200 ranking in WA. Here you can also click the link that shows how to gain a higher rank in WA.

Lastly, to the far right, you should see an icon that is a drop-down menu. This has your very own smiling face:) on it. This drop-down has the following items and information for you to browse.

My Profile – This is your bio page for Wealthy Affiliate. This is what the other members will see when they visit your profile. You can add images, blog posts, questions, training and see new folks in the community here. You will also notice your accomplishment badges and they will light up as you earn them.

Account Settings – This is another link to your account settings in a more convenient spot. It has the same information as the other link.

Credit Dashboard – When you refer folks to WA you earn cash credits. You can pay them out at a certain threshold but you can also buy comments and feedback if you wish to do so. You can buy 20 community credits for 10 US dollars. You can also see and transfer credits to another account on this screen as well.

Take a System Tour – This is a very quick 5 screen dime tour of WA. Their idea is that they don’t want to overwhelm you with how big the website is. They want you to take it in chunks so that you don’t get confused and quit.

See What’s in Premium – This link will take you to some content created by Kyle. He shows you the inside of the premium package.

Logout – Your quick log out of WA button.

How to use Wealthy Affiliate

So here’s where I tell you how to use your time in the website and the wealthy affiliate guide. I’ll also give you some pointers that I wish I knew when I first joined WA.

For some of you, this is your first online venture. This section is for you. The first thing you need to decide is, are you going to promote Wealthy Affiliate. Or promote other affiliate offers and a third option of mixing the two.

Here are some scenarios that may help you to decide.

Tom joined Wealthy Affiliate and has a passion for rollerblading. He has no interest in promoting WA because he feels that it may sound a little gimmicky. He likes what Wealthy Affiliate is doing but doesn’t want it to promote it. This is completely fine. Tom can enjoy all the tools and resources here on WA with no worries about promoting WA. Tom would start his training in the Get Started Here section of the website. Tom’s best bet is to join affiliate networks like Amazon Associates to find products to promote that are related to rollerblading.

Jackie is not too sure what kind of website she would like to create. She joined Wealthy Affiliate to make money and isn’t afraid of sharing or promoting WA on her website. Jackie wants to immerse herself in WA in every way possible. Jackie would start her training in the Affiliate Bootcamp section of the website.

Alex has gone through quite a bit of the regular training. He has a niche website in marketing web hosting services. Alex has started browsing through the training material for the Affiliate Boot camp. Alex decided that he wants to promote Wealthy Affiliate. He only wants a WA sidebar image link on his website about web hosting. Alex may also try to tie in an article about Wealthy Affiliate’s web hosting to make it relevant to his website.

After you decide that you can move on to the training option that best fits you. As a side note, when you are going through the training, try to do all the tasks in order. Don’t skip any of the training even if it seems dull or boring.

There are also weekly webinars that are very informative and are never disappointing. I learn something every week and even though I can’t make most of these live, I do watch the replays every week. So make sure you are getting in there to watch those. Also, hop around the resources everywhere in the website. You will find all sorts of great materials from skipping around.

I Had My Doubts You Will Have Yours

It’s hard to trust anyone on the internet and I get that. If you read my Wealthy Affiliate Review you would see that I struggled to trust WA at first. I wanted to find things wrong with the program so I could label it a scam and run away to my next failure in life.

Their program showed me otherwise when I got that first commission. Yes, my first internet dollar I collected was from Wealthy Affiliate. I had been looking for something to make money online for almost a decade with no answers until WA.