Kaboutjie SA Mommy Blogs by Lynne Huysamen
It is a long time overdue and finally I have written my Wealthy Affiliate review, which I am so excited to share with you!
I get so many people asking me how I learned how to blog, and how they can get started and here’s what I think – there is no better way to learn how to blog than to join Wealthy Affiliate and follow their courses. Not only do they offer amazing step by step videos, they also offer a fantastic community and the tools that you need to make money online.
I was a member of Wealthy Affiliate from 2015 until 2020.
I will very soon be creating my own online courses for moms that want to learn how to make money online, however I will never have the resources that Wealthy Affiliate has or be able to share as much valuable knowledge as their community can.
***Disclosure -The links in this post may contain affiliate links and I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase after clicking on a link.***
What Is Blogging
Blogging is a fantastic way to make money, but there seems to be a lot of confusion around what blogging actually involves. Blogging is simply the process of creating content online and then monetizing it.
Blogging can be done on your own website or on social media and there are many ways to monetize your blog, especially if you have your own self-hosted website.
Some of the ways that you can make money through blogging is through affiliate marketing, influencer marketing, selling advertising space, creating your own digital or physical products, creating courses, marketing your existing business or money making side hustle.
You can pick one of the above, or you can do all or a mix of them.
What Do You Need To Start To Blog?
It depends on where you want to blog. I have a lot of people ask me if they need their own website or if they can blog on a free website or on social media. My answer is always YES, you need your own website and it really does need to be your own website that is self-hosted.
My reason for saying this is that if you have a free website it is never truly yours since you will face limitations and you will be bound to the terms of the company providing you the free website. In addition to this if you have anything for free you will never get the type of support that you need.
If you are only going to blog on social media you are limited in the ways in which you can make money and you are also at the mercy of the social network. They may change their terms at any time, plus they may change their algorithms at any time and they regularly do. This can impact the reach of your profile and the amount of money you can make and how.
In addition to your own self-hosted website you will also need the knowledge and support system to help you learn how to make money online.
Also read: Ysense Review – How I’ve Earned Over $1250 From Online Surveys
What Does Wealthy Affiliate Offer?
So now that I have spoken a little bit about blogging and what you need to get started let’s get back to Wealthy Affiliate and what they offer.
I have come across many platforms that make huge promises and then fail to deliver. Wealthy Affiliate delivers on all of its promises but you must first understand that nothing will come for free and nothing will come without hard work and some time.
Any platform that offers to help you make money fast without any work is going to land up with you falling flat on your face. Any business will take some time and it will take hard work.
If you put in the hard work and you follow the training provided at Wealthy Affiliate you will be able to create a long term, sustainable online business for yourself.
There are three different membership options – Starter membership, Premium membership and Premium Plus membership. Here’s what each membership will give you:
Starter membership:
- 1 Website
- 7 Days unlimited support
- Level 1 training for certification core training
Premium membership:
- 10 Websites
- Intermediate website & hosting package
- Website builder
- Enhanced website security
- Free SSL
- Daily backup
- Hacking prevention
- Sitespeed Extreme Caching
- 24/7 Managed
- 24/7 Site support
- Google pagespeed optimized
- DDos protection
- Image Optimization
- Dual Server Hosting Redundancy
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Instant DNS
- Host Owned Domains
- 250,000 Monthly Visits
- Website Engagement Platform
- SiteContent Publishing Platform
- Duplicate Content Checker
- Unlimited support
- 52+ Expert classes per year
- All levels core training
- 1000+ training modules
- Jaaxy Lite (keyword research tool)
Premium Plus membership:
- 50 Websites – which include all of the above features from Premium with the following differences:
- Advanced Website & Hosting Package
- Advanced Hosting Security Suite
- 1,000,000 Monthly Visits
- Unlimited priority support
- 200+ Expert classes per year
- All levels of core training
- 1000+ training modules
- Jaaxy Enterprise (keyword research tool)
What Does Wealthy Affiliate Cost?
You can join Wealthy Affiliate for free without giving any payment information and you can stay on the free membership for as long as you like to make sure that the platform is for you before you go for a paid membership.
Starter membership – forever FREE (except you cannot downgrade to Starter after being a paid member)
Premium membership – $49 per month or $495 per year (if you go Premium within 7 days your first month is $19)
Premium Plus membership – $99 per month or $995 per year
Is There Any Downside To Wealthy Affiliate?
Even though I absolutely love Wealthy Affiliate there are always some things that may not be to everyone’s taste and here are some of the things that I feel may not be some people’s liking:
- It can be very overwhelming when you first join Wealthy Affiliate – there is so much going on and in the beginning it can feel like too much. There will be so many people welcoming you to the platform and you will receive so many emails that you won’t know where to start. However you can easily set which emails you would like to receive and which you don’t. I advise when you get started you focus on what needs to be done – starting your business. So stick to the training.
- The platform focuses very much on how to make money through affiliate marketing – hence the name Wealthy Affiliate. It is very easy to get hung up on that and think that it is not for you. However it is important to take note that while WA teaches affiliate marketing the lessons that are taught can be applied to any online business and can be adapted to suit your needs. I do make some money through affiliate marketing but that is not my main focus of my business.
- Wealthy Affiliate focuses on working in a very narrow niche, which is a fantastic way to do it because when you make your niche very narrow it is much easier to start getting traffic to your website and to start making sales, BUT for me it takes away the joy. I can’t write about one narrow subject every day, I prefer to enjoy myself more and have the freedom to write about lots of different things. This also works, as you can see I have made a success of it, but it will take longer to make money and to build your business.
