As commerce is changing to be more and more online, affiliate marketing has become a booming industry. There are affiliate programs for almost everything available. You can make money from promoting any product that you use. Getting started as a beginner can be tricky. By far, the best free affiliate marketing training for beginners is one that will take you step by step through the process of the affiliate marketing basics.
Wealthy Affiliate offers their entire step-by-step course free for the first seven days. That is plenty of time for you to set up a website and get started. They do this in hopes that you’ll love their training and community enough to stick around after the free seven days.
The Affiliate Bootcamp Course (70 lessons)
Wealthy Affiliate’s Bootcamp course is designed to take you from zero to hero. It has checklists of things to do each day to get your website set up, your niche selected and your marketing content created. It shares with you ideas for how to drive traffic to your website.
One of the nice things about the Wealthy Affiliate Bootcamp course is there is a checklist to let you know where you left off. This keeps you on track and moving forward. There is something very satisfying about checking things off a list. You start to feel very accomplished.
Here’s what you will be learning in your first 10 (free) lessons:
- Getting Started
- Understanding How To Make Money Online
- How to Select a Niche
- Building Your Own Niche Website
- Setting Up Your Website
- Prepping the Website for the Search Engines
- Creating Your Initial Content
- The Menus on Your Website
- Understanding Keywords & What They Do
- Recap
Each lesson comes with its own video and task list. The items are broken down into easily accomplishable tasks.
Weekly Webinars
The free course that you’ll receive for signing up for Wealthy Affiliate is seven days long. You’ll be able to access one Wealthy Affiliate’s weekly training webinars with updates and tips for keeping up with the changing world of affiliate marketing.
The webinars offer the chance to interact with an expert in affiliate marketing. You can type in questions and wait for him to answer them. He also shares some valuable information about the techniques that are being used and how to apply them in your own marketing.
SiteRubix
Not everyone has the funds to buy a new site. Many people want to test out their site building skills without risking any money. The latest feature of Wealthy Affiliate includes SiteRubix. SiteRubix is a free website builder. This makes it extremely easy to test out your site concept without risking any of your own money.
The great thing about SiteRubix is that even after your free 7 days of premium wealthy affiliate content expires, you can still promote your site. Unlike WordPress.com or Blogger.com, once you have tested out your website’s content, you can move it to your own domain. I have done this with the assistance of Wealthy Affiliate’s help.
Site Comment Features
Getting traffic to your website is important. Having people comment on your posts is equally important in the eyes of Google. Wealthy Affiliate has features that allow you to easily exchange comments with other members of the community. This ensures that you’ll have comments on your website and that there will be some initial starting traffic to your website.
Free Keyword Tool
Wealthy Affiliate has one of the best and most realistic keyword research tools on the market. While I love Google Keyword planner and Ahrefs for a variety of reasons, they seem to inflate the number of searches. Wealthy Affiliate’s keyword research tool gives you a more modest estimate of whether you’ll be able to rank for the keyword and roughly how much traffic that you’ll receive if you rank on the first page with that keyword.
At first, it can seem a bit scary to think that you’ll be writing a 1000 word blog post and the Google SEO traffic will only 5-10 per month. However, it is much more realistic. It also helps you to realize that you need to be taking your own steps in order to drive traffic through either social media marketing or paid advertising.
The Free Starter Membership ($0 – free as long as you wish)
The free starter membership is $0 and lasts as long as you need. I recommend starting from this point. Everyone can join WA as a starter member. There is no credit card required.
While there are restrictions as a free member, there is enough information for beginners to get started in your online business. It helps you to make a determination whether you want to continue. This is the entry level membership of Wealthy Affiliate and I suggest you start from here. Anyone can join WA as a starter member.
I highly recommend joining as a starter member and then taking full advantage of the premium membership for the first week. Just check out the testimonials below.
The Paid vs. Free Training
While I do recommend that you get started with the free resources, there are some subtle difference between the free WA membership and the paid WA membership. You do have access to a bit more training, 24/7 support, private messaging and website security certificates.
Don’t get turned off by the freemium model that wealthy affiliate offers. Many of the online courses that are much more expensive have the same content. However, with Wealthy Affiliate, one of the biggest bonuses is that it comes with a community that is working towards success online. You have members that are willing to visit your website, give you feedback and comment on your posts. This helps your website to stay relevant in the eyes of Google. It also helps you to improve. Sometimes we don’t see the negatives on our website unless someone else points them out to us.
Getting Started with Wealthy Affiliate
It is simple to get started with Wealthy Affiliate. Simply click on the link and fill out your email address and select a username for yourself. This will be posted when you ask questions and chat with other members. Once you’ve signed up, you should click on the training button and go through the affiliate marketing Bootcamp. That will get you a good start with affiliate marketing.