- If you sign up for the Premium membership and then decide to leave you will be unable to revert back to the free membership. If you have your own domain website hosted with Wealthy Affiliate you will need to move it to your own hosting when you leave.
- The bootcamp training is fantastic and I did the entire course, however many people take this training the wrong way. The purpose of the bootcamp training is to teach you how to promote Wealthy Affiliate and how to review other products that teach you how to make money online and size them up against each other. Most make money online products that I have come across are scams, or low quality. It then means you spend your days writing about scams and calling out low quality products. This is not to my personal taste and many of the members then spend their days calling out everything and anything as scams. I like to be positive and review amazing products, so I stick to writing about the things that I love and if I don’t like something I just don’t write about.
My Wealthy Affiliate Review – Final Verdict
Like I have already said I have been a Premium member of Wealthy Affiliate since June 2015 and it was the best thing I have ever signed up for. When I first joined Wealthy Affiliate I had an online store and I was trying to learn how to grow my online business. Within the space of just 6 months at Wealthy Affiliate I learned how to make money online without having to have my own online store.
I learned so much about online business that I changed Kaboutjie from being an online store to only being a blog and I have not looked back since!
In my opinion Wealthy Affiliate is suitable for anyone that:
- knows nothing about working online but is interested in making money online from home
- owns a business but does not yet have a website
- owns a business and has a website but does not know how to make that website work for your business (this was me 5 years ago and look at me now!)
- has a blog and is trying to make money online but not earning enough
Even if you don’t land up blogging full time like me you will learn invaluable skills from joining Wealthy Affiliate that can help you to make more money in your current job, help you to earn money through side hustles and make you more employable.
I have personally been offered jobs by companies and individuals over the years that are interested in employing me for content writing, SEO (search engine optimization), managing WordPress websites, social media marketing and more!
One of the things I love the most about Wealthy Affiliate is the amazing community – there are so many members and people are so willing to help and guide you. I also love that every time I get stuck with something when it comes to my online business all I have to do is log into my Wealthy Affiliate platform and search for the answer.
You just cannot go wrong with Wealthy Affiliate!
Plus if you sign up as a Premium or Premium Plus member you will have my personal support and guidance there too. You can check out my profile here.
I hope you have enjoyed my Wealthy Affiliate review – if you have any questions please pop them in the comments for me to answer.
Sign up for Wealthy Affiliate now.
Awesome Wealthy Affiliate review, Lynne. I wholeheartedly agree that Wealthy Affiliate is the best online platform to learn how to become a blogger. Their step-by-step training is second-to-none.
And I agree with you too about the community aspect, its a brilliant place to meet other bloggers, I am so grateful I met you at Wealthy Affiliate.
I love that you included the spin-offs of learning to blog, like being offered other jobs online. Blogging is the gateway to virtually anything you could imagine doing online.
I’m so glad you enjoyed the review! It has taken me long enough to write this hasn’t it? LOL… just 5 years.
This is such a great review Lynne.
To he honest, I’m not entirely sure whether this is for me.
I absolutely love and enjoy blogging. My aim to set up a website using WordPress and to move my social media traffic to my blog over time.
If I’m not mistaken, it seems as if this site is more aimed at persons who want to market full time? Am I correct so many questions lol
Hi Zoereena – well there are many reasons why you want your own website and I listed some of them here. The fact is that without a website that is self hosted you actually own nothing. Any social media platform can decide to remove your social media account at any time for any reason. In fact last year I had so many issues with Facebook and I nearly lost my account! First someone tried to steal my Facebook page, long story there and very upsetting…. they very nearly succeeded too. Then I had issues with someone reporting my account – I think it was one of the people that tried to steal my Facebook page that tried to make my life hell after I managed to gain control again!
Anyway back to actually answering your question – it can be worthwhile to use Wealthy Affiliate even if it is only for part time. The thing is that you are going to need to pay for your hosting and your SSL anyway, plus you will need a keyword tool, and just with these things included in the WA platform you are already getting your value for money! Then you add in all the valuable training included which will guide you how to set up your website, how to blog on WordPress, get traffic and make an income, I really feel it is amazing!
However as soon as I have some more time on my hands I will be creating some courses here at Kaboutjie on blogging – some of the courses will be free and some paid… the bonus will be that my courses will be cheaper and will be a once off fee for each course you want to do, so rather than a monthly or yearly expense it is a once off amount! But you will still have to pay for your own hosting, SSL and other tools that are included within WA…
Lynne, thanks so much for putting things into greater perspective. My brain is fried (preggies).
I would love to do the courses with you and will definitely give Wealth Affiliate the go once I am settled with my newborn. This will possibly only be in the new year but it is great to have this review as a valuable resource.
And it will probably only be the new year when I get things cracking my side, this year has been so crazy.
Crazy indeed! It’s so hard to believe that the year is almost over.
Yes, it has been a long year but it has also flown by. I’m sure you know what I mean by that!
Time flies for sure. Soon we will welcome the festive season, with a difference of course. 2020 has been an eventful, yet pleasing year.
I wish i saw this earlier!
Very insightful if you are interested in becoming a blogger. Maybe I’ll try it.
Wow. A great lay out of all things a person should learn if they want to be a blogger. I will definitely refer friends who are looking into blogging.
Learned a lot from this review and would be a very good idea to start a blog especially because of the lockdown saga . Thank you